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If you only read one science fiction novel this year, let it be this one. If you've never read SF in your life, now is the time to correct that virginity. If you have a family member or friend between 6 and 25 who likes to read, this is the book to give him or her this year. Readers from 26 to 80 will also have a wonderful time - but it's the young ones who need to read this book, and the rest of us need them to do it.

• Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow, Tor, 382 pages, $19.95

In the very near future, Marcus Yallow, a bright, pleasant, apolitical high school student, happens to be walking with friends on the wrong street in his hometown, San Francisco, when a 9/11-sized terrorist attack occurs only blocks away. At once, he and his friends and anyone else nearby are secretly abducted and interrogated without process - due or otherwise - by the Department of Homeland Security, which uses (only) terror and torture to see whether they're terrorists.

By the time they're finally allowed to leave the island they call Gitmo-by-the-Bay, all of them are utterly subdued by an enemy even senators can't control. Except for Darryl, who doesn't come back and is presumed dead, and his best friend, Marcus, who is angry.

The book had repaid its purchase price by the end of its first chapter. By then, award-winning Canadian science-fiction writer Cory Doctorow had not only succeeded in involving me totally in his protagonist's troubles, along the way he'd told me how to defeat caller ID, how to become invisible to "snoopware" and use applications it doesn't know I have open, and how to keep recognition software from identifying me by my walk. Soon after, I learned why terrorist-identifying gear that is "99 per cent accurate" is actually always 99 per cent inaccurate.

“ Among its many other virtues, this book is a stealth survival guide for thoughtful revolutionaries”

From there, Little Brother kept getting better, until I felt an impulse to pay extra for it. If I'm lucky, that happens to me once every couple of years.

When I was done, I'd experienced a story fully as moving, inspiring and exciting as one of the classic Robert A. Heinlein juveniles (the benchmark for young adult SF that adults will also enjoy). I had been scientifically educated by these books without even noticing; this time the same thing happened about technologies and social networks I need to understand if I hope to remain a free human being in the new millennium.

For among its many other virtues, this book is a stealth survival guide for thoughtful revolutionaries, like Robert A. Heinlein's Hugo-winning adult novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but updated for the Information Age and a younger audience.

By the time you've finished it, you'll know, specifically and in detail, how to hack the Department of Homeland Security. And get away with it. You'll be able to surf the Net invisibly, and to foil cameras, E-ZPass registers, GPS's, RFIDs (Google those), and all the latest toys of those who protect our "freedom" by taking it away. One hint I can't resist giving away: All you'll really need to get started is a decent Xbox ... and a youthful mind.

It's not really grownups' fault that we can't code or game at all. We were just born too soon. But it is our fault if we get all our news from sources we know are all controlled by a bare handful of owners: TV "news," "fact-inspired" movies, psychotic talk radio and newspapers that have the same headlines, articles, graphics and editorials as the 160 other papers in that chain nationwide.

Our kids and grandkids know better places to get information.

I was thrilled by Doctorow's belief that, with the right hardware and the right software hacks, today's game-happy youth might actually form the only force capable of rescuing North America from the bloated parasitic pinworms who now infest it. That the United States might remember what liberty means. That in Canada, it isn't yet too late for us to demand and even get back again peace, order and good government. Doctorow reminds us of the profound truth: People who use technology to control and enslave others are always and everywhere, by definition, stupid and cowardly. There are no brave or intelligent reasons to torture. True intelligence is incompatible with the fascist impulse.

And no adult, however smart or cruel, is ever going to outwit even one 12-year-old forever, much less all of them. Hell, they couldn't even outwit 18-year-olds back in the '60s. Stoned ones.

Little Brother is a most satisfactory coming-of-age story, a political awakening story, a sexual awakening story and, through it all, a sweet but hip love story handled by an expert. It gives me renewed hope for the future of science fiction and of the world.

B.C. writer and podcaster Spider Robinson's 33rd book, Variable Star, is a posthumous collaboration with Robert A. Heinlein.