Author Talk: Cory Doctorow and Annalee Newitz in Conversation - Red Team Blues
Channel: San Francisco Public Library
Date: 03/05/2023

A book launch with New York Times bestseller Cory Doctorow, in conversation with Annalee Newitz, for Doctorow's new thriller, Red Team Blues about cryptocurrency shenanigans that will awaken you to how the world really works.

About Red Team Blues:
Martin Hench is 67 years old, single and successful in a career stretching back to the beginnings of Silicon Valley. He 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 the people who want to find it. He knows computer hardware and software alike, including the ins and outs of high-end databases and the kind 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 the beginning. 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.

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of many books, most recently Radicalized and Walkaway, science fiction for adults; Chokepoint Capitalism with co-author Rebecca Giblin, nonfiction about monopoly and creative labor markets; In Real Life, a graphic novel and the picture book Poesy the Monster Slayer. His novel Attack Surface is a standalone adult sequel to Little Brother, San Francisco Public Library's 2008 One City One Book selection. In 2020, Doctorow was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.

Annalee Newitz writes science fiction and nonfiction. They are the author of three novels: The Terraformers, The Future of Another Timeline, and Autonomous, which won the Lambda Literary Award. As a science journalist, they are the author of Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age and Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction, which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize in science. They are a writer for the New York Times and elsewhere, and have a monthly column in New Scientist. They are the co-host of the Hugo Award-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.