When I read technology news these days, I feel impressed and excited—and mostly terrified. We’re advancing so quickly, with so many pitfalls. Self-driving cars that crash, Bitcoin scams that deplete retirement savings, deepfake videos that can change election outcomes, algorithms that redirect children to step-by-step instructions for self-harm.
It’s sometimes hard to know how to talk about the risks of technologies that seemed implausible until about five minutes ago. Enter tech thrillers, which peel back the ethical layers of our relationship to technology, entertaining us while also forcing us to confront the consequences of constant innovation.
The term “thriller” is notoriously vague. Some people think a thriller must have spies or gunfights. Others expect a marital cat-and-mouse. To me, a thriller is simply a novel that’s fast-paced and exciting (a subjective assessment, to be sure), with a dark tone and life-or-death consequences. In tech thrillers, that darkness is rooted in the ever-mounting tensions between technology and human nature.
These novels usually involve some speculative element, exaggerating an existing technology to throw its dangers into relief. Robots become fully sentient. Virtual reality becomes completely immersive. Devices begin actively surveilling humans. Lately, these fictional scenarios tend to focus on artificial intelligence—not surprising, given the increasingly urgent public conversations about AI.
When reading these novels, it can sometimes be hard to tell where the real technology ends and the speculative technology starts. With artificial intelligence and biotech evolving minute-to-minute, some readers might incorrectly identify some very real threats as imaginary.
This is the challenge and the risk of writing about technology. In the years it takes to write a book (or even in the twelve months it takes to go from copyedits to bookshelves), the world can evolve to make the novel’s contents obsolete—or all too real. Some deepfake horrors that I added to my latest novel, Vantage Point, seemed speculative when I started writing it, and are now accepted parts of reality.
Colin Winnette, whose recent novel Users offers a damning look inside a near-future virtual-reality company, had a similar experience: “I wrote what I thought was a kind of exaggeration of reality, and then over the course of the book’s publication, reality quickly caught up with that exaggeration and everything in the book seemed suddenly more possible in a way I hadn’t really anticipated. It was kind of thrilling, but also terrifying.”
The best tech thrillers embrace this risk. The books on this list are living on the blade edge of progress, using fiction’s vast possibilities to imagine what comes next, for tech and for the people who use it. In a world where tech companies pursue innovation for innovation’s sake, these novels redirect our focus to the human element, trying to anticipate the potential social costs of these advances. And they do it in a way that keeps you on the edge of your seat the whole time.
Michael Crichton, Prey
You can’t talk about techno-thrillers without talking about Michael Crichton, and it’s almost impossible to choose a best novel from his famous body of work. But while Crichton is probably best remembered for his treatment of biological technology in The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park (for which I will always have a soft spot, having spent most of my childhood wearing out the VHS tapes of the movie adaptations), the book that best captures the potential horror inherent in artificial intelligence is his 2002 novel Prey, in which scientists develop a type of nanobots that become sentient and murderous, capable of infesting and devouring humans. As the killer swarms begin infecting the scientists who created them, a computer programmer must act quickly to destroy the swarms before they kill his loved ones. One section in which nanobots create perfect replicas of characters resonates with contemporary conversations about deepfakes, and the novel overall speaks to rising fears about artificial intelligence becoming autonomous.
Samanta Schweblin, Little Eyes
Have you ever had a conversation with a friend about an ocean-themed costume party and then gotten an Instagram ad for shark onesies a few hours later? Have you ever wondered how much our devices truly see into our lives? If so, you might empathize with the characters in Samanta Schweblin’s Little Eyes, translated into English by Megan McDowell. In the universe Schweblin imagines, the world has become enchanted with kentukis, an electronic pet equipped with a camera that allows people thousands of miles away to observe your every move. Through short chapters spanning the globe, Schweblin tracks the allure and danger of these Tamagotchis-on-steroids, exploring how far people will go in search of connection. The novel’s structure is more fragmented and experimental than your typical thriller, but the foreboding tone and pervasive violence can go head-to-head with the darkest crime fiction.
Sierra Greer, Annie Bot
Sierra Greer took the book world by storm last spring with Annie Bot, a novel narrated by a sex robot who gains sentience at her owner’s request, then starts to dream of a life beyond him. This novel is a clever twist on the classic domestic thriller, using the intimate environment of a home to broach broader societal conversations about freedom and artificial intelligence. After all, “sex and lies” has a whole new meaning when one party was invented for sex and has only learned how to lie. Greer executes the concept beautifully: Annie’s voice is the perfect blend of robotic and human. I loved seeing Annie gradually come into her autonomy, learning to fend for herself and protect others, even as her thwarted owner becomes increasingly violent and vengeful. In most of the other novels on this list, technological developments are the source of danger. In Annie Bot, the tech itself is the protagonist. This reversal creates a psychological thrill ride that also delivers a powerful commentary on power, identity, and humanity.
Ken Liu, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories
I learned about Ken Liu’s work from one of my students, Luis Ferrer, who wrote his senior thesis on Liu this fall. This collection pulls together eighteen stories and a novel excerpt, some of which take place in fantasy worlds or distant futures. But the collection also features other stories that speak to more specific present fears. There’s a series of several linked stories beginning with “The Gods Will Not Be Chained”—the series Luis focused on, and which was also the inspiration for the TV show Pantheon—set in a world where it has become possible to upload individuals’ brains to computers, turning them into digital consciousnesses and effectively allowing their minds to “live” forever. In another story, “Byzantine Empathy,” cryptocurrency-literate nonprofits begin turning real atrocities into violent VR experiences to shock users into donating.
The story that hit me a little too close to home was “Real Artists,” in which an aspiring filmmaker learns that the films she loves are secretly made by artificial intelligence. An advanced algorithm called “Big Semi” tracks audiences’ real-time responses and creates countless story iterations until it reaches the “exact emotional curve guaranteed to make them laugh and cry in the right places”—then uses this information to make “perfect films.” When Big Semi’s film studio offers the protagonist a job, she discovers that in this world (as in our own), AI’s success depends on the exploitation of human creative expertise.
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