Hacker Fiction Net
Book Review Excerpts
  • 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

Review of Johnny Mnemonic (1981, 1995)

A 1981 short story by William Gibson and a 1995 movie directed by Robert Longo and written by Gibson.

The short story is just 22 pages in paperback and features Gibson’s typical dense language and the cyberpunk world which later provided the backdrop for the Sprawl trilogy Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive. I got it in print as a part of the 1986 short story collection Burning Chrome.

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 …