Interview: Chuck Wendig On Hacking the Cyber-Thriller Formula in Zeroes

You have some background with comics, and I can’t help but notice some Suicide Squad-esque themes in Zer0es. Was that part of your inspiration for the book?
Oh yeah, there’s a little bit of that in there. It wasn’t really a fundamental part of it, they’re not necessarily pulled out of prison to go on one last, crazy [mission]—it’s sort of that they’re scooped up and assigned to work as white hat hackers for the government. And in doing so, they have a closer seat toward the NSA surveillance program that has, effectively, become self-aware. Then, it becomes a game of ‘did this thing arrange their incarceration in this program in the first place?” Does it want something from them? Are they the ones to defeat it? Is there something else going on here? So it’s kind of that thriller-y, outguessing-the-government-and-this-program type of thing.
Obviously parallels to the current NSA programs are there, but there’s still some old-school CIA, MK Ultra stuff going on.
One of the characters in particular is an old-school sort of cypherpunk who’s able to attack BBS and that sort of stuff…so I kind of tried to address hacking through the ages a little bit, make it engaging—authentic, but not so authentic that it’s boring.
You have a fairly extensive background working hands-on with some of this tech…
Well, I used to run a BBS when I was a kid. I did…[laughs] some of that stuff when I was a kid that I should not have done. You know. [And] one of my jobs was a systems manager for a company, so I have some background in the technology here.
And Zer0es is at least somewhat based on that hard science?
I try not to be too crazy about that, because any time I got too hard science-y about it, it sort of robbed the thrill…I also don’t want to be so glib and so dumb that it’s like some CBS TV show, you know? Like CSI, “we punch buttons, we’re hacking!” things. “I put in a USB key and now I magically hack stuff!” You can’t auto-enhance pixels into more pixels somehow, like Tribbles—pixels creating pixels creating pixels!
So there’s that line of trying not to create a dumb story, but also not to be so smart that everyone’s falling asleep. The mechanics [of hacking] are not that interesting, when you sit down—if I was writing a story over a hacker’s shoulder, it’d be like, “okay, so this is a lot of computer work…” It’s a job. That’s not a thriller, that’s a job.

