What do you think?
Rate this book
Martin Hench #3
Picks and Shovels
New York Times bestselling author Cory Doctorow returns to the world of Red Team Blues to bring us the origin story of Martin Hench and the most powerful new tool for crime ever the personal computer.
The year is 1986. The city is San Francisco. Here, Martin Hench will invent the forensic accountant--what a bounty hunter is to people, he is to money--but for now he's an MIT dropout odd-jobbing his way around a city still reeling from the invention of a revolutionary new technology that will change everything about crime forever, one we now take completely for granted.
When Marty finds himself hired by Silicon Valley PC startup the Three Wise Men to investigate a group of disgruntled ex-employees who've founded a competitor startup, he quickly realizes he's on the wrong side. Marty ditches the greasy old guys running Three Wise Men without a second thought, utterly infatuated with the electric atmosphere of Magenta Women's Enterprise. Located in the heart of the Mission, this group of brilliant young women found themselves exhausted by the predatory business practices of Three Wise Men and set out to beat them at their own game, making better computers and driving Three Wise Men out of business. But this optimistic startup, fueled by young love and California-style burritos, has no idea the depth of the evil they're seeking to unroot or the risks they run.
In this company-eat-company city, Martin and his friends will be lucky to escape with their lives.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
The year is 1986. The city is San Francisco. Here, Martin Hench will invent the forensic accountant--what a bounty hunter is to people, he is to money--but for now he's an MIT dropout odd-jobbing his way around a city still reeling from the invention of a revolutionary new technology that will change everything about crime forever, one we now take completely for granted.
When Marty finds himself hired by Silicon Valley PC startup the Three Wise Men to investigate a group of disgruntled ex-employees who've founded a competitor startup, he quickly realizes he's on the wrong side. Marty ditches the greasy old guys running Three Wise Men without a second thought, utterly infatuated with the electric atmosphere of Magenta Women's Enterprise. Located in the heart of the Mission, this group of brilliant young women found themselves exhausted by the predatory business practices of Three Wise Men and set out to beat them at their own game, making better computers and driving Three Wise Men out of business. But this optimistic startup, fueled by young love and California-style burritos, has no idea the depth of the evil they're seeking to unroot or the risks they run.
In this company-eat-company city, Martin and his friends will be lucky to escape with their lives.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
400 pages, Hardcover
First published February 18, 2025
162 people are currently reading
1098 people want to read
About the author
Cory Doctorow
261 books5,905 followersCory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger — the co-editor of Boing Boing and the author of the YA graphic novel In Real Life, the nonfiction business book Information Doesn’t Want To Be Free, and young adult novels like Homeland, Pirate Cinema, and
Little Brother
and novels for adults like
Rapture Of The Nerds
and Makers. He is a Fellow for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in Los Angeles.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 145 reviews
March 18, 2025
Origin story for Doctorow’s forensic accountant Marty Hench. Historical fiction, set at the dawn of
Enshittification
. A young Hench moves to
S.F.
in the middle of the 80’s Tech Boom. There he joins a tech startup as their finance guy. They fall afoul of fraudulent, malicious competitors. Third book in the Marty Hench Series.
VisiCalc on a vintage Apple PC, Hench’s stock-in-trade
My, autographed, dead tree copy was a hefty 388 pages with a US 2025 copyright.
Cory Doctorow is a British-Canadian blogger, journalist, editor, and science fiction author. He is the author of more than ten novels of post-cyberpunk genre fiction, many short stories, and several non-fiction books. I have read many books and short stories by the author. The last book read by him was The Lost Cause (my review).
Full disclosure, I’m a Doctorow fanboi. I’ve read almost all of his books and all the previous Marty Hench books. I also somewhat followed Hench's path, chasing a different boom much later.
TL:DR
~1980, Marty Hench was a smart, but undisciplined kid. Getting out from under a stern parent, and away from home, he paid more attention to girls and computers rather than grades. He flunked out of MIT . Being handy with the new tech of computer spreadsheets, he eventually becomes a bookkeeper/accountant. (It was easier, cleaner work than becoming a plumber’s assistant.) He and his computer geek roomie, eventually pull-up-stakes, leave Boston and move to S.F. to get a piece of the 1980’s Software Boom.
In S.F., he joins an: idealistic, woman-owned, personal computer (PC), startup. They’re a competitive spin-off of a shady, earlier, PC company leveraging, a very high, hardware and software walled garden. The success of the startup causes them to run afoul of the vengeful, moneyed men, with an affinity for fraud and violence, of the startup’s founders ex-employer.
Hench’s journey from MIT freshman to a working member of a startup’s founding team is his I Want to Be a Real Man journey. (Along the way, he grows-up, falls in love, and gets the girl.)
Doctorow's socio-political theme (there is always at least one) was, that the PC revolution of the mid-80’s was an ideological battle. It was between the believers of computers will set us free, and those who wanted to use them to shackle folks to a must have device, which only they can provide.
Enshitification is the tendency for good technology products to go bad for financial reasons. The lack of choice with creating walled gardens was a lack of freedom to access better and less expensive technology, and consumables. The story was an early example, of Doctorow’s enshittification meme.
The Review
Doctorow is a proficient, experienced author. The writing was technically good. Prose was written in a clear, unaffected manner. I did find a few: typographical, grammatical and repetition errors.
Both dialog and descriptive prose were of the hipster tech-style of the digerati. Dialog was good. It was laced with sly and obvert historical tech and financial culture references. In places I chuckled, although I never laughed-out-loud. This was not one of Doctorow’s funnier books. The descriptive narrative was good, although it could become technically complex in terms of: business practices, policies, and procedures; The Law; and tech. In places I thought it was too detailed, and long passages could have been omitted. However, you don’t read a Doctorow book without having an affinity for info dumps and technospeak?
The book contained a Prologue, 24 chapters and an Epilog. The Prologue was a classic Prolonged Prologue . (It was 15% of the book’s pages.) In the past, I’ve found that Doctorow has had Pacing Problems . They continued. The story moved with the slowness of a much thicker book in the beginning. I felt there was a lot of Padding . Even though I’m interested in: cooking, defunct American punk rock bands, and antique CPU architectures; it became necessary for a truly frantic pace to be taken to end the book with 388-pages. A more measured pacing, and some stern editing could have pulled in the story to closer to 300-pages. Otherwise, Doctorow could have added another 30-pages to the book’s third act, to avoid the Bum’s Rush to the ending. Afterall, 400+ page modern, storytelling is common fare now? Finally, the 3-page Epilog was weak. I've read better Post-Its(tm).
There was a single POV in the story—Marty Hench, the protagonist. Hench starts out the story as a MIT freshman, and ends it a man, with insight on his Goal In Life . In the series, 40-years later, he’s a technically gifted, elderly, bachelor, making a living chasing stolen money through the labyrinth of the financial systems with his spreadsheets. This story introduces that White-and-Grey Morality figure with a green eyeshade. It also describes how he learned to love cooking, and expensive bourbon other series staples.
The antagonists were “The Reverend Sirs”. They were an: Orthodox Rabbi, a Mormon Bishop, and a Catholic Priest. (There are repetitious references to them entering a bar, like the old joke.) They’re Sinister Ministers . They have a captive market selling “faith based” PC systems and consumables to rural adherents and religious groups. Only later is it realized that .
Arthur Hellman AKA Art was Hench’s Best Friend. He's a master, computer geek. He also owned a vehicle, that Hench didn’t have till late in the story. A “ride” is an essential accoutrement in California. The startup’s founders were: Rivka Goldman, Elizabeth Amelia Shepard Taylor, Sister Maria-Ava Fernandez, an Orthodox Jewess, a devout Morman, and a Catholic nun. There was an awkwardly pursued, LGBTQIA+ subplot, when both Rivka and Art came-out as queer.
In addition, there were Hench’s love interests: Lucille (no last name), the older woman and Pat (no last name) the younger woman he falls in love with. Pat is also a master, computer geek. Odd that both Hench’s gals had no last name?
A chronic problem with Doctorow’s stories is the plethora of Mary Sues . That applies to all the above women. Just once, I'd like to read of one of Doctorow's female characters triggering, and post-coitally, tying-up his computer-savvy, protagonist, with the intention of cutting off their thumbs, so they can "never tap the space bar again!" There's enough crazy, sloshing around in tech to support that behavior amongst women and men.
The older Hench always, “knows a guy or gal", or "knows a guy/gal who knows a guy”. The younger Hench didn’t have that advantage. He just bumbled around meeting folks as needed. I don't know which flavor was more annoying? As such, there were numerous NPCs. They were stereotypes from 1980’s Silicon Valley and tech-types: thugs, grifters, coders, entrepreneur-wannabees, apparatchiks, lawyers, office drones, Latino factory girls, etc..
A problem I had with the characterization, was The Bad Guys were and acted like late 20th Century characters. They were: sexist, anti-LGBTQ, racist and more religious. The Good Guys were: less socially conservative, more secular, and tolerant. About their only common ground was the unfavorable views they had toward leading corporations, particularly in tech.
The story contained: sex, drugs, and rock'n roll. The young Hench had a lot of sex, unlike his elder future-self. All the sex was tastefully done, and of the fade to black variety. Marijuana and LSD was consumed. The rise of craft beer not having occurred yet, Hench and his cronies drank bottled. Anchor Steam, S.F.’s now defunct finest was mentioned. Hench was introduced to bourbon, which becomes his series favorite (along with modern "gummies"). Music references were appropriate for the mid-1980’s, with the Dead Kennedys receiving inordinate attention.
Violence was physical, blunt and edged weapons. There were no gun battles. It was moderately descriptive. Both Hench and Rivka were worked-over for their trouble, Rivka seriously. Body count was nil. Hench was extraordinarily physically resilient.
Locations of the story were: Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the San Francisco Bay area; tech being bipolar in the States at that time.
This story was a techno-fest typical of Doctorow stories. Although, it was an antique tech fest. It did contain a fair amount Business Law regarding non-compete and non-disclosure agreements. The injustice of non-competes featured heavily in Hench and Art leaving Boston. It should be noted that in 2024, the FTC adopted a rule banning new non-competes and prohibited enforcement of already executed agreements, with some exceptions.
A problem I had with the story was Doctorow got immersive with the 1980’s computer technology and history of technology. However, he didn’t have savvy readers or a copy editor for the period. The Devil is in the Details. If you're going to get really detailed-- get them correct.
