The Shockwave Rider

The Shockwave Rider is a science fiction novel by John Brunner, originally published in 1975. It is notable for its hero's use of computer cracking skills to escape pursuit in a dystopian future, and for the coining of the word "worm" to describe a program that propagates itself through a computer network.

It is even more notable because it is about the first book to ever describe the internet (although the book calls it the data-net) as something prevalent in everyone's everyday life. If you read it when it came out, you might have trouble understanding why the threat to destroy the data-net is taken as almost the ultimate threat. Today, it is pretty easy to realize the economic and other disasters that would happen.

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Tropes in this work:

• The Cracker: This is how the government sees Nick.
• Deus Est Machina: Well, the machine isn't exactly God, but it does see all and the ending is, without giving it away, interesting.
• Everything Is Online: In the near future, everything is.
• The Government
• Government Agency of Fiction: The Bureau of Data Processing.
• Heel Face Turn: Paul Freeman.
• Inspector Javert: Also Paul Freeman.
• La Résistance: Precipice
• The Mafia: We find out they are running the government.
  • Natasha Grant must've been having a hell of a time.
• My Country, Right or Wrong: Again, Paul Freeman before his Heel Face Turn.
• The Neidermeyer: Freeman's boss.
• Prophecy Twist: The Delphi pool.
• Twenty Minutes Into the Future