Welcome to the June issue of Hacker Chronicles!

My newsletter turns five this month! I'll spend a little time on that and ask you for feedback.

I've also finally published the hacker fiction and cyberpunk timeline online! It took me a year. You're the first to get the link.

You've got one more month to read Michael Crichton's The Terminal Man before I review it. Borrow it from your library or buy a copy. It's 250 pages of brain-implant sci-fi from the early 1970s.

Enjoy!
/John

Writing Update

I was racing toward the halfway mark of my 60k-word goal for Yield. But my writing time was cut short by a beer trip with friends and a sudden feeling that I had to get the hacker fiction timeline done.

As you might recall, I'm writing this novel out of order. Something I reflected on just the other week: the trap of revising what you've already written instead of pushing forward is much more potent when you write out of order. You're jumping around anyway, so there is no "I can't go back until the first draft is done" rule to stick to. Honestly, I might return to linear writing on my fourth novel, for that reason alone.

Celebrating Five Years of Hacker Chronicles 🎉

My first issue went out in June 2021, titled Hackers, Crackers, and Cybercriminals.

Cadence

I remember back then I was worried about the cadence, that y'all would expect more frequent issues, say, weekly. But I wasn't ready for such a commitment and it didn't make sense to me to send you something that often. Updates to word count would barely move.

On the other hand, not having a schedule at all felt like setting myself up for failure. I know I can be consistent and stick with things that I've promised to do. So monthly it was.

Content

I've tried out a few things with my monthly feature. Reviews of books and movies are a staple. But I've written about how hackers dress and talk, about research I've done for my own writing, and about the writing community, including events like NaNoWriMo. I've also interviewed fellow authors and the most recent thing I added was read-alongs of great books, starting with Neuromancer.

Please let me know what you'd like more of by replying to this email! It's OK to say you only read the writing updates, if that's your thing.

June Feature: The Hacker Fiction and Cyberpunk Timeline Online

You might recall that I gave a keynote talk at last year's Security Fest in Gothenburg. I gave you a summary of my slides in the June 2025 newsletter issue and it was all about the hacker fiction and cyberpunk timeline.

Just preparing that talk was a big undertaking. But I had this idea all along that I should publish this timeline as an evergreen thing. I should make sure the history of my genre is out there beyond what's on Wikipedia and blogs.

As said, it took me a year. But now it's out! I've not posted about it anywhere yet, just silently published it on my website.

You are the first ones to get the link: https://hackerfiction.net/timeline/

It looks good on an iPhone and even better in a desktop browser. If any of you can tell me what it looks like on an Android, I'd be happy. It has over 60 entries already and I still have work to do on the descriptions of each piece.

The timeline is the result of me writing this newsletter. Five years ago, I decided that I'm not just going to write about myself and my books here, but about others' work in the hacker fiction space. Eventually that body of work became large enough for me to give the talk at Security Fest, and giving that talk made me realize that this information is missing from the world.

Currently Reading

I finished Chris Miller's non-fiction book Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology.

Now I'm reading Death of a Red Heroine by Qiu Xiaolong. It's his debut novel and a mystery set in Shanghai in the 1990s. Beyond the police-procedural parts, it features the development of China as it adopted a market economy under Deng Xiaoping, lots of Chinese food, flashbacks to Mao's Cultural Revolution, and poetry since the main character is both chief detective and a poet. It received the 2001 Anthony Award for Best First Novel.