For example, I just happen to know a lot about " Apollo and Moto 68K boxes". (How someone who had 'hands-on' experience would say it.) Pat, Hench’s computer, geek gal owned two Apollo workstations. (Today, that would be like your GF owning a Quantum Computer.) Her expositional Unix workstation prose, told me a GenX, Canadian writer, with the help of Wikipedia was writing Pat’s talk the talk. For example, you couldn’t keep two, DN100’s running in an elderly, S.F. building’s studio flat using 120V wall electrical sockets.
This was an OK: historical, political, techno-thriller. Although, it was heavier on the history-of-technology than I’m used to by Doctorow.
I liked parts of it. Folks having worked for a hardware startup may recognize some of it.
However, not everyone will like it. In was technically complicated, and contained a lot of exposition. Also, like most historical fiction, many times the characters, were recognizably New Millennium, products of the present and not late 20th Century, products of the story's times. On the other hand, if historical fictional: digital, hipsterism is your jam you’re going to like this. It’s dense and historically accurate in places, although it’s not as humorous as previous books by the author. Recommended for old, computer geeks and the young digerati.
VisiCalc on a vintage Apple PC, Hench’s stock-in-trade
My, autographed, dead tree copy was a hefty 388 pages with a US 2025 copyright.
Cory Doctorow is a British-Canadian blogger, journalist, editor, and science fiction author. He is the author of more than ten novels of post-cyberpunk genre fiction, many short stories, and several non-fiction books. I have read many books and short stories by the author. The last book read by him was The Lost Cause (my review).
Full disclosure, I’m a Doctorow fanboi. I’ve read almost all of his books and all the previous Marty Hench books. I also somewhat followed Hench's path, chasing a different boom much later.
pick-and-shovel
[ pik-uhn-shuhv-uhl ]
adjective
marked by drudgery; laborious:
the pick-and-shovel work necessary to get a startup underway.
TL:DR
~1980, Marty Hench was a smart, but undisciplined kid. Getting out from under a stern parent, and away from home, he paid more attention to girls and computers rather than grades. He flunked out of MIT . Being handy with the new tech of computer spreadsheets, he eventually becomes a bookkeeper/accountant. (It was easier, cleaner work than becoming a plumber’s assistant.) He and his computer geek roomie, eventually pull-up-stakes, leave Boston and move to S.F. to get a piece of the 1980’s Software Boom.
In S.F., he joins an: idealistic, woman-owned, personal computer (PC), startup. They’re a competitive spin-off of a shady, earlier, PC company leveraging, a very high, hardware and software walled garden. The success of the startup causes them to run afoul of the vengeful, moneyed men, with an affinity for fraud and violence, of the startup’s founders ex-employer.
Hench’s journey from MIT freshman to a working member of a startup’s founding team is his I Want to Be a Real Man journey. (Along the way, he grows-up, falls in love, and gets the girl.)
Doctorow's socio-political theme (there is always at least one) was, that the PC revolution of the mid-80’s was an ideological battle. It was between the believers of computers will set us free, and those who wanted to use them to shackle folks to a must have device, which only they can provide.
Enshitification is the tendency for good technology products to go bad for financial reasons. The lack of choice with creating walled gardens was a lack of freedom to access better and less expensive technology, and consumables. The story was an early example, of Doctorow’s enshittification meme.
The Review
Doctorow is a proficient, experienced author. The writing was technically good. Prose was written in a clear, unaffected manner. I did find a few: typographical, grammatical and repetition errors.
Both dialog and descriptive prose were of the hipster tech-style of the digerati. Dialog was good. It was laced with sly and obvert historical tech and financial culture references. In places I chuckled, although I never laughed-out-loud. This was not one of Doctorow’s funnier books. The descriptive narrative was good, although it could become technically complex in terms of: business practices, policies, and procedures; The Law; and tech. In places I thought it was too detailed, and long passages could have been omitted. However, you don’t read a Doctorow book without having an affinity for info dumps and technospeak?
The book contained a Prologue, 24 chapters and an Epilog. The Prologue was a classic Prolonged Prologue . (It was 15% of the book’s pages.) In the past, I’ve found that Doctorow has had Pacing Problems . They continued. The story moved with the slowness of a much thicker book in the beginning. I felt there was a lot of Padding . Even though I’m interested in: cooking, defunct American punk rock bands, and antique CPU architectures; it became necessary for a truly frantic pace to be taken to end the book with 388-pages. A more measured pacing, and some stern editing could have pulled in the story to closer to 300-pages. Otherwise, Doctorow could have added another 30-pages to the book’s third act, to avoid the Bum’s Rush to the ending. Afterall, 400+ page modern, storytelling is common fare now? Finally, the 3-page Epilog was weak. I've read better Post-Its(tm).
There was a single POV in the story—Marty Hench, the protagonist. Hench starts out the story as a MIT freshman, and ends it a man, with insight on his Goal In Life . In the series, 40-years later, he’s a technically gifted, elderly, bachelor, making a living chasing stolen money through the labyrinth of the financial systems with his spreadsheets. This story introduces that White-and-Grey Morality figure with a green eyeshade. It also describes how he learned to love cooking, and expensive bourbon other series staples.
The antagonists were “The Reverend Sirs”. They were an: Orthodox Rabbi, a Mormon Bishop, and a Catholic Priest. (There are repetitious references to them entering a bar, like the old joke.) They’re Sinister Ministers . They have a captive market selling “faith based” PC systems and consumables to rural adherents and religious groups. Only later is it realized that .
Arthur Hellman AKA Art was Hench’s Best Friend. He's a master, computer geek. He also owned a vehicle, that Hench didn’t have till late in the story. A “ride” is an essential accoutrement in California. The startup’s founders were: Rivka Goldman, Elizabeth Amelia Shepard Taylor, Sister Maria-Ava Fernandez, an Orthodox Jewess, a devout Morman, and a Catholic nun. There was an awkwardly pursued, LGBTQIA+ subplot, when both Rivka and Art came-out as queer.
In addition, there were Hench’s love interests: Lucille (no last name), the older woman and Pat (no last name) the younger woman he falls in love with. Pat is also a master, computer geek. Odd that both Hench’s gals had no last name?
A chronic problem with Doctorow’s stories is the plethora of Mary Sues . That applies to all the above women. Just once, I'd like to read of one of Doctorow's female characters triggering, and post-coitally, tying-up his computer-savvy, protagonist, with the intention of cutting off their thumbs, so they can "never tap the space bar again!" There's enough crazy, sloshing around in tech to support that behavior amongst women and men.
The older Hench always, “knows a guy or gal", or "knows a guy/gal who knows a guy”. The younger Hench didn’t have that advantage. He just bumbled around meeting folks as needed. I don't know which flavor was more annoying? As such, there were numerous NPCs. They were stereotypes from 1980’s Silicon Valley and tech-types: thugs, grifters, coders, entrepreneur-wannabees, apparatchiks, lawyers, office drones, Latino factory girls, etc..
A problem I had with the characterization, was The Bad Guys were and acted like late 20th Century characters. They were: sexist, anti-LGBTQ, racist and more religious. The Good Guys were: less socially conservative, more secular, and tolerant. About their only common ground was the unfavorable views they had toward leading corporations, particularly in tech.
The story contained: sex, drugs, and rock'n roll. The young Hench had a lot of sex, unlike his elder future-self. All the sex was tastefully done, and of the fade to black variety. Marijuana and LSD was consumed. The rise of craft beer not having occurred yet, Hench and his cronies drank bottled. Anchor Steam, S.F.’s now defunct finest was mentioned. Hench was introduced to bourbon, which becomes his series favorite (along with modern "gummies"). Music references were appropriate for the mid-1980’s, with the Dead Kennedys receiving inordinate attention.
Violence was physical, blunt and edged weapons. There were no gun battles. It was moderately descriptive. Both Hench and Rivka were worked-over for their trouble, Rivka seriously. Body count was nil. Hench was extraordinarily physically resilient.
Locations of the story were: Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the San Francisco Bay area; tech being bipolar in the States at that time.
This story was a techno-fest typical of Doctorow stories. Although, it was an antique tech fest. It did contain a fair amount Business Law regarding non-compete and non-disclosure agreements. The injustice of non-competes featured heavily in Hench and Art leaving Boston. It should be noted that in 2024, the FTC adopted a rule banning new non-competes and prohibited enforcement of already executed agreements, with some exceptions.
A problem I had with the story was Doctorow got immersive with the 1980’s computer technology and history of technology. However, he didn’t have savvy readers or a copy editor for the period. The Devil is in the Details. If you're going to get really detailed-- get them correct.
For example, I just happen to know a lot about " Apollo and Moto 68K boxes". (How someone who had 'hands-on' experience would say it.) Pat, Hench’s computer, geek gal owned two Apollo workstations. (Today, that would be like your GF owning a Quantum Computer.) Her expositional Unix workstation prose, told me a GenX, Canadian writer, with the help of Wikipedia was writing Pat’s talk the talk. For example, you couldn’t keep two, DN100’s running in an elderly, S.F. building’s studio flat using 120V wall electrical sockets.
This was an OK: historical, political, techno-thriller. Although, it was heavier on the history-of-technology than I’m used to by Doctorow.
I liked parts of it. Folks having worked for a hardware startup may recognize some of it.
However, not everyone will like it. In was technically complicated, and contained a lot of exposition. Also, like most historical fiction, many times the characters, were recognizably New Millennium, products of the present and not late 20th Century, products of the story's times. On the other hand, if historical fictional: digital, hipsterism is your jam you’re going to like this. It’s dense and historically accurate in places, although it’s not as humorous as previous books by the author. Recommended for old, computer geeks and the young digerati.
January 16, 2025
This is the third Martin Hench novel, where it looks like Doctorow is testing the viability of building a non-sequential series about a forensic accountant. I read the first Red Team Bluesm which ends up hinging more on online security and is set in the modern day, but missed The Bizzle, apparently set in 2006 (I will hunt it down though). This third novel is a bit of an origin story for his lead, Martin Hench, a forensic accountant turned computer security expert, but here a neophyte programmer cum accountant. And almost as much time is spent fleshing out how Hench has his peculiar set of skills (accountancy and programming), and then fitting him into a quite clear good guys / bad guys scenario at the dawn of the tech era.
