The subtitle is “A Silicon Valley Novel,” but I think of it as more of a dot-com novel. I know there were zero-dollar start-up companies staffed with engineers dreaming up all kinds of hardware and software miracles in Silicon Valley for 40 years before Netscape planted the seed that sprouted into dot-com mania, and the subsequent “dot-bomb” fallout… but it still feels like a dot-com story, maybe because it was published in 1997, a time when Silicon Valley was the cradle of the World Wide Web.
Po Bronson went on, after this book, to become a sort of biographer of real dot-com people, in The Nudist on the Late Shift. This is an interesting transition, to first write compelling fiction about a particular time and place and people, and then write nonfiction about the same time and place and people, and make it just as compelling.
The characters in The First $20 Million are imaginative, smart, and devious. Bronson comes up with some wild plot twists as he chronicles the practical jokes, the scheming, and the revenge among the players. It’s incredibly satisfying to read the conclusion to something, near the end of the book, that was set up in the first chapter. Bronson resists the temptation to drop any hints along the way, so the payoff is as sweet for the reader as it might have been for the characters in the story.
Unlike most fiction writers, Bronson gets the technical details right. He succeeds in spite of the challenge provided by his own setting: he follows four engineers on a quest to build a $300 computer. He describes the invention of a virtual machine — in Bronson’s terms, a software “hypnotizer;” think Java or even Virtual PC. Despite these additional opportunities to fail, Bronson’s prose remains clear and believable. One could imagine this story, with all its petty jealousies and paybacks, actually happening.
I have enjoyed reading this book several times over the years. I recommend it to everyone in the industry, or, really, anyone who enjoys character-driven fiction. If you have a technical background you’ll like it even more.
Patronize these links, man:
posted to area: Fiction
updated: 2004-05-24 12:12:04
