In “Breaking and Entering: The Extraordinary Story of a Hacker Called ‘Alien,’” Jeremy N. Smith tells a tale of computer intrigue, but not through the eyes of the black hats whose misdeeds have dominated recent political news. Instead, Smith wants you to meet the people behind the help desk — the tech gurus and security consultants standing between us and digital carnage.
Further complicating things, Smith gives every character and company a pseudonym and changes the locations of key events. We are told this is to protect their privacy, but the effect is that Alien, on whom so much is riding, feels distant. This distance is compounded by the fact that “Breaking and Entering” includes long stretches of dialogue and precise details from decades-old events. When you never quite know how much about a character is fictionalized, such precision can make the scenes feel reimagined. ( )

For a computer professional, this book is appallingly hard to read. I imagine it would be like reading a book billed as "the story of an elite guitarist", and finding breathless descriptions of the time they deployed a diminished seventh chord, or tuned their low E down to a D.
But in all fairness, I suspect it's not much fun for anyone else, either.

By about midway through the book, I had the strong suspicion that the author was mostly interested in the fact that he's writing a about a Girl Hacker, and in fact, one that he once vaguely knew, and that she sometimes had sex - and this latter fact seems to capture more of his attention than one would expect from a book about an elite woman succeeding in a man's world.

The book could be described as "cinematic", but only if we can use that word as a pejorative. It was hard to decide whether Smith is just a bad writer, or whether he was trying to make it easy for the transition to the screenplay, but his writing is bad in the way contemporary movies are bad. Every punch is telegraphed, characters conveniently wear halos if we're meant to like them, every success is prepped by a litany of the consequences of failure and every setback is a chance to get back up and, darn it, try again. You can hear the soundtrack playing in Smith's head, and he's not a good composer.

But mostly, you can see the set pieces that Smith knows will really kill on the screen, and you can see him writing with one hand on his keyboard and the other thinking about the film rights.

This is all a shame, because underneath the terrible writing about Girl Hacker, there is clearly a fascinating story still waiting to be told, about a real woman who is almost certainly a lot more interesting than the caricature Smith brings to the page (and inevitably, to the screen)

I would love to have that story. Perhaps the real Alien will tell it some time. ( )

Poorly sourced. This guy wants to be Tracy Kidder so badly, but he forgot Kidder's strength: spending time and getting immersed in a person and subject long enough to speak truthfully and with authority.

Just read "Soul of A New Machine" instead. ( )