Review:

Neil Gaiman

I’d recommend Little Brother over pretty much any book I’ve read this year, and I’d want to get it into the hands of as many smart 13 year olds, male and female, as I can.

Because I think it’ll change lives. Because some kids, maybe just a few, won’t be the same after they’ve read it. Maybe they’ll change politically, maybe technologically. Maybe it’ll just be the first book they loved or that spoke to their inner geek. Maybe they’ll want to argue about it and disagree with it. Maybe they’ll want to open their computer and see what’s in there. I don’t know. It made me want to be 13 again right now and reading it for the first time, and then go out and make the world better or stranger or odder. It’s a wonderful, important book, in a way that renders its flaws pretty much meaningless.

Neil Gaiman, author of Sandman and Anansi Boys
Review:

Publishers Weekly

Filled with sharp dialogue and
detailed descriptions of how to counteract gait-recognition cameras,
arphids (radio frequency ID tags), wireless Internet tracers and other
surveillance devices, this work makes its admittedly didactic point within
a tautly crafted fictional framework

Publishers Weekly
Review:

Booklist

Readers will delight in the details of how Marcus attempts to stage a techno-revolution … Buy multiple copies; this book will be h4wt (that’s ‘hot,’ for the nonhackers).

Booklist
Review:

Elizabeth Bear

This book has a whole bunch to recommend it: It’s fast-paced, well-written, and the protagonist is engaging in a geeky way, if just a tiny little bit generic. The book is a bit didactic in places. However, since in some ways it’s a fictionalized manual for how to build an underground resistance to an evil government, that’s only to be expected. Really very good, and based on what I remember about my own teenage years,

Elizabeth Bear
Review:

Strange Horizons

Little Brother is not a light-hearted book. Many of the “pro-revolution” YA books I’ve read in the past few years go from resistance to victory without really passing through pain and sacrifice. In the course of this book Marcus and his friends, and others they don’t know of, are tortured, and each time Marcus comes up against the mentality that official suspicion must rest on something, that people must have done something or they wouldn’t be in trouble. Marcus has to deal with betrayal from some of the adults in his life, and the discovery that not all his friends can or will follow him. He learns some hard truths about his own privileged position as he realises that this war against youth is also a war against non-whites. He discovers that the America he understood as historical is not a consensus, that there is no consensus America, only one that has been bitterly contested time after time and is safe only if people fight for it to be safe. Even his victory will be partial, as he discovers that there is no way he is going to be allowed to think of himself as wholly innocent.

Farah Mendlesohn, Strange Horizons

Launching Little Brother at the Toronto Public Library reading series, May 1

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The Toronto Public Library system is just kicking off a gigantic, ambitious speculative reading series that starts next Monday with Michael Skeet hosting a panel discussion with Karl Schroeder, James Alan Gardner and Peter Watts on the pursuit of foresight in Canadian science fiction.

On May 1, Toronto Public Library be launching my next novel, Little Brother, at an event at the Merril Collection, the astounding public science fiction reference library. Books will be on sale through BakkaPhoenix books, and they’re taking pre-orders for signed/inscribed copies of the book to be mailed out to you (CDN$19.95 for the book, plus $9 and GST for shipping in Canada, $15 to the US, $20 to Europe, and $25 to the rest of the world). BakkaPhoenix: 416 963 9993, inquiries@bakkaphoenixbooks.com

(Patient US readers who don’t mind waiting until the end of May for their signed, inscribed copies can request them from San Francisco’s Borderlands Books, who are not charging for domestic shipping. Borderlands: 888.893.4008, webmail@borderlands-books.com.)

Link


Starry Rift: sf antho for kids

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The Starry Rift, a new anthology of kids-oriented science fiction, comes out today. It’s edited by Jonathan Strahan, and includes fiction by Neil Gaiman, Steven Baxter, Greg Egan, Jeffrey Ford, Gwyneth Jones, Kathleen Goonan, Ian McDonald, Kelly Link, Scott Westerfeld, Garth Nix, Walter Jon Williams and others — including me (with my story Anda’s Game).

The editor, Jonathan Strahan, did a fantastic job in pulling this together, and it couldn’t come at a better time. Kids’ literature is peaking right now, and a high-quality anthology that introduces young people to authors they can plunge into for books and books and books is a timely and great idea.

Jonathan’s giving away five copies of The Starry Rift to the first five young readers who write to him and name the last sf novel they loved and why.

Link, Buy it on Amazon


Interview in Germany’s Spex magazine

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The German magazine Spex just published an interview with me, conducted while I was there in February touring with the German edition of Eastern Standard Tribe.

Jede technologische Entwicklung in der Geschichte der Menschheit hat Gewinner und Verlierer produziert. Als es noch keine Radios und Grammophone gab, war für einen Künstler Charisma, die Bühnenpräsenz, das Wichtigste – die Eigenschaft, die ihn erfolgreich werden ließ. Radio und Schallplatte relativierten die Wichtigkeit der charismatischen Bühnenpersönlichkeit, wichtiger wurde die Virtuosität im Studio – die Fähigkeit, seine Stimme oder sein Instrument im Moment der Aufnahme perfekt zu beherrschen! Es gefiel einer Menge Künstler nicht, dass sie ein Produkt einspielten, eine Konserve, die anschließend jemand anders dem Publikum lieferte – diese Künstler mussten sich bald neue Jobs suchen… Wer sich als Autor zu fein ist, Lesungen zu geben, Vorträge zu halten und für Magazine zu schreiben, hat in der heutigen Zeit verloren. Technologie tut Gutes und Böses, und die Frage ist nicht, ob die Helden und Gewinner von Gestern die Helden und Gewinner von Morgen sein werden. Die wichtige Frage ist vielmehr: Wird einer größeren Anzahl von Menschen die Möglichkeit gegeben, an Bildung und Kultur teilzuhaben?

Link