A Smarter Sort of Techno-Thriller

William Gibson famously said that “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” If this is true, it makes the techno-thriller a genre of nearsighted science fiction, about future tech you can’t imagine but that already exists, or at least that the DoD is already paying for and that will be ready any decade now.

This, ironically, means that techno-thriller writers belong to the broad subcategory of media people who got totally disintermediated by the Internet. When Tom Clancy wrote his first novel, he was an insurance broker who nerded out about navy stuff on nights and weekends. After it became a bestseller, the Secretary of the Navy wanted to know who cleared it.

Today, it’s a whole lot less surprising that random civilians have expert-level knowledge about the military. Which means the barrier to entry for thrillers is a lot higher: you’re not going to blow anyone away with your detailed understanding of how medevacs work if the guys running medevacs in Afghanistan are posting about it on reddit and 4chan. In a way, it’s similar to what happened to old-school value investors from the 30s through the 70s. Early on, you could make money buying stocks with a low price to tangible book and a good free cash flow yield because that information wasn’t easy to find. Buffett, for example, read lots of insurance and bank regulators’ filings to evaluate companies that didn’t file with the SEC.

Symmetric information about the “what” means your edge has to be in the “so, what?” If…