Lucky to find another best-of-2023 book so quickly.
The annual total climbs to 8.
Nobody in indie wants to say this, but finding gems in our particular vein can be almost as tricky as picking a winner off the main floor display at Barnes & Noble, in between the “Maybe You’re Gay” table and the “White People Bad” section. One of the missions over at Upstream is to elevate the gems, or even the very pretty-looking rocks, so as to persuade the headlight-numbed masses that there is in fact a Better Way.
Thus it is that when I find a solid diamond with a pure constitution, it is exceedingly pleasing unto me, and such is the case with an otherwise unassuming title on a very low-effort cover: HACKING GALILEO, by Fenton Wood.
I’m lightly acquainted with Fenton through the larger network of indie authors that we both know (Kroese, Finn, Gallagher, Paolinelli, et al). I haven’t read his other stuff but he and I were both in the Mammon anthology edited by Rob, and we follow each other on X. He’s very knowledgeable when it comes to telecommunications and that knowledge comes into play here.
In a lot of ways, HACKING GALILEO reminded me of my short story HOMEWORLD, in that it was told first-person as a memoir about a kid who did something to piss off the government, only (in my opinion) Wood’s story is a lot better than mine. HOMEWORLD is fun and a little quippy. HACKING GALILEO is smart, insightful, and even cautionary. (Which isn’t to say it’s without humor, either.)
The story is set close to our time. The narrator reflects on something he and his friends did in the 80s, bouncing signals into space and trying to see how far they could get. It reminded me of Count Dankula’s video on Kevin Mitnick, the most wanted hacker in the world—he was just a smart kid in a bad environment who passed the time by hacking the phone companies and messing with drive-thru food orders.
(Video here, it’s about 4x longer than his normal Mad Lad videos, but worth the whole watch).
Wood’s characters are a lot like that. Only instead of messing with Bell, they set their sights on NASA, basically hijacking an entire space probe in the early days of telecommunications while the authorities try to hunt them down.
Why would they do such a thing?
They have reason to believe that an asteroid is on a collision course with Earth, and NASA won’t know until it’s too late. Rather than turn themselves into Federal assets and become cogs in the bureaucracy, they elect to solve the problem themselves, steering the Galileo II and its secret nuclear payload into the oncoming asteroid.
As Wood walks the reader through the tale, he weaves an incredible tapestry of fact and fiction (or is it all fact?) involving everything from secret messages in old syndicated TV shows to American Romanovs who can sneak our heroes Roger and Chris to the Soviet Kosmodrome in Kazakhstan, even while the USSR crumbles.
It’s like if Forrest Gump wasn’t just about a guy who happened to be around every big thing happening in the 60s and 70s, but instead crossed lines with major political, technological, commercial, and scientific figures in the 80s, all so they could save the Earth from an extinction-level-event fired out of the Silent Galaxy.
Wood does all of this in under 300 pages. It’s so bonkers that I can only stare at it in awe at what I don’t know, and what I need to be working into my own stories.
I grabbed a Kindle copy and plugged it into Speechify, but I’m gonna buy a paperback for my own library and read it to my kids. Content was clean and the story was full of hard truths about the nature of our government, and just how messed up the entire thing is.
Get one, I highly recommend this book.