I wrote Cyber War I because there was no good fictional content on cyberwar.  Not really.  The first cyberwar story I know was when Clifford Stoll wrote the non-fiction The Cuckoo’s Egg in 1989.  He tracked a spy and wrote about it in first person.  

I was junior in something at IBM at the time.  Can’t recall if I was in data networking, let alone security yet.  My tech career vector has been data networking with a useful understanding of network operating systems, which somehow led to IT systems architecture, back to network, then to security, where I remain stuck.

That tech career vector is what has formed my desires for the better-than-text-book content that can only be delivered with fiction.  Those needs did not go unsatisfied, not by me.  There is other good non-fiction, although mostly cybercrime instead of cyberwar.  You know the difference, right?  “There’s money in cybercrime, but cyberwar will get you killed.”

Read Joseph Menn tell his Fatal System Error story on Barrett Lyon, the Mafia, and Russia.  Or read Kevin Poulsen turn some clever hacker into a super protagonist out to save the world in Kingpin.  Trust me, there’s some non-fiction out there that sets the bar high for fiction.

What I did differently in the blog book-cover photo is it’s literally the front cover, spine, and back cover jpeg of my paperback edition.  After creating the jpeg above, I leveraged the KDP cover-creating publishing tool to add some text to the back cover, and it added the barcode programagically.  What I could not do was move or adjust the text box window, so I hit the return key until I was half way down the page, in order to begin my text on the lower half of the back-cover page.

If you want to be blown away by non-fictional cyberwar, read Malcom Nance’s The Plot to Hack America.  The writing is of course very good, but talk about prescient.  Macolm published it in September of 2016 – before Trump was elected.  You might not believe his story personally, but my point is that it serves as the original source of content for everything about the topic since.

I’ve also shared with you some of my source content that I read around the time of writing the sequel to Cyber War I, Full Spectrum Cyberwar.  That link is to GoodReads, which allowed me to post my unique perspective of the entire book cover.  From there, you can click on the link to buy my book from Amazon – ebook or paperback.  While you’re at Amazon, look for a link in my author page that takes you back to this blog.  If enough of us click through that loop, excessively, I’m wondering if that wouldn’t create an internet looping vortex with enough force to possibly tear a seam into the very fabric of cyberspace itself.  There’s only one way to find out.  Experimentation.

By now, you’ve guessed that this post is pure marketing.  That doesn’t change the fact that you’re still reading and I’m still pitching.  My expectation is for anyone who is my friend on GoodReads to spend $3 on my ebook, read it, and give me a review.  The way reviews work, I probably don’t need overwhelmingly positive  feedback as much as I just need volume.  

Hopefully, GoodReads will sort the best reviews at the top.  So go on, click on that link.  Worse thing that could happen is we take GoodReads down with a massive Distributed Denial of Service attack.