The most important libertarian novel in the last few years (in the broad sense of civil liberties and freedom, not "report to Ayn Rand for instructions") was Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, and now Cory has released a sequel, Homeland.
(Plug for a group I belong to: The Libertarian Futurist Society, the group that gave Robert Anton Wilson his sole literary award, gave a Prometheus Award to Doctorow for Little Brother. The group gave Illuminatus! its Hall of Fame award. We will now resume regular programming after this brief commercial interruption.)
Reviewing Homeland in the Wall Street Journal, Tom Shippey wrote, "Homeland is as dead serious as 1984, as potentially important a 'novel of ideas,' with a much more engaging central character and an apparently inexhaustible supply of information on everything from brewing coffee to sneaky surveillance and how to defeat it."
I just bought a copy for my Kindle — I think Internet freedom is an important issue, so I decided to put my money where my mouth is — but as with his other books, Cory has released a free Creative Commons version. You can download it here. The link to download Little Brother for free is here.
5 comments:
The other night I watched a 61 minute talk Doctorow recently gave in Cincinnati, on his Homeland tour, and was just blown away by his breathless command of his subject matter, and in general what a terrific speaker he is. There were about seven real eye-openers for me, and I already have made some waves about the software filtering company that public schools buy from, but anyway:
If you have an hour and are interested in Aaron Swartz, copyright, hacking, your own digital security, etc:
http://boingboing.net/2013/02/16/video-from-my-book-tour-cinci.html
I'm reading it on Kindle now.
Hard to believe it's being marketed as a YA novel (except for the absence of sex scenes) but it's the young who need to get fired up about these issues. Too many so called adults in this country have already closed their eyes to what's being done in their name.
I'll have to watch the video. I'm almost finished with
Larry Lessig's book, "Free Culture," and I've gotten very interested in copyright reform.
fyreflye, which version are you reading on Kindle? If it's one of the free copies, are you using the HTML version?
"Little Brother" was marketed at a YA novel, but I thought it had as much substance as any of Cory's adult books. I'm a fan of Cory's and I thought it was better than any of his other books.
I'm reading the official Amazon $9.99 MOBI version on Kindle. If you can read .html on Kindle it's news to me.
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