‘Silicon Valley East’: Former software dev’s debut novel revisits the tech world of the 1980s

When Gina Wilson decided to set her first novel in the 1980s, it wasn’t just to jump on a nostalgia trend.

Wilson, a former software engineer, lived through the ‘80s as a young woman technologist firsthand and found those were two angles lacking in published fiction. 

“When I started this, I realized there are so few novels that, first of all, talk about tech that are not sci-fi or history,” Wilson told Technical.ly. “And there are few women in tech. You rarely see a woman’s memoir or even a non-fiction book about a woman.”

The book, “Silicon Valley East” (the name is a term used by President Ronald Reagn during a real-life visit to Malvern, Pennsylvania, in 1985), takes place mainly throughout the mid-Atlantic region, from Delaware — where Wilson is from and currently lives, in the beach town of Lewes — to Philadelphia to Manhattan. 

In 1985, The Route 202 Corridor from West Chester to King of Prussia in Pennsylvania really was seen as the mid-Atlantic’s own future version of Silicon Valley, where countryside just outside of Philadelphia was making way for high tech, not least of all in the healthtech field that is still prominent, and featured in the book.  

Wison combined that history with 80s nostalgia — a “megatrend” of the 2020s where people look back with an almost desperate fondness at the decades preceding smartphones and social media. “Silicon Valley East” turns that on its head in a way — it was a simpler time, sure, but getting the most basic tech things done was almost unimaginably slow and inconvenient compared to today. 

Finding her ‘flow’

For nearly 30 years after leaving a job as a software developer in Malvern, Wilson has been consulting and coaching. It’s her own business that started as a custom software development company primarily serving healthcare clients, the same industry of her “Silicon Valley East” protagonist, Christina Como.

Wilson went on to get her graduate degree in cognitive psychology, moved into management consulting and worked for most of the healthcare organizations in the region.

In 2012, she shifted into coaching.

“One thing I encourage my coaching clients to do is mind what it is that restores them,” Wilson said. “We look for what ‘gets them into a state of flow,’ which is a state of consciousness where you’re so immersed in the activity that you are kind of unaware of time passing, you’re just very engrossed” 

Through coaching other tech professionals to find their flow — a technique that is used to prevent and combat burnout — Wilson discovered her own: writing.

“Silicon Valley East” is the first novel on Bayfront Press, the small publishing imprint Wilson launched in 2021. It’s the imprint’s third book. Her first two books are nonfiction — one about building soft skills, the other about the transition from high school to college.

Historical fiction, but make it tech

Though fiction, “Silicon Valley East” is filled with people using real technology, all of it now obsolete, not for nostalgia purposes, necessarily, but to show how far technology has come since the days of Pac-Man and Centipede. 

“I chose the 80s because I really did want to portray the evolution of health tech,” Wilson said. “Nowadays it’s so easy to do registration online, your lab results are sent to you, and it’s all seemingly seamless.”

In “Silicon Valley East,” data is transported on physical disks via airplanes with smoking sections. Modern technology is foreshadowed often — characters joke about things like someday being able to “beam” data across the country like Scotty on Star Trek. 

When programmers patiently dial in to a staticky switchboard to do their work, it highlights how far tech has come.

“It was a lot different,” she said. “Even my son, who works in data analytics, couldn’t believe the hurdles that we had to get through.”

A goal to inspire aspiring technologists, entrepreneurs and writers

Wilson’s young protagonist is not only a technologist. She also becomes an entrepreneur over the course of the story as she develops software to better manage healthcare records in a time when everything was done on paper.

“I call her an accidental entrepreneur,” she said. “She doesn’t set out to open up a business, but she sees a need, and she goes for it.”

That energy is similar to Wilson’s advice to aspiring authors.

“My biggest advice is, if you have something to say, then you can write,” she said, noting that she hones her craft through things like online classes and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop podcast. “My whole career, I’ve been writing in some capacity — mostly technical writing, a lot of specifications, that sort of thing. Writing a novel was actually very challenging because I wanted it to be interesting, and I also wanted it to be factual.”

Ultimately, Wilson hopes to add additional authors to the Bayfront Press roster, but for now she’s focused on the release of “Silicon Valley East,” available at regional bookshops and online.

“I hope it’s inspiring,” Wilson said, “especially for someone who’s thinking about opening a business or doing something that they’re very passionate about.”