Ross Anderson
Going Viral
Worm: The First Digital World War
By Mark Bowden
Grove Press/Atlantic Monthly Press 245pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
As everything moves online, so do crime and conflict. About twice as many British households suffer fraud as suffer burglary, and the government is noisily boosting the cyber-defence budget even as it cuts our armed forces to levels last seen before the American Civil War.
So what will happen to crime thrillers, war histories and spy novels? The move online isn’t just closing bookstores and squeezing publishers. It seems to be removing the subject matter of half our literature from the human experience and replacing it with something much less familiar. Will Neuromancer and Cryptonomicon
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