/ / Homeland, News


The finalists for the 2014 Locus Awards have been announced and I’m incredibly honored to see that my novel Homeland made the final five in the Young Adult category. The competition in that category is remarkably good company: Zombie Baseball Beatdown by Paolo Bacigalupi; Holly Black’s Coldest Girl in Coldtown, Cat Valente’s The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two (part of her wonderful Fairyland series) and The Summer Prince by Alaya Dawn Johnson.

As always, the Locus list is a great guide to the best sf/f published in the previous year. On this year’s list are some books I really enjoyed (like Stross’s Neptune’s Brood) and others I’ve got in my high-priority to-be-read pile, like Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane.

My sincere thanks to everyone who nominated Homeland for the prize; I couldn’t be more delighted!

2014 Locus Awards Finalists

/ / Homeland, News


Chapter nine of Homeland opens with about 400 digits of Pi. When Wil Wheaton read the chapter, he soldiered through it, reading out Pi for a whopping four minutes! Here’s the raw studio audio (MP3) of Wil and director Gabrielle De Cuir playing numbers station.

There’s less than a week left during which you can get the independently produced Homeland audiobook through the Humble Ebook Bundle!

/ / Homeland, News

Before he died, Aaron Swartz wrote a tremendous afterword for my novel Homeland — Aaron also really helped with the core plot, devising an ingenious system for helping independent candidates get the vote out that he went on to work on. When I commissioned the indie audiobook of Homeland (now available in the Humble Ebook Bundle, I knew I wanted to have Aaron’s brother, Noah, read Aaron’s afterword, and Noah was kind enough to do so, going into a studio in Seattle to record a tremendous reading.

Here is Noah’s reading (MP3), released as a CC0 file that you can share without any restrictions. I hope you’ll give it a listen.

And a reminder that the complete Humble Ebook Bundle lineup is now available, including work from John Scalzi, Mercedes Lackey, and Ryan North, as well as the core bundle, which features Wil Wheaton, Holly Black, Steven Gould, and Scott Westerfeld!

/ / Homeland, News

I’m immensely proud and honored to once again be shortlisted for the Prometheus Award, for my novel Homeland. The Prometheus is given by the Libertarian Futurist Society, and I’ve won it for my books Little Brother and Pirate Cinema. As always, the Prometheus shortlist is full of great work, including both of Ramez Naam’s novels Crux and Nexus, both of which I enjoyed enormously. My thanks to the Libertarian Futurist Society and my congratulations to my fellow nominees! See you at the World Science Fiction convention in London this summer!

/ / Homeland, News, Podcast

Two of my friends contributed afterwords to my novel Homeland: Aaron Swartz and Jacob Appelbaum. In this outtake from the independently produced Homeland audiobook (which you can get for the next week exclusively through the Humble Ebook Bundle), Jake reads his afterword at The Hellish Vortex Studio in Berlin, where he is in exile after several harrowing adventures at the US border. Hellish Vortex is run by Alec Empire, founding member of Atari Teenage Riot. Alec recorded this clip (MP3), and also mixed an alternate version.

Originally Jake had intended for his afterword to be anonymous (I didn’t understand this at the time, and there was no harm done!). In keeping with this, Alec mixed this vocoder edition (MP3), that is pretty awesome.

Humble Ebook Bundle

/ / Homeland, News, Podcast

Here’s Wil Wheaton reading chapter one of my novel Homeland (here’s the MP3, which I paid to independently produce for the third Humble Ebook Bundle, which runs for another eight days.

I’ve loved all of my audio adaptations, but Wil’s was a dream come true for me. He really, really nailed it. What’s more, because I produced this book independently, I can promise that it will never be sold with DRM, which makes it a rarity: Audible, which controls 90% of the market, insists on adding DRM to audiobooks even if the author and publisher object.

I hope you enjoy this as much as I did. The full, unabridged audiobook runs more than 12 hours — thanks, Wil!

Humble Ebook Bundle

/ / Homeland, News

When Wil Wheaton was reading the audiobook for my novel Homeland (exclusively available through the Humble Ebook Bundle for the next nine days!), I had the great pleasure of listening to the raw, unedited studio recordings before they were mastered. Together with editor John Taylor Williams, we collected some of the best outtakes, which I’ve been posting here all week. Here’s the last one (MP3), in which Wil’s subconscious supposes that Marcus Yallow has a hankering to “melt some camels.”

/ / Homeland, Little Brother, News, Podcast

The Humble Ebook Bundle continues to rock, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for a bundle of great name-your-price ebooks, including Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies, Steve Gould’s Jumper, and Holly Black’s Tithe. Also included in the bundle is an exclusive audiobook of my novel Homeland, read by Wil Wheaton.

I commissioned Wil to read the book — it was pretty much the only way to get a DRM-free audio edition in the age of Audible — and while he read, he had a series of conversations with the project’s director Gabrielle di Cuir from LA’s Skyboat Studios. In this clip (MP3), Wil explains how the discussions of crypto and technology in my novels serve as a spur to drive kids — and grownups — to research more about security and freedom.

You’ve got 11 more days to avail yourself of the Humble Ebook Bundle!

/ / Homeland, News, Podcast

The Humble Ebook Bundle is going great guns, with a collection of recent and classic books from both indie and major publishers, all DRM-free, on a name-your-price basis. Included in the bundle is an exclusive audio adaptation of my novel Homeland, read by Wil Wheaton, who also appears as a character in the novel.

When Wil got to the part where the protagonist, Marcus, meets “him” in the story, he kind of lost it, cracking up as he read Marcus’s breathless (and thoroughly deserved!) praise of Wil.

Here’s audio (MP3) of Wil explaining the context of the scene to Gabrielle de Cuir, the director who worked with Wil on his reading.

Listening to the raw daily studio sessions in February was a great treat, and I hope these outtakes give you a sense of some of that behind-the-scene action.

You’ve got 12 more days to score the Humble Ebook Bundle, which includes Steven Gould’s Jumper, Holly Black’s Tithe, Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies, Wil Wheaton’s The Happiest Days of Our Lives, and the audio adaptation of Homeland, read by Wil!