CNET kicked off its brand new fiction series this month with my short story, The Last Taco Truck in Silicon Valley. The CNET fiction series is edited and curated by Janis Cooke Newman (author most recently of A Master Plan for Rescue). CNET’s fiction series features stories about tech, beautifully illustrated and animated (Roman Murdov illustrated The Last Taco Truck, with animations by Justin Herman). At the bottom of the story, you’ll find a video: CNET News Editor-in-Chief Connie Guglielmo and I visited a taco truck near the CNET headquarters, where we talked about Silicon Valley culture, women in tech, and, of course, how to order a taco.
About the story, The Last Taco Truck in Silicon Valley:
An Evangelista—i.e. the Chief Evangelist for a heritage hoodie startup in Silicon Valley—is held hostage in a taco truck. Meanwhile, a guy from Portland with too many debts, is posing as El Taco Hombre. Add the mantra of all marketing—There’s social proof, there’s authority, and there’s scarcity, and the greatest of these is scarcity—to spice things up. Mix it all together, and what you have is a story that sends up everything we in the tech and hipster haven of the Bay Area hold near and dear. Plus the unforgettable hashtag #FrancoNeedsATaco
Technically Literate and “The Last Taco Truck in Silicon Valley” was covered in The New York Times, Publishing Perspectives, the San Francisco Chronicle, Tech News Daily, Chowhound, and elsewhere. As a writer, it’s exciting to see such a respected icon of the tech publishing world reaching out to find and promote literature. To me, it feels like a natural partnership. Tech is so deeply a part of the way we write, and even more a part of the way we reach readers, and I believe CNET, which gets 30 million visitors per month, will bring short fiction to an entirely new readership.
In her foreword to Technically Literate, Newman talks about how the series came to be, and the intersection between art and tech–both in our lives and in the microcosm of San Francisco.
When CNET first approached me with the idea that would become Technically Literate, it seemed like a collision of worlds, until I considered the geography of my day. The San Francisco Bay Area is home to equally vibrant, equally innovative, technology and literary communities. And in the way they share the topography of the city, they also share a world of common touch points.
What’s literature got to do with tech? Guglielmo told Alexandra Alter of The New York Times
“We hope it will help us expand our brand,” Connie Guglielmo, CNET News’s editor in chief, said of the series. “If you don’t experiment, you stay in place, and that’s kind of counter to the culture here.”
The next three stories for the series will be by Anthony Mara, Cristina Garcia, and Nayomi Numaweera.