/ / News, Red Team Blues

Burbank: Apr 26, 6PM, Dark Delicacies

San Francisco: Apr 30, 2PM, San Francisco Public Library (with Annalee Newitz)

PDX/Cedar Hills: May 2, 7PM, Powell’s (with Andy Baio)

Mountain View: May 5, 7PM, Books, Inc (with Mitch Kapor)

Berkeley: May 6/7, Bay Area Book Fair (with Glynn Washington and Wendy Liu)

Vancouver: May 10, 9:50AM, Open Source Summit

Vancouver: May 10, 6:30PM, Heritage Hall (with Sean Cranbury)

Calgary, May 11, 7PM, Wordfest (with Peter Hemminger)

Gaithersburg, May 20, 3:15PM, Gaithersburg Book Festival

DC, May 22, Public Knowledge Emerging Tech Conference (keynote)

Toronto: May 23, 8PM, WEPFest (with with The Rheostatics’ Dave Bidini, Citizen Lab’s Ron Deibert, and the whistleblower Nancy Olivieri)

Hay-on-Wye: May 27/28, HowTheLightGetsIn

Oxford: May 29, 7PM, Blackwell’s (with Tim Harford)

Nottingham: May 30, 6:30PM, Waterstones (with Christian Reilly)

Manchester: May 31, 6:30PM, Waterstones (with Ian Forrester)

London: Jun 1, 2PM, UCL Peter Kirstein Lecture

Edinburgh: Jun 3, Cymera Festival

London: Jun 5, 7:15PM, British Library (with Baroness Martha Lane Fox)

Berlin: Jun 7, Re:publica keynote (with Rebecca Giblin)

/ / Articles, News, Podcast, Red Team Blues

A selfie taken at Skyboat Media, at director Gabrielle de Cuir's workstation, showing Cory Doctorow and Wil Wheaton; Wheaton is telepresent via a tablet.

This week on my podcast, I bring you some clips of Wil Wheaton’s recording sessions for the audiobook of Red Team Blues, my next novel, an anti-finance finance thriller starring the 67 year old forensic accountant Martin Hench, who specializes in high-tech scams.

I’m currently kickstarting this audiobook, pre-selling audiobooks, ebooks and hardcovers. I have to self-produce my own audiobooks, because Audible – the monopolist audiobook division of Amazon – refuses to carry DRM-free titles like mine.

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/ / Articles, News, Podcast, Red Team Blues

The cover for the Tor Books edition of Red Team Blues, which features a male figure sprinting out of a stylized keyhole.

This week on my podcast, I read a selection from my next novel, Red Team Blues, an anti-finance finance thriller about Marty Hench, a 67 year old hard-charging forensic accountant who’s seen every finance scam that Silicon Valley has come up with over the previous 40 years. Marty’s ready to retire, but an old friend pulls him in for one last job, an offer he can’t refuse: recovering the stolen keys to a hidden backdoor in a cryptocurrency system that are worth more than a billion dollars. Recovering the keys turns out to be the easy part: the hard part is surviving the three-way war that is ignited in their wake, between Azerbaijani money-launderers, Mexican narcos, and crooked three-letter agencies.

I’m currently kickstarting a real audiobook of this one, and I’m going into the studio with Wil Wheaton on Monday. If you enjoy my stories, articles and podcasts and want to know how to show your gratitude, please consider backing this kickstarter by pre-ordering an audiobook, ebook, and/or hardcover.


One evening, I got a wild hair and drove all night from San Diego to Menlo Park. Why Menlo Park? It had both a triple-­Michelin-­star place and a dear old friend both within spitting distance of the Walmart parking lot, where I could park the Unsalted Hash, leaving me free to drink as much as I cared to and still be able to
walk home and crawl into bed.


I’d done a job that turned out better than I’d expected—­well enough that I was set for the year if I lived carefully. I didn’t want to live carefully. The age for that was long past. I wanted to live it up. There’d be more work. I wanted to celebrate.

Truth be told, I also didn’t want to contemplate the possibility that, at the age of sixty-­seven, the new work might stop coming in. Silicon Valley hates old people, but that was okay, because I hated Silicon Valley. Professionally, that is.

Getting close to Bakersfield, I pulled the Unsalted Hash into a rest stop to stretch my legs and check my phone. After a putter around the picnic tables and vending machine, I walked the perimeter of my foolish and ungainly and luxurious tour bus, checking the tires and making sure the cargo compartments were dogged and locked. I climbed back in, checked my sludge levels and decided they were low enough that I could use my own toilet, then, finally, having forced myself to wait, sat on one of the buttery leather chairs and checked my messages.

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/ / Novels

A few years later, California’s economy collapses, but Marcus’s hacktivist past lands him a job as webmaster for a crusading politician who promises reform. Soon his former nemesis Masha emerges from the political underground to gift him with a thumbdrive containing a Wikileaks-style cable-dump of hard evidence of corporate and governmental perfidy.

It’s incendiary stuff—and if Masha goes missing, Marcus is supposed to release it to the world. Then Marcus sees Masha being kidnapped by the same government agents who detained and tortured Marcus years earlier.

/ / Novels

Trent McCauley is sixteen, brilliant, and obsessed with one thing: making movies on his computer by reassembling footage from popular films he downloads from the net.

In the dystopian near-future Britain where Trent is growing up, this is more illegal than ever; the punishment for being caught three times is that your entire household’s access to the internet is cut off for a year, with no appeal.

/ / Novels

Earth has a population of roughly a billion hominids. For the most part, they are happy with their lot, living in a preserve at the bottom of a gravity well. Those who are unhappy have emigrated, joining one or another of the swarming densethinker clades that fog the inner solar system with a dust of molecular machinery so thick that it obscures the sun.

The splintery metaconsciousness of the solar-system has largely sworn off its pre-post-human cousins dirtside, but its minds sometimes wander…and when that happens, it casually spams Earth’s networks with plans for cataclysmically disruptive technologies that emulsify whole industries, cultures, and spiritual systems. A sane species would ignore these get-evolved-quick schemes, but there’s always someone who’ll take a bite from the forbidden apple.

/ / Novels

For the Win, published in May 2010 by Tor (US) and HarperVoyager (UK) is my second young adult novel: a game about workers who toil in virtual sweatshops, “gold farming” wealth in video games for sale to rich western players. They form a trade union called the Industrial Workers of the World Wide Web, using the games to organize under their bosses’ noses. It’s an action-adventure story about games, economics and labor politics.

/ / Novels

Makers, published in October 2009 by Tor (US) and HarperVoyager (UK) is about people who hack hardware, business-models, and living arrangements to discover ways of staying alive and happy even when the economy is falling down the toilet. Weirdly, I wrote it years before the current econopocalypse, as a parable about the amazing blossoming of creativity and energy that I saw in Silicon Valley after the dotcom crash, after all the money dried up.

/ / Novels

Little Brother is my first young adult novel, a story about hacker kids in San Francisco who use technology to reclaim democracy from the Department of Homeland Security after a terrorist attack and the concomitant crackdown. It was published by Tor Books on April 29, 2008.