Techno Thrillers

Technology can be thrilling element in contemporary mysteries. In today’s episode, Brook and Sarah discuss what makes a Techno Thriller and how technology can drive a story.

Discussed and mentioned

The Lost World (1912) Arthur Conan Doyle

Jurassic Park (1990) Michael Crichton

The Lost World (1995) Michael Crichton

Prey (2002) Michael Crichton

The Andromeda Evolution (2019) Daniel H. Wilson

The Andromeda Strain (1969) Michael Crichton

Micro (2011) Richard Preston and Michael Crichton

Chrysalis (2022) Lincoln Child

Origin (2017) Dan Brown

The Net (1995) film, directed by Irwin Winkler

Enemy of the State (1998) film, directed by Tony Scott

The Deepest Fake (2025) Daniel Kalla

Zero Day (2025) Netflix series, directed by Lesli Linka Glatter

Little Brother Novels (2008-2020) Corey Doctorow

Tracers in the Dark (2022) Andy Greenberg

Zero Days (2023) Ruth Ware

Sneakers (1992) film, directed by Phil Alden Robinson

For more information

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Transcript

This transcript is generated by a computer and there may be some mis-spellings and strange punctuation. We try to catch these before posting, but some things slip through.

Sarah	Welcome to Clued in Mystery. I’m Sarah.
Brook	And I’m Brook, and we both love mystery.
Sarah	Hi, Brook.
Brook	Hi Sarah. Can I just say that I am so happy that it’s recording day. It’s just always a pleasure to get together and talk about mystery, and today, specifically, techno thrillers.
Sarah	Yeah, I’m, I’m really looking forward to this conversation as well.
Sarah	Before we begin, Brook, I just want to mention that our book Life or Delft is available for pre-order. It’s a cozy mystery that we wrote over the last several months.
Brook	It’s so exciting, Sarah, to have our first collaboration available for pre-order. At this point, it’s on Amazon and we’ll link that in the show notes. But ah once it’s released, it’ll be available at all your favorite vendors. So um go out and check it out.
Sarah	So, when you’re reading a mystery, Brook, technology can set the reader in a specific time. Are the characters pulling a phone from their pocket? Are they picking up the receiver to make a call?
Sarah	Are they checking their day planner or are they looking something up in a Palm Pilot? As we have integrated technology into our lives, it can play a greater role in mystery.
Sarah	You’ll never find the detective asking when a cell phone pinged a tower in a Golden Age mystery. But in modern techno thrillers, they often use technology to drive the story.
Sarah	And it can become almost cautionary tale as the authors speculate how our use of technology might go wrong. These books often cross over into science fiction, incorporating elements of political and spy thrillers. And as we will, I’m sure discuss, can get into great detail about how technology works. An early example of a techno thriller is The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle, the same author of our beloved Sherlock Holmes.
Sarah	This was released in 1912, and you know, there’s a very detailed description of a journey in a South American jungle to verify claims of dinosaurs. And it features many of the characteristics that are common in this subgenre. So technical detail, secrets, adventure.
Sarah	And The Lost World inspired Michael Crichton to write Jurassic Park. And then he titled the sequel to that ah Jurassic Park: The Lost World.
Sarah	And Crichton is ah arguably one of the most recognizable names in the techno thriller space. So ,I thought Brook, that we could start with him.
Brook	That sounds great, Sarah. Thank you for that intro summary.
Sarah	So have you read any Michael Crichton books?
Brook	I know that I read Jurassic Park. I read it after seeing the movie because I was, you know, at that age where going to the movies a lot. But here’s the kicker for me, Sarah. Like, give me…
Brook	…a horror book, vampire goblins, you know, some creepy supernatural ghost, and I’m totally fine. But these plausible, scary technological advance stories scare me to death. And they will keep me up at night. So it’s really difficult for me to read in this genre.
Brook	On the one hand, I love it because I really love technology and science and like the research part of it. But I think that’s part of why it’s so scary is because I realize that a lot of this is possible.
Sarah	That is so true. It is very possible. And it’s interesting to look back at books that were written, say, in the early 2000s and see what of those predictions have have come true. Has it turned into this almost nightmare scenario that um that the authors were predicting 25 years ago? And in some ways, the answer is yes. Right?
Brook	Absolutely.
Sarah	I think you’ve touched on a, on a ah great point of a lot of, you know, a lot of mysteries that we read are not that plausible, right?
Sarah	A caterer is not going to be encountering a body every time they are working a job, but being in an environment that is largely online, where there is a rogue AI is not outside the realms of possibility.
Brook	Mm-hmm.
Sarah	Certainly, it feels like that in 2025.
Brook	Absolutely. Yeah. This week I read um a Michael Crichton book, Prey, which was ah written in 2002. And he has an amazing introduction. I listened to the audio book and he does the introduction himself. And it’s fascinating and wonderful, but he’s talking about um the fact that there are potential for these nanoparticles to become a rogue virus, which is the crux of the book Prey.
