Silicon Follies
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
Welcome to Silicon Valley -- where fortunes are fast, dating's dysfunctional, and computer geeks rule. Meet Paul Armstrong, a late-twenties computer "consultant" who sits in his cubicle at TeraMemory wondering where it all went horribly wrong.
"Well, I wasn't always a nerd. I started out as a liberal-arts type in college -- though I aggressively concealed this on my resume. Hiring managers don't like it. Non-technical outside interests. Bad sign."
Watch him order a latte from the ofÞce coffee cart and poke at his Chinese lunch special while his longtime pal Steve Hall, hacker extraordinaire, accuses him of selling out to The Man.
"When the money dries up, this place will be just like anywhere else. It was never the place, anyway -- that's what The Man will never understand."
Meet The Man himself: Barry Dominic, the þamboyant, lecherous, millionaire founder of TeraMemory. He insists they're poised to revolutionize networking with a cutting-edge technology, appropriately called WHIP.
"Nobody f***s with Barry Dominic."
That's where Liz Toulouse comes in. A Stanford English Lit grad and TeraMemory marketing associate, she accidentally cc's the entire company a snide e-mail about The Man's bad grammar on her very Þrst day....
"If only I'd had any idea. I'd have stayed in school. I'd have changed majors. Gotten a master's. Anything."
Welcome to Silicon Follies, a hilarious dot.comedy of ambition and disillusionment in a land of luck, loss, and sometimes even love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his satire of Silicon Valley and its technological trappings, Scoville portrays a world as rich with youth and enthusiasm as it is with hypocrisy and loneliness. Originally published as a series of short works on Salon.com, this "dot.comedy" is the story of TeraMemory, a fictitious tech behemoth, and its attempt to revolutionize the Internet through the launch of its new product, appropriately named WHIP (or Wireless, High-density Internet Protocol). As the story unfolds, the digital age is viewed through the eyes of Barry, the arrogant TeraMemory CEO; Liz, Stanford English major turned marketing assistant; Steve, a single-minded antiestablishment hacker; and Steve's best friend, Paul, possibly the last humble engineer in the entirety of Silicon Valley. As WHIP's launch date approaches, with the requisite hype and stock price gyrations, Barry is nearly one-upped by Steve and his hacker community (collectively known as Free Bits). Meanwhile, Paul and Liz discover that e-mail communications and digital meetings are no substitute for love and human interaction. The novel's plot is one-dimensional and only real techies will appreciate all the code and jargon, but Scoville is a witty, savvy guide to the infotech world, la Douglas Coupland in Microserfs.
