Picks and Shovels (2025) is the third Martin Hench novel (following red-team-blues and the-bezzle) and continues the series' retrospective chronology by moving further back in time — to the early personal computing era of the 1980s. The title invokes the Gold Rush aphorism: in a gold rush, the people who get reliably rich are those who sell picks and shovels to miners rather than the miners themselves. Applied to Silicon Valley, the metaphor points to the infrastructure and tooling layer that extraction schemes require: the unglamorous middle position that turns out to be more consistently profitable than the speculative activity it enables.
The Early Personal Computing Setting
Setting the third Hench novel in the early 1980s allows Doctorow to examine the origins of the conditions he analyzes in the contemporary Silicon Valley of red-team-blues and the 2008-era setting of the-bezzle. The personal computing revolution — Apple II, early IBM PC compatibles, the software industry's emergence — is the moment at which the structures Doctorow analyzes throughout the series were first established: proprietary hardware ecosystems, software licensing rather than software sale, the first DRM experiments, the first attempts to use technical and legal mechanisms to suppress competitive-compatibility.
A younger Martin Hench working in this environment encounters financial fraud that is structurally primitive compared to later cases but recognizable in its essentials: exploitation of captive customers, suppression of interoperability, concentration of power in chokepoints. The historical distance makes the mechanisms legible by stripping away the sophistication that obscures them in contemporary cases.
The Picks and Shovels Metaphor
The metaphor structures the novel's argument about where power actually resides in technology ecosystems. The computing industry of the 1980s generated enormous speculative excitement about applications and hardware platforms, but the durable extraction occurred at the infrastructure layer: the operating system vendors, the component suppliers, the distribution channels. This is the structural insight that the Hench series develops across its three installments: financial fraud in technology industries concentrates at bottlenecks, whether those are contemporary platforms, prison communications contractors, or 1980s software distribution channels.
The metaphor also speaks to Doctorow's own position. His pluralistic-blog and public intellectual work are themselves a form of picks-and-shovels provision: building the analytical tools (the enshittification framework, adversarial-interoperability, chokepoint-capitalism) that others use to understand and contest platform power, rather than directly operating in the political or market arena the tools are used to navigate.
Series Completion and Retrospective Structure
Picks and Shovels completes the announced three-novel arc of the Hench series, with each novel covering a different decade of Silicon Valley history: the 1980s personal computing era, the 2008 financial crisis period, and the 2020s cryptocurrency moment. Together, the three novels constitute a non-chronological intellectual history of how the structures Doctorow analyzes in his nonfiction were built, how they operated across different technological contexts, and how the frauds they enabled changed in scale and sophistication while remaining structurally similar.
Read in internal chronology (picks-and-shovels → the-bezzle → red-team-blues), the series traces the development of platform power from its origins in the proprietary software era through the financialization of the 2000s to the speculative mania of cryptocurrency. Read in publication order, it moves from the present back to the origins, using the known outcome to illuminate the earlier cases.
Relationship to Nonfiction Work
Picks and Shovels appears the same year as the-internet-con and alongside ongoing pluralistic-blog analysis of platform regulation. The novels and nonfiction are increasingly complementary: the fiction provides concrete, human-scale illustrations of the economic structures the nonfiction analyzes, while the nonfiction provides the analytical vocabulary that gives the fiction its precision. The Hench series in particular reads as a novelization of the arguments in chokepoint-capitalism-book — different narrative vehicles for the same underlying analysis of how extraction works.