The Fool's Run - Comments

This is the first novel in the Kidd series. But due to an unusual publishing issue and some resultant confusion, this is not always clear. There is even printed information saying that it is the second book in the series.

Here's what happened:

In 1989, Henry Holt & Co. published The Fool's Run under the name John Camp. About a year later, it was released in paperback by Signet books (which was part of the Penguin group).

In 1991, Henry Holt & Co. published The Empress File, also under the Camp name. But when the paperback was printed, it was printed by Berkley Books, which is the company that traditionally publishes the Prey series.

Later, in 1995, Berkley decided to capitalize on the success of the Sandford name by reprinting the two Kidd novels – originally released under the Camp name, remember – with the Sandford name instead. The problem was that they didn't have the paperback rights to The Fool's Run. They only had the rights to The Empress File.

The solution was simple: just re-release The Empress File as the first novel, while negotiating for the paperback rights for The Fool's Run. And later, release that novel as the second in the series. It didn't matter that The Empress File referred to events in the earlier novel. The way they were doing it was expedient for business.

To make matters worse, when they did publish their version of The Fool's Run it contained text that was very misleading as to the order of the books. In some of the early printings of the Berkley version, the jacket text says:

And with his smash bestseller [1] The Empress File, Sandford gave suspense an ingenious twist and took readers into the minds of two irresistible con artists plotting the ultimate sting. Now, Kidd and LuEllen return in The Fool's Run.

Of course, Kidd and LuEllen aren't really returning, since it's their first appearance. But the typical reader won't know that if they're only going by the covers [2].

The Sandford books usually contain a list of books more-or-less in order [3]. For a few years, the list would always place The Empress File before The Fool's Run. That error is still going. In the most recent paperback release of Rules of Prey, the list of books in the beginning lists the full Kidd series:

The Empress File The Fool's Run The Devil's Code The Hanged Man's Song

This is from the most recent paperback printing of any of the books (as of this writing). The error has already been noted and corrected for some of the earlier books. But someone, somewhere, "corrected" it so it's wrong again.

Oh, and just because things aren't complex enough: in 1998, the Penguin Group (which, remember, owns Signet, which had the paperback rights to The Fool's Run) purchased both G.P. Putnam's Sons and Berkley Books. I can't prove that the subsequent shuffling of bureaucracy resulted in some of these errors propogating, but I would not at all be surprised if that were the case [4].

Anyway, just to restate so it's clear: The Fool's Run is the first book in the Kidd series, and The Empress File is the second.

Naming the book

This book was written mostly on an Amiga [5], with the files stored on 3.5" floppy disks. The labels on the disks give clues to a potential name for the book:

Thrill Thrill backup Thrill Rewrite 1 Thrill Rewrite 2 Thrill Rewrite 3 Final Archive – Fool's Code

While I don't know if a book called Thrill would be successful, the movie Scream certainly was, so maybe someone will have to try that out some day [6].

But that last entry, Fool's Code, is tantalizingly close to the final title. It's as close as the author got to coming up with one of the titles for about five years. Where the "Run" part came from for the final version, we don't know. We also managed to use "Code" a few years later, so the title was, in a distributed sense, completely reused.

The original story

In many ways the original story is the same as the final one: a computer hacker is hired by large company to wreak havoc with some other institution. But virtually all the details were different.

First, Anshiser was not a major aerospace corporation. It was a huge agricultural commodities firm, the president of which was pissed at the government for their lack of help / empathy / whatever with regards to the ongoing farm crisis [7]. This allowed the author to use all the research he'd done on the farm crisis for his Pulitzer-winning newspaper series.

The enemy, of course, is the government. Kidd's job was to just do as much damage to certain things as he could. Eventually he's caught, but they cut a deal when it turns out that Kidd has some insurance, in the form of the same trick he uses at the end of the final version: computer-based industrial sabotage targetting major power companies [8].

This version had a lot of issues, and the author sums it up well:

Those of you who have read The Fool's Run know that there's no sign of any commodities firm in the novel. Nothing at all about farmers. That's because I got about sixty thousand words into the farm version of the novel, realized what I was doing – writing a social novel disguised as a thriller – thought about it for a couple of agonizing weeks, then ripped out about forty thousand words and wrote a thriller.

So the Anshiser agricultural commodities firm became the Anshiser Holding Corporation, a high-tech aerospace firm that handled military contracts (and some civilian stuff). The enemy went from being a vague and nebulous "the government" to Whitemark Aerospace, their big rival firm. And what they were fighting over is similar in many ways to the fight between Lockheed - Boeing - General Dynamics and Northrop - McDonnell Douglas. Anshiser's Sunfire is essentially the YF-23 Black Widow II, while Whitemark's Hellwolf is the F-22 Raptor [9].

And even then the book still didn't have enough "thrill" to it, so the author added the betrayal of Kidd (orginally he'd just been abandoned and denied by the company when he was caught). The gunfight in the woods was inserted. A layer of cynicism about everything went in as well. And in the end, Kidd went from being a straight computer mercenary sort to one who at least tries to do the right (if technically illegal) thing for the right (if often self-serving) reasons. Or something like that.

The technology

The technology in the book was high-tech for its time, and included a lot of things that were barely on the horizon of the computer-awareness of the general public. Kidd used viruses to target the enemy. The problem of cracking a (presumed) one-time pad is addressed. The intelligence capabilities of the NSA are brought up. This was all in 1989, when most people thought of hackers as being like Matthew Broderick in Wargames.

