Guest Blogger James Swallow on Exotic Tech

James Swallow is the author of Nomad, released on 2nd June by Bonnier Zaffre publishing Click here to view it on Amazon.  Nomad has been described as 'A terrific white- knuckle, lip chewing thriller' by Rhianna Pratchett.  Whilst Ben Aaronovitch describes Nomad's hero Marc Dane as 'An intelligent, likeable and, above all, believable hero.' 
Here on The Crime warp (5th June 2016) I described this amazing book as being 'the sort of book you finish reading and then, hours later, you've still got adrenalin fizzing around your system.'  The Crime Warp warmly welcomes James Swallow.

EXOTIC TECH

When I decided to write my contemporary action thriller novel

NOMAD, one of the first questions I had to consider was the

tone of the fictional world. How real did I want it to be? In my mind, the devil is always in the details – so if someone is driving a car, I want to know what kind. If they’re shooting a gun or looking at their watch, I want to be able to connect that to a real-world object. I realized early on that my lead character – Marc Dane, a field technician working for the

British security services who is reluctantly pushed into the line of fire – was the kind of guy who would know the tech-specs for a particular piece of kit. Mixed into his hero DNA is a little dash of geek, and when I found that, I knew I had the key to him.

I like the idea of a hero who reads Wired and Gizmodo for fun, who is at home with a keyboard as much as with a handgun – so I decided that NOMAD would indulge a little of Dane’s (and let’s be honest, my) love of cool tech. And what I found was this: the hardware that anyone can buy online

right now is the kind of kit that twenty years ago would have been the cutting edge of any nation’s espionage effort. Forget Q Branch – you can pick this stuff up from Amazon.

Out there are micro-drones smaller than sparrows, parabolic transmitters that can

hack your computer through walls, tactical ballpoint pens that double as daggers, “throw-bots” little bigger than beer cans that can be tossed through a window to sneak through building interiors... And those are just the analogue items. There’s also a world of virtual tools, apps that turn your iPhone into a spyPhone or make your desktop PC the computer equivalent of a neutron bomb.

But it wasn’t enough; I asked myself, what’s out past the

cutting edge? How about digital tablets with built in tazers and phones that conceal .22 derringers, or electromagnetic pulse devices made from off-the-shelf microwave oven components? As I built up a search history that would have raised hairs on the back of the neck of any surveillance monitors, I learned how to build wet smoke bombs from garden supplies, make bathroom napalm from petrol and concentrated orange juice, and how to turn batteries, water, a condom and a travel mug into an improvised hand grenade.  Okay, so maybe we’re not talking

about kit as out-there orbital laser satellites or a helicopter-in-a-can, but what I found in my research is that whatever thriller writers can think of, someone out there in the real world has, or will, build it. Our fiction may be more fact than we may be comfortable with...
James Swallow is the author of NOMAD, published by Zaffre, 2^nd June.