Little Brother – Award winning young adult sci-fi

Little Brother is a young adult sci-fi novel by popular author Cory Doctorow. The book features a teenage hacker and his group of friends as they navigate San Francisco after a terrorist attack, ending up accused of involvement they rally social support in the fight against civil infringements and abuse of political authority.

The topics in Little Brother are quite out there, but nothing that teenagers today aren’t surrounded with. Wikipedia says this about it: “Little Brother has major themes that, according to some, are too serious for a young adult novel. In an interview, the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy asked Doctorow about his “potentially heavy themes, including paranoia, loyalty, sex, torture, [and] fear” and when his editing staff asked to censor the themes, he replied, “Oh, no.”

The YA novel received 4 literary awards in 2009 the year following its publication.

(Editor: Cory Doctorow has just become this site’s new Young Adult Sci-Fi writing hero! Second only to our current Sci-fi favourite Nick Creech, and of course Joe and Ryan, for middle-grade Sci-Fi. )

Cory Doctorow is a professional author who revels in making all his books available under the CC-BY-NC license and has done since his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, published in 2003. Cory is proof that books can be both commercial and available for free digital distribution since his career is built on it.

Download or Read Online Little Brother, young adult sci-fi book on the Buttons below the post.]

Something interesting about the book and the author, from wiki, in 2014, a high school principal in Pensacola, Florida, Michael Roberts, pulled Little Brother from his school’s summer reading list because the book is “about questioning authority” and portrays questioning authority “as a positive thing.” Roberts also described Cory Doctorow, a Canadian author living in England, as “an outsider to the George W. Bush administration. In response, Doctorow had his publisher send a free copy of the book directly to every 9th and 10th grade student at the school.

See more of Cory’s books all of which are available for free download, or can be purchased as hard copies or as ebooks, at his website, here: https://craphound.com/

Take a look at some of our other young adult books, free to download in our YA category

Also by Cory Doctorow, For the Win

Sample Text From Little Brother:

I’m a senior at Cesar Chavez high in San Francisco’s sunny Mission district, and that makes me one of the most surveilled people in the world. My name is Marcus Yallow, but back when this story starts, I was going by w1n5t0n. Pronounced “Winston.”

*Not* pronounced “Double-you-one-enn-five-tee-zero-enn” — unless you’re a clueless disciplinary officer who’s far enough behind the curve that you still call the Internet “the information superhighway.”

I know just such a clueless person, and his name is Fred Benson, one of three vice-principals at Cesar Chavez. He’s a sucking chest wound of a human being. But if you’re going to have a jailer, better a clueless one than one who’s really on the ball.

“Marcus Yallow,” he said over the PA one Friday morning. The PA isn’t very good to begin with, and when you combine that with Benson’s habitual mumble, you get something that sounds more like someone struggling to digest a bad burrito than a school announcement. But human beings are good at picking their names out of audio confusion — it’s a survival trait.

I grabbed my bag and folded my laptop three-quarters shut — I didn’t want to blow my downloads — and got ready for the inevitable.

“Report to the administration office immediately.”