Sitting in my evening chair, listening to the news, pondering our economic situation and that presented in A. G. Hayes and my thriller, QUANTUM DEATH (Savant 2016), I was surprised to find the two worlds moving ever closer, and worse, hearing the politicians cheer it on. For want of a few dollars, America's leaders are selling our nation into monstrous debt, the kind that will undoubtedly rise on its haunches in the distant future and tear asunder what few social nets are left to people in order to pay it off. For a trillion plus dollar debt, we get what? Really? A national health care system of which we can be proud? A stronger social security retirement system? Better physical infrastructure? A simpler, more equitable tax system? 

In QUANTUM DEATH, Koski and Falk face a mysterious pair of repeating events: a sudden interruption of everything seemingly electronic, followed immediately by a global auction in Bitcoins of one after another part of the USA. The Eastern Seaboard, the Mid Atlantic, the South, each episode causing Americans to rethink what it means for the world to have parallel virtual monetary systems, increasing electronic sophistication, burgeoning knowledge and power in the realm of quantum physics, an exponential rise in valuing "the dollar," and what, collectively, this all might portend. 


Most see these events as separate and distinct, but I have to wonder if, not unlike in the book, what is going to be required is an entirely new way of collective thinking about today's "progress." In QUANTUM DEATH, greed, economics, propaganda, global virtual warfare, virtual currency and quantum physics are inseparably linked, a situation that makes for a great thriller, but not necessarily a great, though admittedly a brave new world.