Locus Magazine has published its annual Recommended Reading list, which is my favorite annual guide to the best that science fiction and fantasy have to offer. The 2013 roundup includes several of the books I’ve reviewed on Boing Boing this year, including Paolo Bacigalupi’s Zombie Baseball Beatdown, Charlie Stross’s Neptune’s Brood, Lauren Beukes’s The Shining Girls, Richard Kadrey’s Dead Set, Terry Pratchett’s Raising Steam, Ian Tregillis’s Necessary Evil, Holly Black’s The Coldest Girl in Coldtown and Nathan Ballingrud’s North American Lake Monsters.

I’m also delighted to see that my novel Homeland (the sequel to Little Brother) made the list!

The whole list is just a fantastic signposting of the best the field has to offer.

2013 Locus Recommended Reading List

(via Tor.com)

Holy. Cats. My novel Little Brother has made it into the CBC’s Canada Reads Top Ten. It is in astoundingly great and humbling company, including Margaret Atwood’s Year of the Flood and Joseph Boyden’s The Orenda. I’m so, so pleased by this — thank you to everyone who supported the book. And I hope you check out the whole top ten, which is quite a list of wonderfulness.

These two young fellows are brothers from Palo Alto who’ve set out to produce a series of videos explaining the technical ideas in my novel Little Brother, and their first installment, explaining Bayes’s Theorem, is a very promising start. I’m honored — and delighted!

Technology behind “Little Brother” – Jamming with Bayes Rule

As I mentioned last week, the CBC’s Canada Reads list of top 40 Canadian books is up, and it’s got a really commendable, wide-ranging variety of titles in it (including my own novel Little Brother). The CBC is asking for readers to choose their favorites by tomorrow, at which point they’ll release the top ten list.

It’s a great exercise for energizing the nation about reading, and I’m immensely flattered and excited to have a small part in it.

Canada Reads Top 40: Explore the books

I just received the delightful news that my novel, Little Brother made it to the CBC’s “Canada Reads” list of top 40 Canadian books, and it is in some spectacular company. There’s a competitive element to this (you can vote for your top ten here), but the real value of this list is as a broad, eclectic, amazing collection of books that deserve your attention and enjoyment. Have at it — and yeah, if you feel so moved, by all means, vote for Little Brother!
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As I’ve mentioned before, my novel Little Brother is the San Francisco Public Library’s pick for its first One City/One Book citywide book-club. They’re already in the middle of the three months’ worth of events, from debates to robotics and crypto workshops to movie screenings (and much more), and I’m gearing up to head to San Francisco for several days’ worth of school visits and other presentations.

If you’d like to catch me while I’m there, your best bet is my evening presentation with Nico Sell at the SFPL main branch (100 Larkin Street) at 6PM on Oct 2. I’m also doing a presentation at Borderlands Books (866 Valencia St) on Oct 3 from 12:30-1330h. I hope to see you there!

Hey, Londoners! I’m launching the UK edition of Homeland this Wednesday at the Forbidden Planet Megastore from 18h-19h. This is the sequel to Little Brother, and it includes the novella Lawful Interception, which follows on from the action in Homeland.

If you’re not a Londoner, don’t despair! Forbidden Planet has a great mail-order service and will ship signed copies anywhere.

How cool is this? My novel, Little Brother, is the San Francisco Public Library’s “One City One Book pick for 2013, which means that it’s the book for the annual “citywide book-club.” The library is advertising the initiative with bus-shelter, bus- and coffee-sleeve-ads all over town, and the librarians just tweeted me this pic of the first ads going up in situ.

Holy.

Awesome.

There’s a whole ton of events, from screenings of movies like Sneakers, Source Code and Existenz to a “LED Robot Plushie Workshop + Little Brother Book Discussion” and Lego robotics workshops, and I’m doing a public event in conversation with Wickr/DEFCON’s Nico Sell, at the Main Library’s Koret Auditorium on Oct 2. I’m totally, utterly thrilled!

We are live around town!

On yesterday’s “This Week in Google,” a Google engineer called Matt Cutts revealed that the company started encrypting its queries in 2008 after reading my novel Little Brother, in which one of the plot-elements is a guerrilla movement that gets a friendly ISP to encrypt a lot of its traffic so that the movement’s own encrypted connections won’t stand out. I am incredibly honored and flattered to learn about this!

Coincidentally, I learned about this at the same time that Jens brought #oplittlebrother to my attention: it’s a plan to organize a mass purchase of Little Brother on Saturday (tomorrow!).

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