Review: Red Team Blues by Cory Doctorow

Review: Red Team Blues by Cory DoctorowRed Team Blues (Martin Hench) by Cory Doctorow
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback ebook, audiobook
Genres: computer history, technothriller, thriller
Series: Martin Hench #1
Pages: 213
Published by Tor Books on April 25, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

New York Times bestseller Cory Doctorow's Red Team Blues is a grabby next-Tuesday thriller about cryptocurrency shenanigans that will awaken you to how the world really works.
Martin Hench is 67 years old, single, and successful in a career stretching back to the beginnings of Silicon Valley. He lives and roams California in a very comfortable fully-furnished touring bus, The Unsalted Hash, that he bought years ago from a fading rock star. He knows his way around good food and fine drink. He likes intelligent women, and they like him back often enough.
Martin is a―contain your excitement―self-employed forensic accountant, a veteran of the long guerilla war between people who want to hide money, and people who want to find it. He knows computer hardware and software alike, including the ins and outs of high-end databases and the kinds of spreadsheets that are designed to conceal rather than reveal. He’s as comfortable with social media as people a quarter his age, and he’s a world-level expert on the kind of international money-laundering and shell-company chicanery used by Fortune 500 companies, mid-divorce billionaires, and international drug gangs alike. He also knows the Valley like the back of his hand, all the secret histories of charismatic company founders and Sand Hill Road VCs. Because he was there at all the beginnings. He’s not famous, except to the people who matter. He’s made some pretty powerful people happy in his time, and he’s been paid pretty well. It’s been a good life.
Now he’s been roped into a job that’s more dangerous than anything he’s ever agreed to before―and it will take every ounce of his skill to get out alive.

My Review:

Martin Hench doesn’t really believe in that saying about the best defense being a good offense. Or rather, that it may work just fine in other fields, but it doesn’t work at all in his.

Martin would describe himself as a forensic accountant. And it’s true for certain definitions of all of the words. But what Martin really does is provide leverage – and yes, that’s “leverage” in the sense of the TV series. When someone has used dirty tricks – even if said tricks are technically legal – to hide someone else’s money, Martin has the skills with money, spreadsheets and investigative techniques to figure out where that money went and get it back for you.

For 25% of the value of what gets returned. Martin is very, very good at his freelance gig.

Which is why one of his oldest and dearest friends asks Martin to clean up a terrible costly mistake. Which leads Martin into the tangled, thorny weeds of cryptocurrencies, blockchains and governmental bureaucracies determined to look the other way as long as harm gets reduced to “acceptable” levels. Meaning that their allies, agents and patsies don’t get caught with their hands in the cybersecurity cookie jar.

Martin doesn’t believe in that old saw about defenses vs. offenses because people can’t switch their mindset between being the offense – red teamers like Martin – and being on the blue team defense. From Martin’s perspective, the blue team has to be perfect 24/7/365, while the red team just needs to find one, single mistake and exploit it for all it’s worth. Usually a lot with the kind of businesses that Martin generally deals with.

But helping his friend Danny, figuring out who stole the cryptokey generating laptop that Danny should never have put together in the first place, is exactly Martin’s kind of job. An investigation into the cracks to find something hidden. It should have been an easy $250 million – or thereabouts.

When his investigation leads to three dead 20somethings and a trail of double-crosses, it becomes the kind of trouble that has Martin on the run from both the feds who want to protect their assets and the very nasty people who want to blame Martin for the doublecross.

Forcing lifelong red teamer Martin straight onto the blue team, desperate for a way to save his own life, knowing that all it will take is one mistake for it all to be over just when it’s really getting to be interesting.

Escape Rating A+: I galloped through Red Team Blues in a single sitting. It wasn’t any of the things I was expecting it to be, but it was just so damn good – and utterly compelling from the first to the last.

To the point where I seriously hope this is the start of a series (I just found out that IT IS!), because I want more of both Martin Hench’s adventures and his wryly acerbic and somewhat self-deprecative point of view.

Red Team Blues has the feel of a caper thriller. Rather like Leverage, in fact, or any thriller where the hero is running as fast as they can to get away from people who are out to get them for something they aren’t even responsible for while desperately seeking a way out of a jam that they should not even be in.

Those kinds of stories are always fun when they are done right – and Red Team Blues is absolutely done right.

What this isn’t, and what one might expect considering the author’s body of work (and that it’s published by Tor Books) is science fiction. This isn’t set in even a relatively near future. It’s now. Crypto and blockchain may not currently be in exactly the same state that they are in this story, but otherwise, it’s just now.

Which makes the whole thing just that much more fascinating, as Martin’s techniques about investigating the case and finding where the money went by mining social media and poking into publicly available information are all entirely possible. So what makes this such a compelling read is how he goes about it.

Being set in the now provides opportunities for all kinds of social and political commentary, set in Martin’s sometimes sarcastic, often world-weary, voice. In the end, I followed him because I liked him and wanted to see where he went and how he got out of the pickle that is trying to swallow him – one way or another.

So Red Team Blues is a technothriller where you don’t have to understand all the ins and outs of the techno in order to get fully immersed in the thriller. I had a ball with this one, and I hope you will too.

Martin Hench will be back next February in The Bezzle. YAY!

