Drones

Thriller fun fact. In the parlance of those who work in this area, when someone has been attacked using a drone he is said to have been “droned.” As in, “Last week we droned five Tangos in a pickup truck.”

As noted in Thriller Guy’s last entry, he has received a bunch of drone-themed thrillers to review recently, so many that TG is now declaring this an official sub-genre of the military adventure thriller. As TG has said, drones are cool, so it has not yet grown boring to read the various directions that writers are taking, but once the basics are covered, unless an author comes up with a new take on what has become familiar material then they’re surely going to get a lesser review than they would if they came up with something novel. This is the case in other sub-genres, i.e. Da Vinci code knockoffs and the suitcase nuke sub genre that TG has complained about on these pages before.

The three most recent drone books are, Sting of the Drone, by Richard Clark, Drone by Mike Maden, and Drone Strike by Dale Brown and Jim DeFelice. All three of these books were very good and very different and TG recommends all of them to readers who like the military/adventure genre.

Drone, by Maden, is obviously the first out of the gate and as such snagged the one word title. Promised as the first of a series, his hero Troy Pierce heads up a business, Pearce Systems, that specializes in drones that travel not just in the air, but on land and in and under the sea. Maden’s plot has Pearce using his drones against a Mexican cartel with the aim of eliminating the drug trade between Mexico and the US once and for all. It’s a great, original concept and readers will leave the last page thinking, why doesn’t our government do something like this? Well, there are lots of reasons, but maybe sometime in the future…

Dale Brown, the author of Drone Strike, has been in the business of aviation thrillers for a long time and his easy expertise shows in all of his various series. His co-author, Defelice has become the go-to co-author in the thriller writing business and his name shows up on many famous-name books. TG thinks he’s one of the best in the business and most any book he’s involved with is going to be good. These guys have come up with the coolest drones, nano-UAVs dubbed Hydras which are the size of “a cheap desk calculator” and shaped like “a cross between lawn darts and studies for a video game.” They drop down in swarms out of mother-drones and zip around and hover on command from “pilots” far away in trailers in the desert. The gambit here is an attack, in conjunction with a Delta Force team, on an Iranian underground nuclear facility. Things go well for a while, then everything goes “pear shaped” as the British say.

The last of the three, Richard Clark’s Sting of the Drone, is arguably the best of them, at least in being very comprehensive in all areas involved. Once a Kill Call to Washington establishes that a High Value Individual (HVI) is a threat to America the pilots and analysts at the Global Coordination Center at the Creech Air Force Base in Nevada go about setting up a mission to take out that HVI. They have many successes (the drone effort is far more extensive than civilians know) but eventually a very smart al-Qaeda terrorist decides to take revenge on the drones and their operators. This back-and-forth duel as the terrorists find ways to outwit the drones, is fascinating. TG has praised Clark’s thrillers before, and here he brings a solid knowledge of what really goes on with the men and women who call the shots on who gets droned and on the men and women who fly the UAVs and undertake the missions. TG read this one with his mouth hanging open. Outstanding.

After writing those three mini-reviews, TG feels ready and willing to read any new efforts that writers are beavering away on out there. Bring ‘em on.

A recent email conversation with Thriller Guy reader Joel Lovell turned up an interesting post from him. Joel is working on his own thriller that features, among other elements, drones, and here’s what he had to say…

“The more I've thought about what hobbyist drones could do, the more I'm convinced that society is going to be dealing with some real problems very soon. I mean, what if you are a jewelry storeowner, for example, and a drone shoots out your front window, flies in, and a voice states, "Interfere with this drone and it will explode. Ignore what I say and you will be shot. Fill the bag with diamonds, now." 

"With the fuel powered mini-helicopter drones (which China is building and selling already weaponized) even more audacious crimes could be committed. Sure, they can be taken out easily, but if they threaten to explode or release a poison spray or - what if four or five MAC-10 mounted drones come swarming in? 

"An assassin could easily have any number of drones with a laser aimed firearm mounted, or have one fly over a driving car and set down the home grown equivalent of a magnetically attached claymore mine on the roof of the vehicle and set it off. (With the noise and sad lack of security cameras able to track and differentiate at night - someone could do this right now to a commercial airliner while it sits at the gate - a drone could fly right over it, set down, leave a 'package' and then fly away. Once it's airborne, that's it for the airliner.)

"Then there are the underwater and surface water models...when fuel cell technology (already being used in beta by one manufacturer to produce 8 hour flight times) it is conceivable that a small fleet of smuggling devices could swarm in undetected along any deserted stretch of shore along any coastal area. Things that small are simply not going to be spotted or detected. They wouldn't even have to go that far - if deployed right from international waters they have reduced their risks considerably. Cartels are killing each other over the few 'remaining' routes they have. I'm astonished that they have not thought about using technology this way already.

The above things I've described I've researched carefully, the technical capabilities are there and ability to stop them is not.”

