Little Brother

recommend Little Brother over pretty much any book I've read this year, and I'd want to get it into the hands of as many smart 13 year olds, male and female, as I can.
    Because I think it'll change lives. Because some kids, maybe just a few, won't be the same after they've read it. Maybe they'll change politically, maybe technologically. Maybe it'll just be the first book they loved or that spoke to their inner geek. Maybe they'll want to argue about it and disagree with it. Maybe they'll want to open their computer and see what's in there. I don't know. It made me want to be 13 again right now and reading it for the first time, and then go out and make the world better or stranger or odder. It's a wonderful, important book, in a way that renders its flaws pretty much meaningless.
    - Neil Gaiman, author of ANASI BOYS
    Little Brother is a scarily realistic adventure about how homeland security technology could be abused to wrongfully imprison innocent Americans. A teenage hacker-turned-hero pits himself against the government to fight for his basic freedoms. This book is action-packed with tales of courage, technology, and demonstrations of digital disobedience as the technophile's civil protest."
    - Bunnie Huang, author of HACKING THE XBOX
    Cory Doctorow is a fast and furious storyteller who gets all the details of alternate reality gaming right, while offering a startling, new vision of how these games might play out in the high-stakes context of a terrorist attack. Little Brother is a brilliant novel with a bold argument: hackers and gamers might just be our country's best hope for the future.
    - Jane McGonical, Designer, I Love Bees
    The right book at the right time from the right author — and, not entirely coincidentally, Cory Doctorow's best novel yet.
    - John Scalzi, author of OLD MAN'S WAR
    It's about growing up in the near future where things have kept going on the way they've been going, and it's about hacking as a habit of mind, but mostly it's about growing up and changing and looking at the world and asking what you can do about that. The teenage voice is pitch-perfect. I couldn't put it down, and I loved it.
    - Jo Walton, author of FARTHING
    A worthy younger sibling to Orwell's 1984, Cory Doctorow's LITTLE BROTHER is lively, precocious, and most importantly, a little scary.
    - Brian K Vaughn, author of Y: THE LAST MAN
    "Little Brother" sounds an optimistic warning. It extrapolates from current eve nts to remind us of the ever-growing threats to liberty. But it also notes that liberty ultimately resides in our individual attitudes and
    actions. In our increasingly authoritarian world, I especially hope that teenagers and young adults will read it — and then persuade their peers, parents and teachers to follow suit.
    - Dan Gillmor, author of WE, THE MEDIA

About the bookstore dedications

    Every chapter of this file has been dedicated to a different bookstore, and in each case, it's a store that I love, a store that's helped me discover books that opened my mind, a store that's helped my career along. The stores didn't pay me anything for this — I haven't even told them about it — but it seems like the right thing to do. After all, I'm hoping that you'll read this ebook and decide to buy the paper book, so it only makes sense to suggest a few places you can pick it up!

Chapter
1

    This chapter is dedicated to BakkaPhoenix Books in Toronto, Canada. Bakka is the oldest science fiction bookstore in the world, and it made me the mutant I am today. I wandered in for the first time around the age of 10 and asked for some recommendations. Tanya Huff (yes, the Tanya Huff, but she wasn't a famous writer back then!) took me back into the used section and pressed a copy of H. Beam Piper's "Little Fuzzy" into my hands, and changed my life forever. By the time I was 18, I was working at Bakka — I took over from Tanya when she retired to write full time — and I learned life-long lessons about how and why people buy books. I think every writer should work at a bookstore (and plenty of writers have worked at Bakka over the years! For the 30th anniversary of the store, they put together an anthology of stories by Bakka writers than included work by Michelle Sagara (AKA Michelle West), Tanya Huff, Nalo Hopkinson, Tara Tallan —and me!)
    BakkaPhoenix Books: 697 Queen Street West, Toronto ON Canada M6J1E6, +1 416 963 9993
    I'm a senior at Cesar Chavez high in San Francisco's sunny Mission district, and that