Plot summary
Derek "Van" Vandeveer is a young, well respected, computer scientist. He is rich with stock options and heady with his own success when his whole world is suddenly and forever changed as the planes begin crashing into the World Trade Center. Within months his fortune is gone to an Enron-like scandal, and his wife and son have moved west to work on a new telescope being developed by a billionaire entrepreneur.
Van is recruited into a nascent wing of the government, working on the outside of the main bureaucracy to vastly improve the security of government systems. His ingenious design gains him even more respect from his peers, but as the project continues Van goes through personality changes, becoming more paranoid and simultaneously more patriotic. Without the psychological aid of the money and nice house of his former company, he even begins to question whether he really is a computer scientist or just an over-glorified technician.
The novel comes to a head as Van is asked to look into the reason a multibillion-dollar pork project spy satellite is failing in space. The bureaucracy, thinking that he will fail in this endeavor, hopes to use it to discredit his boss and him and put an end to their power climb in Washington. Van discovers the problem and through a covert military-like attack on the source, puts an end to it.
Michael Bruce Sterling is an American science fiction author known for his novels and short fiction and editorship of the Mirrorshades anthology. In particular, he is linked to the cyberpunk subgenre.
HAL 9000 is a fictional artificial intelligence character and the main antagonist in Arthur C. Clarke's Space Odyssey series. First appearing in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL is a sentient artificial general intelligence computer that controls the systems of the Discovery One spacecraft and interacts with the ship's astronaut crew. While part of HAL's hardware is shown toward the end of the film, he is mostly depicted as a camera lens containing a red or yellow dot, with such units located throughout the ship. HAL 9000 is voiced by Douglas Rain in the two feature film adaptations of the Space Odyssey series. HAL speaks in a soft, calm voice and a conversational manner, in contrast to the crewmen, David Bowman and Frank Poole.
Neuromancer is a 1984 science fiction novel by American-Canadian writer William Gibson. Considered one of the earliest and best-known works in the cyberpunk genre, it is the only novel to win the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Hugo Award. It was Gibson's debut novel and the beginning of the Sprawl trilogy. Set in the future, the novel follows Henry Case, a washed-up hacker hired for one last job, which brings him in contact with a powerful artificial intelligence.
A password, sometimes called a passcode, is secret data, typically a string of characters, usually used to confirm a user's identity. Traditionally, passwords were expected to be memorized, but the large number of password-protected services that a typical individual accesses can make memorization of unique passwords for each service impractical. Using the terminology of the NIST Digital Identity Guidelines, the secret is held by a party called the claimant while the party verifying the identity of the claimant is called the verifier. When the claimant successfully demonstrates knowledge of the password to the verifier through an established authentication protocol, the verifier is able to infer the claimant's identity.
Bruce Schneier is an American cryptographer, computer security professional, privacy specialist, and writer. Schneier is a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society as of November, 2013. He is a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Access Now, and The Tor Project; and an advisory board member of Electronic Privacy Information Center and VerifiedVoting.org. He is the author of several books on general security topics, computer security and cryptography and is a squid enthusiast.
Dr. Henry Jekyll, nicknamed in some copies of the story as Harry Jekyll, and his alternative personality, Mr. Edward Hyde, is the central character of Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. In the story, he is a good friend of main protagonist Gabriel John Utterson. Jekyll is a kind and respected English doctor who has repressed evil urges inside of him. In an attempt to hide this, he develops a type of serum that he believes will effectively compartmentalize his dark side. Instead, Jekyll transforms into Edward Hyde, the physical and mental manifestation of his evil personality. This process happens more regularly until Jekyll becomes unable to control when the transformations occur.
The Difference Engine (1990) is an alternative history novel by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. It is widely regarded as a book that helped establish the genre conventions of steampunk.
True Names is a 1981 science fiction novella by American writer Vernor Vinge, a seminal work of the cyberpunk genre. It is one of the earliest stories to present a fully fleshed-out concept of cyberspace, which would later be central to cyberpunk. The story also contains elements of transhumanism, anarchism, and even hints about The Singularity.
Batman Beyond is an American superhero animated television series developed by Bruce Timm, Paul Dini, and Alan Burnett. It was produced by Warner Bros. Animation in collaboration with DC Comics and is the fourth series in the DC Animated Universe. The series began airing on January 10, 1999 on Kids' WB, and ended on December 18, 2001. In the United Kingdom, it began airing on September 4, 2000. After 52 episodes spanning three seasons and one direct-to-video feature film, the series was brought to an end in favor of the Justice League animated series, and plans for a fourth season were cancelled.
Donald Watts Davies, was a Welsh computer scientist who was employed at the UK National Physical Laboratory (NPL).
Forty Signs of Rain (2004) is the first book in the hard science fiction "Science in the Capital" trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. Robinson has been nicknamed the "Master of Disaster" for his description of natural disasters based partly on the contents of this book.
Today We Choose Faces is a 1973 science fiction novel by American writer Roger Zelazny. As originally constructed, Part 1 was an extensive flashback which followed Part 2, but the order of the sections was changed at the request of editor David Hartwell, who felt that the novel worked better in chronological order. Zelazny later wrote, “I was younger then & more in need of the money at the time & couldn’t afford to argue [with] him about it. I still prefer it the way I wrote it.”
A security hacker is someone who explores methods for breaching defenses and exploiting weaknesses in a computer system or network. Hackers may be motivated by a multitude of reasons, such as profit, protest, information gathering, challenge, recreation, or evaluation of a system weaknesses to assist in formulating defenses against potential hackers. The subculture that has evolved around hackers is often referred to as the "computer underground".
Adam James Susan is a fictional character and the main antagonist of the comic book series V for Vendetta, created by writer Alan Moore and illustrator David Lloyd. He is renamed Adam Sutler in the 2005 film adaptation, in which he is portrayed by John Hurt.
The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge is a collection of science fiction short stories by American writer Vernor Vinge. The stories were first published from 1966 to 2001, and the book contains all of Vinge's published short stories from that period except "True Names" and "Grimm's Story".
Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority v. Anderson, et al., Civil Action No. 08-11364, was a challenge brought by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) to prevent three Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) students from publicly presenting a security vulnerability they discovered in the MBTA's Charlie Card automated fare collection system. The case concerns the extent to which the disclosure of a computer security flaw is a form of free speech protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
The bibliography of American science fiction author Bruce Sterling comprises novels, short stories and non-fiction.
Batman Beyond is a comic book series featuring the fictional character Terry McGinnis as Batman and based on the animated television series of the same name. It has appeared in various DC Comics publications, including a six-issue miniseries from 1999, a 24-issue series running from 1999 to 2001, the "Hush" arc by DC Comics in 2010, and an eight-issue miniseries in 2011. A short-running series titled Batman Beyond Unlimited was later released, followed by Batman Beyond 2.0 in 2013.
The Peripheral is a 2014 science fiction mystery-thriller novel by William Gibson, set in near- and post-apocalyptic versions of the future. A television series adaptation of the book, produced by Amazon, began streaming on October 21, 2022.
