I’m back this month to wrap up my recap of last year’s news articles that have details that closely resemble novels I’ve published. Sometimes the world feels random and chaotic, but if you follow all the threads, they tend to weave themselves together in predictable ways. Technology changes but nefarious elements are always lurking, causing history to wobble along like a broken record. Thank goodness. Otherwise, I’d have to find a real job.
In case you missed it, here’s Part 1 of this year’s Stranger Than Fiction predictions.
Darkness Falls
In the early 2000s, there were a lot of conversations about energy prices and reducing foreign oil dependence, while interest in renewable energy was increasing.
It got me to thinking how important petroleum products are to modern life. Not just for transportation, but also for plastics, pharmaceuticals, clothing, and machine lubrication. Virtually everything that makes our lives possible has at least a passing connection to petroleum.
In the same way that we don’t fuel trains with coal, my assumption was that these products would lose their importance as technology progresses. But what if our access to oil was cut off suddenly? Over the course of a few weeks or months?
In Darkness Falls, an environmental terrorist sets out to do this. But how? After a great deal of research and thought, I landed on an oil-eating bacteria that is let loose in our oil deposits and spreads across the globe.
Over the last ten+ years, scientists have discovered a number of organisms that do something similar and many function much as I’d imagined. Fortunately, they’re being used for good, not evil—cleaning up spills and eating the plastic in our oceans. Now I find myself wondering what ancient lifeforms we’ll find lying dormant as our polar ice caps melt. No doubt they’ll spawn a whole new world of what-if scientific thrillers.
Total Power
I’ve featured Total Power a number of times in my year-end roundup because America continues to see homegrown terrorists attempting to sabotage our country’s power grid. In November, a white supremist affiliated with several extremist groups plotted to fly a drone carrying three pounds of C-4 into a Nashville substation. He didn’t realize it, but he was working alongside undercover FBI agents and was arrested shortly after he arrived at his launch site.
This book was one of the scariest I’ve ever researched. The US has more than 6,000 power stations and nearly a half million miles of high-voltage lines. Many are located in rural parts of the country and are minimally protected. I originally set the book in August, but as I gamed out the scenarios, I couldn’t find a realistic way that my hero could save the country from collapsing. The answer was to move the attack to the middle of winter when the effects would be more drawn out and provide time for a solution.
If the American people actually took the time to understand how vulnerable we are to these types of attacks, I believe they’d demand swift action from Congress to secure our power supply. One day we may live to regret our inaction.
The Patriot Attack
The US military is unquestionably the most effective fighting force in history, but it’s much more than that. It’s a complicated collection of interrelated organizations often governed by tradition. It also operates with a moral compass that prevents it from unleashing its full capabilities on the enemy.
In The Patriot Attack, I wondered what would happen if a major power—in this case Japan—created an organization that was less a traditional military than a next-generation war machine. Everything would be on the table—from miniature nukes to bioweapons to fully autonomous offensive systems. The motto would be small, cheap, and autonomous.
Since 2014 when I first imagined the book, DARPA has been working hard to make my ideas reality. This naval drone is very much what I imagined—lurking in hibernation mode on the sea floor until being called into action against enemy shipping.
Further, the AI that made this dogfight possible is taken almost directly from the pages of my book. In my mind, though, the drones were hyper-maneuverable ramming machines cheap enough to deploy in swarms.
As we continue to watch Ukraine, it seems that once again we’re having to rethink how modern wars between sophisticated opponents will play out. Weapon systems and tactics will become deadly beyond all imagination. Will that be enough for humanity to back away from conflict? I doubt it.
Want more Stranger Than Fiction? Here are 2024’s Predictions Part 1 and Part 2.