Realistic fiction sounds like a bit of an oxymoron, doesn’t it? But readers love characters who feel familiar, locations they know in real life, and situations that could happen but haven’t. Except when they have.

Thirty-five years ago, author Tom Wolfe complained about having his fiction scooped by reality between serializing, then fully publishing, his New York novel Bonfire of the Vanities. In that 1989 Harpers article, he quoted a similar complaint made sixty five years ago by Philip Roth.

Fast forward to 2024, and the challenge is that much more real. As a writer of thrillers with strong technology plots, I definitely face it. I dodged it in my debut thriller Raven (High Frequency Press, 2025) by setting it in 1990 at the end of the cold war and beginning of the internet. Want to know what the internet had in store for us in 1990’s future? Just look around!

Raven is set in Boston in the spring of 1990, when Cambridge was still gritty and before the Big Dig blew up downtown. It’s easy to draw contrasts between then and now: pay phones instead of cell phones, dial up modems instead of broadband internet, less computing power in a supercomputer than you have in your cell phone in your pocket. (A current iPhone is 5000 times more powerful than the pictured  32 million dollar 1984 Cray-2 Research supercomputer!)

By most standards a book set in 1990 doesn’t even count as a “historical” novel. (Definitions of “historical fiction” vary widely: before 1950, at least 50 years earlier, etc. I call mine “near historical.” I’m a writer; I get to make stuff up.) Even thirty years gives me enough distance to make the world seem very different from our own.

In contrast, writing in the present moment, particularly with technology and politics as part of a storyline, opens up some very weird possibilities. Rob Hart, author of the 2018 novel The Warehouse, wrote in 2020 a CrimeReads blog post titled “When Speculative Fiction Becomes Reality”:

An online retail giant dominating the economy while the small business landscape is wiped out. And an exponential erosion of job security and worker protections. And children learning remotely as municipal budgets are crippled. And government sitting idly by while corporations rake in record profits.

These are the things I saw on the horizon, maybe ten or twenty down the road. Which is why, whenever anyone asked me when the book was set, I would shrug and say: soon enough.

I didn’t realize that would mean seven months after it hit shelves.

Turns out, writers of apocalyptic fiction usually don’t want it to come true in their immediate present. I found myself in much the same position in one of my current works in progress, Critical State. (Working title of course. Stories around publishers’ particularities about book titling is a whole other blog post!)  Set in the present day, Critical State follows a journalist/blogger as she uncovers a plot to weaponize social media to malignly influence public opinion. I swear that sounded really out there when I’d started drafting it a few years ago. Just close enough to reality to be relatable, not so far out as to be science fiction.

Yeah, well, I guess I need to go a little farther out.

I’ve been an avid reader of Science Fiction/Speculative Fiction my whole life, and have dedicated myself to high tech thrillers for years as well. And like Rob Hart, I believe that “no one gets into writing speculative fiction because they’re a fatalist,” but because they want to make change, to expose something that we are hurtling toward and convince us to alter course.

One of the principles of writing thrillers is to “turn it up to eleven.” (If you don’t know that reference, recommending the movie This is Spinal Tap is my gift to you.) To make the danger, the threat, the fear, even more outsized than it might be in real life. But, in my case, and in the case of countless other writers, we were perhaps too meek. You read the news and think “how bad could it get?” then realize the answer is “much worse.”

And it’s our job as writers to make that “much worse” grab you by the shirt collar and drag you along.