Red Team Blues

Maybe @pluralistic@mamot.fr lost a bet? Why else write a novel about an 'ageing accountant'? If so, Cory Doctorow got the last laugh, because Red Team Blues is a gripping page-turner!

Our hero, Marty, is only technically an accountant (forensic accountant “when I wanted to talk about the job”), this is really a detective novel, complete with organised crime in the shadows, grisly murders, covert government agents, thugs with clubs lying in wait in lobbies, and “old fashioned shoe-leather work”.

These crime-novel boxes are ticked, as only Doctorow can, with the most germane near-future-but-could-be-today technological and social elements possible. Cryptocurrency is central to the plot (and Marty's strong opinions about crypto groaned out in the very first chapter), as are ‘secure enclaves’, a ubiquitous computing technology that's as obscure as it is crucial.

Doctorow brings this obscurity into the light with trademark clarity, but the tech, the drilling through processors, the tor network connections, etc. aren't really the point. This is a story about a man navigating a maelstrom of vast powers, using his smarts and experience, and not a little help from his friends (and a few friendly strangers), to keep his head above the waves. It's also about the perils of moving from titular the read team - the attackers who only need to find a single chink in the defenders armour - to the blue team, who need to find and plug every one of those chinks.

Along the way we get a fascinating tour of a variety of anthropological micro-climates, from the Silicon Valley elite set, through their lawyers and accountants, down to the tented homeless, imperilled by dangers as mortal and merciless as, but much less seemingly glamorous than, those that threaten Marty himself. And also lots of enjoyably wry opinions about certain social media billionaires, Starbucks, and many near mythical narratives of rises and falls in the tech world.

This is firmly a novel in the Cory Doctorow canon, but also a departure in a couple of ways. Apart from being a new genre (previous novels have been more purely directly SF and YA ‘activism-fic’), unlike in previous stories, this protagonist is old. There are lots of gripes about aches and pains and the frequency of nocturnal urination, and also many many references that will tickle the atrophied synapses of older computer nerds like myself, from UUCP/Usenet through Lotus 1-2-3, to gripes about remembering “when crypto meant cryptography”.

I enjoyed this so much that, having recently finished the audio-book version narrated by the peerless Wil Wheaton, I've just started an immediate re-read in e-book format. Both, of course, are DRM-free!

I finished @pluralistic’s #RedTeamBlues this evening, and I would highly - highly - recommend it! It’s a short read, just a tad over 200 pages but it’s quite engrossing. I probably could have finished it last night, but I forced myself to sleep instead.

I really like Doctorow’s writing style, and I always learn some new words (and not just technological ones) when I read his books. One of my favorite hallmarks of his fiction is the use of what I would term “non-standard” protagonists - in this case a 67-year-old confirmed bachelor facing retirement. Definitely not someone I would have expected to be enmeshed with a cast of Very Ruthless People ™️ and crypto-bros. That alone makes the stories so much more relatable and entertaining to me and easier to identify with. And as always, the more technical elements of the plot are thoroughly well-researched and expertly woven together like an episode of #MrRobot, but explained in an accessible and easy-to-follow manner.

If you’re looking for a short(ish) techno-thriller to read with a page-turning plot, this book should be right up your alley. That ain’t no lie, cutie pie.