Cory Doctorow Signing and Reading: Homeland

Cory Doctorow’s 2007 novel Little Brother was a young-adult novel featuring themes some considered too heavy for the genre, including paranoia, sex, torture and social activism. In a novel about four teenagers who, after a terrorist attack, brave a Department of Homeland Security assault on civil liberties, Doctorow doesn’t soft-pedal it. Homeland, the sequel to Little Brother, comes out this month, and the author will visit The Leonardo to read and sign copies of his book at an event presented by Weller Book Works.

Doctorow has been a pioneer in writing about technology in science fiction and nonfiction, as well as in the way written works are distributed, and has released many of his works as Creative Commons downloads—free as long as they aren’t used for commercial purposes. The 41-year-old writer’s novels and short stories have received some of the highest honors in science fiction. He serves as co-editor of BoingBoing.net, and has written for The Guardian, The New York Times, Wired and numerous other publications on technology and digital rights. Doctorow is a scholar in virtual residence at the University of Waterloo in Canada, and a visiting senior lecturer at Open University in the U.K.

The afterword to Homeland was written by Aaron Swartz, the Internet activist who committed suicide in January, and one of the characters in these books was partly based on Swartz. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which is stranger, truth or fiction, but in the science-fiction world of an author like Cory Doctorow, the two are inseparable. (Brian Staker)