Hacking Galileo by Fenton Wood is many things: an adventure, a lament for an age now lost, even a manual for subverting obsolete technology.

This book is for the adults who once were the spergy GenX and GenY kids who are the stars of this book. The kids who built radios and telescopes in their garages. The kids who hiked off in the desert and came back days later and their parents didn't even blink. It was a different world, but this book captures what it felt like to live in it.

Hacking Galileo uses the method of good "hard" science fiction, instructing the reader in scientific or engineering principles using an adventure story to keep things from becoming tedious. Despite the fact that I think science fiction isn't a real genre at all, I do have a great fondness for the many authors who successfully hybridize adventure stories with futuristic speculation.

However, Hacking Galileo has another side to it; one that would have horrified the truest of true believers in science who coined the term "science fiction" precisely to exclude the kind of fantastic speculation that you get here. Readers of Fenton's earlier works will not be surprised, but the Terrible Secret of Space would have given the Futurians fits.

The Futurians wanted to make their readers good socialists by throwing away the fantastical, but it kept sneaking in the back, because it makes for good stories. Hacking Galileo is a good story. Fenton Wood blends the hardest of hard sci-fi, with orbital mechanics, antenna engineering, and good old fashioned social engineering with some of the craziest stuff I have seen in print.

That it all hangs together is a testament to Fenton's skill, and a lot of fun besides. Almost as much fun as those boys had saving the world. ( )