#'punks' the novel

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Kickstarting a new Martin Hench novel about the dawn of enshittification

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/07/weird-pcs/#a-mormon-bishop-an-orthodox-rabbi-and-a-catholic-priest-walk-into-a-personal-computing-revolution

Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by @wilwheaton:

http://martinhench.com

This is the third Hench novel, following on from the nationally bestselling The Bezzle (2024) and Red Team Blues (2023). I wrote Red Team Blues with a funny conceit: what if I wrote the final volume of a beloved, long-running series, without writing the rest of the series? Turns out, the answer is: "Your editor will buy a whole bunch more books in the series!"

My solution to this happy conundrum? Write the Hench books out of chronological order. After all, Marty Hench is a financial hacker who's been in Silicon Valley since the days of the first PCs, so he's been there for all the weird scams tech bros have dreamed up since Jobs and Woz were laboring in their garage over the Apple I. He's the Zelig of high-tech fraud! Look hard at any computing-related scandal and you'll find Marty Hench in the picture, quietly and competently unraveling the scheme, dodging lawsuits and bullets with equal aplomb.

Which brings me to Picks and Shovels. In this volume, we travel back to Marty's first job, in the 1980s – the weird and heroic era of the PC. Marty ended up in the Bay Area after he flunked out of an MIT computer science degree (he was too busy programming computers to do his classwork), and earning his CPA at a community college.

Silicon Valley in the early eighties was wild: Reaganomics stalked the land, the AIDS crisis was in full swing, the Dead Kennedys played every weekend, and man were the PCs ever weird. This was before the industry crystalized into Mac vs PC, back when no one knew what they were supposed to look like, who was supposed to use them, and what they were for.

Marty's first job is working for one of the weirder companies: Fidelity Computing. They sound like a joke: a computer company run by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest and an orthodox rabbi. But the joke's on their customers, because Fidelity Computing is a scam: a pyramid sales cult that exploits religious affinities to sell junk PCs that are designed to lock customers in and squeeze them for every dime. A Fidelity printer only works with Fidelity printer paper (they've gimmicked the sprockets on the tractor-feed). A Fidelity floppy drive only accepts Fidelity floppies (every disk is sold with a single, scratched-out sector and the drives check for an error on that sector every time they run).

Marty figures out he's working for the bad guys when they ask him to destroy Computing Freedom, a scrappy rival startup founded by three women who've escaped from Fidelity Computing's cult: a queer orthodox woman who's been kicked out of her family; a radical nun who's thrown in with the Liberation Theology movement in opposing America's Dirty Wars; and a Mormon woman who's quit the church in disgust at its opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment. The women of Computing Freedom have a (ahem) holy mission: to free every Fidelity customer from the prison they were lured into.

Marty may be young and inexperienced, but he can spot a rebel alliance from a light year away and he knows what side he wants to be on. He joins the women in their mission, and we're deep into a computing war that quickly turns into a shooting war. Turns out the Reverend Sirs of Fidelity Computer aren't just scammers – they're mobbed up, and willing to turn to lethal violence to defend their racket.

This is a rollicking crime thriller, a science fiction novel about the dawn of the computing revolution. It's an archaeological expedition to uncover the fossil record of the first emergence of enshittification, a phenomenon that was born with the PC and its evil twin, the Reagan Revolution.

The book comes out on Feb 15 in hardcover and ebook from Macmillan (US/Canada) and Bloomsbury (UK), but neither publisher is doing the audiobook. That's my department.

Why? Well, I love audiobooks, and I especially love the audiobooks for this series, because they're read by the incredible Wil Wheaton, hands down my favorite audiobook narrator. But that's not why I retain my audiobook rights and produce my own audiobooks. I do that because Amazon's Audible service refuses to carry any of my audiobooks.

Here's how that works: Audible is a division of Amazon, and they've illegally obtained a monopoly over the audiobook market, controlling more than 90% of audiobook sales in many genres. That means that if your book isn't for sale on Audible, it might as well not exist.

But Amazon won't let you sell your books on Audible unless you let them wrap those books in "digital rights management," a kind of encryption that locks them to Audible's authorized players. Under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it's a felony punishable with a 5-year sentence and a $500k fine to supply you with a tool to remove an audiobook from Audible and play it on a rival app. That applies even if the person who gives you the tool is the creator of the book!

