Like to read? Me too.

Mark Lawrence, author of Prince of Thorns, has created The Million Dollar Bookshop webpage, where he’s selling off pixels to raise money for children’s charities: http://www.themilliondollarbookshop.com/

Donors can have their books listed, which gives them valuable exposure while raising money. Each image links to a the retailer or author page of your choice. I’ve made a donation to Doernbecher Children’s Hospital, and listed A.I. Apocalypse.

Check it out: http://www.themilliondollarbookshop.com/

The notion of a ‘contained thriller’, that is a story which takes place entirely within a constrained environment, holds tremendous appeal for me because it allows the exploration of ideas, characters and settings without the distractions of the world at large. I find that the tension is further heightened because the environment is limited: Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window would be an entirely different movie if our protagonist could simply have gotten up out of his wheelchair and walked over to the neighbor’s apartment.

Such is the case with the novella Brody: Hope Unconquered. Erik Wecks has done a superb job of using a contained environment (a two-person spacecraft on an unstoppable/unchangeable five year journey) to create, hold, and build the tension core to the story. In a time when year-long crewed missions to Mars are under consideration, I think this is a timely exploration of just what it means to live within such an environment.

The other example of a contained environment scifi story is Hugh Howey’s Wool, which I loved and reviewed a few months ago. I found a similar enjoyment in both Wool and Brody in terms of growing to understand the universe at large as well as the limitations of their environments.

Brody has two intertwined threads: the story of the trip through space, and a backstory thread that explores how Roger and Helena came to be on the ship, and the stakes involved for them. This backstory serves to heighten the tension of the forward storyline. The integration of the two is perhaps the one weak point of the book, as I sometimes found myself confused in the backstory thread, but this didn’t interfere with my enjoyment of the book as a whole.

I enjoyed Brody: Hope Unconquered and hope you’ll check it out.

Daniel Suarez, author of Daemon, Freedom, and the recently published Kill Decision, giving a talk at Google, discussing technology and lethal autonomy:

(If you liked Avogadro Corp or A.I. Apocalypse, you’ll love Daniel’s books.)

In my technothriller, A.I. Apocalypse, I wrote about a teenage computer hacker who writes an evolutionary computer virus. Among other things, the virus hunts for bits of useful computer functions in existing legitimate applications, such as a library for copying files, sending data, or encrypting data.

This morning I read about the Frankenstein Virus, which is a real-world virus that does the same thing:

Having infected a computer, it searches the bits and bytes of common software such as Internet Explorer and Notepad for snippets of code called gadgets – short instructions that perform a particular kind of small task. 

Previous research has shown that it is theoretically possible, given enough gadgets, to construct any computer program. Mohan and Hamlen set out to show that Frankenstein could build working malware code by having it create two simple algorithms purely from gadgets. “The two test algorithms we chose are simpler than full malware, but they are representative of the sort of core logic that real malware uses to unpack itself,” says Hamlen. “We consider this a strong indication that this could be scaled up to full malware.” 

Frankenstein follows pre-written blueprints that specify certain tasks – such as copying pieces of data – and swaps in gadgets capable of performing those tasks. Such swaps repeat each time Frankenstein infects a new computer, but with different gadgets, meaning that the malware always looks different to antivirus software, even if its ultimate effects are the same.

This is a huge leap forward in virus writing, because it makes it substantially more difficult to detect such self-creating viruses:

Existing malware already attempts to randomly mutate its code to some extent, but antivirus software can still recognise them as something nasty. 

Frankenstein is different because all of its code, including the blueprints and gadget-finder, can adapt to look like parts of regular software, making it harder to detect. 

Read the full story here.