Mara Turing: Adventures of a Hacker

Harry Potter got a whole generation wanting to be wizards, and the series The Queen’s Gambit sent chess board sales through the roof. The obvious question follows: can a novel get a kid wanting to be a hacker? With that idea in mind I sit down with Javi Padilla, author of the Mara Turing saga.

Javi is an internet entrepreneur from Seville (he founded El Desmarque, among other projects) who trained as a journalist and one day got the urge to write. That’s how Mara was born, an eleven-year-old girl who gets a call from a hacker uncle who vanished years earlier and who, following his instructions, learns to program in a New York garage so she can talk to him in secret. The story started out as a trilogy and is now heading toward six books; they’ve sold 16,000 copies and a translator is putting them into English.

What interests me most is the crusade behind it. Javi insists on separating hacker from cracker (the hackers are the good guys) and on kids going from being programmed by their screens to doing the programming themselves. He tells the story of a girl from Seville who signed up for robotics after reading it and ended up winning a national prize. We agree on something simple: a calling is better sparked by interest than imposed.