You mentioned that this is sort of a cross-section of all the different approaches to hacking in a sort of ensemble. A lot of your other writing has been focused on singular protagonists—they have their supporting casts, but it’s their story. Now you have a story that belongs to all of these characters.
It does belong to all these characters. And I started to do that in Heartland, my teen series. The first book is predominantly about one of the characters, but the subsequent two books really blow out the perspective. And the first book had that originally, but we wanted to trim it to keep it lean. And obviously, writing a Star Wars book is about writing a cast. You can do some great things with that, especially in a thriller. You can create a lot of suspense by having one character know something the other characters don’t know, secrets and betrayal. One character perspective is great for kind of that single bullet story like Atlanta Burns. When you want to do something more multifarious, multi-tiered in a thriller sense, I think [having] a lot of characters is cool.
Do you think there’s one that’s more difficult for you to write?
Well, the multi-character stuff requires more work. It’s plottier. Even though I still consider plot—especially the ones I write—to be outward extensions of the character’s decisions, characters are making the plot for me. I don’t have to force them into actions and events, they have things they want. And in pursuit of those things, plot happens. But I still have to keep track of all of it, still have to make sure everything is playing well together and everything makes sense and that you’re revealing things at the right time. It just takes more fine tuning.
Are there times when you’ve finished your outline and are getting into writing and you realize “wait, this character would never act this way”?
You know, no attack plan survives contact with the enemy. That’s always, every time, 100 percent the problem. My endings are usually the same—the ending I imagine is often the same one I get to. How I get there is often very different from the outline. You can plot the best [route] driving across the country that you’d like; there are inevitably going to be highways closed to you. You’re going to have to make do with the exit that is afforded. You take the sensible way to go and make it work.
You’re very active on social media, and were talking earlier about various online lowlifes. Did you draw from real-life inspiration for the “troll” member of the team?
Reagan Stolper. I did, but at the same time, I also read a lot of stories about people who were trolls, what they were like, and psychological profiles of trolls and why they do what they do. And at the end of the day, I’m still making a character that I need to be empathetic—not sympathetic, I don’t want you to feel bad for him, but I want you to understand. I want you to get on board a little bit as a reader. So the question is, how do you make a troll to some degree a hero at the same time? But while still maintaining that—you know, not “I’m putting all this aside to be a good person now!” No, I’m a bad person who’s doing good things, or I have a good side too.
Even a troll isn’t a troll constantly.
Right. And there’s a reason for it. Everyone’s the hero of their own story, so why is she doing it? Even Anonymous has done terrible things as a collective, but they’ve also done amazing things.
That’s actually what I wanted to ask you about next—there are a lot of aspects to Anonymous, but you can kind of divide them into two groups: the older “create a ruckus for its own sake” Anon, and the new “let’s take down Scientology” crowd.
And those sides do not always agree.
Sometimes violently. Is there a camp that your Anon falls into?
The newer social justice ones, definitely. There’s a reason for that which is revealed throughout the book. He’s very much into trying to create social change but at the same time, kind of get revenge too. There’s sort of a horrible component. So again, there’s that positive and negative. I love that about hacking culture. Hackers are sort of a demonized thing—a hacker! Gonna hack your bank account and steal your credit card! But there are so many things hackers have done that are kind of amazing, how they point out flaws instead of just exploiting them. How they can point out places where you’re vulnerable, where the NSA has stolen things from us. Edward Snowden, WikiLeaks. There’s nothing pure about it and there’s nothing demonic about it. It’s this great middle territory for ethical investigation. [laughs]
Was there one of the characters that was hardest for you to empathize with?
Aleena was the trickiest—she’s an Arab Spring, what you might consider a white hat hacker—just because she’s a world away from me. I wanted to get that right, but at the same time I didn’t want to be so slavish to it that I had to make it feel like I was trying to force something. I believe very much in writing diversity into fiction, but at the same time, I don’t want to write Diversity Bingo like I’m trying to do some sort of agenda. It’s always walking that line.
I needed to find out what I understood about her. For someone who lives such a different life and is such a different person from me, how do I find that empathy? How do I find that psychic bridge between this character and me? I did a lot of research.

Is there a real hero here?
No, and see, that’s the great—I try to switch it. The character Chance seems like he’s the hero, he’s the Anonymous guy. You think he’s doing the right thing for the right reasons. But he’s also kind of an idiot, and he’s not very good at what he does; it’s what Mad Max does very well in Mad Max. In Fury Road, Max is actually sort of an inept clingalong. He’s functional, he has functional parts, but he has to become sort of humanized from that survivor-animal from the beginning. [There’s] that great scene where he’s firing the gun into the distance and he’s not hitting anything, so he has to pass the rifle to Furiosa and she uses him like a mount. Chance sort of [fills] that role in the book for me; he has function in the story, but he doesn’t actually belong there. He is not deserving of the role he’s been given. That’s what I was interested in exploring—he’s trying to hang, but he can’t keep his nose above water. So Aleena’s the one who’s sort of the completely functional, superstar hacker who basically has to keep him from dying.
You were talking [at your Phoenix Comic-Con spotlight panel] about the real dangers of this sort of technology. Is Zer0es in some way your “warning” to us all, in a different sense than your postapocalyptic work?
It has a little bit of that, yeah. I’m writing a novel now for Harper about an FBI futurist who gets caught up in this…thing. She’s a consultant, she gives talks, and there’s one up front that’s about how all the technology we use is constantly there to either destroy us or evolve us. And we often try to do both of those things; you can split the atom and try to gain energy forever, or you can destroy a city of people. Even a simple knife can spread butter or slit someone’s throat. And this is one of those things that has that dual side; we’re using it simultaneously to to evolve ourselves, and possibly to destroy ourselves at the same time. [laughs] Every [piece of] technology’s this constant sense of battling against our best and worst instincts. Which will win? She says at the end, “well, evolution and ruination are running in a race. There’s only one door and only one can get through.” Every time, you have to sort of see which one is going to shepherd you to the next level or going to knock you back—sort of an atavistic knockback. [laughs] This technology’s great but man, there’s a lot of creepy shit that comes out of it.
Zer0es is available August 18.