Latest Books Clive Cussler’s Desolation Code by Graham Brown

Clive Cussler’s Desolation Code by Graham Brown

By José H. Bográn

DESOLATION CODE, in Graham Brown’s own words, is action. It’s adventure. It’s suspense. But more than any of the other books he’s done in the NUMA series, it revolves around a central theme: what does it really mean to be alive? What does it mean to be conscious or sentient? In what ways is that bound up with self-determination?

This is the new NUMA Files adventure in the series, and the 13th penned by Brown. In this book, every character is fighting to preserve, change, or create life. Kurt Austin, Joe Zavala, and the rest of the NUMA team are attempting to stop a mass extinction from sweeping across our seas.

The villain is striving to bring a machine he calls TAU to life by linking it with human minds. But TAU may already be conscious and developing its own ideas about the future. Even the villain’s chief enforcer lives in conflict. A ruthless mercenary who is kept alive thanks to genetic engineering and other treatments TAU has given to him, he’s also a prisoner bound to do the villain’s bidding.

The story is fast-paced and not heavy but it does ask each character to grapple with fundamental questions of what it means to be human, alive, and masters of our own destinies.

The Big Thrill recently caught up with author Graham Brown to talk about DESOLATION CODE.

How did such an idea come about?

For reasons I can’t fathom, I’ve spent a lot of time over the years thinking about how a machine could actually come to life. What we call artificial intelligence these days is more accurately described as Simulated Intelligence. A program reads a query, scans the internet database, runs a few million comparisons and offers an answer. However, nothing inside the machine is even aware of the reality of what it’s doing. It’s no more conscious than an automobile engine which runs and does certain things and then shuts off.

So I came up with a couple of ideas. One, it would need to have wants and desires and fears like all living organisms. And it would have to be able to experience life through the minds of humans. So —spoiler alert—the computer program at the heart of the story achieves these things but at a cost. Wants can make us irrational and fears can make us paranoid. If a machine can feed off those emotions, it can spiral down the same path as any unstable human.

Incriminating fake videos, manipulating masses through social media: it’s all very high-concept, but also feels quite real at times. How do you balance the fiction against our current reality?

The more computers take over, the more we are going to need other computers to fight the battle of reality for us. Good computers against bad ones, that could be the next book. Or perhaps we’ll go back to believing only what we see in person. That might be a good thing.

As for reality versus fiction. It’s always good to blend them as closely as possible. Since the first time I read Jurassic Park and became convinced that we could bring dinosaurs back to life based on the actual science in the book, I’ve always been interested in mixing science fiction with science fact.

Honestly, most of the outlandish things in DESOLATION CODE, from silicon chip brain implants, cloning of human organs and brain tissue, and the idea of a merge between them, are all currently accelerating technologies.

How do you keep the familiar and beloved characters as close to the original incarnations while also making them resonant with our times?

I think the key with the characters is to have them in your mind the whole time. You have to almost know them as if they’re real. But you also have to give them a little room to grow, which is harder with a series than a standalone. I think we’ve managed to do that, especially with this book. In the end, the readers will have to be the judges of that.