Book Review: Hacking Galileo, by Fenton Wood
The blurb:
A story untold for over 30 years...
Teenage hacker Roger O. Miller made national headlines when he was arrested for hacking into NASA computers and hijacking an interplanetary probe. He told the authorities a wild story about a rogue asteroid on a collision course with Earth. Eventually, he recanted and admitted that he fabricated the whole thing.
Or did he?
For the first time, his closest confederate tells the real story of what motivated a group of brainy teenagers to create an illegal space program under the noses of the authorities. It all started with a radio experiment that led to an accidental discovery...
HACKING GALILEO is a tech memoir by an insider, full of ingenious exploits and fascinating details about the aerospace technology of the 1980's.
Author and publisher alike are risking Federal retaliation by publishing this book. Is it a true account, or a clever work of fiction? What is the Terrible Secret of Space, and what does it have to do with the origin of the rogue asteroid? Read it for yourself--while you still can!
Everyone knows by now how much I loved Nightland Racer. Wouldn’t shut up about it and still haven’t. That made me more than eager to pick up Fenton Wood’s latest novel as soon as I could.
I knew it was a different tack for him, with far more hard sci-fi elements and far less whimsy and magic. Yet I had a feeling he wouldn’t dry it out completely, and I was right!
This is precisely what the blurb calls it: a tech memoir, but it’s also a lot more. What is a tech memoir? Here we have a grown protagonist reminiscing about the technical exploits of him and his friends in a bygone era, with absolutely all the fat trimmed off. This book is almost pure plot, with relevant technical details, only dialog that moves this plot forward, and a bit of nostalgia and political grievances peppered in.
All of that may still sound quite dry, but trust me, in Fenton’s hands it works. We still have his strong authorial voice with its requisite subtle humor and quirkiness, and he (much to my delight) proved unable to completely excise cosmic and metaphysical wackiness from the story, though it does linger at the periphery for the most part.
Plot:
As stated, the plot takes center stage. We are told we will learn what drove this group of growing prodigies to attempt to hack Galileo, what it leads them to discover, and what their efforts achieve, and that’s what we get. There are no parental incursions throwing monkey wrenches into the proceedings, no girls getting in the way of our characters’ motivations, and no bits of interpersonal drama threatening to tear the boys apart.
We barely even see what the boys do between the main events of their hacking, infiltration, and other activities.
This will not be what some readers expect, but once you see what the author is doing and roll with it, you really get how he makes it work.
The plot is fast-paced due to a complete lack of fluff, and it pushes at the restraints of reality just enough to satisfy fans of Wood’s other work. The conclusion is satisfying and appropriate, a fitting homage to the book’s 80s kid inspirations.
Character:
The characters are not terribly distinct apart from their aptitudes and contributions to the project. There are small hints of personality, but the reader must remember that this is a ‘tech memoir’ and not a navel-gazing nostalgia piece. I get the sense that minimizing the rendering of our characters was a conscious choice, and so again it’s a situation where some readers may balk and complain, but those who are willing to go along for the ride will have no problems.
Really the cast functions as a kind of hive mind of intellectual motivations and technical expertise. At times, it only matters which character get a dialog attribution because the character name has to match their stated skillset!
And again, some may call the sparse character design a flaw, but I see the art in it.
Craft:
Wood is a capable author with a strong vision for his works. If you’re on board with his premise and method, you will enjoy this novel enough to see it through the dense descriptions of retro technology and get to the heart of the book.
I thoroughly enjoyed Fenton’s depictions of smart boys with the drive to do awesome things just for kicks, and to stand up against impossible odds from the forces of evil, ignorance, and apathy when push comes to shove, even if it means risking their very freedom.
Reading Hacking Galileo really felt like finding a banned manuscript you’re not supposed to have, from the simple presentation of the printed book to the gripping contents of the book itself.
Grab your copy now, before the technocratic censors rewrite it!