Pluralistic: The internet is not a (link)dump truck (30 Sept 2023)


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Pluralistic: Justin C Key's "The World Wasn't Ready For You" (19 Sep 2023)


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Pluralistic: Links, dumped (10 June 2023)


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Pluralistic: Ian McDonald's "Hopeland" (30 May 2023)


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Pluralistic: Justice Warriors (22 May 2023)


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  • Justice Warriors: Matt Bors', Ben Clarkson's and Felipe Sobriero's scorchingly brilliant, viciously funny, dystopian sf graphic novel.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • This day in history: 2003, 2008, 2013, 2018
  • Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading

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Pluralistic: Dumping links like Galileo dumped the orange (20 May 2023)


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Don’t Curb Your Enthusiasm

Marcus Yallow + 50 Years = Marty Hench?

The “Marty Hench” figure from the cover of Red Team Blues, next to the “M1k3y” figure (with large, binary-digit-lined red “X”) from the cover of Little Brother.

The old crow is getting slow;

the young crow is not.

Of what the young crow does not know,

the old crow knows a lot.

At knowing things,

the old crow is still the young crow’s master.

What does the old crow not know?

How to go faster.

The young crow flies above, below,

and rings around the slow old crow.

What does the fast young crow not know?

WHERE TO GO.

-John Ciardi, About Crows


Marcus Yallow is the 17-year-old hero of Little Brother, my 2008 novel about kids in San Francisco who wage high-tech guerrilla war on the Department of Homeland Security, who occupy the city after a terrorist attack.
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Pluralistic: The seductive, science fictional power of spreadsheets (29 Apr 2023)


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Silicon Valley Noir

Red Team Blues and the Role of Bitterness in Technothrillers.

A section of a high-resolution image of a secure coprocessor; superimposed over it is the graphic from the cover of the Tor Books edition of Red Team Blues, which features a male figure sprinting out of a stylized keyhole.
Pauli Rautakorpi/CC BY 3.0 (modified)

My next novel is Red Team Blues, an anti-finance finance thriller starring Martin Hench, a high-tech forensic accountant who’s spent 40 years busting Silicon Valley grifters large and small.

At 67, Marty’s seen it all, and while he is full of compassion for the victims of the scams he unwinds, his overwhelming feeling is bitterness. As he says in the opening pages of the book, after landing a job that will change his life:

Truth be told, I also didn’t want to contemplate the possibility that, at the age of sixty-­seven, the new work might stop coming in. Silicon Valley hates old people, but that was okay, because I hated Silicon Valley. Professionally, that is.

Red Team Blues is the first volume in the Martin Hench series, a series that runs in reverse chronological order. The next book, The Bezzle (Feb. 2024) is set in the mid-2010s, while the third, Picks and Shovels (Jan. 2025) is Marty’s origin story, starting in the early 1980s when Marty drops out of MIT and comes west to San Francisco in the first heroic years of the PC revolution.
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Pluralistic: Kickstarting the Red Team Blues audiobook, which Amazon won't sell (21 Mar 2023)


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