You read that right: if I make an audiobook and then give you the tools to move it out of Amazon's walled garden, I could go to prison for five years! That's a stiffer sentence than you'd face if you were to just pirate the audiobook. It's a harsher penalty than you'd get for shoplifting the book on CD from a truck-stop. It's more draconian than the penalty for hijacking the truck that delivers the CDs!

Amazon knows that every time you buy an audiobook from Audible, you increase the cost you'll have to pay if you switch to a competitor. They use that fact to give readers a worse deal (last year they tried out ads in audiobooks!). But the people who really suffer under this arrangement are the writers, whom Amazon abuses with abandon, knowing they can't afford to leave the service because their readers are locked into it. That's why Amazon felt they could get away with stealing $100 million from indie audiobook creators (and yup, they got away with it):

https://www.audiblegate.com/about

Which is why none of my books can be sold with DRM. And that means that Audible won't carry any of them.

For more than a decade, I've been making my own audiobooks, in partnership with the wonderful studio Skyboat Media and their brilliant director, Gabrielle de Cuir:

https://skyboatmedia.com/

I pay fantastic narrators a fair wage for their work, then I pay John Taylor Williams, the engineer who masters my podcasts, to edit the books and compose bed music for the intro and outro. Then I sell the books at every store in the world – except Audible and Apple, who both have mandatory DRM. Because fuck DRM.

Paying everyone a fair wage is expensive. It's worth it: the books are great. But even though my books are sold at many stores online, being frozen out of Audible means that the sales barely register.

That's why I do these Kickstarter campaigns, to pre-sell thousands of audiobooks in advance of the release. I've done six of these now, and each one was a huge success, inspiring others to strike out on their own, sometimes with spectacular results:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/books/2022/04/01/brandon-sanderson-kickstarter-41-million-new-books/7243531001/

Today, I've launched the Kickstarter for Picks and Shovels. I'm selling the audiobook and ebook in DRM-form, without any "terms of service" or "license agreement." That means they're just like a print book: you buy them, you own them. You can read them on any equipment you choose to. You can sell them, give them away, or lend them to friends. Rather than making you submit to 20,000 words of insulting legalese, all I ask of you is that you don't violate copyright law. I trust you!

Speaking of print books: I'm also pre-selling the hardcover of Picks and Shovels and the paperbacks of The Bezzle and Red Team Blues, the other two Marty Hench books. I'll even sign and personalize them for you!

http://martinhench.com

I'm also offering five chances to commission your own Marty Hench story – pick your favorite high-tech finance scam from the past 40 years of tech history, and I'll have Marty bust it in a custom short story. Once the story is published, I'll make sure you get credit. Check out these two cool Little Brother stories my previous Kickstarter backers commissioned:

Spill

https://reactormag.com/spill-cory-doctorow/

Vigilant

https://reactormag.com/vigilant-cory-doctorow/

I'm heading out on tour this winter and spring with the book. I'll be in LA, San Francisco, San Diego, Burbank, Bloomington, Chicago, Richmond VA, Toronto, NYC, Boston, Austin, DC, Baltimore, Seattle, and other dates still added. I've got an incredible roster of conversation partners lined up, too: John Hodgman, Charlie Jane Anders, Dan Savage, Ken Liu, Peter Sagal, Wil Wheaton, and others.

I hope you'll check out this book, and come out to see me on tour and say hi. Before I go, I want to leave you with some words of advance praise for Picks and Shovels:

I hugely enjoyed Picks and Shovels. Cory Doctorow’s reconstruction of the age is note perfect: the detail, the atmosphere, ethos, flavour and smell of the age is perfectly conveyed. I love Marty and Art and all the main characters. The hope and the thrill that marks the opening section. The superb way he tells the story of the rise of Silicon Valley (to use the lazy metonym), inserting the stories of Shockley, IBM vs US Government, the rise of MS – all without turning journalistic or preachy.

The seeds of enshittification are all there… even in the sunlight of that time the shadows are lengthening. AIDS of course, and the coming scum tide of VCs. In Orwellian terms, the pigs are already rising up on two feet and starting to wear trousers. All that hope, all those ideals…

I love too the thesis that San Francisco always has failed and always will fail her suitors.

