The Shockwave Rider

The Shockwave Rider is a science fiction novel by John Brunner, originally published in 1975. It is notable for its hero's use of computer cracking skills to escape pursuit in a dystopian future, and for the coining of the word "worm" to describe a program that propagates itself through a computer network.

It is even more notable because it is about the first book to ever describe the internet (although the book calls it the data-net) as something prevalent in everyone's everyday life. If you read it when it came out, you might have trouble understanding why the threat to destroy the data-net is taken as almost the ultimate threat. Today, it is pretty easy to realize the economic and other disasters that would happen.

Tropes in this work:

 * The Cracker: This is how the government sees Nick.
 * Deus Est Machina: Well, the machine isn't exactly God, but it does see all and the ending is, without giving it away, interesting.
 * Everything Is Online: In the near future, everything is.
 * The Government
 * Government Agency of Fiction: The Bureau of Data Processing.
 * Heel Face Turn:.
 * Inspector Javert:.
 * La Résistance: Precipice
 * The Mafia:.
 * Natasha Grant must've been having a hell of a time.
 * My Country, Right or Wrong:.
 * The Neidermeyer: Freeman's boss.
 * Prophecy Twist: The Delphi pool.
 * Twenty Minutes Into the Future