Doctorow, Cory

Martin Hench is sixty-seven years old, single, and successful in a career stretching back to the beginnings of Silicon Valley. He lives and 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 people who want to find it. He knows computer hardware and software alike, including the ins and outs of high-end databases and the kinds 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 all the beginnings. 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.

"Most days, Masha Maximow was sure she'd chosen the winning side. In her day job as a counterterrorism wizard for an transnational cybersecurity firm, she made the hacks that allowed repressive regimes to spy on dissidents, and manipulate their every move. The perks were fantastic, and the pay was obscene. Just for fun, and to piss off her masters, Masha sometimes used her mad skills to help those same troublemakers evade detection, if their cause was just. It was a dangerous game and a hell of a rush. But seriously self-destructive. And unsustainable. When her targets were strangers in faraway police states, it was easy to compartmentalize, to ignore the collateral damage of murder, rape, and torture. But when it hits close to home, and the hacks and exploits she's devised are directed at her friends and family--including boy wonder Marcus Yallow, her old crush and archrival, and his entourage of naive idealists--Masha realizes she has to choose. And whatever choice she makes, someone is going to get hurt"--OCLC.

"Once her parents are off to bed, Poesy excitedly awaits the monsters that creep into her room. With the knowledge she's gained from her trusty Monster Book and a few of her favorite toys, Poesy easily fends off a werewolf, a vampire, and much more."--Dust jacket.

When Marcus, once called M1k3y, receives a thumbdrive containing evidence of corporate and governmental treachery, his job, fame, family, and well-being, as well as his reform-minded employer's election campaign, are all endangered.

At any hour of the day or night, millions of people around the globe are engrossed in multiplayer online games, questing and battling to win virtual gold, jewels, and precious artifacts. Meanwhile, millions of "gold farmers", trapped by abusive contracts and physical threats, toil in electronic sweatshops harvesting virtual treasure that their employers sell to First World gamers for real money. Mala is a brilliant fifteen-year-old from rural India whose leadership skills in virtual combat have earned her the nickname "General Robotwalla". In Shenzhen, heart of China's industrial boom, Matthew defies his former bosses to build his own gold-farming crew. Leonard lives in Southern California and spends his nights fighting virtual battles alongside his buddies in Asia. All of these young people, and more, become entangled with the mysterious woman called Big Sister Nor, who builds them into a movement to challenge the status quo.

In a world divided by time zones, Art Berry, a member of the Eastern Standard Tribe, attempts to sabotage the Greenwich Mean Tribe in order to advance his people, and finds that he must decide between happiness and intelligence.

"[Amanda] loves Coarsegold Online, the massively-multiplayer role playing game that she spends most of her free time on. It's a place where she can be a leader, a hero. It's a placewhere she can meet people from all over the world, and make friends. Gaming is, for [Amanda], entirely a good thing. But things become a lot more complicated when [Amanda] befriends a gold farmer -- a poor Chinese kid whose avatar in the game illegally collects valuable objects and then sells them to players from developed countries with money to burn. This behavior is strictly against the rules in Coarsegold, but [Amanda] soon comes to realize that questions of right and wrongare a lot less straightforward when a real person's real livelihood is at stake"--Amazon.

Told through one of the most on-pulse genre voices of our generation, Radicalized is a timely collection consisting of four SF novellas connected by social, technological, and economic visions of today and what America could be in the near, near future. Unauthorized Bread is a tale of immigration, the toxicity of economic and technological stratification, and the young and downtrodden fighting against all odds to survive and prosper. In Model Minority, a Superman-like figure attempts to rectifiy the corruption of the police forces he long erroneously thought protected the defenseless, only to find his efforts adversely affecting their victims. Radicalized is a story of a darkweb-enforced violent uprising against insurance companies told from the perspective of a man desperate to secure funding for an experimental drug that could cure his wife's terminal cancer. The fourth story, Masque of the Red Death, harkens back to Doctorow's Walkaway, taking on issues of survivalism versus community.

When Marcus, once called M1k3y, receives a thumbdrive containing evidence of corporate and governmental treachery, his job, fame, family, and well-being, as well as his reform-minded employer's election campaign, are all endangered.

In a not-so-distant future, Hubert, Seth, and Natalie decide they've had enough of the confines of traditional life and choose to join a group of others known as walkaways--a growing group that lives without rules or jobs. And the walkaways have made the ultimate discovery--how to beat death. When war breaks out, the walkaways will have to discover if they have what it takes to survive in a world turn upside down.