Author Bio
John Wilander writes hacker fiction where hackers are the heroes. He is the author of the West William Wilder series: Identified and Submerged, with a third novel, Yield, in the works.
John holds a PhD in computer science and has dipped his toes in history and law. As a kid, he was always told he had a “wild imagination,” and he never really grew out of it. These days he puts it to work in near-future fiction. Outside of writing, he has composed and produced music, which you can find on Spotify and Apple Music under his own name. He loves plants and his garden, and he reads a lot of older books, preferably bought used and in print. His sweet spot is a spy novel or police procedural from 1950 to 1975.
About Me
Hi! I'm John Wilander. I write hacker fiction.
My daytime job is in software engineering, primarily privacy and security. I live in Silicon Valley, California.
Did you know that the oldest hack listed on Wikipedia is from 1903? It involves telegraphy and you can read the story in New Scientist. Makes you want to write about steampunk hackers.
My Introduction to Hacker Fiction
My personal love for computers and the mystery around hacking began with the 1980s movie WarGames and the movie’s hero “Lightman.” He is an example of an unintentional hacker – a person who out of curiosity starts to poke at computer systems and finds criminal plans afoot or triggers something dangerous. It made me feel like all kinds of adventures would await me as long as I mastered computers. I later saw the movie Sneakers which features professional hackers who break into systems for money which means they risk becoming agents of the wrong principal. Not long thereafter I saw the movie Hackers featuring a group of vigilante hackers – people who use hacking to fight oppression, lies, corruption, or government surveillance. Hackers can of course also be villains and in fiction they often hack broadcast networks to spread their doomsday message to the world.
About Hacker Fiction Net
Robberies, heists, espionage, and wars take place in cyberspace today. Law enforcement and national defense have to be in that dimension to do their jobs. The hacker — professional or vigilante, villain or hero — plays a key role in our society, and hacker fiction plays a key role in the fears and aspirations of our present, as well as in envisioning and forming our future. How long will it be until artificial intelligence gives us something akin to Precrime from Minority Report? The novella was published in 1956.
This website and my newsletter explore that space.
Hackers In Great Stories
Crime novels, war stories, and thrillers, can easily fit in those three hacker archetypes — unintentional, professional, and vigilate. The trick is to not make the computer part boring but still believable, like techno thrillers and hard science. We don’t see the years of training behind expert killers like John Wick or Lorraine Broughton in Atomic Blonde, so we don’t have to see hackers investigating a software bug for three weeks. Hacking can be an exciting part of fiction!
Frequently Asked Questions
What's your favorite hacker movie?
WarGames. It has had a life-long impact on me, since it got me into computers and security. It also scared the US federal government enough to legislate computer crime. President Reagan watched it, asked his advisers and the Joint Chiefs of Staff whether the premise was possible, and was told it was. Congress then passed the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. (I'm not saying that's a good law though.)
What's your favorite hacker novel?
This one is hard. Memories fade, and I don't re-read books as often as I re-watch movies. But I'd have to say Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.
What is the best part of writing?
Researching interesting parts of the world, or the possibility of a hack. And I do like it when I succeed at show-don't-tell for hacks.
What has been your most profound reading experience?
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. It's a great example of Hemingway's Iceberg Theory at work. Filling in the emotional blanks of the main character myself was a whole other level.
Who is the best author of all time?
I have to say Agatha Christie. She owns the cozy mystery genre, she is the best-selling novelist of all time with more than two billion copies sold, and she was incredibly productive with over sixty detective novels under her name. I love her Poirot novels.
Image Credits
Book covers and movie posters on the Historical Timeline are used for commentary and review purposes under fair use.
All book covers and movie poster images are served directly from this site. They were sourced from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, where they are used under individual fair use claims for criticism and commentary — the same rationale Wikipedia itself applies to such images.
Two images originate from Wikimedia Commons, which only hosts freely licensed or public domain content:
- Fantastic Universe, January 1956 — first publication of Philip K. Dick's The Minority Report. Commons file page. Public domain (US copyright not renewed).
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? first edition cover. Commons file page.
Other image sources:
- Several book covers are loaded from Open Library (Internet Archive).
- The Mr. Robot and GoldenEye posters are from The Movie Database (TMDB).
- The Open Source cover is courtesy of Anna L. Davis.
- The Ghost in the Shell manga cover and Neuromancer graphic novel cover are owned by their respective publishers and are reproduced here for review purposes.
Reach Me On Email
Request an Interview
I’m happy to talk to you on your blog or podcast about my writing, what I read, movies I like, my background all the way from the 1980s home computing revolution to my PhD in computer science, and my thoughts on hacker fiction.
I avoid talking about my daytime job or the web standards work I do, simply because there’s no connection between those activities and my writing. Thanks for understanding that I want to keep those two careers apart.
Social Media
These accounts are all mine. Follow and chat with me on Mastodon, Bluesky, X (Twitter), or Instagram. My books are listed on my Amazon author page.