Ryan M. Patrick

Had a (shockingly good) Twitter interaction earlier this month

Decided to write a bit more about it. And given my background I may be one of the few people who’s able to coherently do so.

In this blog post, I’ll talk about what a technothriller is, and then break them into two camps – the “military” technothrillers written by Tom Clancy and others that the Twitter post referred to, and then the “science” camp led by Michael Crichton and others. Then, we’ll discuss why the latter is still going strong while the former is fading into obscurity. My hypothesis is that the military ones are becoming harder to write (see my Twitter post again!) because of where new military technologies, capabilities, and whatnot are going while the science ones are becoming easier as what was thought of as “science fiction” becomes more mainstream.

Technothriller

It’s arguably my favorite genre to read, but can be hard to define.

The best one I’ve come up with is “High-stakes thrillers where real or plausible advanced technology, systems engineering, and domain knowledge drive the plot and create tension.” The science isn’t tangential, it’s crucial to the plot. Jules Verne’s stuff is probably the Ur-example, but they were popularized in the late 20th century with the aforementioned Clancy and Crichton.

And, again, given my background, it’s no wonder why I like them, yet am also very critical of the bad ones. I want them to be realistic, to feel like the worlds I’ve lived and worked in, but have that slight speculative element that makes them not a straight thriller. I’ve written about this in the past; there’s a sliding sale of accuracy vs rule of cool that is hard to nail down and get right.

Authors that I’d categorize as technothriller writers:

• Tom Clancy
• Michael Crichton
• Clive Cussler
• James Rollins
• A.G. Riddle
• Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child
• Stephen Coonts
• Matthew Reilly
• Dale Brown
• Larry Bond
• Daniel Suarez
• And of course, yours truly!

They’re almost all male (I can’t think of a single female technothriller author other than some sci-fi authors writing near-future stuff; Nancy Kress has a couple that fit this category) and the majority of them have subject-matter experience (Dale Brown was a USAF pilot, Crichton was a doctor, etc). And as I mentioned earlier, they fit into one of two categories. One is thriving, one has stagnated. We’ll go with the stagnated one first.

Military Technothrillers

This is what a lot of people think of when the word is mentioned.

And for good reason! Tom Clancy was one of the biggest authors of the 80s and 90s, his name still adorns best-selling video games (and zombie books written by others!) decades after his death. The good ones are super-realistic military thrillers with one speculative or alternative aspect (the Red October, Dale Brown’s super jets, Larry Bond’s complex geopolitics) that use high technology as a crucial piece of the novel or movie. The authors in this category (Those 3 + Stephen Coonts) have sold millions upon millions of novels.

But they don’t hit the same way that they used to. Outside of Ghost Fleet, I can’t think of a single military-style technothriller that’s made it big over the last few decades. And there’s two reasons for that, both related to classification and domain knowledge.

In the Cold War, the military kept plenty of things secret, but the majority of technological advancements took place in almost full view of the American public. It is really hard to hide large pieces of hardware, test articles, and whatnot – see the recent sighting at Area 51 – and that was where the American and Soviet militaries were spending their time building. And, to build on that, they both showed off new military advancements in a show of force. It was the Cold War, after all!

That let people like Tom Clancy – an insurance salesman! – to write a hyper-realistic military technothriller like The Hunt for Red October using only open-world sources. He didn’t get everything right, but he got enough right that someone in the know (like me) is drawn into his world and fully engrossed in the story. I’m not pointing out little inaccuracies like the meme below.

But as the Cold War ended, there was no need to show off our latest, greatest aircraft, missiles, and other military hardware. Huge swaths of technology went under cover and still hasn’t emerged.

And that’s not even the worst part. That would be that capability development moved from hardware to software, and that’s not observable like a new test article at Tonopah or Groom Lake! Look at how LLMs were used in the recent Iran conflict. Or imagine the difference between what we claim our aircraft and spacecraft can do and what they’re actually capable of.

Military technothrillers have declined because they’re no longer realistic. The people who don’t know anything are writing them (and some are doing ok, don’t get me wrong) while the people in the know…they can’t write them because of NDAs and security clearances and whatnot. Ask me how I know!

Science Technothrillers

This is the classic Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child book, and this is what I write (Lag Delay and Crush Depth fit into this category). It’s just as realistic, but not necessarily focused on the military conflict piece – more on the effects of science and technology on society or people.

And they are killing it right now. Andy Weir (who I’m not a huge fan of, for what it’s worth) is huge, every James Rollins novel hits the NYT bestseller list, and the Jurassic Park/World franchise created by Michael Crichton is still going strong.

But why have these continued to thrive while the military technothrillers have fallen off?

Because we see technology progress every single day and the rate of progress seems to go almost parabolic. Look at SpaceX and Blue Origin and the massive rockets we’re sending to space, look at the proliferations of LLMs and how we’ve built them into our daily routines, look at how advanced our cell phones are compared to the bricks I used in the late 90s.

We see technology and science progress and we want to read more about it. And as long as we live in a golden age of this, readers will want to consume books that touch on the “what-ifs.” And unlike military matters, this is all open-source – there’s no secret compartment for what an iPhone does that you have to be read into!

Plus, you can write all kinds of novels with the “real world + 1 speculative aspect” hook – thrillers, horror, mysteries, you name it, pretty much every genre can handle it. Look at Preston & Child’s mostly-mysteries compared to Rollins’ action/adventure novels. The genre is as wide as is it is deep. The only hard part is getting the domain knowledge needed to write a believable one…which, honestly for me, is the easiest part if I’m writing aerospace stuff!

Conclusion

The technothriller isn’t dead, but it’s definitely changed. The military ones will continue under the zombie-Clancy novels until someone else comes along who can write a believable one. But the science/technology-focused ones are huge, continue to be best-sellers, and capture the imagination of people who want to look toward the future but don’t necessarily want to read sci-fi.