red team blues by Cory Doctorow

Red Team Blues by Cory Doctorow
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Cory Doctorow’s red team blues: a martin hench novel is “science fiction” foreseeing an honest and moral international cybersecurity sleuth (Hench) among brilliant, violent and/or unscrupulous high-tech financial power barons that feels “all too true.” I mean, look at Elon Musk and our “very stable” former President – are these the guys we really want clashing and finagling over our lives, planet, governments and billions of dollars’ worth of semi-invisible, somewhat intangible and very volatile digital resources?  Do we have a choice? (I hope so...)

Some of them/us are humane, some bumbling, some crazy and some downright rotten to the core; just like Doctorow’s awesome and eventually captivating cast of characters.

Doctorow starts out spamming us with tech talk in the first 20 pages, trying to drive out the non-nerds, I guess, but then really picks up with a more and more believable and endearing first person narrator (Hench) in a fast-moving, dialogue-rich, both serious and entertaining tale of hide-and-go-seek action and research “gone bad.” 

Very, very bad. But not nearly as “over the top” violent and objectifying as John Wick, The Wild Bunch et cetera. He carves out mostly sympathetic, genuine relationships of all kinds and multi-dimensional, intelligent female characters! Thank you! 

It’s all set in the Bay Area (of course) and environs, which makes it even more relevant; and deeply conscious of our phenomenally wealthy / horrifically poor divide full of spectacular elevations, suffering populations and plummeting overnight crashes. His character development, detail and voice consistency are quite good, without being bulky: well-balanced and compact in a way that other writers haven't all mastered. 

A good read!

Published 19 October, 2023 as “Boundaries of Fiction, Power, Humans,” Knox Book Beat in The Berkeley Times.


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