Hench falls in love with computing when he gets to MIT at age 18. Devouring the magazines, programming early machines obsessively to the degree he eventually flunks out. Discovering that the accountancy course has access to a bunch of early Apples, he does that, while running a pretty shonky business on the side. And so we have a programmer, an accountant, a burnt businessman, and a few friends (his friend Art who is a significant plot driver in Red Team Blues is a core character). Once that is out of the way Doctorow manages to set up a grungy techno-thriller that ticks a lot of his soapboxes: namely a tech firm that sells bad machines that aren't cross-compatible - a solid stand to fight for creative commons. The bad computer company makes machines for faith communities (it is run by a Rabbi, a Catholic and a Mormon - spreading the blame across faiths). Against them are three women of faith, their best saleswomen and much better programmers who hate the scam they have been selling, and try to atone. The women in tech side is solidly reminiscent of Halt And Catch Fire (which is high praise from me), and also allows Doctorow to engage in conversations about tolerance in faith and others. Indeed its 1986 San Francisco setting also means they can tip into historical issues around gay bashing, and even when the story starts delving into organised crime and violence, and core distrust of the police.
What's charming about Picks And Shovels, which I hoovered down in a day, is that its lead is not fully formed. He makes plenty of mistakes, in business, in life and love. And even at his most didactic, Doctorow comes off as helpful - Hench learns to be a better listener as the book goes on and it's quite clear that this is a key skill that the author thinks has been lost in the world. The most fun aspect is how this is a period tech novel, which invents a company and a scam that feels more than plausible, and even if the good guys here might be too good to be true, the Wild West process of early computing is captured perfectly.
Hench falls in love with computing when he gets to MIT at age 18. Devouring the magazines, programming early machines obsessively to the degree he eventually flunks out. Discovering that the accountancy course has access to a bunch of early Apples, he does that, while running a pretty shonky business on the side. And so we have a programmer, an accountant, a burnt businessman, and a few friends (his friend Art who is a significant plot driver in Red Team Blues is a core character). Once that is out of the way Doctorow manages to set up a grungy techno-thriller that ticks a lot of his soapboxes: namely a tech firm that sells bad machines that aren't cross-compatible - a solid stand to fight for creative commons. The bad computer company makes machines for faith communities (it is run by a Rabbi, a Catholic and a Mormon - spreading the blame across faiths). Against them are three women of faith, their best saleswomen and much better programmers who hate the scam they have been selling, and try to atone. The women in tech side is solidly reminiscent of Halt And Catch Fire (which is high praise from me), and also allows Doctorow to engage in conversations about tolerance in faith and others. Indeed its 1986 San Francisco setting also means they can tip into historical issues around gay bashing, and even when the story starts delving into organised crime and violence, and core distrust of the police.
What's charming about Picks And Shovels, which I hoovered down in a day, is that its lead is not fully formed. He makes plenty of mistakes, in business, in life and love. And even at his most didactic, Doctorow comes off as helpful - Hench learns to be a better listener as the book goes on and it's quite clear that this is a key skill that the author thinks has been lost in the world. The most fun aspect is how this is a period tech novel, which invents a company and a scam that feels more than plausible, and even if the good guys here might be too good to be true, the Wild West process of early computing is captured perfectly.
February 28, 2025
A disappointing entry in the Martin Hench series. I really enjoyed the first Hench book, and I thought the second one was fine. I like Cory's writing, a lot of the time. His nonfiction always delivers. But when he tries to couch his points in fiction the results are mixed. Especially it seems, when combined with a period setting he's REALLY excited about.
This is not a detective story or a mystery of any kind. It's a coming-of-age story about a guy we've already met multiple times, but before he got his shit together. The genre shift is a little annoying, but it's the tone that hurts the most. The coy way Cory writes moments of sex or violence, and the extreme level of earnestness radiating from every character and scene. It drastically undercuts his many, many attempts at social critique when the characters feel like caricature and the lessons feel like parody. This is tragic because even if you know his heart is in the right place it's still extremely embarrassing to read. That's been an issue in his previous books like Little Brother and Lost Cause, but this is the worst it's been, amplified by the obsessively detailed setting and molasses-slow plot.
And it's not helped by Wil Wheaton's abysmal audiobook narration. I really didn't mind him on the first two Hench novels, but he seems to have gotten the instruction this time to go as big as possible on every single line and emote for the back of the room. It's exhausting, and washes away what little subtlety there may have been in the writing.
This is a very negative review I know, but I don't think this series should end, and I'll keep reading Cory's work, because despite his incredible corniness I agree with his vision for the world and for technology. I just beg for him to enlist the services of a stronger, more critical editor 🙏
This is not a detective story or a mystery of any kind. It's a coming-of-age story about a guy we've already met multiple times, but before he got his shit together. The genre shift is a little annoying, but it's the tone that hurts the most. The coy way Cory writes moments of sex or violence, and the extreme level of earnestness radiating from every character and scene. It drastically undercuts his many, many attempts at social critique when the characters feel like caricature and the lessons feel like parody. This is tragic because even if you know his heart is in the right place it's still extremely embarrassing to read. That's been an issue in his previous books like Little Brother and Lost Cause, but this is the worst it's been, amplified by the obsessively detailed setting and molasses-slow plot.
And it's not helped by Wil Wheaton's abysmal audiobook narration. I really didn't mind him on the first two Hench novels, but he seems to have gotten the instruction this time to go as big as possible on every single line and emote for the back of the room. It's exhausting, and washes away what little subtlety there may have been in the writing.
This is a very negative review I know, but I don't think this series should end, and I'll keep reading Cory's work, because despite his incredible corniness I agree with his vision for the world and for technology. I just beg for him to enlist the services of a stronger, more critical editor 🙏
August 21, 2025
Maybe 3-1/2 stars
I really enjoyed the first two novellas in this series -- the first taking place when forensic accountant/computer hacker Marty Hench was in his 60's and the second twenty years before that. They were tight, clever, cynical stories; I loved Marty's elderly and middle-aged perspectives and his dry tone. This, however, is no novella. It's Marty's very long origin story, covering his life from 18 to 25/26, to show how he became The Marty Hench.
And ... meh. It's just too much. Marty teaches himself to code, flunks out of MIT, becomes an accountant instead, moves to San Francisco with his gay roommate/best friend, and gets drawn into a war between a company that sells computer systems (hardware and software) specifically to religious congregations and a group of former employees who realized said company was a scam and started their own counter-company.
I very much preferred the focus of the novellas. It's nice to see Marty mature and learn meaningful life lessons while also working against a greedy corporation. But it just wasn't entertaining the way the novellas were. It was all a tad preachy-feeling, more like overwrought YA.
Seeing as how this series has gone backward in time, I hope this is not the last I'll ever see of Martin Hench. I'd love to read a few more novellas about his escapades outwitting filthy-rich over-capitalist crooks. It would be sad for me to see the series end on this unsatisfying note.
I really enjoyed the first two novellas in this series -- the first taking place when forensic accountant/computer hacker Marty Hench was in his 60's and the second twenty years before that. They were tight, clever, cynical stories; I loved Marty's elderly and middle-aged perspectives and his dry tone. This, however, is no novella. It's Marty's very long origin story, covering his life from 18 to 25/26, to show how he became The Marty Hench.
And ... meh. It's just too much. Marty teaches himself to code, flunks out of MIT, becomes an accountant instead, moves to San Francisco with his gay roommate/best friend, and gets drawn into a war between a company that sells computer systems (hardware and software) specifically to religious congregations and a group of former employees who realized said company was a scam and started their own counter-company.
I very much preferred the focus of the novellas. It's nice to see Marty mature and learn meaningful life lessons while also working against a greedy corporation. But it just wasn't entertaining the way the novellas were. It was all a tad preachy-feeling, more like overwrought YA.
Seeing as how this series has gone backward in time, I hope this is not the last I'll ever see of Martin Hench. I'd love to read a few more novellas about his escapades outwitting filthy-rich over-capitalist crooks. It would be sad for me to see the series end on this unsatisfying note.
January 31, 2025
Martin Hench is hired to investigate a business stealing customers from a company they used to work for. What he discovers will change the way he views businesses forever.
Fast paced, tense and imbued with a technological sense of the real, 'Picks and Shovels' shows a new world opening up and a character that is starting his intricate journey towards being an anarchic hero.
Fast paced, tense and imbued with a technological sense of the real, 'Picks and Shovels' shows a new world opening up and a character that is starting his intricate journey towards being an anarchic hero.
February 25, 2025
Warning - this book is not “cozy”. It has detailed descriptions of the results of violence that may be difficult to read.
January 2, 2025
Picks and Shovels is the third in Cory Doctorow’s series of books centred around forensic accountant Martin Hench. While the first book in the series Red Team Blues was set in the near future and the second book The Bezzle was set in the 1990s, Picks and Shovels goes back to the late 1970s and 1980s to give readers the Martin Hench origin story. And in doing so, Doctorow unsurprisingly reveals that the capitalist grifts that he exposed in the previous novels is nothing remotely new.
Much like The Bezzle, Picks and Shovels starts with a lengthy prologue which rehearses some of the themes of the book and sets up the main action in the book. In it, a young Martin Hench travels to MIT to study engineering but quickly finds that he is “a prototypical MIT fuckup”. Hench finds himself besotted with emerging computer technology and drops out of his studies to become a proto-coder. Hench meets Art Hellman and the two find themselves on the bleeding edge of this new technology through which he develops a love for spreadsheets and from there into accounting. After finding themselves being used, the two head for California where they get into deeper trouble, ending up in a war between a corrupt computer company and its former employees.
Picks and Shovels is another deep critique of American capitalism, a system that encourages grifting and rorting and the value of the company over any humanity. In this case, Doctorow doubles down as the computer firm he imagines is run by the representatives of three major religions who operate under the cover of piety. Against them, he pits a group of plucky underdogs, helped by Hench, in a David and Goliath battle that rages across the streets of San Francisco.
Hench continues to be a great central character – observant, incisive but also not beyond self criticism. This book is an origin story in many ways – not only how Hench becomes an accountant in the first place but also why he moved into forensic accounting and developed his code of ethics. Hench is surrounded by a vivid group of side characters including his friend Art who is able to express himself in the hedonistic San Francisco of the 1980s, the three tough women who he helps and his punk coder girlfriend. In doing so he also brings to life the subcultures of 1980s San Francisco that were the breeding grounds for the Silicon Valley domination of technology.
Underlying this is the very contemporary idea of computer firms using their power to lock consumers into their products. Anyone who has try to move between Apple and Android will know that this type of consumer capture is still alive and well and that attempts to squash cheaper competition are still alive and well.
In Picks and Shovels, Doctorow once again manages to take real world ideas, concerns and philosophies and weave them into an engaging tale focussing on those trying to fight the system. And unfortunately there are plenty of Ponzi schemes, grifts and market manipulations for Doctorow to point Martin Hench at. But his gives him the platform for a long running series that can continue to illuminate the world we live in a little more brightly but also entertain.
