The Hacker Ethic

Well this is not really a novel, but it's a great book about real hackers. It's by Pekka Hinamen and has a forward by Linus Torvalds.

This is from one of the reviews:
"At last we have a book about the ethics of true hackers . . .not the criminals and vandals that the press calls hackers today, but the idealistic pioneers whose ethics of openness, enablement and cooperation laid the cornerstone for our new economy."