{"id":8385,"date":"2020-02-19T09:20:22","date_gmt":"2020-02-19T14:20:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=8385"},"modified":"2020-02-19T09:27:03","modified_gmt":"2020-02-19T14:27:03","slug":"net-force-dark-web","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=8385","title":{"rendered":"***Net Force: Dark Web"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"photo:<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Jerome Priesler\u2019s new techno-thriller, Net Force: Dark Web<\/a><\/em> carries on a series created by the late Tom Clancy and Steve Pieczenik, but lacks the immersive, gotta-turn-the-page qualities of Clancy\u2019s work. It\u2019s certainly true that cybersecurity becomes more consequential by the day, but this book doesn\u2019t make the case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

True to current thriller-writing style, it comprises short\nchapters of a few pages that skip around to cover the actions of a large number\nof players, among them: black hat hackers versus white hat hackers, corrupt\nAfrican leaders, the President of the United States and her new cyber-initiative\nteam, CIA and FBI operatives, parking garage attendants, and moms with kids. In\nother words, a lot. Too much, in fact. If an author expects to maintain your\ninterest for around 700 pages, the length of the paperback version, at least\nsome of those characters should be written in enough depth to make you care\nabout them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story starts strong, with a prologue set in 2023 in\nMalta (why this was a \u201cprologue\u201d and not just Chapter 1, I don\u2019t know, as it\u2019s\ncontemporaneous with the rest of the story and integral to it). A young woman\nwho has something to do with software development flees through city streets,\ntrailed not just by men in vehicles, but also by a drone following her every\ntwist and turn. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just as you’re rooting for her escape, in a nice reversal, she\u2019s captured, and you learn her pursuers are CIA and she may not be one of the good guys after all. Then the action moves to Romania where black hat operators plan to use the woman\u2019s clever software to take control of a wide array of computers. They probably can\u2019t anticipate the full ramifications of their project, given the near-future pervasiveness of the Internet of Things. The CIA wants the woman\u2019s help, but she\u2019s resisting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I won\u2019t go into how all the other plot threads and descriptive\nelements merge with this set-up, except to say some of them don\u2019t. The entire\nAfrica plotline was extraneous to the story; deleting it would have reduced the\npage count. Likewise, Priesler describes every new character at length, whether\nthey reappear or not. You may regret struggling to remember all those backstories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What makes a techno-thriller work is confidence that the author has the technology down pat (good examples are Ghost Fleet<\/a><\/em> or This is Gomorrah<\/a><\/em>). Inevitably, a moment arrives when the author goes out on a limb, when you must suspend disbelief and just hang in, but I never reached that point of trust. As far as I can tell from his past works, Priesler has not written this type of book before, and it shows. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Photo: openDemocracy, creative commons license <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jerome Priesler\u2019s new techno-thriller, Net Force: Dark Web carries on a series created by the late Tom Clancy and Steve Pieczenik, but lacks the immersive, gotta-turn-the-page qualities of Clancy\u2019s work. It\u2019s certainly true that cybersecurity becomes more consequential by the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6582,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"***Net Force: Dark Web - The Tom Clancy association means this techno-thriller about cybersecurity risks may get some attention. It\u2019s a great topic, but this book falls short. ","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[40,126,453,186,32],"tags":[1700,1701],"class_list":["post-8385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","category-reading-2","category-science-fiction","category-technology","category-thriller","tag-jerome-priesler","tag-net-force-dark-web"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/vweisfeld.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/cyberspace.jpg?fit=300%2C225&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2bf","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8385"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8385\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8387,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8385\/revisions\/8387"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}