Gayle Lynds: I’m thrilled to introduce one of the smartest, most talented folks I know: Robert T. Kelley. Imagine spending three decades in tech, building multiple successful companies, then turning to intriguing startups, and, finally, at long last, to fiction writing. And we are the richer for it. His debut novel, Raven, is chock full of suspense and fascinating technology that makes scary sense. It’s impossible to put down!
By Robert T. Kelley
As the 1980s came to a close, the Cold War was, at long last, also coming to an end. A moment so extraordinary the political scientist Francis Fukuyama declared it “the end of history,” and Americans looked forward to a “peace dividend,” when the billions of dollars spent on Cold War deterrence could now be redirected.
At the same moment, a new technology spawned from that very military spending—a computer network designed to survive a nuclear strike—was expanding rapidly. No longer confined to scientists and university researchers, the network, then known as the Advanced Projects Research Agency Network, or ARPANET, was evolving into what would become the now-ubiquitous internet. It took a few more years before the general public caught on, with the first rush of interest exploding after the Mosaic web browser was released in 1993.
In that innocent moment, pundits predicted the web would become a kind of self-policing egalitarian public forum, a place where Google’s founders could say “don’t be evil”—and do it with a straight face.
Needless to say, things worked out a little differently.
Even as techno-utopians were imagining new ways to use these connected machines, the dangers of connectivity began to emerge. In 1988, a Cornell student, Robert Tappan Morris, released a self-replicating program, a “worm,” onto the internet. Designed to jump machine to machine, his code possessed a flaw that caused it to replicate too aggressively, bringing down 10% of the nascent internet. While the damage was unintentional, he was indicted and later convicted under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. And we came to understand that with all of that potential came the opportunity to abuse it.
During the waning days of the Cold War and the dawning of the internet, cyberspace seemed filled with both possibility and peril. My debut thriller Raven takes place at that moment, at ground zero of the computer revolution: the year 1990 on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
My protagonist is a brilliant, self-taught programmer, and self-proclaimed hacker. Fleeing the consequences of her own computer misdeeds, she lands at MIT, in one of its most prestigious laboratories under the tutelage of its famous director, her future assured. But as her real-life counterparts also discovered back then, things don’t always turn out as we expect.
Readers, how does the internet affect your life (in good ways and bad)?
Robert T. Kelley spent 30 years in the technology industry, building multiple companies before turning to writing and working with startups. Formerly the publisher of literary journal The Maine Review, Rob now regularly blogs for Maine Crime Writers. He received his undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Missouri-Rolla and his PhD in English from Indiana University. Rob lives in Midcoast Maine with his wife, writer Margot Anne Kelley, and an indeterminate number of cats. Raven is his debut novel.
This is a fascinating look back at the development of the now ubiquitous internet – what would we all do without it??? I use it to research my books, (and to promote them), to contact all sorts of companies that interest me, deal with social media and so much more. Now I can’t wait to read “The Raven” – thanks for being a guest blogger today!
That is an amazing rabbit hole of thought to go down! What if the internet had been what it is today when the cold war was going on? And are we in a new cold war, fought entirely online with bots, scams and (actually) fake news?