Brook	And, you know, I’m like feeling like the sweat break out on my forehead because um everyone, we lived through 2020, right? And the experience of that pandemic really shaped the way that we look at these possibilities. And hearing him speak about things that were potential in 2002 that I’m like, oh, that’s like real science today in 2025 just gave the book like that much more um realism, I guess. When it’s supposed to be science fiction.
Sarah	I read one of his books. Actually, no, it wasn’t written by him. It was written by Daniel H. Wilson, and it’s Andromeda Evolution. And it is the, it’s touted as the sequel to Michael Crichton’s book, The Andromeda Strain. And there’s a lot of reference to what happened in that first book, um, in this, in this second one. Um, and then I started, but haven’t finished reading Micro, which was published after Michael Crichton died, but I think he started the manuscript and then, um, Richard Preston finished it.
Sarah	Uh, and in that book, it’s again, it’s like nano, um nanotechnology that yeah, does not feel like it is that wild of a suggestion.
Brook	No, and especially with the proliferation of AI that we’ve seen over the last two years, um you know learning technologies, ah but it is not difficult to imagine some of these rogue AI or rogue um you know computer particles learning and then doing evil things.
Sarah	So, Brook, we’ve talked a little bit about techno thrillers featuring AI, I recently read a book by Lincoln Child called Chrysalis, which is ah i think it’s part of a series that he writes, but I read it as a standalone and it it was fine.
Sarah	You didn’t need to have read any of the previous books. um And his name may be familiar because he often co-writes with Douglas Preston, a series featuring Pendergrast.
Sarah	ah Anyway, ah this book, Chrysalis, features wearable technology and it being manipulated to harm the wearers. And, you know, I can see in our near future that being something that is really pushed on us, shifting us from using our phones to interact with the internet and and AI and and using wearable technology. So it was, um you know when you talk about being a little bit scared of ah of these books, it was in that sense a little scary.
Brook	Yeah, just hearing you say that kind of made my pulse rate increase a little bit. And I think about our kids, you know, i think about what is the world going to be like when our kids are 20, 30, 40, you know, um but what gets me through when I have that little spike of worry and fear in these stories is that um we’re reading crime fiction.
Brook	And I always tell myself, you know, the good guys are going to win in the end. There’s going to be justice. There’s going to be resolution. And usually there is. And I hope that’s the case for real life as well, Sarah.
Sarah	I, a while ago read Origin by Dan Brown. Um, and that was published in 2017 and I actually read it in 2021. Just speaking about the pandemic, I was unable to read very much during the pandemic. And, um, I can remember one day saying, okay, I need to get out of this slump.
Sarah	I, looked on my library’s app. I hadn’t ever listened to an audio book, but I chose this one because it was by Dan Brown and I was familiar with, you know, the Da Vinci Code and other books that he’d written. So I thought, okay, if nothing else, this is going to be a thriller and it’s just going to keep me entertained for a couple of hours. Right.
Sarah	Um, and, uh, it’s the book that got me out of my, my reading slump. So it was the first audio book that I listened to [Brook: wow] and it was, um, it got me back into, into reading after, after that first year of the pandemic. And it features an AI entity. And again, this was published in 2017. So he was, you know, very much forecasting the way that this might um that that this might evolve.
Sarah	And it was this personal personal assistant entity. And, you know, there’s a tech bro involved. And it was, it it feels, you know,
Sarah	At the time it didn’t feel as aged as sometimes these books can, right?
Brook	Mm-hmm.
Sarah	Sometimes the technology that is described sounds very incredible for the time, but then you read it five years later and you’re like, no, whatever, man, we’ve all got that.
Sarah	And it’s not been that bad. um But it, I thought in 2021, when I read it, that um it it stood up. You think about The Net by the film with Sandra Bullock that came out in 1995. So that was 30 years ago, just when we were ah being introduced to using the internet, right? And the premise was this woman, lives at home and does nothing except for lives her life online, which at the time seemed very novel, but is quite frankly how most of us live our lives right now. I haven’t watched it probably since ‘95 or ‘96, but I wonder if it would stand up.
Brook	I thought of that movie too. um you know I saw that in the movie theater. And in 1995, I was in college and did not have the internet.
Brook	There were a few computers in a specific lab that you could go to that sort of, kind of, had some dial-up. But you know there was nothing on the internet. So that movie felt extremely science fiction to the original audience. But it doesn’t today. As you said, that’s how most of us live our life.
Brook	But I do think it would be worth a rewatch to see, if nothing else, just for the nostalgia. Remember when life used to be like that?
Sarah	And just speaking about AI, um Daniel Kalla, who was a former guest on our show, um just released a book. I haven’t read it yet, but it’s called The Deepest Fake. And it’s about AI. And I’m sure it would be a ah very interesting read.
Brook	Absolutely.
Brook	I think that there are some of these techno thrillers that are and some that aren’t actually crime fiction, because some of them are just kind of suspenseful science fiction tales, aren’t they? Like, there’s not a bad guy. There’s not a villain trying to do something. But in many of them, there are.
