Goodreads asked Alexander Ferrick:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Alexander Ferrick Hack3r takes a lot of influence from other cyberpunk stories that have preceded it, perhaps most obviously from The Matrix films. I've always been fascinated by Virtual Reality, and it was not a stretch to write about it, but the first few images to come to me for Hack3r, ironically, are set in the real world of Hack3r, not the online one. It started with the image of the skyscrapers of Los Angeles protruding from the sea, and grew outard from there.

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