Despite cultural entropy, enshittification, corruption, greed and all the betrayals there’s a core of hope and honour in the story too.

-Stephen Fry

Cory Doctorow writes as few authors do, with tech world savvy and real world moral clarity. A true storyteller for our times.

-John Scalzi

A crackling, page-turning tumble into an unexpected underworld of queer coders, Mission burritos, and hacker nuns. You will fall in love with the righteous underdogs of Computing Freedom—and feel right at home in the holy place Doctorow has built for them far from Silicon Valley’s grabby, greedy hands."

-Claire Evans, editor of Motherboard Future, author of Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet.

"Wonderful…evokes the hacker spirit of the early personal computer era—and shows how the battle for software freedom is eternal."

-Steven Levy, author of Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution and Facebook: The Inside Story.

What could be better than a Martin Hench thriller set in 1980s San Francisco that mixes punk rock romance with Lotus spreadsheets, dot matrix printers and religious orders? You'll eat this up – I sure did.

-Tim Wu, Special Assistant to the President for Technology and Competition Policy, author of The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

Captures the look and feel of the PC era. Cory Doctorow draws a portrait of a Silicon Valley and San Francisco before the tech bros showed up — a startup world driven as much by open source ideals as venture capital gold.

-John Markoff, Pulitzer-winning tech columnist for the New York Times and author of What the Doormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry

You won't put this book down – it's too much fun. I was there when it all began. Doctorow's characters and their story are real.

-Dan'l Lewin, CEO and President of the Computer History Museum

[a-chaotic-dumbass]

when its time to cry over house tully again and edmure's kindness and care for his people and brynden's loyalty to a seemingly dead cause and hoster's grief and regret over lysa's marriage by his last days and catelyn's love for her family which ran so deep that she now haunts the riverlands as a punishment for those who wronged them

[k41tlyn8487]

This is me right now trying to read Franz Kafkas Metamorphosis for my Drama and Theatre Studies exam

[artificelux]

I've said before that I always want Cyber Monday to be cooler than it is, to be neon-soaked and punky...

In short, Cyberpunk Monday.

Well, what's more punk than forgoing the big corpo sites and buying straight from creators and small businesses? Supporting art and artists directly, adding value to the ecosystem of unconventional stories that don't follow the traditional sales model.

So, I'm trying something different this year... I'm going to run a 20% off sale through noon on Dec. 3. It's an automatic discount site-wide on colorofamirror.net (including all versions of the novel, plus the vinyl soundtrack). The only exclusion is the already-better discount of 25% off for the Full Moon Bundle, which doesn't stack with this sale.

This will likely be the only sale I run during the year, so if you've been interested in picking up a copy of the book or you have someone in mind for a holiday gift, this is your chance.

A noir science fiction story, COLOR OF A MIRROR is written, designed, published, and sold by me (and can be found in a couple independent bookstores in the New England area). It has received "Editor's Pick" from BookLife Reviews and a "Get It" verdict from Kirkus Reviews. I don't sell on Amazon/Kindle or B&N, and the e-book is DRM-free so you can read on whatever device you choose, making this a perfect Cyberpunk Monday offering.

--

This weekend, whether you're shopping local bookstores on Small Business Saturday or finally picking up that bespoke item from a favorite creator, let's support those that are making the art we love... not the big businesses trying to turn us into dollar signs.

[goober-37]

Omg an OC sketch?? During pride month?? Anyways, meet Damien! He’s my latest character and I’m still working out his personality n shit since he’s like a FRESH new character rn, but I figured I needed to sketch him out. I think I want him to have fire powers lowkey but idk maybe gimme some ideas on the comments!

I’ll probably have some more art coming soon hopefully 😍

[whaliiwatching]

hobie in a croptop that says ‘thot crime’

and proud of it too

[isabeauwolf]

This beauty is from Law's Novel Illustration! We need this novel of Law and The Heart Pirates in English, I'm begging! Tell us what happened after he left Corazon's death, escaped The Bird Cage and The Donquixote Family, how he met Bepo, Shachi and Penguin, and forming The Heart Pirates!

*end of Law's novel rant and rambling* But seriously, we need this!!!!!

Now we are deep diving into what I have saved on my computer XD I regret nothing, nope, no, never!

Film Red Law! I'm so happy!

