Thrilling Tales Hub

One of the hazards of writing technological thrillers is that reality has absolutely no respect for publication schedules.

You spend a year inventing something that feels just a little beyond the edge of possible. Then you open the news…And there it is.

This week I’m heading to Killer Nashville, where The Forbidden Strain is a Silver Falchion finalist for Best Thriller. I’m also sitting on a panel called Using Current News to Drive Plots. The timing is almost comical…

Iranian hardliners are reportedly considering whether prolonging conflict into the U.S. midterm elections could increase political pressure on President Trump.

Ukraine is attacking the supply network carrying military material between Iran and Russia. And then there are the drones.

Ukraine has become one of the world’s laboratories for AI-assisted warfare. Drones can identify and track targets, continue missions when communications are lost, and increasingly make decisions faster than the humans supervising them.

For now, the official line is human in the loop. Those four words bother me. Because sooner or later someone is going to ask the obvious question: What if the human is the slowest part of the system?

Then somebody removes him…

That question is uncomfortably close to the one at the center of my new novel, The Babel Protocol. The book asks what happens when we create an artificial intelligence smarter than ourselves—and then, with perfectly good intentions, keep giving it more authority.

Financial systems. Military intelligence. National defense… Nuclear weapons.

At what point does the adviser become the decision-maker? And when does the decision-maker decide it no longer needs permission? That sounded wonderfully fictional when I started writing the book.

Not so much anymore.

I ran into the same problem with The Forbidden Strain. That novel began with genetic engineering, longevity research, and another very human question: Just because we can do something, does that mean we should?

Apparently I have a theme. Scientists build something remarkable. Governments see possibilities. Someone decides the rules are getting in the way. Things go badly.

Works every time.

Thriller writers aren’t fortune-tellers. We don’t predict the future. We watch the world, connect a few dots, and ask: What if?

Lately, the distance between what if and what happened this morning seems to be getting awfully small.

The Forbidden Strain goes to Killer Nashville this week as a Silver Falchion finalist and The Babel Protocol releases September 1.

Preorder The Babel Protocol on Amazon

I sincerely hope it remains fiction.