A Review of Bruce McCabe’s Skinjob
It’s not every day you get to read a book written by one of your professional associates; it’s rare when the book happens to be a gripping yarn that has you wanting to tell everyone about it. Skinjob by Dr. Bruce McCabe is such a book.
I first met Bruce in 2006 when he came to interview me about my journey in taking Altium to the Cloud. At the time the things we were doing at Altium with what later became known as ‘Cloud Computing’ were pretty revolutionary, Some senior people at Salesforce told me that some of my emails about how I was using their system sent shock waves through the entire organisation and were instrumental in the development of Force.com. One person has even described me, rather embarrassingly I think, as the “Father of Force.com”. Anyway I digress. Bruce was researching some of the new technologies emerging for his consulting firm and had visited San Francisco to see several companies including Salesforce. He was interested in meeting people who were pushing the envelope and he was referred to me. Here he was in America looking for innovators globally, and was referred to someone that lived almost on his doorstep.
Since those days, Bruce and I have maintained a good professional relationship, and he mentioned to me over a coffee that he was writing a work of fiction – a thriller set in the immediate future. I didn’t think much at the time – I have seen lots of people talk about writing books, but there was a glint in his eye and he seemed serious enough. Fast forward almost a year, and I have just read his first novel – Skinjob. I was seriously impressed.
Once I got past the initial thoughts of “I know this author”, and settled into the book, I was absorbed. I had intended to finish on a plane next week, but I simply couldn’t put it down.
Without giving anything away, the book grabs you on multiple levels. Firstly there is the whodunnit mystery laced with enough threat to the main characters to consider it a thriller. At this level the book is entertaining with a complex plot that is managed and presented well, each dimension to the story doled out at a steady pace that balances beautifully the need to know what’s happening, with the desire for more. The astute reader is given enough hints to solve the mystery. Few readers will see the giveaways though, and I am certain no-one will predict the complete plot line.
Delve one level deeper and we are presented with a number of different predictions about how technology will impact on our world in the next five to ten years. McCabe’s has thoughtfully woven a number of technical advances into our daily lives, focusing on how they relate to things that are very close to all of us, examining intimate entertainment, policing and religion. I like the way in which he illustrates how data will be collected and analysed, and how computing power will be made available for the public ‘good’. In particular the iterative analysis of unstructured data is well thought through. I don’t want to say too much about this because it will give part of the story away. Suffice it to say the book makes a great case study on how Big Data and Cloud Computing will impact on our lives.
At a third level we are challenged with questions of morality and ethics about our behaviour and our rights to privacy. When people see new opportunities to make money or achieve other self interested goals, they will often overlook their moral compass and push on towards what can ultimately be a very slippery slope. McCabe does a great job of raising issues about how technology will impact on the moral decisions we make at the social and individual level, without being at all judgemental.
I think the author is destined for big things. And I am not the only one Bruce McCabe appears to have piqued the interest of the literary agent who made Harry Potter’s J.K. Rowling famous.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading Skinjob. I think others will too.
Links:
- Amazon – http://www.amazon.com/Skinjob-ebook/dp/B00CLCZEOM
- Skinjob The Book – http://skinjob-the-book.com
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