Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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Continue reading "Pluralistic: Pluralistic is four; The Bezzle excerpt (Part III) (20 Feb 2024)"
Continue reading "Pluralistic: An excerpt from The Bezzle (17 Feb 2024)"
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.
Continue reading "Don’t Curb Your Enthusiasm"
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"
