Tom Clancy's Net Force

About the Tom Clancy's Net Force series

Net Force imagines a near-future FBI cyber-crime division created to police a world that has become dangerously dependent on its own networks -- power grids, financial markets, even a shared virtual-reality space -- against hackers, terrorists and rogue states who treat the internet as a battlefield. Created by Tom Clancy and psychiatrist Steve Pieczenik but written throughout by other novelists, the original run (1998-2006, all by Steve Perry) follows commander Alex Michaels and his team as they chase increasingly ambitious digital threats, extrapolating the still-young public internet of the late 1990s into a plausible, occasionally prophetic vision of a networked society under constant low-grade siege.

After a thirteen-year gap, Jerome Preisler relaunched the series in 2019 with a new cast and a thoroughly updated premise for the smartphone-and-social-media era, while keeping Net Force's core idea intact: a dedicated federal unit built specifically because ordinary law enforcement can't keep pace with crime that moves at network speed. Both eras share the same techno-thriller DNA as Clancy's other franchises -- real (or near-future) technology treated with procedural seriousness -- but told at a brisker, more plot-driven clip than Clancy's own Jack Ryan novels, with cybercrime and infrastructure sabotage standing in for the geopolitics of his solo work.