Picks and Shovels

Third of the Martin Hench books, the first had Marty dealing with corporate corruption in the current day, and the second in the dot-com boom. This time the author takes us back to the eighties to see how Marty started out. And I really enjoyed this. Though the early days of Silicon Valley are a million miles from where I was at the time - a kid loving computers in the UK - the whole vibe of the book feels bang on. A lot of it is very nostalgic to me but nostalgia doesn’t always make a book good, and most of this isn’t particularly rose-tinted nostalgia, there’s plenty of bad stuff going on as well, for example the book didn’t shy away from addressing that this wasn’t a great time to be queer, but also, it was and things would get better.

There’s a lot of Marty’s back story for build-up before you get to the main story that’s about a computer company that’s founded by ex-employees of another computer company and of course there are a stack of scams and legal-loopholes for Marty to unearth and Doctorow to explain to us how they all work. I’m plenty familiar with a lot of the background here but there was also new stuff I hadn’t come across and the way some of the devices were employed in service of the plot was very entertaining. Some of the plotlines seemed kind of ludicrous but in an “I expect stranger things have happened in the real world” kind of way. There were some great strong female characters and I wish some of them had had more time on the page.

I’d definitely recommend this episode in the series to anyone with an interest in retro-computing, I’m not sure how great it would be if that’s not your thing, but it’s mine and I really enjoyed it. I’m not sure whether there are plans for more books in this series since Marty has explored three different eras and I think that might be the optimal amount for fictional Martys (though I’m no expert having only seen the first film in that series). I’d certainly be very happy to read more about this Marty’s adventures in the past, present or future though.