Category: Books

I closed out last year with two straight months of audiobook work on a number of projects I am so thrilled to be part of.

One of them was just announced yesterday, and as many of you correctly guessed, it’s When The Moon Hits Your Eye, by John Scalzi:

The moon has turned into cheese.

Now humanity has to deal with it.

This is a rollicking crime thriller, a science fiction novel about the dawn of the computing revolution. It’s an archaeological expedition to uncover the fossil record of the first emergence of enshittification, a phenomenon that was born with the PC and its evil twin, the Reagan Revolution.

The year is 1982, and PCs are weird. Marty Hench is not yet Silicon Valley’s most accomplished forensic accountant, scourge of tech-bro finance scams. In 1982, Hench is a newly arrived MIT washout with a community college degree and his first job: working for Fidelity Computing, a PC company run by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest, and an orthodox rabbi. Sounds like a joke, right? But the joke’s on their parishoners, who are recruited into a pyramid selling faith scam that exploits social bonds to sell junk PCs that are locked in – from the gimmicked floppy disks that only work with their high-priced drives to the gimmicked tractor-feed paper that only works with their high priced printers.

Marty’s job is simple: figure out how to destroy Computing Freedom, a rival company started by three women who broke away from Fidelity, whose products are designed to unlock every customer the Reverend Sirs of Fidelity have locked in. Marty isn’t that far into this assignment when he realizes that he’s on the wrong side, and he throws his lot in with Computing Freedom’s founders: a queer orthodox woman who’s been expelled from her family, a nun who’s thrown in with antiimperialists liberation theology radicals resisting America’s dirty wars, and a Mormon woman who’s left the church over its opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment.

But when Marty sends his resignation to the Reverend Sirs, he learns that Fidelity isn’t just a weird PC company running a faith scam: it’s a violent criminal enterprise. Suddenly the stakes get a lot higher.

Picks and Shovels is a rollicking tale of the AIDS crisis, queer hardware hackers, gifted punk rock Unix programmers, Reaganomics-fuelled pyramid schemes, and the moment where the seeds of tech’s enshittification were planted in Silicon Valley. 

Cory is one of my favorite authors and thinkers. He is going to be remembered and lauded in the future for his work in this moment, when we find fascist tech broligarchs threatening to take complete control of how we communicate and how freely information — true information — flows in America and the world. His novels are not just incredibly fun and satisfying to read (or listen to me read to you), they address very serious and meaningful issues of freedom, security, equality, and human rights.

Both of these books, as well as the not-yet-announced book, were tremendously satisfying to narrate. And something wonderful happened during the sessions. My favorite director, Gabrielle, gave me a simple note at the top of a page, a suggestion that I approach this part of the text with this particular thing in mind (I’m not going to get into more detail now. I may in the future.) and when I did that, something inside of me fundamentally changed.

Imagine a few elements all sitting next t each other on a workbench. You can put them together in various orders, and get generally the same thing with some subtle differences that most people won’t notice because they don’t know to look for them.

Now imagine you are handed a catalyst — a catalyst that was sitting on another table the whole time, that you just didn’t notice — and when you pour that catalyst across the elements, they suddenly reveal something new that you didn’t even know you could create from them. And that new thing looks an awful lot like the things you’ve built from them before, only this thing is clearly different than all those other things. It’s richer, more interesting, more complex, more satisfying … it’s just more.

That happened near the beginning of these sessions, and all the work I did after that was built using this new skill. People have told me for years that I’m a good audiobook narrator, and I have the awards and stuff to sort of back that up, but I’ve never really felt it. I’ve always been afraid that I’m barely sneaking past a guard, and at any moment someone will see me and shout out THAT GUY IS A BIG FAT PHONY!

I know that’s not true, but anyone else who knows the secret handshake absolutely understands what I’m talking about.

Well, for the rest of my life, every time I sit down to narrate a story, I will be using this updated skill set, and all the confidence and serenity that comes with it.

I’m very excited for y’all to hear these books. I hope you like them.