But technology changes quickly. Almost too quickly to write a plausible techno-thriller without it seeming hopelessly outdated by the time it comes out [10]. The computers and such used by Kidd were very nice for the time, but they're laughable now:

His main computer is an Amiga 2000. Even with the best accelerator card you could get, its top speed was 30MHz. That is 1/100 the speed of typical desktop computers today, and the chip is much less advanced anyway.
Kidd uses modems for everything, usually at 1200 baud [11]. The Internet didn't exist back then. Or at least, for the public it didn't exit beyond special (usually university-based) connections to ARPAnet [12].
Nobody uses encryption. With the exception of academics specifically studying it and certain governmental agencies, encryption effectively didn't exist. Even the sensitive files in the Anshiser and Whitemark computers are unencrypted.

All of that is easy enough to get away with, in a literary realm. When it comes out, it's topical and timely. Years later, it's a nostalgic romp set in the golden age of hacking. But this did not stop some people from savaging it because the technology aged. If you check out the book on Barnes & Noble, you'll find that one of the reviews says:

This book is about high-tech computer crime, and I'm sorry, but the IBM AT and Amiga 2000 just aren't going to cut it. That this book was re-printed without the author updating the technology is an insult to his readers. It should be withdrawn from the market.

By that logic, Ray Bradbury's classic sci-fi novel The Martian Chronicles should be "withdrawn from the market" because we now know he got Mars all wrong. Nobody in Agatha Christie's novels had cell-phones? It doesn't matter if it wasn't current technology when she wrote them – withdraw them from the market! And don't even get me started on The Illiad. Swords and chariots? Please... [13]

The author and I actually debated updating the book into The Fool's Run 2.0. We eventually agreed that it'd just make things bad, so that project never got started [14].

Footnotes to the comments

1. It actually was not a "smash bestseller". Yes, it did get on the NYT chart, which is more than it had done for its original release, but its sales were still just "okay". But part of the job of marketing is to make something seem as successful as possible, even when it was a disaster. Go check out the DVD for the My Big Fat Greek Life TV series. It has something like "A smash comedy!" on it, even though it lasted, what, six episodes? Less? Everything released by anyone has to have text like that. Irritating.

2. I have received many, many emails asking about certain anecdotes in The Empress File. They are, of course, references to The Fool's Run. Some of them even count as spoilers, so the reader would know some important plot twists in advance. Grr.

3. I say more-or-less because they usually put The Night Crew between Sudden Prey and Secret Prey. Yes, it did come out then, so it's accurate. But when the list separates out the Kidd novels from the Prey novels, it seems unusual to leave a non-Prey novel in the Prey list, even if it is in the right spot chronologically.

4. One of the more amusing things from the merger: I got an email from some PenguinPutnam legal weasel who wanted me to take down (or modify) the website because I called it "The Official John Sandford Website" when clearly it wasn't. I responded that, yes, it is the official website, that the author was (at the time) sitting ten feet away, and that the author's editor – a vice president of PenguinPutnam – approved of the site. I never got a response [15].

5. An Amiga 1000, in fact. Yes, we had the earliest Amiga ever. It had 512k of RAM (the author splurged a bit to get that much), a high-capacity floppy drive (880k per disk!), and a luxurious 14" computer screen. No hard drive or anything, but it was still more system than we could handle [16].

6. It just won't be me.

7. The farm crisis of the 80s eventually just... went away. None of the problems were solved, and a lot of the things that happened back then are still happening now. It just stopped being important, in the eyes of the media.

8. One major problem with this worldview is not that the government won't cut deals. It will. It's that almost nobody in the government, who would be working on that scale, would have both the courage and the authority to cut that kind of deal. That's the problem with fighting a bureaucracy: there's nobody to negotiate with.

9. Personally, I liked the YF-23 much better than the YF-22 (which is now the F-22). It was (in my opinion), sleeker, more versatile, and more capable. Unfortunately, it was also far over budget, and not as heavily armed as the YF-22. Still a pretty plane though.

10. The general rule (a derivation of Moore's Law) is that computers will double in speed / capacity every 18 months without changing in price. A paperback novel will typically come out 10-12 months after the hardcover version. So if a techno-thriller has real-life cutting-edge technology for the hardcover, it will seem fairly mundane by the time the paperback comes out. A year after that, and it's already obsolete [17].

11. Baud, for those who don't know, is a measure of computer bits per second. The older modems would go as slow as 300 baud (or even 110), and the most recent would go up to 56,000 baud. This technology has largely been surpassed by broadband communication, where you're sending millions of bits per second instead of mere thousands.

12. ARPAnet and MilNet – the former being the main forerunner of the modern Internet – are both mentioned in the book, albeit in passing.

13. I'm being facetious here, but judging from the reviews on Amazon Dot Com, there are people out there who really would find issue with those works for the reasons cited. The reviews there (and elsewhere) are generally more useful as an example of the collective stupidity of humanity than they are as actual reviews.

14. We did not discuss this very long. He brought it up one evening when I was around, and we bounced the idea around a bit, and then decided that it was terrible.

15. I felt pretty good about it anyway. I mean, it's not very often that I even get the chance to verbally bitch-slap someone who is thoroughly in the wrong. I probably shouldn't feel good about it, but I do.

16. I still remember my first-ever "huge" hard drive. It held 300 megabytes and was about the size of a toaster, with a very large internal power supply. Now I have a keychain-sized USB flash drive that holds three times as much. Heh.

17. One common dodge is just to make stuff up. If you say that the computer has a 3GHz Pentium 4 chip in it, you can date it pretty specifically. But if you say it's got a "Ming-Mecca chip" [18] and provide no details, it'll never be obsolete. You just lose a lot of the verisimilitude. It depends which approach you prefer, really.

18. The "Ming-Mecca" chip is from the movie π. It's a small black cube about an inch on a side, with four pins coming out of it. Given that it's supposedly the most advanced chip in the world, I should hope that they're very high-density pins.

Webmaster @ JohnSandford . org
13 May 2008

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