Citizens’ rights are at the heart of book

“Homeland” by Cory Doctorow and afterwords by Jacob Appelbaum and Aaron Swartz; Tor Teen, 396 pp. ($17.99)

At a book tour stop in Cincinnati, a 13-year-old girl asked author Cory Doctorow how she could get involved in politics.

Doctorow, the author of “Homeland,” the sequel to the bestselling young adult novel “Little Brother,” said he told her she could get involved with a youth group of a political party of her choice or join a model United Nations chapter.

	If you go Cory Doctorow will give a brief PowerPoint presentation on “Homeland” at 3 p.m. Wednesday at Taylor Ranch Library, 5700 Bogart NW. Doctorow will also discuss “Homeland” and host a question-and-answer session at 6 p.m. Wednesday at South Broadway Cultural Center, 1025 Broadway SE. One $20 ticket admits two to the event and comes with one copy of “Homeland.” Tickets are available at www.alamosabooks.com or at Alamosa Books, 8810 Holly NE. If you buy tickets online, you can pick up the book in the store prior to the event, or you can have it held for pick-up at the event.

If she really wants to be an activist, she could get involved with a local “maker” studio and dissemble and reassemble computers. Do that and it will help make people free, Doctorow said he told the girl.

Maker is the name of the growing subculture of informal learning, including technological innovation and creative design. The subculture is the subject of the Doctorow novel “Makers” and is a discussion topic on the popular weblog http://boingboing.net.

“Homeland” may be fiction, but it challenges readers of all ages to confront important real-world themes of open access to public documents and government control of a citizen’s right of privacy and information.

Doctorow will give a brief PowerPoint presentation on “Homeland” Wednesday afternoon at the Taylor Ranch Library on the West Side.

Later the same day, Doctorow will discuss his book at the South Broadway Cultural Center. He said it will probably be more q-and-a than reading.

“I’ll talk about issues that moved me to write the book and tie it in to Aaron’s story because it’s important to remember his contributions,” he said in a phone interview from Chapel Hill, N.C.

Doctorow was referring to Aaron Swartz, who wrote one of the afterwords in “Homeland.” Swartz came up with many of the ideas that a lead character in the book creates for a Senate campaign for which he’s hired as webmaster.

Last month the 26-year-old Swartz, an Internet activist, committed suicide. Swartz, cofounder of Reddit.com and Demand Progress, had been indicted on federal charges of illegally accessing a subscription service and downloading almost all of the service’s library of journals.

In his “Homeland” afterword, Swartz had written, “…if some of the more conspiracy-minded stuff in the book seems too wild to be true, well just Google Blackwater, Xe, or Bluecoat. (I myself have an FOIA request in to learn more about ‘persona management software,’ but the Feds say it will take three more years to redact all the relevant documents.”)

FOIA stands for the Freedom of Information Act.
— This article appeared on page 23 of the Albuquerque Journal