Daniel Suarez’s Tech Thriller Novel Influx Acquired By 20th Century Fox
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Unless you’ve been extremely wealthy and/or spoiled your entire life, chances are you’ve experienced the feeling of being jealous that someone else has some form of technology that you don’t. Be it a video game system, a certain kind of phone, or even a vibrating Chinese finger trap made specifically for a different part of the anatomy. Somebody else always seems to have something better than you, and that’s the core of the story behind author Daniel Suarez’s fourth novel, Influx, which has been preemptively acquired for development by 20th Century Fox. So that means now I get to be jealous of someone else getting a movie deal. (slow claps)
The novel sounds a bit like Dark City in its sense of scope for turmoil, but who knows where it will go? It follows a particle physicist named Grady who, along with his research team, somehow devises and constructs a device that can reflect gravity. As you can imagine, Grady imagines the world’s exclusivity will be at his fingertips, only a shadowy organization shows up (of course!) and puts all that to a stop. Their name: The Bureau of Technology Control. Their game: hording all the really big ideas, medical advancements, and technology before they reach the public, ensuring their own firm grip on humanity’s stasis. Some of you out there already think this faction exists, don’t you?
Grady is given the choice to join the BTC team, but he doesn’t want to, and he’s given a pretty exclusive place inside of a high-security prison with a bunch of other smarties who went against the Bureau’s orders. Since great minds think alike, escape becomes the goal, and…well, I don’t know. The book won’t actually be published until February 20. (Pre-order it here.)
For now, Fox isn’t talking about directors or screenwriters, but THR points out that Fox is having a good year when it comes to pairing fan-favorite novels with big directors, as they’ve set David Fincher for Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and Tim Burton for Ransom Riggs’ Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. It’s hard to gauge who can direct a tech thriller with magnificence though. Edge of Tomorrow and The Bourne Identity‘s Doug Liman? There’s no point in guessing, really. (Let it be Terry Gilliam!)
Suarez previously published the novels Daemon in 2006 (later picked up by Dutton in 2009), Freedom in 2010 and Kill Decision in 2012. The film rights to Daemon were acquired by WarGames producer Walter F. Parkes, but Suarez currently owns the rights.
I’m not familiar with his work, but it sounds like it’ll make an interesting story. Let me know in the comments if I should be excited about this or not. In the meantime, give a listen to Suarez talking about his first three books on “This Week in Technology” below.
