This month I’m sharing a few more articles that popped up in my news feed last year and track closely to plotlines I’ve written into my novels. If you missed the Stranger Than Fiction 2024 segment in January that focuses entirely on captagon—the drug at the center of Code Red—you can find it here.
Let’s have a look at the subject of oil and electricity. Both are essential to our way of life and for those of you who’ve read the novels below, you already know the devastating outcome of our country losing power.
Darkness Falls
I first became interested in the topic of oil and the loss of this important resource when I was writing The Second Horseman, a story about a Vegas heist. I imagined what would happen if we cut off the supply of foreign oil as a way to starve the Middle East of the billions they use to buy weapons, support terrorism, and generally inflict suffering around the world. In the end, it turned out to be an idea worthy of a book of its own.
Darkness Falls was born.
The driving force behind the plot is an environmental terrorist who decides to destroy the world’s oil supply in an effort to save the earth from the effects of industrialized society. When I first started to research this book, I hadn’t considered the far-reaching ramifications of a loss of oil. It’s a commodity that goes well beyond filling our gas tanks and is critical to machine lubrication, the production of plastics, and the manufacture of pharmaceuticals.
My imagined ecoterrorist accomplishes his deadly attack via bacteria that eat oil. While bioprospectors have known about oil-eating bacteria for a while now, this past year scientists finally figured out exactly how this process works. It’s a fascinating field of study and these hungry microbes could eventually help us solve problems like how to eradicate plastic waste from the environment. But in the realm of thrillers, technology and biology in the wrong hands can turn deadly.
Total Power
Total Power has made my Stranger Than Fiction predictions list for the third time in a row now and sadly, this year likely won’t be the last. America has an enormous challenge when it comes to our power grid. It’s old, sometimes crumbling, and often completely unprotected. As a result, it has become an increasingly tempting target for external enemies and domestic extremists.
For the past several years, we’ve seen various physical and online incursions. In early 2023, DOE data showed that attacks to critical grid infrastructure had doubled compared to the same time period in 2022. Lawmakers, counterterrorism agents, and industry experts are working to secure it, but it’s a monumental task due to the size and complexity of our energy infrastructure.
These are just a few of the stories that surfaced in 2023:
- A woman and a neo-Nazi leader were charged with conspiring to attack energy facilities around the Baltimore area.
- A lone actor in California was arrested for transformer bombings.
- US officials and industry security officials said Chinese hackers “have accessed the computer systems of two dozen critical entities in the past year…which include a West Coast port and pipeline, a water utility in Hawaii, and the Texas power grid.”
Where does this end? Unfortunately, there’s no way to know but what is certain is that increased vigilance, funding, and attention are needed to shore up this chink in our nation’s armor. A successful coordinated attack could create a massive death toll.
Want more Stranger Than Fiction? Here are the interesting parallels from Part 1 and Part 2 of Stranger Than Fiction 2023.
