© James Pyles
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I became aware of Fenton Wood (a pseudonym) when he reviewed my SciFi/Fantasy novelette Ice on twitter (but alas not on Amazon or goodreads).
Curious, I took a look at his twitter/X account, which led me to his e-book Hacking Galileo.
It had fabulous reviews, an interesting premise, and was reasonably priced, so I downloaded it onto my Kindle Fire.
The first words you read in the book after the usual preamble stuff is “This is a work of fiction.” Wood then goes on to explain the inspirations and influences for various parts of his story, the background of some of the technical details, when he “cheated,” making certain events happen at a slightly different point in history for the sake of the plot, and how security at Cray Research and Bell Telephone Company weren’t quite as lame as he depicted.
That’s really important because the rest of the book is written from the point of view of a man who, in the 1980s, was part of a teenage hacker group, really just a bunch of high school friends in Palmdale, California, who performed acts of hacking from the interesting to the fantastic.
The main character Roger O. Miller (ROM, see what he did there?) is writing and recounting events that happened thirty years ago where he and his three friends actually saved the world from destruction by an alien space probe. There’s a lot of build up to get to that point, but almost all of it is fascinating.
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