{"id":3273,"date":"2026-09-25T16:53:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-25T15:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/?p=3273"},"modified":"2026-09-25T17:13:53","modified_gmt":"2026-09-25T16:13:53","slug":"nuns-on-the-run","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/?p=3273","title":{"rendered":"Nuns on the Run"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/a>
Source: Nuns on the Run (1990) https:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0100280\/<\/a><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

This review originally appeared in the September issue of Brum Group News, the newsletter of the Birmingham Science Fiction Group<\/a> and is reproduced here (lightly edited) by kind permission<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am a big Cory Doctorow fan and have read over half of both his novels and short story collections, in addition to his non-fiction, but would be the first to admit that nerdy teenagers, very keen on computers, distant from their parents and pitched against the authorities, while surrounded by other cooler activists (usually female and pined after by said nerdy teenagers) are very preponderant amongst his protagonists, from Pirate Cinema<\/em>, to the Little Brother<\/em> trilogy, to Walkaway<\/em> and The Lost Cause<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So when a new series of novels started about a 67-year-old forensic accountant called Martin Hench, I was immediately extremely interested. The first, Red Team Blues<\/em>, came out in 2024 and was a finalist for the Locus Award for best SF novel. This introduced Hench as looking to retire but agreeing to do one last big job for a friend before he does, which obviously turns out to be considerably more difficult and dangerous than it first appeared, even for someone like Marty who is financially secure, and who lives out of a motor home and moves area very regularly. The main idea in the book is that it is much easier to be on the Red Team, ie the one trying to break through the electronic and cyber defences of an organisation, as you only have to succeed once. The Blue Team defending against your attacks have a much tougher time, as they have to succeed every time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From Red Team Blues<\/em>, we follow Hench into The Bezzle<\/em>, a disturbing novel revolving around the corruption and financial exploitation built in to the US prison system, after a friend of his ends up inside on trumped up charges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The third novel in the series, Picks and Shovels<\/a><\/em>, came out last year, around the same time as Enshittification<\/em>, and received far less publicity, which is perhaps not entirely surprising but still a shame. This is in many ways a companion piece in showing us that enshittification was always there as an option from the earliest computer days. In it Doctorow takes us back to the early years of the personal computer, and a 20-year-old Marty, big Dead Kennedys<\/em> fan and accountant, first working out how to make spreadsheets on Visicalc<\/em>. Which led him into process engineering, then trying to leave process engineering, then getting hit by a noncompete clause in his contract that means they can’t work on computers for anyone else for three years. Which leads to him moving to California where noncompete agreements are illegal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Doctorow then introduces us to Fidelity Computing, a company which operates like Apple: they make the computers, operating system and all the hardware and software to go with them, none of which work with any other computer. “The Reverend Sirs” who owned the company comprised a Catholic priest, a Mormon bishop and an Orthodox rabbi and they sold via word of mouth in their religious groups spread by their reps on commission. And then three of their female employees, only one of who is in fact a nun, left them and formed a company called Computing Freedom (CF) which sold all of the same peripherals at considerably lower prices. The two companies are now locked in legal disputes and Fidelity ask Marty to make sense of the boxes of floppy discs that CF have sent them under discovery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Marty find is that the floppy discs Fidelity makes for their computers are damaged in a very specific way, and that the first thing that a Fidelity computer does on start up is check that the disc is damaged. If it is not, it refuses to run it. He discovers that they make printers with a sprocket spacing that does not match anything found on the market other then their own computer paper. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marty goes to meet the three women behind CF: they are in the business of trying to jailbreak Fidelity’s customers from the high prices the Reverend Sirs charge. It involves kits to replace the sprocket mechanisms on their printers, dongles that undoes the swap of the first and last byte that a board on Fidelity printers produces. And so on. Marty quickly realises he is on the wrong side.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Things turn nasty when CF tries to compete Fidelity out of business. One of the women ends up in hospital and all of them are threatened with violence. CF don’t have the financial resources to put Fidelity out of business, but the rest of the market does. As Doctorow puts it:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Dead Kennedys broke up in 1986. That same year, Microsoft went public. It was the starter pistol for a new race whose finish line was the West Coast tech scene.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is also the creation myth of Martin Hench. He now understood who he is:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I never made the mistake of actually joining a company again. From then on, I stopped pretending I was a finance guy and stuck strictly to being the anti-finance guy – the guy you called when you wanted to catch the finance guy red-handed.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am looking forward to many more episodes to come!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This review originally appeared in the September issue of Brum Group News, the newsletter of the Birmingham Science Fiction Group and is reproduced here (lightly edited) by kind permission I am a big Cory Doctorow fan and have read over half of both his novels and short story collections, in addition to his non-fiction, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3273"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3273\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3308,"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3273\/revisions\/3308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}