As someone who writes computer security related fiction, I have a vested interest in seeing what others do in my quest, which is somewhere between “desired profession”, hobby and religious fanaticism. What I’ve found divides nicely between the technically accurate but boring, the technical abstract but exciting, and the complete fantasy that makes no sense.
Dan Brown’s “Digital Fortress” was the first book that really shocked me. It fits into the latter category, for combining research gleaned from Scientific American and Slashdot with a whopping dose of unrealistic fantasy. It left me with the same feeling I had after watching the movie “Hackers.” Wow, this one has a PCI bus, and my eyes wandered after that.
I’m accustomed to some of the better writing from the second category, like the William Gibson and John Brunner cyberspace fantasies, and have only encountered the first type on the net as unpublished work of interest to a small community. I think the divide comes about because of a need for stories to romanticize reality, and technical accuracy pulls in a different direction.
For example, if I want to write a post-modern style story, I need to find a meta-metaphor to give people that sense of profound, life-changing theory about the story. This means I’m going to have to contort my writing around the idea of an XOR, or character escapes, or the idea of layers in packeted networking. It’s not a terrible gig, but it’s by nature very cerebral.
It’s too much easier to create The Matrix instead, where we get the hacking out of the way early on so the kung fu and cryptic concept salad dialogue can take over. But not all of us have given up, and there are some out here who believe that good science “equals” good fiction, in the way the older science fiction authors like Heinlein, Wells, Dick and Bradbury did.
Christopher Blanc writes computer security related fiction and “post-postmodern” fiction by night, and works in the IT industry by day. Blog originally posted at Slashdot.