IDENTIFIED: A hacker thriller ripped from the headlines of today's newspapers by John Wilander
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Premise: hacker-focused heist in an uber-surveillance world.

Honestly, this book should 100% appeal to me. I love a great rag-tag rebellious skills-based comeuppance against corporate and nationalist Big Brother.

What is really surprising, and at least initially wonderful, was the sheer page-count of actual hacking, with actual hacking problems/knowledge. I can APPRECIATE the neat woo-woo of so many technical challenges and visualizations of the problems while also thinking, quite often, that it DESTROYS the natural flow of the novel.

So, it's a caveat. This is a fun techno-thriller that forces you to study and follow complicated grids of numbers with no easy way to just hand-wave the challenges away--unless you just skip them.

For those who do want a challenging book, by all means, pick this up and challenge yourselves. The story, characters, plot, are just fine. I'm not saying the whole book is impenetrable. It's also not a Greg Egan.

Brass tacks: is it fun? Yep. Does it challenge your T in your MBTI? Yep.

If I were to synesthesia this review, I'd say I'd be smelling ozone the entire time I read it. Specifically, dust getting burnt in ozone, the smell of a case getting cracked while the fan is still running, the heat of a machine in a cold room. My nose still feels cold in memory.


Personal note:
If anyone reading my reviews might be interested in reading my own SF, I'm going to be open to DM requests. I think it's about time I get some eyes on them.

Arctunn.com

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