My next novel, Little Brother, is coming out in about six weeks, on April 29. It's a book for young adults, about freedom, surveillance, and how technology can be used to free you or to lock you up. It's about a gang of hacker/gamer kids in San Francisco who use technology to restore freedom to America, despite the damndest efforts of the Department of Homeland Security to take it away in the name of fighting terrorism.
Since this book is intended for high-school-age kids, my publisher has agreed to send 200 advance review copies of the book to school newspaper reviewers, along with the same press-kit that gets sent to "real" papers like the New York Times and the Washington Post (actually, the school kit has even more stuff — it also includes a signed personal letter explaining why I wrote this book and why I hope kids will read it).
If you edit or write for your school paper (or if you have kids or friends that do) and you're interested in receiving a copy, send an email to torpublicity@tor.com with the subject line "DON'T TRUST ANYONE OVER 25" — and include your contact info, high school/newspaper, and mailing address.
Here are some nice things that other preview readers have had to say about Little Brother:
"A rousing tale of techno-geek rebellion, as necessary and dangerous as file sharing, free speech, and bottled water on a plane."
– Scott Westerfeld, author of UGLIES and EXTRAS
"I can talk about Little Brother in terms of its bravura political speculation or its brilliant uses of technology — each of which make this book a must-read — but, at the end of it all, I'm haunted by the universality of Marcus's rite-of-passage and struggle, an experience any teen today is going to grasp: the moment when you choose what your life will mean and how to achieve it."
– Steven C Gould, author of JUMPER and REFLEX
I'd recommend Little Brother over pretty much any book I've read this year, and I'd want to get it into the hands of as many smart teenagers, male and female, as I can.
Because I think it'll change lives. Because some kids, maybe just a few, won't be the same after they've read it. Maybe they'll change politically, maybe technologically. Maybe it'll just be the first book they loved or that spoke to their inner geek. Maybe they'll want to argue about it and disagree with it. Maybe they'll want to open their computer and see what's in there. I don't know. It made me want to be 13 again right now and reading it for the first time, and then go out and make the world better or stranger or odder. It's a wonderful, important book, in a way that renders its flaws pretty much meaningless.
-Neil Gaiman, author of ANASI BOYS
