Homeland by Cory Doctorow

After finishing “Little Brother” by Cory Doctorow at the end of my winter vacation I knew I wanted to also read its successor, “Homeland”, as soon as possible. I just needed a little break by ways of reading some non-fiction first 😉

Homeland takes place a couple of years after its predecessor but features pretty much the same cast. Markus and Ange are still together but while she’s now on college he dropped out and is now looking for a job. All things start to get really complicated, though, when they meet Marsha at Burning Man and are entrusted with a USB stick full of dirty secrets she intends to use as leverage in case of an emergency.

Personally, while I really enjoyed this book, it wasn’t as exciting as the first one. The pace was much slower and only picked up during the last 100 pages. It was still a great tour through various tech topics with a bit of a focus on Tor and hacker-/makerspaces. Again, there’s lots of fighting against police brutality and surveillance but this time you read more of the tactics for large protests and also the political side of activism and campaigning.

I’d have loved to be a bit more thriller in this techno-thriller but it was still a very enjoyable read and I just had to know how the story continued 😉

P.S.: The book starts with a trip to Burning Man and eventually also name-drops Club Mate as the official drink of hackerspaces. At this point I’m really waiting for an entry in that series that somehow incorporates the Chaos Communication Congress 🙂

Over the years I've written quite a few reviews 🙂 You can find them at /reviews/.

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