Hacker Fiction Net
Book Review Excerpts
  • If you enjoy hacker thrillers, check out John's debut novel, Identified.

    – Daniel Suarez, author of Daemon

  • Fantastic book! I enjoyed it from cover to cover. I will be recommending this book to everyone on my social media accounts.

    – Joseph Bruce

  • This was a good book! It makes you think and it seems like these hacking scenarios could actually happen, since there is so much unknown with computers.

    – Megan Davan

  • What impressed me the most is all facts can happen in real life! All the hacks, the government decisions, the behaviours of the heroes of the book …

    – Carette Antonin

  • Fabulous book!! I want more!! Excellent story, plots within plots, technically sound regarding the hacking, great character development, exciting pacing …

    – L. J. Erste

  • Fast-paced, great characters, and grapples with technology and society issues that are near-and-dear to hackers and will make any reader think.

    – Dan Cornell

  • This was a really fun read in the vein of Hackers, Sneakers, the Net, and other great hacking movies. I loved the characters. The stakes felt real.

    – John Wilker

  • It's a page turner. The suspense, the romance, the stage for the security-privacy near future plot make this a quick and delightful read.

    – Adam Baso

  • If you enjoyed Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, Homeland and Attack Surface, this book will feel just right, and fits in with their dystopian surveillance nightmare.

    – KJ

  • Identified reveals the near future, in which the government surveillance apparatus, as revealed to us by Snowden, has grown immeasurably powerful.

    – Ryan G

  • The story is great, the main characters are memorable, and the ending was satisfying.

    – Mark Papadakis

  • More technically accurate than a typical hacker book.

    – Adriana Porter Felt

  • A caper for computer geeks.

    – Eric Lawrence



A mock book at an angle with a cover looking as follows - dark gray background, a stylized title Identified, a vectorized facial recognition model in cyan, and the text 'A hacker thriller by John Wilander'.

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Select Blog Posts

Hacker Review of Ghost in the Shell (1995)

I've been longing to dive deep on this modern classic.

Ghost in the Shell was originally published as a manga by Masamune Shirow in 1989-1990. It entered the wider pop culture with its anime (animated movie) release in 1995, directed by Mamoru Oshii. The anime is a combination of several of the manga pieces put into a tight timeline.

The Wachowskis were heavily influenced by Ghost in the Shell when they created the Matrix trilogy. Even the Matrix digital rain is inspired by the anime.

The digital rain with green characters pouring down on a black background.

Hacker Rating

Hacker Realism: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Hacker Plot Importance: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐
Hacks: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Continue reading …

The Origins of Cyberspace

The word cyberspace started out as something quite different from what we know it as today. Atelier Cyberspace was created in the 1960s by Danish artist Susanne Ussing and her partner architect Carsten Hoff. Here’s what Hoff said about it in 2015:

To us, "cyberspace" was simply about managing spaces. There was nothing esoteric about it. Nothing digital, either. It was just a tool. The space was concrete, physical.

Continue reading …