Much like The Bezzle, Picks and Shovels starts with a lengthy prologue which rehearses some of the themes of the book and sets up the main action in the book. In it, a young Martin Hench travels to MIT to study engineering but quickly finds that he is “a prototypical MIT fuckup”. Hench finds himself besotted with emerging computer technology and drops out of his studies to become a proto-coder. Hench meets Art Hellman and the two find themselves on the bleeding edge of this new technology through which he develops a love for spreadsheets and from there into accounting. After finding themselves being used, the two head for California where they get into deeper trouble, ending up in a war between a corrupt computer company and its former employees.
Picks and Shovels is another deep critique of American capitalism, a system that encourages grifting and rorting and the value of the company over any humanity. In this case, Doctorow doubles down as the computer firm he imagines is run by the representatives of three major religions who operate under the cover of piety. Against them, he pits a group of plucky underdogs, helped by Hench, in a David and Goliath battle that rages across the streets of San Francisco.
Hench continues to be a great central character – observant, incisive but also not beyond self criticism. This book is an origin story in many ways – not only how Hench becomes an accountant in the first place but also why he moved into forensic accounting and developed his code of ethics. Hench is surrounded by a vivid group of side characters including his friend Art who is able to express himself in the hedonistic San Francisco of the 1980s, the three tough women who he helps and his punk coder girlfriend. In doing so he also brings to life the subcultures of 1980s San Francisco that were the breeding grounds for the Silicon Valley domination of technology.
Underlying this is the very contemporary idea of computer firms using their power to lock consumers into their products. Anyone who has try to move between Apple and Android will know that this type of consumer capture is still alive and well and that attempts to squash cheaper competition are still alive and well.
In Picks and Shovels, Doctorow once again manages to take real world ideas, concerns and philosophies and weave them into an engaging tale focussing on those trying to fight the system. And unfortunately there are plenty of Ponzi schemes, grifts and market manipulations for Doctorow to point Martin Hench at. But his gives him the platform for a long running series that can continue to illuminate the world we live in a little more brightly but also entertain.
January 14, 2025
The second book in this trilogy was the first book in 2024, so it seems fair to close it with this third and final volume, probably along with the first the best of the three, although I would have been quicker to say that I didn't like the second one so much. Martin's beginnings, which coincide with those of the programming, a little earlier than I did, but almost contemporary, too bad I never got attached to it. Once again Doctorow uses his stories to pit good against evil, this time throwing in religion as well, to make sure he doesn't miss anything.
Il secondo libro di questa trilogia é stato il primo libro del 2024, mi sembra giusto quindi chiuderlo con questo terzo ed ultimo volume, probabilmente assieme al primo il migliore dei tre, anche se facevo prima a dire che il secondo non mi é piaciuto tanto. Gli inizi di Martin, che coincidono con quelli della programmazione, un po' prima di me, ma quasi contemporanei, peccato che io non mi ci sia mai affezionata. Ancora una volta Doctorow utilizza le sue storie per contrapporre il bene con il male, stavolta buttandoci dentro anche la religione, per non farsi mancare nulla.
I received from the Publisher a complimentary digital advanced review copy of the book in exchange for a honest review.
Il secondo libro di questa trilogia é stato il primo libro del 2024, mi sembra giusto quindi chiuderlo con questo terzo ed ultimo volume, probabilmente assieme al primo il migliore dei tre, anche se facevo prima a dire che il secondo non mi é piaciuto tanto. Gli inizi di Martin, che coincidono con quelli della programmazione, un po' prima di me, ma quasi contemporanei, peccato che io non mi ci sia mai affezionata. Ancora una volta Doctorow utilizza le sue storie per contrapporre il bene con il male, stavolta buttandoci dentro anche la religione, per non farsi mancare nulla.
I received from the Publisher a complimentary digital advanced review copy of the book in exchange for a honest review.
February 18, 2025
Probably the least successful of the Hench novels. Reads too much like a business school case study. Very reminiscent of his other novel Lost Cause.
May 16, 2025
When I picked up Red Team Blues two years ago, it looked like a standalone. I absolutely LOVED it, but I just didn’t see how it could ever be more than a one-off. Forensic accounting just isn’t all that exciting – but the story did an excellent job of playing into that assumption. To the point where forensic accounting in general might not be all that thrilling, but the situations that Martin Hench gets himself into while doing his job certainly are.
That Marty is a terrific raconteur telling his own story made the whole thing work – and work WAY better than I expected. But I still expected it to be a one-off. Two books later, it’s pretty clear that I was wrong – and I’m glad about it.
The Martin Hench series reads like it’s been written backwards. That first book, Red Team Blues, took place in the present. The second book, The Bezzle, turned the clock back to 2006, when Marty was very much in his prime. (Meaning that this books takes place before either of the others and a new reader could start here and be just FINE.)
This latest book, Picks and Shovels, goes all the way back to the beginning. This is Marty’s ‘origin story’, the story of how Marty became the man that readers know and love from Red Team Blues.
So it begins with Marty flunking out of MIT because he’s discovered the one, true love of his life. Just as so many people did in the mid to late 1970s, Marty was introduced to personal computers at the dawn of that revolution – and it swept him away.
It also swept him out of MIT, into an Associates Degree program at UMass Boston where he was introduced to the Apple ][ Plus and the revolutionary program VisiCalc. As it turns out, spreadsheets made Marty’s world go round, and his rare combination of skills, the ability to create complex business models AND the accounting background to engineer or especially reverse-engineer a company’s financial statements, turned what most saw as a ‘hobby’ into a satisfying, sustaining and surprisingly fascinating career.
The story in Picks and Shovels also sets up the pattern of Marty’s life – at least as he tells it. Because, this origin story, like the stories of the life that follows after it, is the story of how Marty dives head-first into a job, discovers that his employers are not on the side of the angels, and then puts himself on the side of the angels by the most expedient method possible.
Unfortunately for Marty, but fortunately for the reader, Marty’s expedient methods of switching sides usually piss off the villains in a way that is exponentially worse than if he’d been professional about the whole mess. He ends up making lifelong grudges while thinking that he’s the good guy. Which he mostly is even though his self-righteous cluelessness creates even more enemies than he needed to. On the other hand, it creates good friends, too.
That, along with telling the story of how Marty got to be the Martin Hench of Red Team Blues, Picks and Shovels is also steeped in the early ‘glory days’ of the Silicon Valley ‘gold rush’ and the whole thing is told in Marty’s wry, witty and often self-deprecating way, combines two great stories into one terrific tale.
Escape Rating A: I fully admit that there’s a certain amount of nostalgia in just how much I enjoyed this book. I built my first computer out of a kit. In 1979. Meaning that I remember this period entirely too well. I even lived some of it. Scarier still, I’m realizing not just that Marty and I are about the same age, but that he’s exactly the sort of guy I dated back then. And I’m a bit freaked out about all of that. I’m also VERY weirded out that a time period that I have adult memories of has become historical fiction.
Because this is stuff I remember as it happened, I found Marty’s story about the early days of personal computing and the rise of Silicon Valley to be a bit like the fable about the frog in the pot of water that is slowly turned up to boil. Not that the situation is quite as bad as that poor frog’s, but rather in the way that Picks and Shovels is very much grounded in real events in the way that what started out at least seemingly sane got overwhelming surprisingly fast but the people in the soup were too busy to notice. Those years were every bit as chaotic as Marty describes.
Where the water really starts boiling, to stretch the metaphor, is the way that the story adds in the fictional elements in ways that are utterly plausible. Because, while this particular crap didn’t happen, crap like it very much did. To the point where I had to look to see if the setup was based semi-obviously on a real company, although if it is I couldn’t find it.
But there were plenty of situations of the kind of built-in customer lock-in and the jacking of prices because companies and organizations were held hostage, not just during the 1980s but even into the 1990s in some niche applications. It was all as wild and wooly as portrayed.
The situation does eventually fly right over-the-top, but until that point most of it parallels stuff that really happened, if not necessarily all in one single combination.
The story, and the series as a whole, works because of Marty’s voice as a character. Marty is the one telling this story. So, of course, Marty is the hero of his story, as we all are the heroes of OUR own stories – even the villains. But Marty is a likable, intelligent and a thoughtful character. His head is an interesting place to be – at least as he tells it. And this story makes it easy to see how the Marty we met in Red Team Blues got to be that person even though he’s not fully baked in Picks and Shovels.
That’s what origin stories are for, after all. This particular origin story turned out to be a doozy.
OTOH, it’s hard to imagine the series diving back any further into Marty’s past. Meaning that the one-off could be a three-off and be done. Howsomever, based on what we’ve learned about Marty over these three books, I’m confident that Marty has PLENTY more stories to tell about his escapades in the years between Picks and Shovels and Red Team Blues. And I’d be happy to read them all!
Originally published at Reading Reality
That Marty is a terrific raconteur telling his own story made the whole thing work – and work WAY better than I expected. But I still expected it to be a one-off. Two books later, it’s pretty clear that I was wrong – and I’m glad about it.
The Martin Hench series reads like it’s been written backwards. That first book, Red Team Blues, took place in the present. The second book, The Bezzle, turned the clock back to 2006, when Marty was very much in his prime. (Meaning that this books takes place before either of the others and a new reader could start here and be just FINE.)
This latest book, Picks and Shovels, goes all the way back to the beginning. This is Marty’s ‘origin story’, the story of how Marty became the man that readers know and love from Red Team Blues.
So it begins with Marty flunking out of MIT because he’s discovered the one, true love of his life. Just as so many people did in the mid to late 1970s, Marty was introduced to personal computers at the dawn of that revolution – and it swept him away.
It also swept him out of MIT, into an Associates Degree program at UMass Boston where he was introduced to the Apple ][ Plus and the revolutionary program VisiCalc. As it turns out, spreadsheets made Marty’s world go round, and his rare combination of skills, the ability to create complex business models AND the accounting background to engineer or especially reverse-engineer a company’s financial statements, turned what most saw as a ‘hobby’ into a satisfying, sustaining and surprisingly fascinating career.
The story in Picks and Shovels also sets up the pattern of Marty’s life – at least as he tells it. Because, this origin story, like the stories of the life that follows after it, is the story of how Marty dives head-first into a job, discovers that his employers are not on the side of the angels, and then puts himself on the side of the angels by the most expedient method possible.
Unfortunately for Marty, but fortunately for the reader, Marty’s expedient methods of switching sides usually piss off the villains in a way that is exponentially worse than if he’d been professional about the whole mess. He ends up making lifelong grudges while thinking that he’s the good guy. Which he mostly is even though his self-righteous cluelessness creates even more enemies than he needed to. On the other hand, it creates good friends, too.
