Austin “Soon I Will Be Invincible” Grossman’s written a fantastic review of my young adult novel Little Brother for this weekend’s New York Times book review section. Incidentally, the book went into a fifth hardcover printing last week, and is going back for a sixth printing next week because so many orders came in between the fifth printing being set up and it being delivered!
“Little Brother” is a terrific read, but it also claims a place in the tradition of polemical science-fiction novels like “Nineteen Eighty-Four” and “Fahrenheit 451” (with a dash of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”). It owes a more immediate debt to Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli’s comic book series “DMZ,” about the adventures of a photojournalist in the midst of a new American civil war. …MY favorite thing about “Little Brother” is that every page is charged with an authentic sense of the personal and ethical need for a better relationship to information technology, a visceral sense that one’s continued dignity and independence depend on it: “My technology was working for me, serving me, protecting me. It wasn’t spying on me. This is why I loved technology: if you used it right, it could give you power and privacy.”
BTW, if I’m not mistaken, there are still some signed first-edition hardcovers in stock at Bakka Books in Toronto and Borderlands in San Francisco, and both stores ship.
