One of the goals of leaving the amazing Rapp-verse was to move away from the problems of the Middle East and dive deep into the rapidly evolving dangers of the modern world. If you were born in 1300 and were lucky enough to live to be a hundred, what would you have seen? The development of a slightly better cannon? A marginally taller cathedral? The development of mechanical clocks that only existed in a few of Europe’s wealthiest town squares?
By contrast, I now have to constantly monitor the news for new technologies that might make entire chapters obsolete before they’re even finished. Fade In had some fascinating topics to tackle and the research necessary took a lot of time and energy. It’s not your dad’s wheel gun anymore. This stuff’s getting complicated.
Artificial Intelligence
For good reason, AI is on everyone’s mind right now. When I started Fade In, it wasn’t much more than media hype. At the end, it had begun to permeate every aspect of our lives.
A lot of people think about it becoming sentient and ending up in a Terminator/Matrix-type dystopia, but that’s unlikely. It’s actually more insidious than that. Autonomous cars eliminating an entire category of jobs, deep fake videos, increasingly sophisticated internet scams and social media bots, and independent weapons. I explored a number of these angles, including an autonomous anti-personnel drone that was terrifying because I know that it’s inevitable. With sophisticated signal jamming, there’s no question that these will be the weapons of the future. Let’s hope they’re a little more predictable than the current version of ChatGPT.
COVID
I did a detailed review of the origin of the disease, which was intriguing in that it was so inconclusive. The intelligence agencies can’t agree on whether the virus was created in the Wuhan lab or spilled over from a nearby wet market.
The critical piece here is that the former is so plausible. As technology advances, it becomes easier and easier to produce weapons once unimaginable of mass destruction. How will the world survive when someone with an undergrad degree can create a bioweapon capable of killing billions? Or maybe skip the degree and just ask AI.
Medical Advances
We are quickly entering a new age of custom therapies that can be designed to work with a single person’s genetic makeup. Cancer treatments, anti-aging strategies, and even physical and mental improvements never considered by Mother Nature. They’re expensive, though, and their potency is going to get way ahead of their affordability.
Are we moving into an era that the hyper-wealthy will no longer die of cancer? Age more slowly than the rest of us? Will their children be faster, stronger, smarter, and better looking than us? How will we compete when they’re not just richer than us, but genetically superior? The really scary thing is that this isn’t just something playing out in my book. Some of it is already happening in the real world.
Population Collapse
This isn’t something that most thrillers touch on because it’s kind of a slow emergency, but it plays a part in the book and it turned out to be a fascinating subject.
With the exception of some time around the plague, the human population has always grown, and since 1930 has flat out exploded. It’s hard to believe, but when I was born, the number of people on earth was less than half of what it is today.
The ramifications of this are massive and far reaching, affecting everything from economics to geopolitics, to the environment.
China is a country with one of the steepest declines and it’s interesting to think about how that will play out. One terrifying theory relates to a potential invasion of Taiwan. Because of China’s rapidly aging population and the fact that their opponent will inevitably be at the forefront of AI air and sea drones, their attack window is closing. Will that loudly ticking clock goad them into making one of the most disastrous moves in modern history?
Now that you’ve read about my research for the book, do you know the story Behind the Book?