Little Brother's World

From Scavenger to Justice seeker, his courage shakes his world…

Little Brother had survived as an orphan on the colony planet Mother’s World by following two very firm rules in his scavenging through the Alor City trash dump: First, you grabbed anything edible before the valuables. Second, you never talked to the garbage. But then the Pube girl Sally talked to him—and he talked back, even though she was tied up "garbage" deposited in the dump.

To make matters worse, Sally was not your everyday garbage person. She was a Breed, a person with a finely tailored genetic code whose geneflesh was very, very valuable on a world of rigid castes, hard choices, and little sympathy for those who questioned the rules. And keeping secret Sally's genetic heritage took more than a robe with long sleeves to hide the GeneCode tattoo on her wrist.

For rather than be happy with a full belly and a warm place to sleep, Sally questioned the way of Mother's World, and her questioning drew unwanted attention. Before Little Brother knew it, they were both on the run to escape the deadly attention of the Church of Flesh and the assassin of Sally's parents.

Little Brother discovered that, in rescuing Sally, he had begun a quest to learn why he alone had been born without the GeneCode tattoo that set one’s status, job, and destiny. That quest would lead him to a truth that some on his world would kill to keep secret—and the lives of two young people count for nothing in the Game of Power. But Little Brother has a Talent stronger than hatred or power, a Talent linked to his birth without a GeneCode tattoo. It is a Talent that might help both of them survive.…

Reviews:

"When I'm turning a friend on to a good writer I've just discovered, I'll often say something like, 'Give him ten pages and you'll never be able to put him down.' Once in a long while, I'll say, 'Give him five pages.' It took T. Jackson King exactly one sentence to set his hook so deep in me that I finished Little Brother's World in a single sitting, and I'll be thinking about that vivid world for a long time to come. The last writer I can recall with the courage to make a protagonist out of someone as profoundly Different as Little Brother was James Tiptree Jr., with her remarkable debut novel Up the Walls of the World. I think Mr. King has met that challenge even more successfully. His own writing DNA borrows genes from writers as diverse as Tiptree, Heinlein, Norton, Zelazny, Sturgeon, Pohl, and Doctorow, and splices them together very effectively." —Spider Robinson

"If you're sensing a whiff of André Norton or Robert A. Heinlein, you're not mistaken—those are the first two names in T. Jackson King's list of acknowledgments. Little Brother's World is no mere imitation of Star Man's Son or Citizen of the Galaxy. Rather, it takes the sensibility of those sorts of books and makes of it something fresh and new. T. Jackson King is doing his part to further the great conversation of science fiction; it'll be interesting to see where he goes next." —Analog Science Fiction and Fact, March 2011