Picks and Shovels by Cory Doctorow
CBC Books | Posted: February 12, 2025 9:16 PM | Last Updated: March 7
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, fuelled 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. (From Tor)
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, fuelled 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. (From Tor)
Cory Doctorow is a Toronto-born author, activist and journalist living in Los Angeles. His work, spanning non-fiction, fiction, and adult, YA and childhood audiences, has seen him inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame and earned him the Sir Arthur Clarke Imagination in Service to Society Award for lifetime achievement. His book Radicalized was a 2020 Canada Reads contender, defended by Akil Augustine.