iCommons auction - win an early copy of Little Brother!

iCommons, the international Creative Commons project, is holding a fundraiser to support the work it's doing in more than 80 countries to create local versions of the CC licenses and promote their use locally. I've donated a bunch of stuff, including a signed, rare, pre-press copy of my forthcoming novel Little Brother, which won't be published until May 2008. As a bonus, the winning bidder also receives a signed copy of the IDW comic adaptation of my story Anda's Game!

Little Brother is a young adult novel about hacker kids who fight to bring the Bill of Rights back to America after the War on Terror turns San Francisco into a police state -- a kind of Ferris Bueller meets Neuromancer story. It's my biggest book to date -- complete with a national book tour! Link

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator

Miles, are you just being a jerk, or was there some point to that?
Zaren

Question to the author, since he seems to be reading this site from time to time :)

What’s the definition of “young adult” as far as appropriate reading? I’m trying to get my 11 year old son past his Warriors books into something else, but he has expressed no interest in Harry Potter or… well, anything else, for that matter. He’s testing at a much higher level of capable reading than he’s doing right now, so I suspect he’s just lazy about school, like dear old dad. I listened to that one segment you stuck out on your podcast, and thought it might have been a bit racy, so I’ll probably give the book a spin first… kinda making this whole line of questioning moot, actually…

At any rate, do you think this book would be appropriate for someone who hasn’t hit puberty yet? :)
Cory Doctorow

I’m thinking that the major target here is high-school freshmen, but I think that precocious 12 year olds will find it good! The book will be a CC download as well as a commercial object, so you can always get him to look at the first chapter onscreen and see for yourself before you buy it!
ethan

Too bad I’m poor. I’m intensely, intensely jealous of everyone who’s already read this.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator

Zaren, I phoned the book’s editor and asked. From his description, I don’t think there should be a problem.

In general, I wouldn’t worry too much about these fine distinctions in novels meant for a general audience. Kids skip over the mushy stuff. When they’re old enough to stop thinking of it as mushy stuff, they start paying attention to those bits.
Peter

I have to admit one of my personal pet peeves is the usage of the word “win” to advertise an auction. You’re not winning anything, you’re buying it, all that an auction is the sale of a single item to a single person with a novel way of settling the price. A person ‘wins’ by being able to and willing to spend the most money, much like too much in life. If it were a raffle, where you could buy as many tickets as you wanted, but even buying one ticket gave you a chance to win, that would justify the use of the word.

Good luck with the auction though, it is a good cause, and I might check out the book when it gets released normally. I just wanted to rant a bit. :)
TheG33K

If you want to read a great book a few months ahead of everyone else, this is a great opportunity.

When Cory was in Vancouver a few months ago, the bookstore I worked at sponsored his talk/reading and as thanks, he gave copies of Little Brother to myself and my coworker. I had it read by the next day and is pretty much exactly what I would have wanted in a YA book back when I was a YA, and why I enjoy them so much now.

I remember watching Wargames when I was about 11 and thinking how cool it all was and how I wanted to become a hacker to explore and learn as much as I could. And I suppose there was always the thought in the back of my head that if you know their secrets, you can fight back. Well, Cory’s book is about exactly that–kids who are stepped on (HARD) by the sytem and the steps that they take in order to fight back. The part that’s really awesome, in the same way that Wargames was, is that all the tech is pretty much real. If he made any of it up, I don’t think I spotted it, and that’s darn cool, for at least a couple of reasons:

- It makes sci-fi material out of things we use every day, which is neat
- It makes the achievability of resistance (to anything!) matter-of-fact

And the second point is the big one, because if the kids who are growing up now realize (through Little Brother and other sources) that they can foil the Powers-That-Be when they go too far then suddenly the future is a little less dark than it was before.

So thanks, Cory, for both a great read and a force for positive change.

Oh right, and everyone else should put in a good bid on it, too.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator

Okay. Rant noted. See your point.
Miles

Damn. Sorry about the cover, man