Excerpt from Homeland, the sequel to Little Brother

Tor.com has just published an excerpt from Homeland, the sequel to my novel Little Brother. Homeland's coming out in February:

Attending Burning Man made me simultaneously one of the most photographed people on the planet and one of the least surveilled humans in the modern world.

I adjusted my burnoose, covering up my nose and mouth and tucking its edge into place under the lower rim of my big, scratched goggles. The sun was high, the temperature well over a hundred degrees, and breathing through the embroidered cotton scarf made it even more stifling. But the wind had just kicked up, and there was a lot of playa dust—fine gypsum sand, deceptively soft and powdery, but alkali enough to make your eyes burn and your skin crack—and after two days in the desert, I had learned that it was better to be hot than to choke.

Pretty much everyone was holding a camera of some kind—mostly phones, of course, but also big SLRs and even old-fashioned film cameras, including a genuine antique plate camera whose operator hid out from the dust under a huge black cloth that made me hot just to look at it. Everything was ruggedized for the fine, blowing dust, mostly through the simple expedient of sticking it in a ziplock bag, which is what I’d done with my phone. I turned around slowly to get a panorama and saw that the man walking past me was holding the string for a gigantic helium balloon a hundred yards overhead, from which dangled a digital video camera. Also, the man holding the balloon was naked.

Homeland (Excerpt)

• [Sagodjur]

  Don’t trust him – the naked man’s an agent provocateur from the FBI!

• [Madam Defarge]

  My 15-year-old, who decided he wanted to go to high school in his native SF, is reading Little Brother (I loved it!) for half of his — we hope — Balboa HS summer reading requirement.  I won’t have time to read Homeland until the move back from Connecticut is done, but I’m looking forward to it.  P.s., I hope he’ll cotton to   your project regarding how much $ schools waste on filters his senior year.  

• [Josiah White]

  Uneducated publishing question: why is the book coming out in February? Is the book done or do they need to edit things, or wait for good timing? Honest question.

• [TWX]

  I really hope that the balloon isn’t being held by the method implied…

• [digi_owl]

  And the presence of a naked man is likely to kick up more fuss about the book than anything it says about surveillance and how to counteract it.

• [LinkMan]

  Do the quadcopters deliver burritos?

• [func]

  Looking forward to the book!  Little Brother was great, and drones + Burn = awesome!

• [cubby96]

  For those of you who haven’t yet done so, click the link at the end of the post.  The part here is but a small portion of what was released today.

• [Stewart Berntson]

  That was a cruel, cruel thing to do… I’m already hooked into the book, and need to wait another 7 months before I can finish it :’(

• [Kevin Baker]

  It strains my suspension of disbelief a little bit that, after all he did in Little Brother, Marcus couldn’t secure a full ride scholarship somewhere or other.

• [lumpygravy2]

  Well meaning proponents of literacy say it is not important what youth read, it is more important that they read anything.

  I disagree.  Teen lit and other age targeted genres belong in the Fantasy section.  Too many of this ilk suffer from the Wesley Crusher syndrome, where some teen saves the day where a world of adults fail. 

  The worst part is not the adults who purvey this pap, but the teens so gullible to waste their time on it when they could be reading real masterpieces like Dumas, Twain, or Doyle.

  • [Kevin Baker]

    Not many teens are going to read Twain or Dumas (voluntarily) without having read something more modern and age-targeted first.

    And while teens do mor then their fair share in Little Brother, a major thematic point of the novel is that in the end, they can’t do much without adult allies.

  • [jason swick]

    There are so many things wrong with this statement I don’t even know where to begin…

  • [Antinous / Moderator]

    I disagree. Teen lit and other age targeted genres belong in the Fantasy section. Too many of this ilk suffer from the Wesley Crusher syndrome, where some teen saves the day where a world of adults fail….they could be reading real masterpieces like Dumas, Twain, or Doyle.

    You think that D’artagnan, as written by Dumas, or Sherlock Holmes are more realistic that Wesley Crusher? You’re focusing on a tiny part of the reality continuum.

• [Adam Cheshire]

  Sweet! I loved Little Brother – who am I kidding? I’ve genuinely loved every book of yours i’ve read Cory, especially “Someone comes to town. Someone leaves town.”. I’m so reading this as soon as I’m done with The Drowned World. (Shit, I really must get back to reading iq84….)

• [Adam Cheshire]

  Wait, it’s not due out till February? DAMN YOU DOCTOROW!