Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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Continue reading "Pluralistic: The seductive, science fictional power of spreadsheets (29 Apr 2023)"
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.
Continue reading "Silicon Valley Noir"
Continue reading "Pluralistic: Podcasting "Gig Work Is the Opposite of Steampunk" (20 Mar 2023)"
Continue reading "Pluralistic: Matt Ruff's "Destroyer of Worlds" (21 Feb 2023)"
Continue reading "Pluralistic: Deena Mohamed's 'Shubiek Lubiek' (11 Jan 2023)"
Three of my short stories that got it right…kinda.
I am on record on the subject of science fiction writers predicting the future: we do not. Thank goodness we don’t predict the future! If the future were predictable, then nothing any of us did would matter, because the same future would arrive, just the same. The unpredictability of the future is due to human agency, something the best science fiction writers understand to their bones. Fatalism is for corpses.
Continue reading "Pluralistic: All the books I reviewed in 2022 (01 Dec 2022)"
Author’s Note: This short story was originally commissioned by Deakin College as part of an AI ethics course; they have since take it down. This is its new home. For a nonfiction analysis of the problems set forth herein, see my Guardian column on the subject. Here’s an audio edition.