Brook	One company steals another company’s technology in order to do something malicious with it um and those kinds of crimes. And sometimes there are um there is actually a murder mystery within because maybe someone’s trying to stop that malicious activity.
Brook	But I think sometimes the larger crime that is woven into these stories are more like crimes against humanity. Doing something that is so unethical and short-sighted.
Sarah	I think that’s ah that’s a great observation, Brook. And I think those kinds of stories ah are more the, I can think of examples that are more like political thrillers.
Sarah	And an example of that is Enemy of the State, the 1998 film with Will Smith and ah Gene Hackman. And that is really about how the government can track people, which, you know, is something that people are, for the most part, not very comfortable with.
Sarah	And ah another more recent example of that is Zero Day, which it was a series that was on Netflix earlier this year, starring Robert De Niro. And ah it involves more of a cyber crime kind of ah story. But again, is, you know, government and government influence on the information that that people have.
Sarah	And I enjoyed I enjoyed watching that. um And ah Cory Doctorow has a series. It’s the Little Brother novels. I’ve I’ve read one of the books set in that world that was lots of detail about cybercrime and hacking from the um hacker’s point of view. Iin trying to defend against government surveillance. And I thought that that was that was really interesting.
Brook	Oh, those those are all great examples. And I’m glad you brought up Enemy of the State. It’s a classic. And it’s an example of what you mentioned at the beginning of a locked network.
Brook	It’s an example of the modern-day locked room mystery where it’s, you know, not picking locks or ah trying to decide how someone shut themselves in and then the crime was committed, but um cracking surveillance systems and IP addresses and things like that. It’s the same conundrum, but high tech.
Sarah	That’s a great description, Brook. So, I have a nonfiction example, and that is Tracers in the Dark by Andy Greenberg, who he is a reporter editor for Wired magazine. And he does a really great job of explaining technology in a way that the layperson can understand. So, this book is around crime around cryptocurrency, which cryptocurrency may be something that people don’t really understand very well. And he does ,like I said, a very good job of explaining the way that the criminal element ah takes advantage of blockchain and and and cryptocurrency.
Sarah	And it does read a bit like a thriller, but it is nonfiction. I will say that there are some um pretty terrible things that people get up to and he does, doesn’t get into a lot of detail, but he mentioned some of them. And he’s, so you know, may not be for everybody. I think there’s a warning before those chapters, but it, I enjoyed it for just feeling like I was learning something.
Brook	Oh, that’s great. I love the true crime connection to any of our topics. um Well, you mentioned Zero Day, which is a film with Robert De Niro, but one of my recent techno thriller reads was Zero Days by Ruth Ware, and this came out in 2023. And it centers on a near future cybercrime scenario, which ah these penetration testers, they’re essentially… um hackers, ethical hackers that are hired to break into physical and digital spaces to expose security flaws. And um it was it was really good. It was such a departure for Ruth Ware as well to be in this more techno thriller space. But it was really interesting and really great.
Sarah	Oh, I very much enjoyed that book when I read it. It’s definitely a ah good example of ah a book in this space.
Brook	I think one of the reasons I liked it was it really reminded me of one of my all-time favorite movies, which I never made the connection that we would really be considering a techno thriller in this, but it’s Sneakers, which is a 1992 film.
Brook	I’m really showing my age on this episode, you guys.
Brook	It’s a caper thriller with technology woven in The star is Robert Redford, but it’s an ensemble cast with Dan Aykroyd, Ben Kingsley, River Phoenix.
Brook	And these are a group of security specialists that are also hired to um to penetrate into a company in order to steal a black box. But they realize that the job is much more involved and there’s a big conspiracy going on. It’s so good. Have you seen that one, Sarah?
Sarah	I have, Brook, and I probably saw it close to when it came out in 1992 and really enjoyed it. And I wonder if it would stand up now because it it like technology was involved, and obviously it would have been technology of the early 1990s um but that i think the themes remain and And that’s true. I actually think of a lot of the books in this genre, right?
Sarah	Whether it, you know, the technology may not be something that is current now, but the themes of that fear of whether it’s government manipulation or companies manipulating us or just technology taking taking a wrong turn, those are persistent.
Brook	Absolutely. And that’s what draws us to these types of stories, isn’t it? Like, we like to be a little bit scared, which is like kind of the name of the game in all of crime fiction and definitely ah solid marker in techno thrillers.
Sarah	Well, Brook, it has been so fun to discuss techno thrillers with you. And, you know, maybe this is something that we will revisit in future as technology evolves.
Brook	That’s right. We’ll be looking back to 2025 and laughing at the things that we thought were high tech, Sarah.
Brook	But for today, thanks for joining us, listeners, on Clued in Mystery. I’m Brook.
Sarah	And I’m Sarah, and we both love mystery.