Cory Doctorow is joining us today to talk about his novel, [novel name]. Here’s the publisher’s description:
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 invented: 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 Fidelity Computing 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 Fidelity Computing without a second thought, utterly infatuated with the electric atmosphere of Computing Freedom. Located in the heart of the Mission, this group of brilliant young women found themselves exhausted by the predatory business practices of Fidelity Computing and set out to beat them at their own game, making better computers and driving Fidelity Computing 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.
What’s Cory’s favorite bit?
I find lore intimidating.
Look, it’s hard enough to keep track of things that happen in a single book and make sure they all line up. That’s because I write like a bricklayer: a certain number of pages every day, without fail, leaving off mid-sentence so that I’ve got a rough edge to add onto when I come back to it the next day.
Decades ago, I underwent an indispensable realization: that the way I feel about writing as the words are leaving my fingertips is totally unrelated to the quality of those words. “Writers’ block” isn’t the inability to come up with worse per se – it’s the feeling that all the words I can conjure are inadequate or deficient or defective.
Right at the start of my career, when I was European Director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, on the road 27 days a month, with a second and third novel due, I came to understand that the feelings I had about my writing were leakage: getting my ass kicked in the European Parliament or at the UN in Geneva made me feel like a miserable failure, so the words I wrote felt like miserable failures, too. Ditto for fighting with my girlfriend, having jetlag, missing meals, or fighting a hangover.
Once I realized this, I learned to put myself into a kind of trance where the feelings I had about my writing were sealed up, not silenced but at least muffled, and I just wrote. One weird side effect of this is that I often can’t quite remember what I wrote on previous days, and going back to look it up while I’m laying the next brick – writing the day’s pages – messes with that emotional discipline and makes it hard to get the day’s words down.
So I find lore intimidating. I can’t quite remember what I wrote before. I just write, and then fix it in post. Mostly.
But then I discovered the joys of backshadowing.
During the covid lockdowns, I ensconced myself in my backyard hammock, cranked up the Talking Heads 5.1 Downmix on endless shuffle, and wrote nine books. It turns out that being able to compartmentalize your feelings with writing makes for an excellent coping strategy during a global pandemic.
One of those books was Red Team Blues (Tor, 2023). The conceit of Red Team Blues was an odd one: what if I wrote the final volume in a beloved, long-running series, without writing all the other books? Could I capture that last-day-of-summer-camp energy of reading the conclusion to a series you’ve followed faithfully for decades without all those other books?
Turns out, you could! I banged out the first draft of Red Team Blues in six weeks flat and emailed it to my editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden. The next morning, I had an email in my inbox, just three lines:
> That was.
> A fucking ride.
> WOAH.
Then Patrick called my agent and bought three novels starring the hero of Red Team Blues: Martin Hench, a two-fisted, hard-charging forensic accountant who, at 67, has spent more than 40 years in Silicon Valley, unwinding every scam that every tech bro could think of.
Now, on the one hand, this was very good news. I loved writing Marty’s adventures. At 67, ready to retire, he was a great sleuth – wise, experienced, gallant, and careful with the emotions of the people around him. Inhabiting Marty for those six weeks was a great experience.
But on the other hand, I really liked Marty. He had earned his retirement. Bringing him out of retirement for two more volumes after I’d pulled off such a smashing finale for his long and storied career felt mean.
That’s when I hit on the – in retrospect – obvious idea of writing these books out of order. After all, Marty has seen literally every tech/finance scam since the first Intel 8080 CPU rolled off the line. I could write dozens of adventures starring Marty Hench and his “very particular set of skills, acquired over a very long career.” Which is exactly what I did.
Last year, Tor published The Bezzle, a Marty Hench adventure from the mid-2000s about the unbelievably sleazy, private-equity dominated prison-tech industry. The book did great – a national bestseller!
This week, Tor is publishing Picks and Shovels, Marty’s first adventure, set in the early 1980s, about a weird PC company run by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest and an orthodox rabbi whose grift is a pyramid-selling faith scam backstopped by violent, hired thugs.
In writing the Hench series out of order in this way, I’ve learned to love lore. You see, I’m no longer worried about foreshadowing. With the books running backwards and sideways in time, I can backshadow them. Preparatory to writing each new Hench volume, I review all the cool stuff I put in the other books and pull out cool stuff that Marty has done in his past and use it as story beats for those earlier volumes. I don’t have to use them all, of course – I’ve got at least three more Hench books on the drawing board, so there’s plenty of space for unused lore to get squeezed in. What’s more, each new volume generates more backshadowing fodder to put in still more volumes. It’s a perpetual motion machine that spits out cool plot points!
Best of all: backshadowing lets seat-of-the-pants plotters like me seem to be the most premeditated sort of forward planner imaginable. It’s a conjuring trick that makes the trancelike automatic writing I learned to do all those years ago feel like the cold-blooded machinations of a criminal mastermind.
Man, that’s a great feeling.
LINKS:
BIO:
Cory Doctorow ( craphound.com < http://craphound.com/>) is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of many books, most recently PICKS AND SHOVELS (a followup to THE BEZZLE), THE BEZZLE (a followup to RED TEAM BLUES) and THE LOST CAUSE, a solarpunk science fiction novel of hope amidst the climate emergency. His most recent nonfiction book is THE INTERNET CON: HOW TO SEIZE THE MEANS OF COMPUTATION, a Big Tech disassembly manual. Other recent books include RED TEAM BLUES, a science fiction crime thriller; CHOKEPOINT CAPITALISM, nonfiction about monopoly and creative labor markets; the LITTLE BROTHER series for young adults; IN REAL LIFE, a graphic novel; and the picture book POESY THE MONSTER SLAYER. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. In 2022, he earned the Sir Arthur Clarke Imagination in Service to Society Award for lifetime achievement. In 2024, the Media Ecology Association awarded him the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity. York University (Canada) made him an Honourary Doctor of Laws; and the Open University (UK) made him an Honourary Doctor of Computer Science.
