By James Grady

The world we used to write in and about is gone.

Us thriller fiction prose-slingers used to create imaginary worlds that were a mere blink away from what our readers saw outside their car windshield or their cozy homes’ locked front door.

Our words created a world where a hitchhiker on a deserted Badlands highway smiles as he climbs into a homicidal maniac’s blue Chevy. 

We stunned readers with the sultry dyed blonde damsel in distress who in Chapter 19 reveals to them—but not to our yearning hero who has to make it to Chapter 33—the straight razor hidden in her garter-belted black stockings. 

Our readers pictured how they themselves grew up as they turned pages of a touchable book, swiped a Kindle screen or listened to an audiobook while driving the gray highway toward either Kansas City as our all-alone heroine schoolteacher’s low-heeled black shoes click her way through the deserted school corridor only to find the EXIT doors unbeatably locked. 

Our readers absorbed the ticking clock saga of a CIA analyst working out of The Company’s deep cover field station in Montana near the Canadian border amidst atom bomb delivering missile silos who realizes he’s been set-up as a Terminate With Extreme Prejudice enemy spy.

Lovers of classic thriller fiction smiled at our Dashiell Hammett–Raymond Chandler homage where a solo private eye gumshoes and keyboard clicks his way through our modern maze to discover the missing hotshot lawyer husband of his scarlet-haired trophy wife client may have been `the cost of doing business’ for one of our new herd of billionaires who sanction takedown bullets.

But today, tomorrow, and evermore we thriller authors are in a world far beyond what was perceived by the great American author of my (Boomer) generation Bruce Springsteen’s “runaway American dream.”

We’re live in a world where a human-sized, white steel skin, two-legs, two arms, black domed motorcycle helmet robot walks out of the White House with our First Lady and waves its black hands to the crowd on a day when global climate change is murdering Antarctica and drowning Hawaii as wildfires threaten Hollywood.

That robot waves as the whole concept of books and literature is attacked by soulless Artificial Intelligence invaders and invasions programmed to replace us beating hearts writers with manufactured data posed and sold as human prose.

Our readers exist in multiple realities that are often lightning webs of lies.

We can still write wondrous novels about our used to be’s going all the way back to wait a minute: What if it wasn’t Eve who gave Adam the apple?

But writing about today is terrifyingly tense as time now truly races at the speed of light. Classic real life entities and entanglements get swept away by tornadoes this afternoon to a tomorrow when Dorothy is gone and forgotten. 

What should we do? What can we do? 

Strap on and face what we got.

Follow murder thriller author Albert Camus’ brilliant epiphany that a true rebel says yes.

Battle foolish and traitorous publishers who covertly or overtly employ A.I.

Make our readers feel we’re in this now with them and their heirs.

Make our readers hear our recognition of this we better be brave new world even if it’s only by having our thriller story chronicle time-locked real news coming out of the blue Chevy’s scratchy radio tuned to the Badlands’ nearly extinct local AM radio station.

Use our fictions to reveal both timeless and timely truths while keeping our readers thrilled.

Like Duke Mantee/Humphrey Bogart in 1936’s The Petrified Forest says: “Let’s listen to the music and not make any wrong moves.”

But as always, we gotta make moves. 

And some of our moves are gonna be wrong.

So what. We’re thriller writers. We imagine what could be from what-is. 

Copyright our products and premises like I have with my snapshot plots here. Be careful but bold about where we reveal them.

Then click keyboards. 

What better can we do with what life’s put in our hands?