Hmmm. Thanks, Joel. Scary. 

Drones

Thriller Guy is getting sick of books about drones. They’re cool, sure, but over the last month TG has read four of them and he’s is very afraid that there are scores more out there, hovering overhead out of sight, just waiting to plunk down on his desk and demand to be reviewed. But we’ll get to the drones in a moment; first TG would like to introduce a couple of new features here at Thriller Central.

(First of all, TG would like to condemn and excoriate those writers who now delete the word "of" when used, as above, in the phrase "a couple of whatever." They now write this as "a couple whatever." Where did this come from? And TG is horrified to see that there is some acceptance of this in writerly circles. Shame, shame. You will have to pry that "of" from TG's cold dead hands.)

TG often reads some great lines in the books he reviews, and because he knows you readers and writers alike appreciate clever writing, TG is going to pass along these examples from time to time. First up is from The Dead Sea Deception, which is a Da Vinci Code type of thriller by Adam Blake. Blake is a pseudonym of Mike Carey, a British comic book writer. Deception has strange warrior villains who bleed from their eyeballs and take a drug that turns them into deadly, incredibly efficient killers, plus there are codes and religious mysteries and a lesbian woman detective who is as tough as any of the guys. Her name is Kennedy and here she and her mysterious partner, Tillman, are gearing up to go after the eye bleeders…

Excellent writer’s lines #1. "Tillman had transferred a whole lot of light and heavy ordnance into a kit bag he carried on his back. In his hands, in place of the Unica, he carried a FA-MAS Clairon assault rifle in the French Army configuration, complete with bayonet and grenade launcher. The thing terrified Kennedy: it looked like the Swiss army knife of sudden death."

See how Blake works in the all-important gun info (the Unica reference is to a particular unusual type of handgun) then tosses in the kicker Swiss Army knife line, which is perfect because it’s an image that clicks into the reader’s visual brain. Deception is a good book, due out in June and the sequel is scheduled for July.

TG also comes across lots of good Thriller info in the course of reading all these books. Most Thriller writers understand the need for research and throwing in fun facts is always a smart idea. You don’t want to use everything you learn, that just slows things down and makes the writer look like a smarty pants, but the judicious use of cool facts is the hallmark of a great thriller.

Cool fact #1. From a book by Richard Clark, whose novel Drone will be discussed below, we learn that when you see gun camera footage from attacking fighter aircraft, (go to the Internet and look for YouTube videos) after an air to ground missile is released and hits the target, a big explosion cloud goes up and after a few seconds you almost always see a little guy run out of the cloud and scamper away. These guys are called, by the attackers, “squirters.” A perfect name and another great image.

Cool fact #2. From The Red Room, by Ridley Pearson. “Face recognition software has improved exponentially in the past few years, to the point at which X-ray imaging in an airport’s full-body scanner can utilize an individual’s skull features to overcome attempts at disguise like glasses and wigs.” Who knew?

Pearson has written more than 48 novels (after awhile you lose count) and has some very Thriller Guy pronouncements on the art and labor of writing. From his website:

How many rejection slips did you get before your first novel was published?

I wrote 6-7 hours a day for 8 1/2 years before my first fiction was under contract. I think of it as my graduate school days—although I was “there” long enough to be a brain surgeon.

Do you get ideas for new books all the time and you keep them written down, or does one come to mind just when you need one?

I keep a notebook with me at all times. (Check out TG’s entry on the Field Notes brand of excellent notebooks. And look for a new upcoming entry on an excellent new tougher notebook in the line.)

What inspires you to write? Where do you get your ideas?

I love telling stories. I’ve been a storyteller much of my life, and I think the novels allow me to express that. My ideas come from experience, newspapers, listening to others, observation. It’s all around us. Everything has a story if you take the time to listen and look for it.

Have you found certain methods or tricks for writing novels?

I don’t have tricks. It comes down to hours and hours of work. I rewrite every novel no fewer than four times, sometimes as many as nine times. You can’t believe how many hours that consumes. It’s ENDLESS. You have to be patient to be a published writer, and you have to practice humility, because the editor (or teacher) is nearly always right. (Hey, is this not what TG has been drilling into your heads for the last, what, 4 years?)

Do you have any writing advice for beginner writers?

If you read, read, read and study the way various authors make characters come to life on the page you will see that working both with the five senses and internal thoughts can really help. My advice is to read the character descriptions in the books you love and to especially pay attention to how they speak and what they say as that is what shapes people’s impressions of us and therefore readers’ impressions of characters. (Again, this is straight from TG’s playbook.)

Most importantly, pick an amount of time each day, 30 mins, 1 hour, and sit down and DO IT. (TG: Ditto, ditto, ditto)

Wait a minute, TG, what about the Drones?

That’s just going to have to wait. Where does the time go? Keep coming back for new entries from the Thriller Guy. And for a good read, check out any of the books by Allen Appel listed at the appelstore.com site to the right of this entry.

Onward.