Tech writing meets sci-fi
Although most of us TWs realize we're writing fiction much of the time (for vaporware, of course), and there are some tech writers who moonlight as sci-fi authors (e.g., Leah R. Cutter), only rarely does a tech writer have a role in a sci-fi story. Cory Doctorow has written one such story, 0wnz0red, featured in Salon, about a burned-out programmer "horizontally promoted" into tech writer. His initial reaction is not flattering:
A tech writer. Why not just break his goddamned fingers and poke his eyes out? Never write another line of code, never make the machine buck and hum and make his will real in the abstract beauty of silicon? Tech writers were coders' janitors, documenting the plainly self-evident logic of APIs and code-structures, niggling over punctuation and grammar and frigging stylebooks, like any of it mattered -- human beings could parse English, even if it wasn't well-formed, even if you had a comma-splice or a dangling participle.
Of course that's only a small part of the story, but read it yourself. And see boingboing for a glossary if you have trouble with the 1337 lingo.
7:17:06 PM 
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