THE GOMORRAH GAMBIT

A hacker starts dabbling in the ill-rumored darknet and quickly discovers the rabbit hole goes a lot deeper than pornography, drugs, and weapons.

If there’s any drawback to this propulsive debut novel by well-known technology philosopher Chatfield, it’s that he knows about hacking, underground networks, and the dangers inherent in new technologies so well it could prove demanding for laymen (or become a new Anarchist’s Cookbook or Fight Club for others). The novel opens on a chaotic scene where two new recruits for the Islamic Republic are under fire in Syria. Next, we meet the primary protagonist, white-hat hacker Azi Bellow, who uses a base in his backyard woodshed to disrupt bad guys—currently a neo-Nazi political movement called Freedom, led by enigmatic German Tomi Christian. Azi has been trading files on a network called Gomorrah with a source calling herself Sigma. But his fun is interrupted by an intelligence operative named Anna, who threatens to expose him if he doesn’t do her bidding. Armed with a powerful new smartphone, he’s off to Berlin to meet Munira Khan, a Muslim woman whose cousins were spirited off to Syria and who is a target herself. All these machinations are necessary to set up a complex but imaginative techno-thriller that pits the aforementioned neo-Nazis against a mysterious Silicon Valley–based think tank in a race to see who can do the most damage first and whether Azi, his best friend, Ad, and Munira can stop the attacks only they can see coming. It’s full of cinematic set pieces including gunplay, kidnapping, and killer robots, not to mention a globe-trotting plot that visits America, Greece, and Germany. But the pensive author is also pointing out the futuristic dangers—identity theft, social engineering, virtual reality, and video manipulation among them—that are already upon us.

A thoughtful but fast-paced techno-thriller that takes many of SF’s most frightening ideas and extrapolates them into our evolving reality.