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Hacking Galileo
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!
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!
257 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 1, 2023
7 people are currently reading
17 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 22, 2024
Back in the early days of the internet of the late 90's/2000's you had a number of stories you'd come across that were hacker based that had just enough of the technology but didn't skimp out on the "fiction" to make the story interesting. Some of these book titles have been lost to memory and time but their stories I remember reading. Hacking Galileo was remembering these stories and adding good ol' nerd indie writing to the mix!
This book is not going to be for everyone. Wood has done a lot of homewood and the science and tech of the late 80's of telephony, computers, HAM radio, astrophysics are there. Homoages to early OG hackers like Kevin Mitnick, 2600, and others are scattered throughout. This is like Stranger Things but with nerdier people and less running around with monsters.
On one hand, many of these characters are too smart and too good at what they do, especially in high school to be real. But again, I harken back to the days of reading hacker fanfiction and this is right up there with all the characters I loved to read about. I will say that the main character who is telling the story tends to get lost in the story. He's there, of course, and he helps do things as he has some skill for "not being noticed" but that seems to be it. He might add details but the other characters are doing the heavy lifting in "the team". The book is also "written" by the main character and the indie author gets away with the amateur look to the font and chapters because it makes it out like one of the self-published conspiracy books you'd buy from a guy at a table by the Grassy Knoll in Dallas, Texas. It just adds a lot to the story and the feeling of reading it. The excess of chapters also makes the book read very quickly.
There are parts where you suspend your disbelief when it comes not to just the characters but to the plot. Going to Russia and acceptance to different groups that puts our characters on the right path and is just part of the fun. There are a couple of chapters in there where it switches to this attempt to parallel the story with a fantasy novel a friend was working on and I just hated that shift. But it's a few pages and is done after that. The conclusion was a bit mixed but overall, the renegades of society against the Man, the System, the Fedbois, the world - I really just had a lot of fun with this book. This was nostalgia done right! Final Grade - A
This book is not going to be for everyone. Wood has done a lot of homewood and the science and tech of the late 80's of telephony, computers, HAM radio, astrophysics are there. Homoages to early OG hackers like Kevin Mitnick, 2600, and others are scattered throughout. This is like Stranger Things but with nerdier people and less running around with monsters.
On one hand, many of these characters are too smart and too good at what they do, especially in high school to be real. But again, I harken back to the days of reading hacker fanfiction and this is right up there with all the characters I loved to read about. I will say that the main character who is telling the story tends to get lost in the story. He's there, of course, and he helps do things as he has some skill for "not being noticed" but that seems to be it. He might add details but the other characters are doing the heavy lifting in "the team". The book is also "written" by the main character and the indie author gets away with the amateur look to the font and chapters because it makes it out like one of the self-published conspiracy books you'd buy from a guy at a table by the Grassy Knoll in Dallas, Texas. It just adds a lot to the story and the feeling of reading it. The excess of chapters also makes the book read very quickly.
There are parts where you suspend your disbelief when it comes not to just the characters but to the plot. Going to Russia and acceptance to different groups that puts our characters on the right path and is just part of the fun. There are a couple of chapters in there where it switches to this attempt to parallel the story with a fantasy novel a friend was working on and I just hated that shift. But it's a few pages and is done after that. The conclusion was a bit mixed but overall, the renegades of society against the Man, the System, the Fedbois, the world - I really just had a lot of fun with this book. This was nostalgia done right! Final Grade - A
May 15, 2023
Hacking Galileo by Fenton Wood is many things: an adventure, a lament for an age now lost, even a manual for subverting obsolete technology.
This book is for the adults who once were the spergy GenX and GenY kids who are the stars of this book. The kids who built radios and telescopes in their garages. The kids who hiked off in the desert and came back days later and their parents didn't even blink. It was a different world, but this book captures what it felt like to live in it.
Hacking Galileo uses the method of good "hard" science fiction, instructing the reader in scientific or engineering principles using an adventure story to keep things from becoming tedious. Despite the fact that I think science fiction isn't a real genre at all, I do have a great fondness for the many authors who successfully hybridize adventure stories with futuristic speculation.
However, Hacking Galileo has another side to it; one that would have horrified the truest of true believers in science who coined the term "science fiction" precisely to exclude the kind of fantastic speculation that you get here. Readers of Fenton's earlier works will not be surprised, but the Terrible Secret of Space would have given the Futurians fits.
The Futurians wanted to make their readers good socialists by throwing away the fantastical, but it kept sneaking in the back, because it makes for good stories. Hacking Galileo is a good story. Fenton Wood blends the hardest of hard sci-fi, with orbital mechanics, antenna engineering, and good old fashioned social engineering with some of the craziest stuff I have seen in print.
That it all hangs together is a testament to Fenton's skill, and a lot of fun besides. Almost as much fun as those boys had saving the world.
This book is for the adults who once were the spergy GenX and GenY kids who are the stars of this book. The kids who built radios and telescopes in their garages. The kids who hiked off in the desert and came back days later and their parents didn't even blink. It was a different world, but this book captures what it felt like to live in it.
Hacking Galileo uses the method of good "hard" science fiction, instructing the reader in scientific or engineering principles using an adventure story to keep things from becoming tedious. Despite the fact that I think science fiction isn't a real genre at all, I do have a great fondness for the many authors who successfully hybridize adventure stories with futuristic speculation.
However, Hacking Galileo has another side to it; one that would have horrified the truest of true believers in science who coined the term "science fiction" precisely to exclude the kind of fantastic speculation that you get here. Readers of Fenton's earlier works will not be surprised, but the Terrible Secret of Space would have given the Futurians fits.
The Futurians wanted to make their readers good socialists by throwing away the fantastical, but it kept sneaking in the back, because it makes for good stories. Hacking Galileo is a good story. Fenton Wood blends the hardest of hard sci-fi, with orbital mechanics, antenna engineering, and good old fashioned social engineering with some of the craziest stuff I have seen in print.
That it all hangs together is a testament to Fenton's skill, and a lot of fun besides. Almost as much fun as those boys had saving the world.
September 24, 2023
I love science fiction books with a lot of plausible technical information. I also didn't realize how much I enjoyed reading about plausible hacks into telephone, computer, and other systems. The adventures of these four boys was fantastic. For a while I forgot it was supposed to be science fiction.
It had a definite Libertarian tone, which was a bit of a surprise, but pleasantly so. In spite of the unlikelihood that four teenage boys in the 1980s could get away with what they did, It was a delightful read. Unfortunately, there were just a couple of diversions that were way outside the tone of the rest of the novel.
All that said, I'd definitely recommend this for adult and YA reading. I'm sure my teenage grandson would have a blast.
It had a definite Libertarian tone, which was a bit of a surprise, but pleasantly so. In spite of the unlikelihood that four teenage boys in the 1980s could get away with what they did, It was a delightful read. Unfortunately, there were just a couple of diversions that were way outside the tone of the rest of the novel.
All that said, I'd definitely recommend this for adult and YA reading. I'm sure my teenage grandson would have a blast.
July 10, 2025
I didn't like the YA aspects, and the government doesn't work like the author described - especially when it comes to space. But it's beautifully written and the science is technically accurate. A very fun read that I'd recommend for anyone looking for diamond-hard engineering in their hacker thriller.
September 6, 2023
AWESOME.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews