Zero Point Blog Tour: High Tech and Politics are Combustible by Nafeez Ahmed

Date of Publication:August 14, 2014Goodreads | Amazon US | Amazon UK | Barnes & Noble | Kobo
Description:
Near future Great Britain is on the brink of collapse. Mass riots. Economic meltdown. Blackouts. And a new oil war in Iraq to keep the world economy afloat.
Iraq War veteran and war crimes whistleblower David Ariel is sick of violence, and trying to make ends meet working for Specialist Protection. But after Prime Minister Carson is brutally assassinated by extremists on Ariel’s watch, he is covertly targeted by a compromised police investigation.
When forensics discover that Carson’s assassination inexplicably defied the very laws of physics, bodies drop like flies as key witnesses are murdered in impossible circumstances.
Fleeing for his life while London is locked-down under martial law, Ariel gets a phone call from Iraq he will never forget. His estranged girlfriend, journalist Julia Stephenson, warns that the Carson killing is just the beginning of a wider plot to bring the West to its knees. Then she disappears.
Ariel’s blood-soaked race against time to track the terror cells behind Carson’s death tumbles into the cross-fire of a hidden battle between mysterious rogue intelligence agencies. The goal: to monopolise black budget technologies which could unlock the universe’s darkest, arcane secrets.
As the world he thought he knew unravels, Ariel faces off against bent coppers, double-crossing agents, psychic killers and super soldiers to complete a black ops mission like no other: stop Quantum Apocalypse.
ZERO POINT  - high tech and politics are combustible.What if the human species continued business as usual, pursuing unlimited economic growth on a finite planet, plundering the planet’s natural resources for the benefit of a corporate few – despite the danger of climate catastrophe? What if Iraq destabilized to such an extent that our governments dragged themselves into another prolonged war in the Middle East? What if our Middle East wars didn’t stop terrorism, but, as with the 2003 Iraq War, inflamed regional tensions and sparked blowback at home? What if fear of this prompted our intelligence agencies to, instead of re-assessing state-militarism, fund new forms of surveillance, contributing to the rise of an increasingly repressive police state? What if we were able to develop stupendously powerful technologies that could conceivably save us from our looming environmental challenges?
Of course, no one can know the answer to these questions for sure, but we don’t need a crystal ball to hazard reasonable guesses. While these questions surely concern matters of utmost significance to many of us in current times, they also make great material for a dystopian scifi thriller!
Without wanting to make light of such issues, I started writing ZERO POINT about six years ago because I wanted to explore such questions through the medium of fiction. As such, ZERO POINT is unashamedly political fiction – inspired by ‘true events’ in the real world of politics and espionage, and jam-packed with a not-so-subtle political message about the dangers of business-as-usual.
But it’s also a lot of fun. I think the motivation to write a work of fiction came about as a fan of both science fiction and thrillers, whether in terms of literature, films, or TV. But both of these genres have occasionally bugged me – scifi in terms of its futurism, and thrillers in terms of their politics.
Much scifi attempts to build futuristic, self-contained worlds in relative isolation from the present. While semi-plausible narrative strands that link them up to present times are often utilized, still, we are often offered dystopian scifi worlds wholesale as visions of the future, vast vistas in our imaginations that allow us to escape from the doldrums of the everyday, while also reflecting subliminally on the everday’s political underbelly.
I love such scifi, but with ZERO POINT I wanted to do something different. I wanted to explore how the machinations of the present could give birth to the dystopian future – how such dystopia is not, really, all that distant, but is even now emerging from seeds we plant today in the everyday. I wanted to explore how the dystopian universes we imagine in a fictional far-flung future could actually come about.
That’s why ZERO POINT is set in a near future very much like our own, and indeed begins with the taut unpredictability of a conventional political thriller. But it soon opens up into a strange, parallel world in which unimaginable high technology is just beginning to emerge, with extreme social and political ramifications. The next volumes in the trilogy go deeper, by extrapolating today’s trends further into the future. But rather than simply fast-forwarding to that future, I explore the shaping of the present into that future.
Equally, this is where I take on the staple tropes of conventional thriller writing. Most spy thrillers take the essential ‘goodness’ of our spy agencies for granted. If they are responsible for evil, it’s usually through the actions of rogue agents, or megalomaniacally evil leaders. In the real world, I can tell you based on my experience as an investigative journalist who has broken major stories on global affairs, terrorism, and international security, this is simply not the case. In the real world, the unaccountability of our spies and spy agencies is the problem.  If there are ‘rogues’, quite often they are whistleblowers, ruthlessly demonized and excommunicated by their own agencies just for exposing their failures.
This leads us into a realm that is much more morally complicated than simplistic spy stories of ‘us good’ and ‘them evil’, in which the institutional corruption of intelligence exposes interweaving good and bad intentions, exploitation, double-crossing, bribery, ideology, and careerism – ingredients which, when combined with the dangers of high technology, are extremely combustible.


About Nafeez Ahmed:  Nafeez Ahmed is a bestselling author, investigative journalist, and international security academic. He writes for The Guardian via his Earth Insight blog, reporting on the geopolitics of interconnected environmental, energy and economic crises. The author of five critically-acclaimed non-fiction works addressing humanity’s biggest global challenges, Nafeez’s forthcoming book is a science fiction thriller, ZERO POINT, due out 18th August 2014.
Nafeez has also written for the Independent on Sunday, The Independent, The Scotsman, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Huffington Post, New Statesman, Prospect Magazine, Le Monde Diplomatique, among many others. He has been a talking head for BBC News 24, BBC World News with George Alagiah, BBC Radio Five Live, BBC Radio Four, BBC World Today, BBC Asian Network, Channel 4, Sky News, C-SPAN Book TV, CNN, FOX News, Bloomberg, PBS Foreign Exchange, Al-Jazeera English, Press TV, Islam Channel and hundreds of other radio and TV shows in the USA, UK, and Europe.
Nafeez is also cited and reviewed in the Sunday Times, Times Higher Educational Supplement, New York Times, The Independent, Independent on Sunday, The Observer, Guardian, Big Issue Magazine, Vanity Fair, among othersFind Nafeez Ahmed:Website | Facebook | Twitter | Goodreads