Cory Doctorow has an axe to grind.

This is, of course, nothing new. Cory’s anger at The Way Things Are, and his revolutionary zeal to bring the whole towering edifice of modern capitalism tumbling down is what makes him Cory, and what makes his books so good to read.

This is the third of his Marty Hench techno thrillers, but chronologically the earliest. Marty’s just out of accountancy school after his MIT degree was derailed because he discovered personal computers. He moves to Silicon Valley because of course he does and falls in with a punky crowd and does what he can to help three religious women liberate themselves and their customers from a deeply dodgy totalitarian company that’s locking decent churchgoing folk across the country into an abusive pyramid scheme of a computer system.

He fails, of course.

I could quibble about some of the computer history/dates, but that would be to miss the point. I can’t help noticing the occasional flub because that’s the kind of geek I am, but I’m learning not to let it spoil my enjoyment of something.

Oh yeah—and thank god for this—Cory’s got way better at writing sex scenes over the years. I still shudder at the memory of some of the stuff in Makers, but he finds a decent balance here. The age gap thing is still there though. It seems to be a thing for him. Not that I’m one to throw stones, being married to someone nineteen years older than me.

Wil Wheaton just gets better and better as an audio book narrator. He really gets inside Marty on this one. Frankly, I can’t imagine ever reading Cory on paper so long as Wil’s doing such a bang up job of narrating his books.