Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading.

Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.

Google's chatbot panic: On the infinite insecurities of a self-styled creative genius who really just buys other people's ideas.

You can listen to an audio recording of Doctorow reading an excerpt from Homeland on his site Craphound. For me, that's a pretty bleak message, and not one I'd necessarily want to instill in my own young adults. We are living in a police state, school and college are a means to keep young people in chains, and the only hope is to go underground and try to destroy it from within. It's clear from reading Homeland that to the author, this is no exaggeration. Doctorow makes it easy by providing essays at the end of the book – including one by Aaron Swartz.īut be warned: as dark as Doctorow's other novels are, Homeland is even darker. How to withstand a police gassing, and how both the government and a resistance movement can make use of UAVs to keep tabs on large gatherings.Īll interesting enough to make many readers want to follow up with more investigation of their own. Stuff like how to set up a darknet that avoids government or commercial surveillance, and how to protect your devices in the event of a circuit-frying energy pulse.

Perhaps the right question to ask is not 'what is the story' but 'what will you learn by reading Homeland.' A lot of useful stuff, if you want to find out how to launch a revolution. I'll stop before I reveal too much of the plot, which is, as I said, secondary anyway. A trip to Burning Man with his girlfriend Ange leads to more trouble, as Marcus witnesses the kidnapping of Masha, a former government snitch, by Carrie Johnstone, the same sadistic agent who imprisoned him after the bombing of the Bridge.

In his spare time, he hangs out at Noisebridge, the local makerspace, and learns more about hacking and avoiding electronic surveillance. Homeland follows the hero of the earlier book, Marcus, now a college dropout looking for work after his parents lose their jobs in the recession. In Little Brother, a group of tech-savvy teens manages to undermine the new totalitarian government by creating its own internet using old gaming consoles. Homeland is the sequel to the well-regarded Little Brother, an updating of Orwell's 1984 set in a post 9/11 San Francisco, where a terrorist attack on the Bay Bridge turns the country into a police state in the blink of an eye. As I said in my review last year of Pirate Cinema, a Cory Doctorow YA novel is as much a treatise as a story.

Homeland cory doctorow