Homeland by Cory Doctorow

Homeland by Cory Doctorow

In Cory Doctorow's wildly successful Little Brother, young Marcus Yallow was arbitrarily detained and brutalized by the government in the wake of a terrorist attack on San Francisco an experience that led him to become a leader of the whole movement of technologically clued-in teenagers, fighting back against the tyrannical security state.

A few years later, California's economy collapses, but Marcus's hacktivist past lands him a job as webmaster for a crusading politician who promises reform. Soon his former nemesis Masha emerges from the political underground to gift him with a thumbdrive containing a Wikileaks-style cable-dump of hard evidence of corporate and governmental perfidy. It's incendiary stuff and if Masha goes missing, Marcus is supposed to release it to the world. Then Marcus sees Masha being kidnapped by the same government agents who detained and tortured Marcus years earlier.

Marcus can leak the archive Masha gave him but he can't admit to being the leaker, because that will cost his employer the election. He's surrounded by friends who remember what he did a few years ago and regard him as a hacker hero. He can't even attend a demonstration without being dragged onstage and handed a mike. He's not at all sure that just dumping the archive onto the Internet, before he's gone through its millions of words, is the right thing to do.

Meanwhile, people are beginning to shadow him, people who look like they're used to inflicting pain until they get the answers they want.

Fast-moving, passionate, and as current as next week, Homeland is every bit the equal of Little Brother a paean to activism, to courage, to the drive to make the world a better place.

Cory Doctorow is a blogger, journalist, and author of nonfiction and award-winning science fiction. His science fiction has won numerous awards, and his young-adult novel Little Brother spent seven weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. He is a contributing author to Wired magazine, and his writing has been published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, the Globe and Mail, the Boston Globe, Popular Science, and others. He is coeditor of the blog Boing Boing, and he was named one of the web's twenty-five influencers by Forbes and a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. His novels have earned such awards as the Prometheus Award, the 2000 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, Locus Award for Best First Novel, Sunburst Award, White Pine Award, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. He has served as Canadian regional director of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in Los Angeles.