Review: Radicalized by Cory Doctorow

Review: Radicalized by Cory DoctorowRadicalized by Cory Doctorow
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook
Genres: science fiction, short stories
Pages: 304
Published by Tor Books on March 19, 2019
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.org
Goodreads

From New York Times bestselling author Cory Doctorow, Radicalized is four urgent SF novellas of America's present and future within one book

Told through one of the most on-pulse genre voices of our generation, Radicalized is a timely novel comprised of four SF novellas connected by social, technological, and economic visions of today and what America could be in the near, near future. Unauthorized Bread is a tale of immigration, the toxicity of economic and technological stratification, and the young and downtrodden fighting against all odds to survive and prosper.

In Model Minority, a Superman-like figure attempts to rectifiy the corruption of the police forces he long erroneously thought protected the defenseless...only to find his efforts adversely affecting their victims.

Radicalized is a story of a darkweb-enforced violent uprising against insurance companies told from the perspective of a man desperate to secure funding for an experimental drug that could cure his wife's terminal cancer.

The fourth story, Masque of the Red Death, harkens back to Doctorow's Walkaway, taking on issues of survivalism versus community.

My Review:

This is my first Cory Doctorow, and probably won’t be my last. I’ve seen his columns in Locus, where he predicts the future -sorta/kinda – but hadn’t read any of his books. When this popped up on my radar, it seemed like the time.

The advantage of collections is that the individual entries are generally shorter. I could always bail if it didn’t work for me. That didn’t happen – although I occasionally wanted to stop out of sheer terror.

The disadvantage of collections is that they are sometimes uneven. That didn’t happen here either. What did happen is that the stories get darker as they go. The first one isn’t exactly light-hearted, but does end with a glimmer of hope.

And that glimmer is the last light we see. The stories, and the futures that they posit, get progressively darker from there.

What this is is a collection of very-near-future dystopias. This is a future so close that we can see it from here. It seems to be mining a similar vein as If This Goes On, the recent collection edited by Cat Rambo – although these stories feel closer. A bit too close.

Unauthorized Bread is the first story in Radicalized, and it’s the one that ends in that glimmer of hope I mentioned. Not that there isn’t plenty of darkness in the middle. This story is about a lot of things, particularly the way that immigrants and others at the lower end of the socioeconomic lottery are marginalized and demonized. That message seemed fairly overt.

The less overt message, but still very much present, is the message about just how different “choice” looks from the perspective of people who have the societal privilege of being able to always choose between good, better and best, as opposed to those who are squeezed into the position of being forced to choose between terrible, awful and least bad.

But the plot is also a slightly terrifying extension of digital rights management – frequently a horror story all by itself – from the world of music, video and software to the world of appliances. We’ve seen the start of this, when Keurig introduced DRM into its line of coffee makers, allowing them to restrict use of the device that you own to pods that they authorize. Think about that, scale it up, and then shake in fear – and caffeine withdrawal.

The Model Minority is where the chill really sets in in this collection. But in the end, it ultimately felt sad. The future is posits is frightening, and all too plausible – even, perhaps likely. But this is one where I really felt for the character, and he ends up in a very sad place by the end. And so should we all.

The protagonist of this piece is a superhero who is meant to be Superman without ever naming him such. (DC would probably object – with lawyers). But he’s an alien whose current mundane identity is named Clark and whose girlfriend is a reporter named Lois. And he has a rich friend named Bruce who also has a secret identity. You connect the dots.

The story here is what happens when our hero is confronted with blatant racism. He witnesses a bunch of white cops pull a black man out of his own car and beat him nearly to death while putting on a show for their body cameras. Superhero steps into save the man being beaten, and attempts to get him proper medical treatment and a fair trial.

And it all goes pear-shaped, as we all expect it to. The system is designed to protect the cops and demonize the innocent black motorist. The media gins up, the way it does, to make it seem like the arrest and brutal beating are all the fault of the victim – because he’s black. The more our hero tries to help the man, the more trouble he causes, not only for the original victim, but also for himself.

Because when he threatens that fragile white majority with evidence of their own racism, they turn on him rather than look inside themselves. As they do. As we do.

The title story in this collection is a story about the weaponization of what is now the quiet desperation of families who are about to lose or have lost a beloved family member. Not because their condition is untreatable, but because their health insurance company refuses to pay for treatment.

Combine that with a big “what if?” What if those quietly desperate people treated health insurance company executives and employees exactly the same way that abortion providers are “treated” by the so-called right-to-life movement – with doxxing and harassment and terrorist attacks. This is purely my interpretation of the story, but it feels right. And ends up making the story about whether the ends justify the means – a contemplation that is itself frightening.

Last but not least, The Masque of the Red Death. On the surface, it’s the story of a prepper’s dream that turns into a prepper’s nightmare. A whole bunch of smug one-percenters are so certain that they’ve figured out how to survive the coming collapse of civilization – and that they will emerge from their hidden sanctuary fat and happy and ready to be back on top of the new civilization that they are just certain will be exactly like the old one, and that they’ll rule it.

Discovering that they have planned for everything except for their own humanity – and their hubris – takes this tale from chills to downright horror in quick steps. This is one of those cases where the road to hell is paved with bad and thoughtless intentions that the thinkers believe are good – at least for them.

Thinking about it, however, it strikes me that this story also ends in a glimmer of hope – just not for its initial protagonists.

Escape Rating A+: Science fiction in general, and this author in this collection in particular, is at its thought-provoking best when it comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable. These stories do much more of the latter than the former, and are all intensely well-done in ways that will make the reader think – and squirm.