In Cory Doctorow's wildly successful Little Brother, young Marcus
Yallow was arbitrarily detained and brutalized by the government in the
wake of a terrorist attack on San Francisco--an experience that led him
to become a leader of the whole movement of technologically clued-in
teenagers, fighting back against the tyrannical security state.
A few years later, California's economy collapses, but Marcus's
hacktivist past lands him a job as webmaster for a crusading politician
who promises reform. Soon his former nemesis Masha emerges from the
political underground to gift him with a thumbdrive containing a
Wikileaks-style cable-dump of hard evidence of corporate and
governmental perfidy. It's incendiary stuff--and if Masha goes missing,
Marcus is supposed to release it to the world. Then Marcus sees Masha
being kidnapped by the same government agents who detained and tortured
Marcus years earlier.
Marcus can leak the archive Masha gave him--but he can't admit to being
the leaker, because that will cost his employer the election. He's
surrounded by friends who remember what he did a few years ago and
regard him as a hacker hero. He can't even attend a demonstration
without being dragged onstage and handed a mike. He's not at all sure
that just dumping the archive onto the Internet, before he's gone
through its millions of words, is the right thing to do.
Meanwhile, people are beginning to shadow him, people who look like
they're used to inflicting pain until they get the answers they want.
Fast-moving, passionate, and as current as next week, Homeland is
every bit the equal of Little Brother--a paean to activism, to
courage, to the drive to make the world a better place.
