Five fictional hackers who use their skills for good

James Swallow is an author and scriptwriter with over fifteen years of experience in fiction, television, radio, journalism, new media, and video games. He is a three-time New York Times bestselling author of more than thirty-five novels with over 750,000 books currently in print in nine different worldwide territories. He was nominated by the BAFTA for his writing on the critically acclaimed Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Ghost is the latest novel in Swallow's Marc Dane thriller series.

At CrimeReads, the author tagged five of fiction’s greatest hacker-heroes, including:

Lisabeth Salander

If Kevin Flynn was the archetype for Eighties hackers, Lisabeth Salander is undoubtedly the model for the Oughts. Her creator Stieg Larsson suggested she was a “grown-up Pippi Longstocking”, but clearly one with a life full of dark turns and grim realities. A wiry, asocial goth-geek, Salander first appears in Larsson’s 2005 novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and swiftly sets out her persona as the damaged but defiant hacker dedicated to exposing the violent and the hateful. In the following books – The Girl Who Played with Fire (2006) and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest (2007), Salander’s journey uncovers bleak truths about her own past intertwined with conspiracies that she drags into the light. After Larsson’s death, the character has returned in The Girl in the Spider’s Web (2015) and The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye (2017), continued by David Lagercrantz, and played variously by Noomi Rapace, Rooney Mara and Claire Foy in movie adaptations of the novels.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo made Amy S. Foster's list of five books featuring women who shoot first and ask questions later, E(ugene). C. Myers's top five list of books featuring heroic hackers, Fanny Blake's top five books about revenge, Kat Rosenfield's list of the eight most famous body parts in fiction, Rebecca Jane Stokes's top ten list of books about women in peril…who fought back, Maureen Corrigan's top five list of crime & mystery novels of 2008, Camilla Läckberg's top ten list of Swedish crime novels, and is one of Lynda Bellingham's six best books. The Millennium Trilogy is one of Ken Follett's five best trilogies, and Lisbeth Salander is among Panayiota Kuvetakis's top ten fictional female friends we'd like to have as anything close to real-life friends and Anne Holt's top ten female detectives.

--Marshal Zeringue