Brent Salish

 

About Brent

Brent Salish (that’s me) lives on an island north of Seattle.

I’ve led an interesting life that informs my books.

I worked for one of those big tech companies (for a long time).

I’ve taught and lectured around the world.

I’ve played in bands. I even directed plays in New York, once upon a time.

Nowadays, I write. (There’s a blog down the bottom of this page, too.)

Novels

Published: First Tuesday, a thriller about stealing the election by hacking just a few voting machines in the right precincts. Torn from the headlines and all that crap, except I wrote it in 2015. And it’s based on real stuff, both deep research and a bit of inside dope. By the way, nothing has changed. It’s still possible for a couple of hackers to pull off the basics of the plot. So go buy First Tuesday, read it, and worry. (And yes, there is a solution to vote-machine hacking. No, it’s not returning to paper ballots. Just… read the book.)

Preparing for Publication:

Short Stories Published

  • The 101st Monkey
    For two hours Sunday and via a chain of roughly thirty prompts, I asked an AI engine to write Shakespeare’s Antigone. It’s not Shakespeare, not even Beaumont and Fletcher… but it’s not awful, either. It’s better than Gammer Gurton’s Needle. The language is superficially right. It’s probably good enough that an untrained ear couldn’t tell… Read more: The 101st Monkey
  • Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time
    Out walking today, I had what I thought was a great moment for a book I’ve been working on for a while. And as is my wont, and as I preach to others, I opened OneNote on my phone and “wrote it down,” which these days often means turning on the speech-to-text facility and speaking… Read more: Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time
  • Uber-Rape
    No, there’s no umlaut over the U. This isn’t über-rape – I don’t want to know what that might be – but Uber- and Lyft-rape. An article in the NY Times suggests this is a significant problem. I mean, even one incident is a serious problem but here I mean significant as in “significant figures,”… Read more: Uber-Rape
  • The World in a Pocket
    I used to walk around with one of these: This was 1989 or so, and I was freelancing, and needed to be available to clients. Or so I told myself, and indeed I got calls on it from actual, paying clients. (I have the same number thirty-five years later. What I no longer have is… Read more: The World in a Pocket
  • What’s Writing Worth?
    I came across a survey that says Gen-n would pay considerably more for Broadway theater more when they understand how much work goes into it. Gen-n = anybody younger than me, which at this point is a whole lot of people. And I’ll ignore the fact that the survey was created by folks who have… Read more: What’s Writing Worth?