Trent McCauley is sixteen, brilliant, and obsessed with one thing: making movies on his computer by sampling and reassembling footage he downloads from the net. In the near-future Britain where Trent is growing up, this is more illegal than ever; if you’re caught three times, your entire household is cut off from the Internet for a year, with no appeal. Trent is sure this won’t happen to him; he’s too clever. Except it does, and it nearly destroys his family—his father’s living, his mother’s health, and his kid sister’s studies all depend on Internet access. Shamed and shattered, Trent runs away to London where he learns how to stay alive on the streets. This drops him straight into the city’s always-rambunctious street scene, a demimonde of artists and activists who are fighting a new bill that will criminalize digital copying even more harmless than Trent’s, making millions of people felons at a stroke. The government is in the grip of a few wealthy media conglomerates. But the powers that be haven’t entirely reckoned with the power of a movie to change people’s minds. . . .
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“This amazing bookcombines young love, terrific humor, great British slang“This amazing bookcombines young love, terrific humor, great British slang, and crazy partieswith astute commentary on intellectual property and emerging modes ofcreativity. Doctorow’s characters are well-defined individuals, all with somefacet, quirk, or activity to give them color. Language arts and civics teacherscould coteach the heck out of this novel, and debaters will find a gold mine ofmonologues. It’s funny, thought-provoking, and glorious.”
— School Library Journal
“Doctorow returns with another down-and-dirty tale of technological guerrilla warfare…Doctorow, a noted free Internet advocate, handles his topic with great passion, creating engaging and believably geeky characters who share his fervor for both the Web and the new forms of art and communication it has made possible. Though the story can be talky and didactic, fans of the author’s earlier work will find it a winner.”
— Publishers Weekly“Can a kid from the wrong side of town fight the British government? Bruce Mann performs in the voice of a young man on the verge of adulthood. The Brit slang sounds natural and exotic at the same time. Mann’s sometimes breathy delivery ratchets up the suspense, and his careful use of accents gives even more personality to the likable characters.”
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Cory Doctorow is a blogger, journalist, and author science fiction and nonfiction. His writing has won numerous awards, including three Locus Awards, two John W. Campbell Awards, three Prometheus Awards, two Sunburst Awards, the White Pine Award, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award, among others. He has served as Canadian regional director of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. He is coeditor of the blog Boing Boing, and he was named one of the web’s twenty-five “influencers” by Forbes and a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. He is a contributing author to Wired magazine, and his writing has been published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, the Globe and Mail, the Boston Globe, Popular Science, and others.
Bruce Mann, Earphones Award–winning narrator,studied classical acting at the prestigious London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and has been a successful voice-over artist and actor for over ten years.