Red Team Blues

I haven't read everything by Doctorow, but have been reading him long enough to see what I think is an interesting progression in his writing. His work in the last few years (from the exceptional "Walkaway", to the superb novella collection "Radicalized"), has seemed increasingly readable and smooth. I think it's probably no coincidence that the stories seem to be getting a little shorter too (mostly, "Walkaway" has a certain heft).

His latest, "Red Team Blues", is a financial tech thriller set in Silicon Valley, in which an itinerant, grizzled forensic accountant, Marty Hench, is drawn into a hunt for crucial McGuffin, one that threatens the foundations of a cryptocurrency network.

Hench as a character is a nice clash of genres. On the one hand, he's a like a gritty noir detective - a loner, connected but never settled (literally, he lives on a tour bus), no time or patience for bullshit. On the other, he's lives and breathes the most bullshit-ridden ecosystem in existence. As he gets caught up in, and tossed back and forth by, forces vying for control of cryptocurrency, Hench splits his time between the magical looms of the emperor's new clothes and the actual streets of San Francisco.

The plot is interesting, but what keeps the reader involved is Hench's no-nonsense getting on with things. His superpower is to move among those who spend their lives playing games and not lose sight of how things actually work, when you look past the hype of constant revolutionary presmises offered by the techbois. What's interesting here is that while Doctorow does give you some of the tech-lore involved, it plays much less of a role than it does in a lot of his work. He is much more interested, here, in contrasting the lives of the rich and how those lives bulldoze, trample, and otherwise destroy people in the world around them. There isn't much technical detail here, particularly of the forensic accounting bit, most of which occurs "off screen". We get a lot more time taken describing cooking of food than cooking of books. Oddly, I wouldn't have minded a little more on the technical end.

It's pace and brevity are definitely in its favour. If you want a sharp, easy-to-read, thriller with Doctorow's signature combination of tech and humanity, you'll enjoy this one.

Maybe @[email protected] lost a bet? Why else write a novel about an 'ageing accountant'? If so, Cory Doctorow got the last laugh, because Red Team Blues is a gripping page-turner!

Our hero, Marty, is only technically an accountant (forensic accountant “when I wanted to talk about the job”), this is really a detective novel, complete with organised crime in the shadows, grisly murders, covert government agents, thugs with clubs lying in wait in lobbies, and “old fashioned shoe-leather work”.

These crime-novel boxes are ticked, as only Doctorow can, with the most germane near-future-but-could-be-today technological and social elements possible. Cryptocurrency is central to the plot (and Marty's strong opinions about crypto groaned out in the very first chapter), as are ‘secure enclaves’, a ubiquitous computing technology that's as obscure as it is crucial.

Doctorow brings this obscurity into the light with trademark clarity, but the tech, the drilling through processors, the tor network connections, etc. aren't really the point. This is a story about a man navigating a maelstrom of vast powers, using his smarts and experience, and not a little help from his friends (and a few friendly strangers), to keep his head above the waves. It's also about the perils of moving from titular the read team - the attackers who only need to find a single chink in the defenders armour - to the blue team, who need to find and plug every one of those chinks.

Along the way we get a fascinating tour of a variety of anthropological micro-climates, from the Silicon Valley elite set, through their lawyers and accountants, down to the tented homeless, imperilled by dangers as mortal and merciless as, but much less seemingly glamorous than, those that threaten Marty himself. And also lots of enjoyably wry opinions about certain social media billionaires, Starbucks, and many near mythical narratives of rises and falls in the tech world.

This is firmly a novel in the Cory Doctorow canon, but also a departure in a couple of ways. Apart from being a new genre (previous novels have been more purely directly SF and YA ‘activism-fic’), unlike in previous stories, this protagonist is old. There are lots of gripes about aches and pains and the frequency of nocturnal urination, and also many many references that will tickle the atrophied synapses of older computer nerds like myself, from UUCP/Usenet through Lotus 1-2-3, to gripes about remembering “when crypto meant cryptography”.

I enjoyed this so much that, having recently finished the audio-book version narrated by the peerless Wil Wheaton, I've just started an immediate re-read in e-book format. Both, of course, are DRM-free!