That, along with telling the story of how Marty got to be the Martin Hench of Red Team Blues, Picks and Shovels is also steeped in the early ‘glory days’ of the Silicon Valley ‘gold rush’ and the whole thing is told in Marty’s wry, witty and often self-deprecating way, combines two great stories into one terrific tale.
Escape Rating A: I fully admit that there’s a certain amount of nostalgia in just how much I enjoyed this book. I built my first computer out of a kit. In 1979. Meaning that I remember this period entirely too well. I even lived some of it. Scarier still, I’m realizing not just that Marty and I are about the same age, but that he’s exactly the sort of guy I dated back then. And I’m a bit freaked out about all of that. I’m also VERY weirded out that a time period that I have adult memories of has become historical fiction.
Because this is stuff I remember as it happened, I found Marty’s story about the early days of personal computing and the rise of Silicon Valley to be a bit like the fable about the frog in the pot of water that is slowly turned up to boil. Not that the situation is quite as bad as that poor frog’s, but rather in the way that Picks and Shovels is very much grounded in real events in the way that what started out at least seemingly sane got overwhelming surprisingly fast but the people in the soup were too busy to notice. Those years were every bit as chaotic as Marty describes.
Where the water really starts boiling, to stretch the metaphor, is the way that the story adds in the fictional elements in ways that are utterly plausible. Because, while this particular crap didn’t happen, crap like it very much did. To the point where I had to look to see if the setup was based semi-obviously on a real company, although if it is I couldn’t find it.
But there were plenty of situations of the kind of built-in customer lock-in and the jacking of prices because companies and organizations were held hostage, not just during the 1980s but even into the 1990s in some niche applications. It was all as wild and wooly as portrayed.
The situation does eventually fly right over-the-top, but until that point most of it parallels stuff that really happened, if not necessarily all in one single combination.
The story, and the series as a whole, works because of Marty’s voice as a character. Marty is the one telling this story. So, of course, Marty is the hero of his story, as we all are the heroes of OUR own stories – even the villains. But Marty is a likable, intelligent and a thoughtful character. His head is an interesting place to be – at least as he tells it. And this story makes it easy to see how the Marty we met in Red Team Blues got to be that person even though he’s not fully baked in Picks and Shovels.
That’s what origin stories are for, after all. This particular origin story turned out to be a doozy.
OTOH, it’s hard to imagine the series diving back any further into Marty’s past. Meaning that the one-off could be a three-off and be done. Howsomever, based on what we’ve learned about Marty over these three books, I’m confident that Marty has PLENTY more stories to tell about his escapades in the years between Picks and Shovels and Red Team Blues. And I’d be happy to read them all!
Originally published at Reading Reality
March 26, 2025
Picks and Shovels provides an origin story for Cory Doctorow’s forensic accounting hacker, Marty Hench of Red Team Blues and The Beezle. It explains why he was kicked out of MIT and how he learned to love spreadsheets. He is drawn to spreadsheets because of their science-fictional quality that encourages what-if thinking.
He moves to San Francisco in the ‘80s, where he discovers the joys of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. When he goes to work for some computing women harassed by greedy clerics, he finds it is more fun to play the red team attackers than the blue team defenders.
Doctorow creates characters with distinct personalities and credible motivations, drawing them into crime plots that reveal essential qualities of the age in which they live. In sum, Picks and Shovels is a zippy crime story with a dash of computing nostalgia.
He moves to San Francisco in the ‘80s, where he discovers the joys of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. When he goes to work for some computing women harassed by greedy clerics, he finds it is more fun to play the red team attackers than the blue team defenders.
Doctorow creates characters with distinct personalities and credible motivations, drawing them into crime plots that reveal essential qualities of the age in which they live. In sum, Picks and Shovels is a zippy crime story with a dash of computing nostalgia.
March 18, 2025
In his third Martin Hench story Doctorow takes us back in time to tell us how a very young Marty Hench became a man and along the way also found his lifelong calling as a forensic accountant.
The publisher's intro tells pretty much what to expect. No need to go over that again. I'll just say it is a good story, well told and filled with interesting characters. It is a coming of age story, an adventure story, and even a love story. Marty is the POV character, but the real main characters are three strong young women he meets in San Francisco.
(The story also took me back to those heady early computing days in the 1980s when I spent so many hours writing code to make those wonderful machines to do what I needed.)
Good book. As usual, Wil Wheaton provides a very good narration.
Solid four stars. ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The publisher's intro tells pretty much what to expect. No need to go over that again. I'll just say it is a good story, well told and filled with interesting characters. It is a coming of age story, an adventure story, and even a love story. Marty is the POV character, but the real main characters are three strong young women he meets in San Francisco.
(The story also took me back to those heady early computing days in the 1980s when I spent so many hours writing code to make those wonderful machines to do what I needed.)
Good book. As usual, Wil Wheaton provides a very good narration.
Solid four stars. ⭐⭐⭐⭐
May 26, 2025
I listened to the audiobook—wasn’t bad. I like listening to Will Wheaton. Plot in this series is starting to feel a bit formulaic: some nerds are doing something cool, and some bad guys try to beat their skulls in. I like Pat and Art, but I don’t think this prequel really did all that much for telling me more about Marty. Meh. If this were the first book in the series, I probably wouldn’t continue. Will probably read the next one anyway.
March 18, 2025
"You cannot reason someone out of something he or she was not reasoned into."
I suspect that Doctorow has now created a whole generation of youngsters who want to become forensic accountants.
The sort-of origin story of Martin Hench was perhaps even more compelling than the two previous books. While I would have preferred something that devoted more time to how Martin developed the skills and reputation as a unique forensic accountant ... able to do the things we know he can do in the later books ... it is a knockout story of Martin's history and the work that drew him into the weird mix of computers and financial scams.
Like the first two, this was a compelling book. I kept reading because I wanted to see what happened next, and because I cared and worried about the characters. (In case it isn't obvious, the three Martin Hench novels are published in reverse chronological order, with Red Team Blues showing Martin near the end of his career and The Bezzle occurring at the height of that career.) All of the books are compelling because the good characters seem real and the bad ones are credible, because the plot moves in interesting ways, and because the story also says some complex things about the good and bad that comes from the mix of tech and capitalism. It has a point of view, but is never preachy; it tells a story that you can think about.
I'm so glad Doctorow wrote these books. They will stick with me.
I suspect that Doctorow has now created a whole generation of youngsters who want to become forensic accountants.
The sort-of origin story of Martin Hench was perhaps even more compelling than the two previous books. While I would have preferred something that devoted more time to how Martin developed the skills and reputation as a unique forensic accountant ... able to do the things we know he can do in the later books ... it is a knockout story of Martin's history and the work that drew him into the weird mix of computers and financial scams.
Like the first two, this was a compelling book. I kept reading because I wanted to see what happened next, and because I cared and worried about the characters. (In case it isn't obvious, the three Martin Hench novels are published in reverse chronological order, with Red Team Blues showing Martin near the end of his career and The Bezzle occurring at the height of that career.) All of the books are compelling because the good characters seem real and the bad ones are credible, because the plot moves in interesting ways, and because the story also says some complex things about the good and bad that comes from the mix of tech and capitalism. It has a point of view, but is never preachy; it tells a story that you can think about.
I'm so glad Doctorow wrote these books. They will stick with me.
August 21, 2024
Thank you Tor and Edelweiss for the digital reading copy.
I really enjoyed Picks and Shovels, and while I have yet to read a Doctorow book I dislike, this one has to be one of his best. Martin Hench as a young man is a likeable character and I feel the other characters are well fleshed out and interesting. It is a marvel how the author gets the reader interested in technology that is "ancient" history in the computer world and it reads like suspenceful futuristic Sci-fi. The only thing that bothered me was that sometimes the timeline felt of, I expected months to have passed by but it had only been a week. I suspect that might just be a me problem though. The San Francisco vibe is fantastic and the villains are both pure evil and comical.
I really enjoyed Picks and Shovels, and while I have yet to read a Doctorow book I dislike, this one has to be one of his best. Martin Hench as a young man is a likeable character and I feel the other characters are well fleshed out and interesting. It is a marvel how the author gets the reader interested in technology that is "ancient" history in the computer world and it reads like suspenceful futuristic Sci-fi. The only thing that bothered me was that sometimes the timeline felt of, I expected months to have passed by but it had only been a week. I suspect that might just be a me problem though. The San Francisco vibe is fantastic and the villains are both pure evil and comical.
April 1, 2025
I think this one could’ve been at least 100 pages shorter. The dialogue was very corny and unrealistic, and there were lengthy descriptions of things that didn’t move the story forward at all. Also, the author seems to be trying to convince the reader at all turns how much he respects women but ends up evangelizing them which is also not feminism. I think if I were a computer person I’d be more fascinated by the story-line. Overall not a bad book, probably just not for me!
April 22, 2025
If you have tech nostalgia for the 80s, you’ll probably dig this book.
July 2, 2025
A solid crime mystery set in the 1980s at the dawn of personal computing. Impressed to learn in the afterword that this author wrote seven book manuscripts in a hammock on a laptop during lockdown.
August 10, 2025
I loved this fictional account of a computer startup in SF Silicon Valley, partially because I grew up in and around Silicon Valley before it acquired that moniker. Very interesting characters and plot kept my attention from the beginning. This is the third book in the series but the first one I read. I will probably read the first two.
January 5, 2025
Hmm. I have enjoyed some of the author’s other books. This one didn’t quite gel for me perhaps because I hadn’t read the previous series. Thank you to #netgalley and the publisher for an ARC.
March 2, 2025
Preface: it's a fine book. I had a fun enough time reading it. I have a lot of critique. But all of that critique is wrapped up in the fact that it was still an enjoyable read.
Point 1: This shouldn't have been a Martin Hench novel. It would have been better if framed as a standalone coming-of-age story about the dawn of Silicon Valley.
I remember Cory Doctorow making a big (and intentionally kind of funny) announcement about how instead of continuing to write about young hackers he was switching to writing books about an aging forensic accountant. It made sense! Doctorow is clearly as interested (or more interested) in the social ramifications of his topics as he is the stories. And he wanted to focus in on the kind of financial manipulations and traps that modern capitalism was using to create an unfair playing field.
But, somehow, the third book in the series is back to being about young hackers! If you're going to make a big announcement about your new focus, you should probably make sure you have interest in that new focus. He clearly doesn't.
