Homeland is Cory Doctorow's direct sequel to his Prometheus award-winning novel Little Brother. Like its predecessor, Homeland takes place in the present, and is steeped in the recession that straddles the end of the GW Bush administration and current Obama administration. Marcus Yallow, the protagonist of Little Brother, now is 19 years old. Due to massive debt, Marcus has dropped out of college, and like so many people of his generation, also finds himself unemployed. The novel opens at Burning Man, the annual Labor Day weekend event, where Marcus and his girlfriend journeyed to experience the event. He also hopes to network into a new job, given the large number of tech-people who attend Burning Man. Impoverished as they are, they can make the journey by tapping into the trade and barter economic model. They join thousands amid the free-wheeling yet peaceful culture of the annual temporary Burning Man event, an exciting if temporary respite from the real world. To readers unfamiliar with Burning Man, Doctorow provides detailed descriptions of the actual events and background for how each event or tradition originated.

During a fortuitous and chance meeting with four notable real-world people at Burning Man, Marcus is given a chance to interview as a webmaster for a political candidate, Joe Noss, who is running as a pseudo-independent Democrat. Here Marcus is given a chance to participate in the big-P kinds of politics, “the kind that involves elections and so on,” as Noss puts it during his first meeting with Marcus. Noss appears to be Doctorow's dream candidate, an “independent” voice, yet still within the liberal fold.

When a novel like Homeland tackles very current events, it must be considered against the backdrop of those events and how those events are interpreted. Homeland tries to walk the ideological minefield of supporting the political infrastructure and people who make massive spying and callous drone attacks possible, while at the same time decrying and pointing out the excesses brought about by the rent seeking of this same political infrastructure.

Whereas the ending of Little Brother and the beginning of Homeland appear to still cling to the idea that changes can come from within the system, the idea that our candidate will not be as bad as the other guy, this viewpoint seems to evolve somewhat by the end of Homeland. The intellectual hand-wringing is exemplified by Doctorow's own tweet on November 7, 2012: “Amazing to think that I'm relieved at the victory of the pro-wiretapping, pro-extrajudicial-assassination, anti-whistleblower candidate.” Would Joe Noss become the same “lesser of evils, but still evil” if elected into office? Would the very nature of political office corrupt and turn him like so many others? Homeland does not quite answer this question.

Setting aside politics, the novel itself dives into the modern privacy versus national security war, a war largely fought by government and resisted by those few who see the looming threat of Big Brother. Written before the whistle-blowing leaks by Edward Snowden, much of the focus is instead upon a Wikileaks/Bradley Manning story driver. At Burning Man, Marcus is contacted by Masha, someone he knew in Little Brother, and who used to work for the government. Having become disillusioned, she found others who shared her views, and became a recipient of dangerous information from various leakers. Now on the run, she gives Marcus a memory stick with a trove of information on government malfeasance. Shortly thereafter, Marcus sees a more dangerous foe, Carrie Johnstone, the vicious military contractor who hounded him in Little Brother. He believe Johnstone has kidnapped Masha, and knows that the information he received from Masha could imperil his own life if Johnstone is aware he has this information. As he returns to San Francisco and gets involved with Joe Noss' campaign, he also could endanger his chances for work if he gets involved in political action that distracts from Noss's campaign.

Marcus and his girlfriend, Ange, decide to carefully release information from the memory stick Masha gave him. They go through a process to make their computer as secure and hidden as possible, and drop carefully selected texts into a Darknet site, one only certain friends can access, so they can vet the files and determine how and what to release. Before they say the word “leaker,” some of that information gets out to the press, and quickly becomes news, placing them firmly in the sites of anti-leak forces in the government.

Marcus also gets involved in a local Occupy protest, which quickly turns into violent repression. Doctorow is skilled at researching current events, and bleeding-edge technology. His passion for maker culture, detailing the concept of legal intercepts, the idea of paranoid linux, permanent and all-intrusive surveillance, make for a thrilling read. Yet despite what actually happens in the world, it seems that the protagonists are more worried about businesses surveilling people than government (despite Wikileaks and the massive Snowden NSA leaks, all government related). Johnstone, the villain in the shadows, isn't shown as a true public employee stooge, but rather a private contractor, a Blackwater-like operative. Motives are rooted in money. Another bane of Doctorow's otherwise great writing is his predilection for info-dumps and lengthy see-what-I-know lectures.

Toward the end of the novel, as Marcus and Liam, a fellow Occupier, discuss their future, Liam scoffs at Marcus’s idea that electing Noss to public office will make the world a better place:

He barked a laugh. “You’re kidding, right? You really think it makes a difference who we vote for? After you’ve seen the darknet docs, seen how someone uses the system to get rich, then used their riches to change the system to keep them that way? Jesus, Marcus, what is this, high school civics?

One page later, when Marcus muses that his government turned his city into a police state, kidnapped and tortured him. While he originally though that it isn’t the system, but the people in office, he has realized that the good apples become bad apples. There are always emergencies, and people use those emergencies. He seems to finally realize what he didn't see in Little Brother, that working within the system just gets you worked over.

A tragic aspect of the novel is reading the Afterword by Aaron Schwartz, the young internet prodigy who killed himself after becoming the focus of an over-zealous prosecutor going after him for hacking and releasing documents into the public domain. Schwartz’s last sentence—“Let me know if I can help” became a distressing read knowing he is no longer alive, his promise and passion extinguished. Homeland is an important novel, a powerful novel. Doctorow might not be a libertarian, but like George Orwell the socialist exposing the ills of socialism through his fiction (Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four), Doctorow cares about freedom, and rails in a powerful voice against those who seek to control our freedom and those who work to limit our rights and abilities to live and act free.