Technology and literature meet in new CNET fiction series
The Bay Area is an undisputed global hub of technology, and it has a widespread reputation as a cauldron of literary activity.
CNET, the San Francisco site that reviews tech products, has just launched Technically Literate, an online fiction series with, in its words, “a tech twist.”
The monthly series kicks off with a comical 5,700-word story by San Francisco novelist Michelle Richmond whose title speaks volumes about the changing nature of the Bay Area.
Graced by whimsical animated art, “The Last Taco Truck in Silicon Valley” is written from the point of a young woman who works at a hoodie startup in Palo Alto — and is being held captive in the back of an El Taco Hombre truck beneath an underpass in Cupertino.
While writing her most recent novel, “A Master Plan for Rescue,” Newman said she would encounter both those communities when biking from the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto and through the tech-saturated mid-Market area.
Pedaling into the Mission,” she wrote, “I’d draft in the tailwind of one sleekly enormous Google bus after another, then coast into the bike lane that passed the shop-windowed offices of McSweeney’s, Dave Eggers’ old-fashioned publisher of some of the most beautiful physical books on the planet.
[...] she said, many of the students who filled the seats of my novel-writing class at the Grotto — aspiring authors working on books about dystopian (and utopian) futures — spent their daytime hours on the campuses of Apple and Facebook.
The goal of Technically Literate is to present literary voices as innovative, and possibly disruptive, as our tech community.