The big clue is that there's no forensic accounting in this book. There's barely any accounting at all. Occasionally, the main character (who shares a name with the character from the first two books but in all other ways has a completely different personality) will say "I did some accounting," but there's no actual description or education about it. He talks a lot about being the finance guy for the company, but unlike the previous two books he does not actually tell you about any of the financial stuff he is doing. And maybe that sounds like an author cutting out the boring bits, but when it comes to Cory Doctorow books, the in-story education is the best stuff! I learned some history from this book (of California and of computing) but there wasn't the same kind of "here's how you do stuff" kind of focus.
Point 2: The first two books (and many of Doctorow's books) are competence porn. The fun of the books is reading a really skilled person talk you through how they are solving problems. Bad things happen, plans go awry, and the antagonist throws wrenches in the works, but overall it's a story about a smart person doing smart things.
I'm not going to say that the Martin Hench character in this book was incompetent. But he definitely wasn't competent. Most of the problems that happened in this book were because of dumb decisions he and his friends were making. They kept ignoring warning signs, kept plowing ahead without considering the consequences, and kept generally being dumb. Which is fine! But, like I said earlier, that isn't a Martin Hench novel.
Point 3: This is going to be a controversial statement, and it's a little tongue in cheek, but in this book Martin Hench and his friends are the bad guys.
Okay, obviously they aren't the bad guys. But, also, they kind of were?
Doctorow always tends to write one-dimensional evil antagonists. And that's fun. It's fun specifically when you're writing competence porn (see point 2). You've got really smart skilled good guys going up against really smart skilled bad guys. It's a race to see who wins!
But when your main characters are kind of dumb (as they are in this book) and mess up on their own, suddenly a one-dimensional evil bad guy doesn't work, because they've also got to be really dumb for it to balance out. And at some point you start wondering how the evil powerful bad guy managed to make any of their evil stuff work in the first place. (And, yes, in real life we have a lot of powerful, evil people ruining everything, but this isn't that kind of book.)
Also... You know how in a lot of Marvel movies you've got a villain (or villainous organization) that starts making a lot of good points? And then suddenly in the story that villain (or villainous org) blows up a building with a bunch of innocent people inside it for no good reason other than the fact that the writers realized the villain was too sympathetic and they needed to change the stakes so that the hero can defeat the villain without everyone feeling conflicted?
So, yeah. Obviously the evil company in this book does evil violent things. But, really, it doesn't make a lot of sense. If you remove all the evil kneecap breaking, then it's just one group of people who don't like that another company is creating a walled garden ecosystem. And so that group who doesn't like walled gardens decides to steal that company's secrets, break contracts and NDAs, plant moles in the company to continually smuggle out their financial records, and use all of that to create a competing company to ruin them. Those behaviors are and should be illegal. Oh, and they continually lie to their investors and steal more and more money from them, while the book portrays those investors as bad people for being mad that they have been lied to repeatedly! It's not really defensible. But that describes what the good guys in this book do.
Obviously I did not like the evil company and their leaders. But it's almost as if you found out there was an independent bookshop in your neighborhood that was overcharging their customers a little bit so you decided to ruin their lives through illegal means. I will ruin this book store and the lives of everyone associated with it because they are charging 15% more than the other bookstore down the street which I am also able to shop at if I want!
Okay, I'm exaggerating, obviously. But it's just hard to be invested in either side of that battle. It's why the plot has the bad business men run around breaking kneecaps so we can feel better about it.
Point 1: This shouldn't have been a Martin Hench novel. It would have been better if framed as a standalone coming-of-age story about the dawn of Silicon Valley.
I remember Cory Doctorow making a big (and intentionally kind of funny) announcement about how instead of continuing to write about young hackers he was switching to writing books about an aging forensic accountant. It made sense! Doctorow is clearly as interested (or more interested) in the social ramifications of his topics as he is the stories. And he wanted to focus in on the kind of financial manipulations and traps that modern capitalism was using to create an unfair playing field.
But, somehow, the third book in the series is back to being about young hackers! If you're going to make a big announcement about your new focus, you should probably make sure you have interest in that new focus. He clearly doesn't.
The big clue is that there's no forensic accounting in this book. There's barely any accounting at all. Occasionally, the main character (who shares a name with the character from the first two books but in all other ways has a completely different personality) will say "I did some accounting," but there's no actual description or education about it. He talks a lot about being the finance guy for the company, but unlike the previous two books he does not actually tell you about any of the financial stuff he is doing. And maybe that sounds like an author cutting out the boring bits, but when it comes to Cory Doctorow books, the in-story education is the best stuff! I learned some history from this book (of California and of computing) but there wasn't the same kind of "here's how you do stuff" kind of focus.
Point 2: The first two books (and many of Doctorow's books) are competence porn. The fun of the books is reading a really skilled person talk you through how they are solving problems. Bad things happen, plans go awry, and the antagonist throws wrenches in the works, but overall it's a story about a smart person doing smart things.
I'm not going to say that the Martin Hench character in this book was incompetent. But he definitely wasn't competent. Most of the problems that happened in this book were because of dumb decisions he and his friends were making. They kept ignoring warning signs, kept plowing ahead without considering the consequences, and kept generally being dumb. Which is fine! But, like I said earlier, that isn't a Martin Hench novel.
Point 3: This is going to be a controversial statement, and it's a little tongue in cheek, but in this book Martin Hench and his friends are the bad guys.
Okay, obviously they aren't the bad guys. But, also, they kind of were?
Doctorow always tends to write one-dimensional evil antagonists. And that's fun. It's fun specifically when you're writing competence porn (see point 2). You've got really smart skilled good guys going up against really smart skilled bad guys. It's a race to see who wins!
But when your main characters are kind of dumb (as they are in this book) and mess up on their own, suddenly a one-dimensional evil bad guy doesn't work, because they've also got to be really dumb for it to balance out. And at some point you start wondering how the evil powerful bad guy managed to make any of their evil stuff work in the first place. (And, yes, in real life we have a lot of powerful, evil people ruining everything, but this isn't that kind of book.)
Also... You know how in a lot of Marvel movies you've got a villain (or villainous organization) that starts making a lot of good points? And then suddenly in the story that villain (or villainous org) blows up a building with a bunch of innocent people inside it for no good reason other than the fact that the writers realized the villain was too sympathetic and they needed to change the stakes so that the hero can defeat the villain without everyone feeling conflicted?
So, yeah. Obviously the evil company in this book does evil violent things. But, really, it doesn't make a lot of sense. If you remove all the evil kneecap breaking, then it's just one group of people who don't like that another company is creating a walled garden ecosystem. And so that group who doesn't like walled gardens decides to steal that company's secrets, break contracts and NDAs, plant moles in the company to continually smuggle out their financial records, and use all of that to create a competing company to ruin them. Those behaviors are and should be illegal. Oh, and they continually lie to their investors and steal more and more money from them, while the book portrays those investors as bad people for being mad that they have been lied to repeatedly! It's not really defensible. But that describes what the good guys in this book do.
Obviously I did not like the evil company and their leaders. But it's almost as if you found out there was an independent bookshop in your neighborhood that was overcharging their customers a little bit so you decided to ruin their lives through illegal means. I will ruin this book store and the lives of everyone associated with it because they are charging 15% more than the other bookstore down the street which I am also able to shop at if I want!
Okay, I'm exaggerating, obviously. But it's just hard to be invested in either side of that battle. It's why the plot has the bad business men run around breaking kneecaps so we can feel better about it.
March 26, 2025
I am the target audience for Doctorow’s books - I’m in tech, I’m a similar age, I’ve lived in SF but don’t current live there, and I know a lot of the same people he knows (including a few thanked by him in his acknowledgements for this latest book)
But I’ve increasingly found that there are elements in his books I’m growing tired of, that don’t work for me as perhaps they once might have.
So not a five star book for me though for many people it well could be. It isn’t precisely science fiction - it’s honestly a bit more like historical fiction but it does in some ways capture a time and place and many aspects of working in tech and for startups.
My objections however are as follows.
1) his characters have a tendency to be exceptionally competent at other stuff as well as whatever they are first good at - often skills that they aren’t shown using or practice or learning until they pull it out and use it. Frequently this means that the character previously shown to have subsisted on largely snacks and take out suddenly is driving hundreds of miles to source ingredients to cook complex dishes just from recipes. I’m a very good cook but I became one over many years of cooking and entertaining and deliberately stocking the tools and ingredients and yes the cookbooks to become good. And there were plenty of mistakes along the way (famously even a few fire alarms before dinner parties)
2) I find his characters have a tendency to act years older than he says they are in the text. This isn’t unique to this book of his but broadly I find personally his characters read as up to a decade or more older than they are supposed to be. In terms of how what they eat and drink, how they interact with others, how they self reflect and in many cases their levels of skill. It’s particularly difficult to capture well in a story set in the past but I’ve found this in his works set in the future as well.
3) there is a lot of build up to what felt like a bit of a rushed ending (and then epilogues). I’ve seen this in some of his other books as well - great setting, some conflict, but the end feels a bit rushed and important elements happen off screen.
4) while he has strong women characters in many ways his stories are full of smaller characters who don’t have much agency in the story. Not that I would necessarily want to read the story from dozens of viewpoints but in this story the many workers at the company the main character works for are very much in the background (and depicted in fairly stereotypical ways - emphasizing their languages spoken over much else with very few exceptions a few times in the book. Similarly the “big bads” in the book are hinted at in somewhat stereotypical ways but don’t make an active appearance. It makes a lot of the action moving the plot forward feel a bit unearned in many places.
There is a lot to like here but I did t find a lot that I love. And many elements of the city felt more like the SF of the early 2000s-2010’s (when I lived there) than the city a few decades earlier.
But I’ve increasingly found that there are elements in his books I’m growing tired of, that don’t work for me as perhaps they once might have.
So not a five star book for me though for many people it well could be. It isn’t precisely science fiction - it’s honestly a bit more like historical fiction but it does in some ways capture a time and place and many aspects of working in tech and for startups.
My objections however are as follows.
1) his characters have a tendency to be exceptionally competent at other stuff as well as whatever they are first good at - often skills that they aren’t shown using or practice or learning until they pull it out and use it. Frequently this means that the character previously shown to have subsisted on largely snacks and take out suddenly is driving hundreds of miles to source ingredients to cook complex dishes just from recipes. I’m a very good cook but I became one over many years of cooking and entertaining and deliberately stocking the tools and ingredients and yes the cookbooks to become good. And there were plenty of mistakes along the way (famously even a few fire alarms before dinner parties)
2) I find his characters have a tendency to act years older than he says they are in the text. This isn’t unique to this book of his but broadly I find personally his characters read as up to a decade or more older than they are supposed to be. In terms of how what they eat and drink, how they interact with others, how they self reflect and in many cases their levels of skill. It’s particularly difficult to capture well in a story set in the past but I’ve found this in his works set in the future as well.
