- Suarez, Daniel.
Kill Decision.
New York: Signet, 2012.
ISBN 978-0-451-41770-1.
-
A drone strike on a crowd of pilgrims at one of the holiest
shrines of Shia Islam in Iraq inflames the world against the
U.S., which denies its involvement. (“But who else is flying
drones in Iraq?”, is the universal response.) Meanwhile,
the U.S. is rocked by a series of mysterious bombings, killing
businessmen on a golf course, computer vision specialists meeting
in Silicon Valley, military contractors in a building near the
Pentagon—all seemingly unrelated. A campaign is building
to develop and deploy autonomous armed drones to “protect
the homeland”.
Prof. Linda McKinney, doing research on
weaver ants
in Tanzania, seems far away from all this until she is
saved from an explosion which destroys her camp by a
mysterious group of special forces led by a man known
only as “Odin”. She learns that her computer model
of weaver ant colony behaviour has been stolen from her
university's computer network by persons unknown who may
be connected with the attacks, including the one she just escaped.
The fear is that her ant model could be used as the basis
for “swarm intelligence” drones which could
cooperate to be a formidable weapon. With each individual
drone having only rudimentary capabilities, like an isolated
ant, they could be mass-produced and shift the military balance
of power in favour of whoever possessed the technology.
McKinney soon finds herself entangled in a black world where
nothing is certain and she isn't even sure which side
she's working for. Shocking discoveries indicate that
the worst case she feared may be playing out, and she must
decide where to place her allegiance.
This novel is a masterful addition to the very sparse
genre of robot ant science fiction thrillers, and this time
I'm not the villain! Suarez has
that rare talent, as had Michael Crichton, of writing
action scenes which just beg to be put on the big screen
and stories where the screenplay just writes itself. Should
Hollywood turn this into a film and not botch it, the result
should be a treat. You will learn some things about ants
which you probably didn't know (all correct, as far as I can
determine), visit a locale in the U.S. which sounds like something
out of a Bond film but actually exists, and meet two of the
most curious members of a special operations team in all
of fiction.
April 2014 