An unprecedented catastrophe has struck the US. The Oroville Dam — the country’s tallest such embankment — has collapsed, flooding a huge swathe of California. Hundreds are dead, thousands hospitalized; a further 150,000 people have been displaced following the destruction of their homes by floodwaters that have engulfed Yuba City and nearby towns. The damage to property is projected to run close to US$30 billion.
President Mick Coin and his team are struggling to come to grips with “the aftereffects of the worst environmental disaster to befall the Unites States in its 250-year history.” However, as Coin and his environmental science and policy advisor Dr Nancy Nillson prepare to visit the scene of the carnage, they are advised of a startling discovery: Rather than being an engineering failure or seismological phenomenon, as was initially conjectured, this was in the words of the head of the Army Corps of Engineers, “a concerted attack on our country.”
This episode, which occurs midway through the novel, sparks a manhunt for the culprit. Investigations by the National Security Agency’s attribution section — the team responsible for identifying the source of national-security-level cyber threats — point toward Unit 61398, the branch of the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) charged with overseeing cyber warfare.
Nicknamed “Advanced Persistent Threat 1,” this elite and highly secretive agency is headed by Major Lin Chong. Analysis of the string of code that triggered the dam’s destruction reveals the paw prints of the Panther Head, as Lin is known. However, there’s a snag. On confronting the Chinese, the Americans discover Lin is a wanted fugitive. Having escaped from a black-site facility where he was tortured on trumped-up charges, Lin’s whereabouts are unknown. With China accused of masterminding a terrorist attack on American soil, a race begins to locate the missing soldier and pull things back from the brink of war.
When Lin is eventually tracked down to a clandestine hacker community of Mount Liang, a ghost town in Shandong Province, he confirms that the piece of code originated with him. Upon learning of the suicide of his wife while he was on the run, Panther Head had released a cyber weapon he called Indra’s Net “into the wild.” This was designed to “connect all the nodes” of a program codenamed Centipede, which had been embedded as a back door into billions of semiconductors worldwide through the insertion of a bug into electronic design automation (EDA) software.
PUBLISHING FRUSTRATIONS
While Lin had not thought he would ever need to deploy Centipede, he knew it “could knee-cap an enemy at any time without firing a shot and without spilling a drop of unnecessary blood.”
Yet, it soon becomes apparent that something much more powerful than Lin’s program was involved in the sabotage at Oroville. As it emerges that non-human actors are behind this incident and a series of unexplained protests, movements and incidents across the globe, Beijing and Washington must cooperate to avert an apocalyptic confrontation.
Author Christopher Bates first came to Taiwan to study Mandarin and martial arts in 1976. Having lived in Beijing and Singapore, he is a permanent resident of Taiwan and now splits his time between Taipei and the Pacific Northwest. In 1993, he released his first novel with Times Editions, Singapore’s largest publisher. They collaborated again on an edition of the Culture Shock: Taiwan! guidebook.
Understandably, Bates has felt frustrated by the lack of interest in his second novel. One might guess at the likely issues for a publisher. Loosely based on the characters and plot arc of the vernacular Chinese classic from which Bates’ borrowed his title, the novel is long, occasionally complex — especially for the less tech-savvy reader — and incredibly ambitious. The scope could seem overwhelming.
EXPERTLY REALIZED
But Bates is rarely out of his depth. Almost everything is conveyed with plausibility. Technology and industry are described with the intricate detail of an expert; closed-door, intra-agency meetings and private discussions between government figures are convincingly depicted; and locations, cultures and characters across the globe are skilfully stage managed.
One standout episode is the heroic but doomed attempt by an employee to shut down the malfunctioning turbines. Brief, but tension-fraught and moving, it can easily be imagined as a sequence from a Hollywood thriller.
Some of Bates’s skill in realizing these scenes doubtless comes from a varied career in industrial product sales, strategy consulting and executive search. This latter field, he told me, certainly helped inform the representation of the “weaponized executive search,” used to find an appropriate candidate to insert Centipede into the EDA software.
As I was halfway through the novel, Bates sent me a link to a New York Times article about an industrial espionage case in the US involving a Chinese-born engineer, enlisted by Beijing via LinkedIn. It was, said Bates, “a hair’s breadth away” from the situation depicted in his novel.
It’s not always easy to gauge how accurate some of the descriptions are, particularly those related to boundary-pushing innovations. Whether these would work now or at some point “in the near future,” to use one of the novel’s subtitles, is unclear (at least to a tech ignoramus such as me).
BALLSED-UP BRITICISMS
As for the pivotal plot twists, these involve the concept of an emergent intelligence that achieves “singularity” — an uncontrollable super-intelligence. This is then revealed to be a conduit to Gaia-type, earth-intelligence, which is where, for non-sci-bods, the credulity is strained somewhat.
Occasionally the narrative strayed into topics that Bates doesn’t seem so familiar with — a description of the “fourth quarter” of a soccer game, being one example. The unintentionally amusing misuse of “bullocks” in place of “bollocks” by Lin Chong, who we learn spent a year at Oxford (presumably bantering with Bullingdon Club yobs) is another jarring misstep.
There are also the frequent references to martial arts, which sometimes feel a little forced, though — like much of the novel — would, again, probably translate well to screen. As a martial arts student of almost 50 years, and a now high-level exponent, the theme is obviously preoccupation for Bates. Indeed, he has just translated a biography of Taiwanese martial arts master Hung I-hsiang (洪懿祥) under whom he trained in the 1980s.
Likewise, the scenes of meditation and spiritualism at the cult-like Mount Liang community are rather abstruse.
But these issues are remarkably few and far between in a text that runs to almost 500 pages and covers so much ground. Over the years I have read plenty of books that were far less meritorious of publication. This is a well-paced, cleverly conceived, and convincing novel that tackles topical issues with ingenuity and aplomb.
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