3) there is a lot of build up to what felt like a bit of a rushed ending (and then epilogues). I’ve seen this in some of his other books as well - great setting, some conflict, but the end feels a bit rushed and important elements happen off screen.
4) while he has strong women characters in many ways his stories are full of smaller characters who don’t have much agency in the story. Not that I would necessarily want to read the story from dozens of viewpoints but in this story the many workers at the company the main character works for are very much in the background (and depicted in fairly stereotypical ways - emphasizing their languages spoken over much else with very few exceptions a few times in the book. Similarly the “big bads” in the book are hinted at in somewhat stereotypical ways but don’t make an active appearance. It makes a lot of the action moving the plot forward feel a bit unearned in many places.
There is a lot to like here but I did t find a lot that I love. And many elements of the city felt more like the SF of the early 2000s-2010’s (when I lived there) than the city a few decades earlier.
May 18, 2025
This is both the final and the first volume in a trilogy relating the adventures of forensic accountant Martin Hench, and it’s just as fascinating and involving and as much fun as the first two (but later) books. See, the first one was set in the present day, when Marty is in his sixties and contemplating retirement, but the second one was set twenty years earlier, and this new one tells of Marty’s origins and early life at M.I.T. in the mid-’70s (where he washed out after he discovered the new Altair 8800, the first step in the Computer Revolution, and quit going to classes), and then dives into the neolithic age of Silicon Valley. (Its early development, which is what the title alludes to.) But -- this being Cory Doctorow -- it all works. Though you’ll enjoy all three books more if you read them in published order, not by internal chronology.
I have to say, first, that I’m a few year older then Marty and I discovered personal computers at about the same time, though I have never been a techie -- just a very experienced end-user. So. Marty taught himself to program in BASIC and Pascal (as did I) and hung out at the Newbury Street Irregulars’ clubhouse, and graduated to machine code (which was always way beyond me), and pounced on the first Apple II+ he saw, and met a young mathematician and proto-hacker named Artie Hellman, who became a close friend, roommate, business partner, and mutually supportive confident.
Then the two of them got caught up in a start-up computer consulting business financed by the Big Business father of one of their contacts from Newbury Street, but it turned sour on them and within a few years they had escaped to the wild and woolly world developing just south of San Francisco. By now, Marty had gotten a two-year degree in accounting -- which seems like an odd career move for someone like him, but the way he explains its attractions, it seems perfectly reasonably.
Though it’s not just pushing numbers around that draws him in, it’s investigating where the books have gone wrong -- the forensics of money. And he has a huge talent for that, which is how he gets involved with a weird computer company operated by three clerics. (“A Catholic priest, a Mormon bishop, and an Orthodox rabbi walk into a technology gold rush. . . .”) And then things really start to pop.
Like Marty’s first two books, this one is both a galloping romp and a morality tale. Cory has observations and opinions to share about both the upsides and downsides of digital tech, all of them well founded in experience -- his early adult experiences and Marty’s have much in common -- and he’s not shy about them. But he also knows how spin a helluva good story while doing it. I really can’t recommend this trilogy highly enough.
I have to say, first, that I’m a few year older then Marty and I discovered personal computers at about the same time, though I have never been a techie -- just a very experienced end-user. So. Marty taught himself to program in BASIC and Pascal (as did I) and hung out at the Newbury Street Irregulars’ clubhouse, and graduated to machine code (which was always way beyond me), and pounced on the first Apple II+ he saw, and met a young mathematician and proto-hacker named Artie Hellman, who became a close friend, roommate, business partner, and mutually supportive confident.
Then the two of them got caught up in a start-up computer consulting business financed by the Big Business father of one of their contacts from Newbury Street, but it turned sour on them and within a few years they had escaped to the wild and woolly world developing just south of San Francisco. By now, Marty had gotten a two-year degree in accounting -- which seems like an odd career move for someone like him, but the way he explains its attractions, it seems perfectly reasonably.
Though it’s not just pushing numbers around that draws him in, it’s investigating where the books have gone wrong -- the forensics of money. And he has a huge talent for that, which is how he gets involved with a weird computer company operated by three clerics. (“A Catholic priest, a Mormon bishop, and an Orthodox rabbi walk into a technology gold rush. . . .”) And then things really start to pop.
Like Marty’s first two books, this one is both a galloping romp and a morality tale. Cory has observations and opinions to share about both the upsides and downsides of digital tech, all of them well founded in experience -- his early adult experiences and Marty’s have much in common -- and he’s not shy about them. But he also knows how spin a helluva good story while doing it. I really can’t recommend this trilogy highly enough.
September 2, 2025
Cory Doctorow is one the most important writers on tech trends around today. He coined the term "enshittification" to describe how companies lure consumers in, reach dominance in a market, and then their platforms degrade over time in the chase for profit, and has written about surveillance capitalism.
Along with his non-fiction writing, Doctorow has written a number of novels. One series casts Martin Hench as the main character, a forensic accountant who invented the role. Doctorow's latest book in this series, *Picks & Shovels* takes us back to the mid-80s and the early days of the computing boom, when 3.5" floppy disks were state of the art and home computers had 16kb of RAM (or 32kb if you were lucky!).
Fresh from flunking out of MIT, Hench takes on an accounting course while also hanging out with a group of computer enthusiasts, giving him knowledge of both fields. After decamping to San Francisco with his roommate, he picks up a few accounting odd-jobs before being hired by Fidelity Computing to investigate a rival company established by disgruntled ex-employees. While Fidelity Computing is run by three men of the cloth their top priority is to fleece their customers and to keep them in their closed ecosystem of equipment and consumables and Hench quickly realises Fidelity is not a reputable business.
We take it largely for granted that todays home computers are built on the principle of inter-operability, that a Lenovo laptop can use a Microsoft operating system, Google software, a Logitech mouse, and a Canon printer, but we only have this freedom thanks to people who fought for it in the early days of the boom. This open vs closed battle is at the heart of *Picks & Shovels* as the upstart Computing Freedom tries to drive Fidelity Computing out of business with superior products.
It would have been easy for Doctorow to just deal with technological issues in this novel, but he also looks at some of the social issues that arose in San Francisco at the time: homosexuals being free to be themselves and choosing their own family after often being cut off from their blood family; the violent assaults they all too often encountered; and the early days of the AIDS pandemic. Doctorow touches on these issues in a sensitive manner through the eyes of Hench, a straight guy who's best friend is gay as they both adjust to their new environment.
In *Picks & Shovels* Doctorow evokes the spirit of the early PC days, and gives a portrait of Silicon Valley and San Francisco before the tech bros arrive. Despite the greed and the betrayals in the book there is a core of hope and honour. This is a great read for anyone vaguely interested in the history of home computing.
Along with his non-fiction writing, Doctorow has written a number of novels. One series casts Martin Hench as the main character, a forensic accountant who invented the role. Doctorow's latest book in this series, *Picks & Shovels* takes us back to the mid-80s and the early days of the computing boom, when 3.5" floppy disks were state of the art and home computers had 16kb of RAM (or 32kb if you were lucky!).
Fresh from flunking out of MIT, Hench takes on an accounting course while also hanging out with a group of computer enthusiasts, giving him knowledge of both fields. After decamping to San Francisco with his roommate, he picks up a few accounting odd-jobs before being hired by Fidelity Computing to investigate a rival company established by disgruntled ex-employees. While Fidelity Computing is run by three men of the cloth their top priority is to fleece their customers and to keep them in their closed ecosystem of equipment and consumables and Hench quickly realises Fidelity is not a reputable business.
We take it largely for granted that todays home computers are built on the principle of inter-operability, that a Lenovo laptop can use a Microsoft operating system, Google software, a Logitech mouse, and a Canon printer, but we only have this freedom thanks to people who fought for it in the early days of the boom. This open vs closed battle is at the heart of *Picks & Shovels* as the upstart Computing Freedom tries to drive Fidelity Computing out of business with superior products.
It would have been easy for Doctorow to just deal with technological issues in this novel, but he also looks at some of the social issues that arose in San Francisco at the time: homosexuals being free to be themselves and choosing their own family after often being cut off from their blood family; the violent assaults they all too often encountered; and the early days of the AIDS pandemic. Doctorow touches on these issues in a sensitive manner through the eyes of Hench, a straight guy who's best friend is gay as they both adjust to their new environment.
In *Picks & Shovels* Doctorow evokes the spirit of the early PC days, and gives a portrait of Silicon Valley and San Francisco before the tech bros arrive. Despite the greed and the betrayals in the book there is a core of hope and honour. This is a great read for anyone vaguely interested in the history of home computing.
January 29, 2025
Picks and Shovels by Cory Doctorow is the excellent, very highly recommended period tech novel and the origin story of forensic accountant and computer security expert Martin Hench.
Martin Hench flunks out of MIT, but while there he falls in love with the emerging computer technology and programming along with all of the possibilities it represents. He also meets his friend Art, joins a group of assorted people all obsessed with programming, works for a dubious business, obtains a 2 year degree in accounting, and eventually he and Art make their way to San Francisco. There he picks up odd jobs until he talks to a predatory computer business, Fidelity Computing. He ends up working for the start-up company that was started by three of their best former saleswomen who are actively opposing Fidelity's business practices.
This is a well-written, completely compelling, detailed period drama that captures the time period and the excitement over personal computers along with the atmosphere in San Francisco and the growth of Silicon Valley as a technology hub. The pace is fast and the plot is engaging so the pages just fly by. It also confronts the very real issue of computer companies trying to lock customers into their brand alone rather than making parts (and operating systems) interchangeable.
Hench is a fully-realized, complex character with both strengths and flaws. All of the secondary characters are equally fully developed as unique individuals. Readers meet Hench at seventeen and into his early 20's while he experiences growth and learns many life lessons that will make him who he is later on in life.
This is the third book in the series, but the series has been presented in a reverse chronology so this starts in the late 1970s and continues into the early 1980s. It can be read as a standalone novel. The first novel in the series is Red Team Blues followed by The Bezzle (set in the 1990s).
Thanks to Tor Publishing for providing me with an advance reader's copy via NetGalley. My review is voluntary and expresses my honest opinion.
http://www.shetreadssoftly.com/2025/0...
Martin Hench flunks out of MIT, but while there he falls in love with the emerging computer technology and programming along with all of the possibilities it represents. He also meets his friend Art, joins a group of assorted people all obsessed with programming, works for a dubious business, obtains a 2 year degree in accounting, and eventually he and Art make their way to San Francisco. There he picks up odd jobs until he talks to a predatory computer business, Fidelity Computing. He ends up working for the start-up company that was started by three of their best former saleswomen who are actively opposing Fidelity's business practices.
