Silicon Follies
In 1998 I had this idea to write a novel about life in the Silicon Valley in the style of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City. There was, I thought, a lot of cultural action there; lifestyles, careers, money and class were mutating like crazy, just as they'd done in San Francisco in the 1970s. So, why not chronicle the lives of dot.commers in the same way?: bite-sized, serial portions, twice weekly, in the funny papers – or in this case, on the Web. I pitched the idea to Salon.com, the official company publication of the San Francisco New Media crowd and Silicon Valley, Inc.
I decided to call it . It was a lot of fun to write. I got a lot of enthusiastic emails while it was running – I was only one or two installments ahead of my audience while I was writing it – and their feedback really fueled the story. Yeah, it was fiction, but much of what I was writing about was actually happening at the time. I just gave it a storyteller's sheen, but it was very much based on my experience and my readers' experiences, too.
It did pretty well for a first effort. A bunch of people read it online, enough to get me a book agent and a New York book deal. It got some really good reviews. It won some editor's awards. It briefly made a couple of regional bestseller lists in geek enclaves around the country. I had a fun little book tour, with a half-dozen stops and some radio interviews. It was swell.
And since my literary agent turned out to be really shrewd, it got optioned as a TV property. In 2001, Ron Howard's Imagine Television actually made an hour-long comedy drama of the same name, with real acting talent like Hart Bochner, Judy Greer, Ethan Embry and Scott Bairstow. Betty Thomas (of Hill Street Blues fame) directed. Now it's floating around in pilot limbo. Maybe someday they'll air it. But I have a copy on DVD. Heh. It's the best party-favor ever.
There was a fair amount of media coverage. Newsweek launched Silicon Follies in the March 18, '99 Cyberscope section. TechWeek did a write-up of Silicon Follies. ZDNN covered it in a piece on Silicon Valley fiction, "Bonfire of the Techno-Vanities." A California law journal covered Silicon Follies. TechWeek did a blurb about the web site of Silicon Follies fictional dot-com, .
Silicon Follies was reviewed by Publisher's Weekly, The San Jose Mercury, Entertainment Weekly, Amazon.com and The Providence Journal, which also featured Follies in their Booknotes section.
Some publishing trivia: The cover art direction came partly from me; it was my idea to have a kind of tongue-in-cheek romance novel feel. The artist did a great job with the concept, I think. And it was interesting to watch him work up the concept. On the way, he rendered a bunch of prototypes. This one was interesting, I think. I actually sort of regret that it didn't go more in this direction.
For those of you interested in the TV pilot, here are some screen caps – video stills – from the Ron Howard production. I've included a little insider commentary as well.
And here's a gratuitous picture of my favorite character, Psychrist.