[partuulla]

Yo, I made another short horror VN.

you play as a mad scientist celebrating his hubris with his lab partner. Explore their messy relationship alongside their dumb death scenarios.

It's fully voiced and free to play here: https://partulla.itch.io/bubo-prologue

(Full credits and content warnings in the Itch.io page)

BUBO voiced by James Dijit AKU PUNK voiced by Michael Kovach Music by Lei Hart

[n30n-ang3l]

Imagine this four in a band.

But the guitarist (Hobie) and bassist (Haruka) always argue about sharing the spotlight and where the band is going creatively while the lead singer and synth player (Jinx) and drummer (Nimona) just hanging out and causing anarchy (like pranking each other or TPing a heckler’s house the person jumped on stage trying to cause some major ruckus which got them kicked out of the venue). Haruka leaves the band because of Creative Differences (but in reality she gets kicked out of the band she did some shit that even Hobie thought that crossed the line). Haruka’s absence prompt’s the band to replace her with this dude.

But turns out he’s not a good bass player at all but they kept him because he is a good rhythm guitarist so the whole band + Chai decides to perform without a bass guitarist. After a night, the band decided to celebrate in a bar (Nimona and Jinx just turned legal adults so Hobie why not have them get their very first drink of beer with their consent) after a first good live show without Haruka. While they’re enjoying their food (with Nimona and Chai arguing if pineapple is good on pizza while Jinx is egging them on) this woman came in wanting to join the band.

She explained to them how she liked their performance during the show and how they would need a bass player. Hobie hesitant at first asks Marceline to perform in the stage (because it’s an open mic night at the bar) to see how she good really is. And she did, she went on the stage and performed I’m Just Your Problem, a song she wrote after a really bad breakup with her college girlfriend for 5 years. Hobie really impressed let her join the band. There is now 5 people (Jinx in lead vocals and synthesizer, Hobie in lead guitar, Marceline in backup vocals and bass, Nimona in Drums, and Chai in Rhythm Guitar) in the band and they’re rocking out all over the world.

P.S. They also have a roadie and guitar who is this lady.

She doesn’t give her name to the band as she told them to call her The Player just because.

There’s also this young woman.

Gwen is close friends with Hobie and occasionally plays drums with the band whenever Nimona is out of commission (usually injuries from one of her’s and Jinx’s hi jinx but she always gets back up better than ever). But she’s sadly not a permanent member because she has a band of her own in The Mary Janes (where she plays drums in) and she’s in college and the band knows that they can’t replace someone like Nimona because they pretty much care about her.

[triumph-of-adaptation]

Persepolis (2007) 🖤

[ghostmoodboards]

Shipboard for Tobias Fangor and Rachel Berenson (Animorphs) late 90s/early 00s/punk/grunge/skate/emo music/birds of prey/wild cats/mountain forests/wilderness/resistance/anarchy/thrillseeking/the sky/space themes For an anon~ Hope you like the look!! ^^

Send an ask, we're open~! ^^

[nonolithic]

Ultralight

[readtilyoudie]

SPIDER-PUNK: BATTLE OF THE BANNED

[angie-j-kay]

OH SHIT my novel chapters are getting put in the city library!!!

So I decided to take a risk, and packed all of my current chapters of What You Cast Out into little envelopes and take them to a few nearby shops. There was an occult shop, a comic shop, the local Hippie grocery co-op, places that are known to be partial to fantasy stories or local businesses.

While the shops didn't show very much interest (beyond the comic shop being politely intrigued), the local city library freaking FELL ON THIS.

"Wait... you're the author? AND YOU DID THE COVER ART??? AND YOU HAD IT PRINTED AT A LOCALLY OWNED PRINTER?????"

Apparently they have a special section of the library where they showcase books written by local authors, and the librarians said that once they'd made it through being entered into the database, my books would be welcome in that showcase.

I'd like to note that there are some local authors here, mostly published through Amazon Press and with 90s-era photoshopped covers. And the topics tend to be local history and folklore, with like one mystery novel that I've heard of.

But there's NO fantasy, and ABSOLUTELY NO FANTASY set here in Southern IL. Like, readers from this region will be able to pinpoint locations and cities in the chapters, as things progress. Also, cover art:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

What You Cast Out: A Tale From Little Egypt (Novel Masterpost)

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