This is a well-written, completely compelling, detailed period drama that captures the time period and the excitement over personal computers along with the atmosphere in San Francisco and the growth of Silicon Valley as a technology hub. The pace is fast and the plot is engaging so the pages just fly by. It also confronts the very real issue of computer companies trying to lock customers into their brand alone rather than making parts (and operating systems) interchangeable.
Hench is a fully-realized, complex character with both strengths and flaws. All of the secondary characters are equally fully developed as unique individuals. Readers meet Hench at seventeen and into his early 20's while he experiences growth and learns many life lessons that will make him who he is later on in life.
This is the third book in the series, but the series has been presented in a reverse chronology so this starts in the late 1970s and continues into the early 1980s. It can be read as a standalone novel. The first novel in the series is Red Team Blues followed by The Bezzle (set in the 1990s).
Thanks to Tor Publishing for providing me with an advance reader's copy via NetGalley. My review is voluntary and expresses my honest opinion.
http://www.shetreadssoftly.com/2025/0...
April 9, 2025
Another delightful Cory Doctorow book. This one is sort of a magical realist piece of historical fiction about San Francisco in the 1980s. He seems a little young and a little Canadian to have actually experienced the scene himself, but he surely knows plenty of people who were actually there. San Francisco in the era of AIDs, when it was still more of a hippie/punk city than the home of our tech overlords, is incredibly rich territory, that I'm now surprised I haven't read more fiction about. This book is apparently a prequel, the third book in a series about forensic accountant Martin Hench, which also serves as an origin story. I'm now looking forward to devouring the other books in the series.
The novel name checks a lot of real history, real companies and milestones in the 1980s tech scene, and real people, but it is emphatically not an attempt at realistic fiction. It's a parable of sorts, as much about the tech world of today as it is about the 1980s. Our hero finds himself working alongside a Latin American freedom-fighting nun, a gay orthodox jewish woman, and a shunned Mormon gal, fighting the tech dominance of a religiously focused computer monopoly. It's all a bit ridiculous, but handled very seriously, and it marvelously conveys what we might imagine that time in tech and in San Francisco might have been. In our more romantic dreams anyway.
The book is a parable about the soul of business, how it can be used for good, and how it's recently most often been pushed in an evil direction. I can't speak to the rest of the Hench series yet, but this book dovetails nicely with Doctorow's recent non-fiction writing, in books and on twitter, covering the many ways that monopolies are damaging the US economy and innovation potential. It's a good fun read, and it helps one develop a sense of outrage that applies well beyond the world of fiction. Highly recommended.
The novel name checks a lot of real history, real companies and milestones in the 1980s tech scene, and real people, but it is emphatically not an attempt at realistic fiction. It's a parable of sorts, as much about the tech world of today as it is about the 1980s. Our hero finds himself working alongside a Latin American freedom-fighting nun, a gay orthodox jewish woman, and a shunned Mormon gal, fighting the tech dominance of a religiously focused computer monopoly. It's all a bit ridiculous, but handled very seriously, and it marvelously conveys what we might imagine that time in tech and in San Francisco might have been. In our more romantic dreams anyway.
The book is a parable about the soul of business, how it can be used for good, and how it's recently most often been pushed in an evil direction. I can't speak to the rest of the Hench series yet, but this book dovetails nicely with Doctorow's recent non-fiction writing, in books and on twitter, covering the many ways that monopolies are damaging the US economy and innovation potential. It's a good fun read, and it helps one develop a sense of outrage that applies well beyond the world of fiction. Highly recommended.
January 15, 2025
Originally published at myreadinglife.com.
This book has yet to be released. I received a copy through Net Galley in exchange for an honest review. I was on the lookout for this book as i had read the other two in this trilogy. This one is due to be published on February 18. You can purchase a copy from the author here.
The trilogy has been a reverse chronology. This final book in the series is Marty Hench's origin story. In it, we learn how he came to flunk out of MIT, start a company with his roommate, and move to Silicon Valley to start his career as a forensic accountant. Once there, he is hired by a trio of religious leaders (a rabbi, a priest, and a Mormon bishop) who are taking advantage of their customers by selling them computers and accessories only from them. The bulk of the story is how he and a group of women who used to work for the Reverend Sirs fight to free their customers from this lock in.
It doesn't sound that interesting when I write it out. I mean, Marty is a forensic accountant for crying out loud. Can you get more boring than accounting? But somehow the author makes forensic accounting exciting, cool, and intriguing all at the same time. The book really does have the feel of the early computer revolution and the optimism that went with it. A thoroughly enjoyable ride and fitting conclusion to the saga of Marty Hench. I will miss him.
My rating: 4/5
This book has yet to be released. I received a copy through Net Galley in exchange for an honest review. I was on the lookout for this book as i had read the other two in this trilogy. This one is due to be published on February 18. You can purchase a copy from the author here.
The trilogy has been a reverse chronology. This final book in the series is Marty Hench's origin story. In it, we learn how he came to flunk out of MIT, start a company with his roommate, and move to Silicon Valley to start his career as a forensic accountant. Once there, he is hired by a trio of religious leaders (a rabbi, a priest, and a Mormon bishop) who are taking advantage of their customers by selling them computers and accessories only from them. The bulk of the story is how he and a group of women who used to work for the Reverend Sirs fight to free their customers from this lock in.
It doesn't sound that interesting when I write it out. I mean, Marty is a forensic accountant for crying out loud. Can you get more boring than accounting? But somehow the author makes forensic accounting exciting, cool, and intriguing all at the same time. The book really does have the feel of the early computer revolution and the optimism that went with it. A thoroughly enjoyable ride and fitting conclusion to the saga of Marty Hench. I will miss him.
My rating: 4/5
February 23, 2025
This is the third Martin Hench novel, and it presents his origin story of how he got obsessed with computers in the early days of personal computing (the late 1970s and 80s). It shows why and how he got bent towards accounting and started his career as a consultant in 'forensic accounting', catching the crimes of people through their financial transactions.
For those who lived through the heady early days of computing it's a nostalgic trip. For the rest, it may not feel as compelling as there is a lot of technical explanations. A lot. The action is modest compared to his other two books where he's well into his career of catching fraud and embezzlement.
As with all of Doctorow's fiction, he's making a point about real-life abuses. In this one, it's the tendency of certain companies to 'lock in' their customers to their technically-deficient platforms. The criminals in this one are religious figures who use their stature to convince their devout followers to adopt their computing systems.
This is also a coming of age story about Hench, as he was quite young when he caught the computing bug (dropping out of MIT) and discovering women when he can come up for air from his computing fetish.
Now that the series has finished its reverse-order chronology, I'd be tempted to tell new readers to read them in chronological order, not published order. But this book, frankly, is the weakest of the lot unless (as I said) you love to geek out on technical jargon of early computing. If so, then go for it. For others, and especially other Doctorow fans, I'd recommend reading them in published order, starting with 'Red Team Blues' and then 'The Bezzle' before finishing with this origin story.
For those who lived through the heady early days of computing it's a nostalgic trip. For the rest, it may not feel as compelling as there is a lot of technical explanations. A lot. The action is modest compared to his other two books where he's well into his career of catching fraud and embezzlement.
As with all of Doctorow's fiction, he's making a point about real-life abuses. In this one, it's the tendency of certain companies to 'lock in' their customers to their technically-deficient platforms. The criminals in this one are religious figures who use their stature to convince their devout followers to adopt their computing systems.
This is also a coming of age story about Hench, as he was quite young when he caught the computing bug (dropping out of MIT) and discovering women when he can come up for air from his computing fetish.
Now that the series has finished its reverse-order chronology, I'd be tempted to tell new readers to read them in chronological order, not published order. But this book, frankly, is the weakest of the lot unless (as I said) you love to geek out on technical jargon of early computing. If so, then go for it. For others, and especially other Doctorow fans, I'd recommend reading them in published order, starting with 'Red Team Blues' and then 'The Bezzle' before finishing with this origin story.
August 22, 2025
This book is brilliantly addictive. I didn’t want to put it down. I ended up reading until midnight as I kept saying, just 1 more chapter. The fact I had to get up for work at 5:30 didn’t stop me. I only stopped at midnight as I finished the book, otherwise it would have been, just 1 more chapter.
This is the 3rd Martin Hench novel, and is his origin story. His freshman days at MIT through to assisting his first tech startup. It’s also the origin story of computers. There is a lot of real history of computers in here and it’s seamlessly merged with the fictitious bits, to the degree this can be seen as Alt History. Despite being written by Cory Doctorow this is barely SF, but it is a complete computer nerdgasm. It reminded me of things I hadn’t thought about in decades. Who remembers Lotus 123 or VisiCalc? Not to mention the machines they were running on.
At the centre of the story is a company called Fidelity Computers, which is a pyramid scheme selling deliberately faulty computers with non-standard components to trap people into their propriety products. Exposing and taking down this company is the central plot, but the plot is really just a vehicle to show the history of computes in Silicon Valley, and the history of Marty Hench. The story is driven by rich and varied characters and detailed world-building of the 80s. There’s also a strong theme of cynicism of the technology businesses and a rebellion against it, which is standard for a Doctorow book.
I should warn that this book isn’t for everyone. If you were a nerd who worked and played with computers back when floppy disks were the hot new thing, then you’ll probably love this book. If not, your enjoyment may not be as high, but the world-building and characters will still entertain.
This is the 3rd Martin Hench novel, and is his origin story. His freshman days at MIT through to assisting his first tech startup. It’s also the origin story of computers. There is a lot of real history of computers in here and it’s seamlessly merged with the fictitious bits, to the degree this can be seen as Alt History. Despite being written by Cory Doctorow this is barely SF, but it is a complete computer nerdgasm. It reminded me of things I hadn’t thought about in decades. Who remembers Lotus 123 or VisiCalc? Not to mention the machines they were running on.
At the centre of the story is a company called Fidelity Computers, which is a pyramid scheme selling deliberately faulty computers with non-standard components to trap people into their propriety products. Exposing and taking down this company is the central plot, but the plot is really just a vehicle to show the history of computes in Silicon Valley, and the history of Marty Hench. The story is driven by rich and varied characters and detailed world-building of the 80s. There’s also a strong theme of cynicism of the technology businesses and a rebellion against it, which is standard for a Doctorow book.
I should warn that this book isn’t for everyone. If you were a nerd who worked and played with computers back when floppy disks were the hot new thing, then you’ll probably love this book. If not, your enjoyment may not be as high, but the world-building and characters will still entertain.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 145 reviews