Underground by Suelette Dreyfus - the Greatest Hacker Book
New voyage fatigue 😅💦
After weeks of making the website for A New Voyage (by William Dampier) - from the very beginning with a very simple idea and layout in mind, to the point of pretty good experience for my personal reading and study today - I felt that I learned quite a bit, and that's even before I find the mood to focus and read the book systematically and sequentially.
Although A New Voyage is absolutely great, it's not always easy to read early modern English, and the content is not a simple and easy Crusoe-style adventure story. If Dampier was the first scientific-cum-adventure writer, Defoe recognized the potential of simplified pure adventure within A New Voyage - both of them undoubtedly started something completely new.
The early modern English and the boring part of the content gave me great fatigue 🥵💦, and I really wanted to read a modern book for a change.
🏴☠️ Pirates - the coolest thing, then what...
But, after reading about pirates (of the Caribbean 🏴☠️ and Spice Islands 🌶️🏝️), what's the most interesting thing today, or from late 80s to early 2000s? (I'm sure as hell don't wanna read a New York Times bestseller 😜.) It's ... HACKERS!
Something like last year or this year (2026), I read Underground by Suelette. To say it's amazing is an understatement.
Not the only book about hackers from Australia, but perhaps THE first and THE best, and in my opinion could be THE BEST anywhere. (Don't believe me, search google or better - ask ai models - they know all the raving reviews.)
I personally have something like 20 major hacker books (bio, auto bio, memoirs), probably at least 10 of those are either very good or the hacker is too important to dismiss a book because of average writing.
Note: don't let the cover of modern editions fool you, the book is not about Julian Assange, although he was one of the major hackers being profiled (of his early years) and did an amazing job helping Suelette write the book. Took them more than 3 years of serious journalism to write one of the best hacker books. Both are seriously and technically competent and obviously very serious about the project.
"Exactly 300 years"
The book was published in 1997, exactly 300 years after A New Voyage, I think that's pretty neat.
Pirates, hackers - they are very much alike - in fact, much of the early Internet culture is about pirating free warez and sharing knowledge!
🤩 Talking about the golden age of sailing, and the golden age of hacking!
🎥 A great hacker documentary
In 2003, Australia made a very solid documentary, In The Realm of the Hackers, about one of the hackers profiled in the book. Suelette was one of the producers.
I'm not saying Australia has a thing for pirates or hackers (as criminals), but Dampier was the first (pirate and) scientist to ever sail there on the first ever government-sponsored long-distance ocean voyage purely for scientific purpose in human history. As a penal colony, plenty of criminals or the lower sorts were shipped to Australia as well, how could they not sympathize with them - it was the Aussies' original core identity, and probably why they still talk differently today 😅.
They certainly have that teenage rebellion spirit, but since it's a very small country in population and very much white, such luxury was tolerated. Besides, who could forget Guadalcanal - the famous pre-mature campaign America risked just to save Australia. (Aussies were literally arming themselves with shovels ready for a fight 😂, talking about how much Brits let them down.)
🆓 Free online
What's even better is - the book is free online.
There are great arguments to be made about free online version. I believe most of the time it's the better strategy to offer this option - most books don't make money anyway - it will not really affect the income and definitely presents much better chance especially in the long run for many more audience which apart from the money was the most important thing for anyone who even bothered to write (certainly they wanted to be read - guarding the copyright of something most (poor) people might just read is stupid).
Since it's free, why bother with this website?
The answer is at the very beginning of this intro - what I learned in the last few weeks - the reading and study experience is unmatched comparing to reading a txt file, a plain html page, a pdf, or a physical copy (if you still have that ancient fetish).
What I am saying here is, A New Voyage was the best about pirates and scientists, and I claim that Underground is the best about hackers and scientists.
By the way, we are all scientists at heart, the only difference is how and how much you were educated to think and behave like a slave, a businessman, or a scientist.
A personal project
This is a personal project for personal use, but it's also open to the public. Since this reading experience on mobile is quite unique - a simple short web address, simple html but with minimal nice styling, page by page content ... it's in a way better than reading a kindle ebook, and mostly better than reading a pdf on non-mobile devices.
Not to sh*t on pdfs, in fact, I very much love ❤️ pdfs and their various styles.