The flood of positive reviews for Little Brother has been nothing short of amazing, but two very special ones came in today. One is from John E. Cook’s son Ean, left on their kitchen whiteboard last night after Ean finished the book (pictured here), the other from my friend and colleague William Gibson: “I’ve not previously expressed my admiration for Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother. As Wm. Burroughs was fond of saying, “young boys need it special”. In the case of Cory’s book, though, young girls need it special too.”

At the end of my book-tour last month, I stopped at the Google NYC office and did a reading from the book and spoke about general subjects related to it.
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Last week, I conducted a long phone interview with The Onion’s Tasha Robinson, who’s reviewed a lot of my work for The Onion in years gone by. We had a great conversation and to my delight, Tasha’s put up the whole transcript of the chat, which covered a lot of ground.

I think that young kids have rarely been people who have disposable income and spend it well. As a writer, I had the good fortune to work in a bookstore that sold new and used books, so I got a real cradle-to-grave view on what happens to creative work, and how audiences mature. So you’d see people coming in who are very young, who had a little pocket money, and would just buy used books. And sometimes they would say, “If someone brings in this new book as a used book, please give me a call. I’d like to be the first person in line to buy it.” And we would actually have someone on staff whose job it was to take the used books that came in, and look them up in the computer to see if anyone was waiting for them, and if they were, to call them up and tell them there was a copy for $2 waiting. As those people cultivated the habit of reading, and more money became available to them, they would spend more freely in the store. Really, what changed wasn’t their willingness to pay, it was their ability to pay, and maybe in our own minds, we conflate those two. In general, when you reach a certain point in your life cycle as a buyer, the cost of a book is not something you generally notice.

It’s kind of like the buyer who walks into a store and is thinking about buying a candy bar, and one of them is priced at $.99 and the other is priced at $1.10. For a little kid, that might make a difference. For adults on their way out of the store with $75 worth of groceries, it makes no difference at all. They’ll pick the candy bar they want, not the one that’s $.11 cheaper. So there’s a certain price sensitivity that evaporates when you get older. And then when you get older still, when you become someone on a fixed income, it reappears. And you see that whole lifecycle of people when you work in a used bookstore, and I kind of feel like what I want to be sure of is not that every time someone reads my book, I get paid for it. I’m more interested in making sure that every time someone decides to make what I call a macro payment, to spend a bunch of money on an entertainment decision, that I’m really close to the top of their wish list of what they want to spend it on. And I think you see this with things like the Nine Inch Nails release, or the Radiohead release, where really, what they were trying to do is say to the people who are cash-poor and time-rich, “Just take this and go around and promote the hell out of it. Go and act as breezes to loft my seeds to every corner of the globe.” Because if you do that widely enough, if you cast those seeds widely enough, some of them will germinate in really fertile soil, some of them will land in the pocket of a guy who’s got a ton of disposable income, who’s sort of 18-34, single, working his first job, his first major professional job at a college, with lots of money jingling in his pocket, who might think, “Holy crap! $300 limited-edition Nine Inch Nails box set, yeah, I’ll take one of those!”

I’m way more interested in, instead of trying to turn the 15-year-old upside down and shake an extra couple of quarters out of his pockets, in how I can use his natural loquaciousness, his natural enthusiasm, to help get the message out about really high-ticket items, like a $20 hardcover, into the ears of people who routinely buy $20 hardcovers without even blinking.

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Have you used technology to overcome the odds when fighting back against authority? I’d love to hear about it!

The UK edition of my young adult novel Little Brother is coming out next November, and HarperCollins, the UK publisher, have asked me to come up with some new material for the British book. I’m noodling with a bunch of different ideas on this score, but one of my favourites is of compiling an appendix of real-world stories of people who’ve successfully used technology to subvert authority and level the playing field between just-regular-folks and The Powers That Be.

To that end, I’m interested in getting your stories — ones that you’re happy to have published — of technological triumph over blind, goofy, obdurate authority. Post them here on the post or email me with them. If I get enough great material, I’ll make it an appendix in the Brit edition!

Ian sends word of the ParanoidLinux project, inspired by the Linux distro used by the freedom fighters in my novel, Little Brother:

Paranoid Linux is an operating system that assumes that its operator is under assault from the government (it was intended for use by Chinese and Syrian dissidents), and it does everything it can to keep your communications and documents a secret. It even throws up a bunch of “chaff” communications that are supposed to disguise the fact that you’re doing anything covert. So while you’re receiving a political message one character at a time, ParanoidLinux is pretending to surf the Web and fill in questionnaires and flirt in chat-rooms. Meanwhile, one in every five hundred characters you receive is your real message, a needle buried in a huge haystack.
~Cory Doctorow (Little Brother, 2008)

When those words were written, ParanoidLinux was just a fiction. It is our goal to make this a reality. The project officially started on May 14th, and has been growing ever since. We welcome your ideas, contributions, designs, or code. You can find us on freenode’s irc server in the #paranoidlinux channel. Hope to see you there!

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(Thanks, Ian!)