Picks and Shovels by Cory Doctorow

Published by ‎ Tor Books on February 18, 2025

Marty Hench, a character I love from Cory Doctorow’s first two novels in this series, tells his coming-of-age story in Picks and Shovels. It is both the story of a young man finding his purpose and the story of a political awakening. And it’s a story of people he met along the way who came to terms with their identities and beliefs — and those who never overcame their innate greed. While the first two books in the series are mysteries solved by a forensic accountant, this one explains how Hench solved the mystery of himself.

Marty’s father was an engineer. He sent Marty to MIT to earn an engineering degree, but Marty was unenthusiastic about his studies. He proved to be more enthused about the emergence of personal computers. He taught himself to program and fell in with a group of students who loved computers as much as he did. Marty was dumpster diving for computer paper (the kind that comes with perforated edges and holes that line up with the printer’s sprockets) when he met Arthur Hellman, an even more committed computer geek who was dumpster diving for anything he could find.

Marty and Art become roommates. To appease his father after dropping out of MIT, Marty gets an associate’s degree in accounting. Marty and Art eventually move to San Francisco, where Silicon Valley is becoming the hotspot for tech innovation, in large part because California law does not allow noncompete agreements to stifle competition. A good many people in the business world extoll the virtues of competition until they have to deal with it.

Marty starts doing freelance accounting work. He contracts with a company called Fidelity Computing, a gig that lets him merge his interest in computers with his knowledge of spreadsheets. Fidelity was founded by a rabbi, a priest, and a Mormon bishop (no, they don’t walk into a bar together). Fidelity’s scam is to sell computer systems to religious schools and businesses. The systems have been designed so that only products (such as floppy disks and printers) purchased from Fidelity are compatible. They’re also designed to fail (the printers jam frequently), forcing customers to turn to Fidelity for expensive repairs.

Three women who worked for Fidelity in tech positions left to start their own company. They reverse engineered Fidelity products to create floppy disks and printers that will work with Fidelity systems. Fidelity is out to get the three women. The company hires Marty to help them. When the women persuade Marty that the company is a scam, Marty breaks his contract with Fidelity and makes a new one with the women.

The story follows the conflicts between the women and Fidelity. Some of the conflicts are violent, as the gangsters who financed Fidelity’s startup don’t take kindly to the lost profits that the women are causing. Marty isn’t much of a fighter, but a badass woman named Pat isn’t afraid to go toe-to-toe with thugs. She also teaches Marty to be a capable lover. The conflicts keep the story moving and provide a satisfying amount of action.

Marty learns other lessons in his young life. On his way to San Francisco, he meets and shags a woman named Lucille who teaches him how to get outside of his own head and listen — truly listen, even to the silences between words — when he has a conversation. Art comes out as a gay man and teaches Marty the pain of not being allowed to live the life that defines you. One of the three women who compete against Fidelity is a lesbian who teaches him a similar lesson when her religious family disowns her. She’s one of several characters who teach him about the hypocrisy practiced by certain religious folk. A few women teach him that fundamental feminist values — the importance of treating women as the equals of men — are really human values. People with money teach him that people who lust for money often place their acquisition of wealth above moral action.

The lessons are valuable, although they are repeated so frequently that the novel sometimes feels like Doctorow is hammering home the things he wants his readers to learn. Readers who think it’s bad to be “woke” — and a disappointing number of science fiction fans feel that way, despite sf’s reputation for encouraging free thinking — might dislike the novel’s emphasis on the value of tolerance, compassion, and decency. Open-minded readers, on the other hand, should appreciate it.

The plot is interesting. Doctorow avoids an artificially happy ending. He makes it easy to sympathize with the women who give the story its heart. The novel’s atmosphere, rooted in San Francisco during the earliest days of the tech boom, will probably evoke nostalgia in readers who are old enough to remember when early versions of personal computers were just arriving on the market. I’m not as high on Picks and Shovels as I was on the first two novels — the preachiness got to me after a bit, even if Doctorow was preaching to the choir — but I nevertheless enjoyed it.

RECOMMENDED