by Omnivoracious.com at 7:26 PM PDT, April 3, 2008

Author and Boing Boing contributor Cory Doctorow makes his YA debut in May with Little Brother, a novel Doctorow told Amazon is "enormously" influenced by dystopian/fascist regime classics. "The genre fascinates me; the novel 1984 is one of my favorite and most re-read. Adolescents are the perfect protagonists for these stories, too--hence Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and Jack Womack's Random Acts of Senseless Kindness."

In the novel, Doctorow's teenage protagonist, Marcus, finds himself caught up in the aftermath of a terrorist attack on San Francisco, with civil liberties suspended and the Department of Homeland Security conducting merciless interrogations. "Marcus...is a smart-alecky, brainy kid who loves showing off what he knows (I was that kid)." Some of these same qualities lead Marcus to try to take down the DHS.

Little Brother comes with glowing praise from the likes of Neil Gaiman, Scott Westerfeld, and Brian K. Vaughn. And the publisher, Tor, has a novel approach to promotion: the book will be sent out to high school newspapers for review. Doctorow says this idea came from "the brilliant people at YPulse, which is probably the best site on the net about marketing and communications for young people. They were an enormous help in formulating the publicity strategy for the book."

Can't wait until May for Little Brother? Doctorow has released a podcast excerpt, which you can listen to here.