Picks & Shovels (Red Team book 3) by Cory Doctorow (book review).
‘Picks & Shovels’ by Cory Doctorow is the third ‘Red Team’ novel, although if you were to read the series in the order of the protagonist’s timeline, this should be the first. This is how Martin Hench became a forensic accountant, effectively a very good detective of monetary fraud scams using computers and spreadsheets as his main tools. That does not mean he can avoid the odd physical fight when the baddies come after him!
A far longer than normal prologue goes into how Marty Hench ended up going to MIT to study electrical engineering. There he discovered and fell in love with computing, starting with a basic Altair 8800 computer kit and moving on whenever bigger and better ones became accessible. The inevitable happened. He flunked his first-year exams and had to drop out of MIT.
Accounting as a career choice beckoned because he could take a two-year associate degree course with access to an Apple ][+, invented in 1977, to learn on. He chose this career path because he was known for being a plodding, methodical, and careful individual. Debugging codes came naturally to him. So did debugging accounts. “Spreadsheets are a form of science fiction,” he said. “They all asked some variation of, What if? If this goes on, or if only—and that’s exactly what a spreadsheet was for.”
Along the way, he picked up like-minded, geek-inclined friends and associates. When there was something he did not understand, he knew who to ask for help. One particular friend was Arty Hellman, who introduced me to the Newberry Street Irregulars computer talk shop. At this point I rolled my eyes, thinking of some of the Sherlock Holmes stories with his Baker Street Irregulars!
Marty had a unique set of skills, computing and accounting, which led to him being hired to investigate a set of disgruntled ex-employees of Fidelity Computing, who started up a company. The Reverend Sirs, an Orthodox rabbi, a Catholic priest, and a Mormon bishop, led Fidelity Computing. Only it turned out they were running a kind of Ponzi scheme within their faiths that, by use of subtle coding, locked the faithful into their computing system and sales. The startup company was selling tools that allowed the faithful to link to computers and software outside Fidelity Computing’s systems. Of course, Marty had to change sides.
What followed was mayhem, chaos, and capers of a unique and, at times, hilarious kind. Along the way, he discovers his strengths and weaknesses, from which he builds himself into what he calls a forensic accountant. This is Marty Hench’s coming-of-age novel.
If you want nostalgia for the bygone era of early development of home computers, this novel is a wonderful place to start.
There were a couple of nitpicks that got to me. For instance, Picks & Shovels has Marty say, ‘I didn’t hear the word “cyberspace” until well into the next decade, but … this is the place I went when I was working on that computer.’ This statement is not entirely accurate. There is a mental state that computer geeks achieve when they are deep into serious computing. It’s weird and locks you out of the real world. This is where geeks go— not the cyberspace of computers. Yes, I and others I’ve talked to have been there, and it’s hard to describe. There isn’t, as far as I know, a word for it.
The reader is seeing this story through Marty’s point of view. As a result, Marty promotes falsehoods that the reader may interpret as genuine. For example, Marty’s point of view states: ‘Mathematics, like chess, is a self-contained system—a world of abstractions that can be manipulated without ever making reference to the real world.’ This is true of chess, but not of math. What is true is that computers make the math a self-contained system. Maths, in its wider sense, is an open system.
To be fair to Doctorow, he does have Marty say much later on that ‘I never thought of that, the math for that’, clearly showing he is not a mathematics guru.
Doctorow must have had some real fun writing this novel. He employed ‘phlogiston,’ a substance believed by 18th-century chemists to be present in all combustible bodies and released during combustion. Who the heck, but those of us who like obscure words would know that?
A further example that science fiction buffs will like is, ‘Spreadsheets are a form of science fiction. Our favourite novels often posed questions like “What if?” or “If only,” which is precisely the purpose of spreadsheets.
There are lovely quotes to be had in ‘Picks & Shovels.’. A couple of examples are ‘I’m very good at minding my own business…even when I’m paid to mind someone else’s’ and ‘Geography begets strategy, strategy begets sociology and industry.’
As can be seen from all the above quotes and summary, ‘Picks & Shovels’ will appeal to many things readers are looking for, from serious thoughts to sheer comedy, from finding out obscure facts to agreeing with succinct summarisations, and from nostalgia to helpful advice about living in today’s world. Above all, ‘Picks & Shovels’ entertains.
Rosie Oliver
December 2024
(pub: Head of Zeus/Ad Astra, 2025. 389 page hardback. Price: £20.00 (UK). ISBN: 978-1-80454-783-0).
check out website: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/discover/head-of-zeus/