TECHNOBABBLE

Nothing in popular fiction seems to grow stale as quickly as writings about computer technology. In part, this is because computer technology seems to be evolving constantly. The internet of 1999 was much less sophisticated than the internet of 2025. The personal computers of the 1980s are nothing like the personal computing devices of the 2020s. When these older technologies were new, it may have struck pop-fiction writers as cool to explain how a dial-up internet connection worked. But few contemporary readers are interested in that type of stuff any longer. In my paperback copy of Michael Crichton’s 1992 thriller, Rising Sun, pages 283 through 311 are almost entirely devoted to an explanation of how VHS security camera tapes can be spliced and doctored. I probably found this stuff interesting in 1992. When I reread the book a few years ago, I found pages 283 through 311 tedious in the extreme. Who cares how videotape was doctored? No one uses it any more. In a contemporary review of the book, Kirkus Reviews praised Rising Sun for being “technologically riveting,” but, nowadays, the book’s technology is its least riveting aspect.

Recently on this blog, I sang the praises of Nancy Rogan’s 1999 thriller, Suspicion. I didn’t mention, however, that the book is somewhat marred by Rogan’s excessive explanation of how a personal computer, circa 1999, can be hacked into. The book contains several scenes in which the characters discuss computer hacking. This might have been cutting-edge stuff back in 1999 but nowadays it reads like an old computer manual: dull and dated. Here’s a sample:

“Here’s your culprit,” Nick says. “The program’s called CopyCat. What it does is link two computers via modem. It’s typically used by cybercommuters to merge their home and work computers…Crafty bastard hid it good. What he did, he created a sub-directory inside a crowded directory, in this case C:/Windows/system. He stuck the CopyCat files in there and marked both the files and the sub-directory ‘hidden.’ Files and directories marked as hidden don’t appear in File Manager unless you specifically set the search parameters to include hidden files, which most people wouldn’t think to do…With this program installed in your computer and his, your cyber-stalking friend can do anything you can do on your computer. He can get into programs, mess with your E-mail, add, alter, or delete files…When he’s ready to disengage, he simply exits the program and both monitors revert to the Windows opening screen.”

A little of that kind of stuff goes far too long a ways, if you ask me. But it is ubiquitous in the popular thrillers of the past three or four decades. I’m not referring just to technothrillers, like the kind Crichton specialized in. Rogan’s Suspicion isn’t a technothriller. It’s basically a haunted house story. Since computers aren’t a major subject of the story, nobody would have cared if the Nick the computer guy had simply told Emma, “Somebody hacked into your computer remotely and tinkered with your email” (or E-mail, as it was often referred to back in the 1990s).

Likewise, Alafair Burke’s otherwise excellent 2007 thriller, Dead Connection, is marred somewhat by excessive (and probably dated) computer jargon. The novel is about a serial killer who uses a computer-dating service to help him lure his female victims to their deaths, so, naturally, some discussion of computer technology is unavoidable. But Burke’s technological passages tend to kludge up her narrative. Here’s an example:

“A cookie is a tiny piece of data sent from a Web server to a Web browser. So when you use a browser like Internet Explorer to go to a Web site like eBay, eBay sends a cookie to your browser, then it’s stored on your computer so that eBay will recognize you the next time you visit the site from the same computer. What people don’t understand is that computers don’t just hang on to the stuff that you intentionally tell them to save. They also hang onto all kinds of data on a temporary basis. Here, take a look at this.”

He had logged Amy Davis onto the law firm’s wireless network and then pulled up the popular search engine Google. He clicked on the empty text box provided for users to type in their Internet search. A menu of text appeared.

“With just one click on an empty box we can see all of the different Google searches she ran since the last time she cleared her search history. That information is all stored in the computer temporarily. Same thing with her Internet browser.” He his a separate button to display Amy Davis’s history on Internet Explorer, then scrolled down to point out all of the Web sites she’d visited recently.

“You could erase all of this data just by hitting Clear, or by scheduling your computer to do it every day automatically. The same is true of all of the cookies that get sent to your computer by Web servers. So what a cookie tracker does is send the victim to a link that’s disguised as a legitimate Web site. But instead of being whatever site it purports to be, the link lets the bad guy steal the cookies off the victim’s computer…A good hacker can steal all kinds of information through cookies. Or cookies could be used to create a profile of a person, by monitoring their activities across a number of different Web sites.”

Nowadays, even technoboobs such a myself understand that computers retain a history of their owners’ web searches. Certainly a crack investigator for the NYPD, such as the protagonist of Dead Connections, would know this. In 2025, a sharp police detective would not need to consult with a computer technician in order to search the browsing history on a computer. If you gave me access to your smart phone or computer, I could search your browsing history, and I barely know how to check my own email. Decades old thrillers such as Suspicion and Dead Connections are still highly readable, but the excessive explanations of computer phenomena that are nowadays routine (remotely hacking into someone’s email, checking someone’s browsing history) act upon the prose of these novels the same way that too many web cookies can act upon your computer – they kludge up the works and make it slower and less efficient than it would be without them.

Recently, I read a thriller called The Policy, which was published in 1999 and written by Patrick Lynch (a pseudonym for Philip Sington and Gary Humphreys). It is a very good book and features an insurance scam involving DNA that I’ve never seen used before in a work of fiction. Nonetheless, every time the protagonist sat down at a computer, I winced. Computer databases were apparently still novel enough in 1999 for novelists to think that readers might be fascinated by how they are accessed and how they work. Thus, in The Policy, we get a lot of passages like this:

From the opening menu Alex selected the last option: TREASURY OPERATIONS. This time she was asked for a password immediately. Again, Alex typed in the four-letter code L-I-R-A. The cursor froze for a second and then Alex was suddenly looking at another list.

TREASURY OPERATIONS DATA

1. LT holdings current

2. LT holdings historical

3. ST & cash positions

4. Transactions record

5. Disbursements ledger

6. Operational projections

She was in. Alex surveyed the options, unsure at first which one to choose…She moved the cursor into the fifth position and pressed ENTER. It took a few seconds for the computer to load up the accounting software, then the data…Then Alex saw what she needed: an option at the top of the screen that read SEARCH. She selected it and entered the sort code…”

I used to work for a title insurance company back in the 1990s, and I can attest that the above description fairly accurately represents what it was like to search for information on a company computer circa 1999. There may have been a time when this type of computer detail fascinated readers. But nowadays I think most readers would prefer to simply have Patrick Lynch write: “Alex sat down at the computer and accessed the information she was looking for.” What’s more, Alex is searching the computer system of a major banking operation, so it seems crazy, nowadays, that the info could be accessed via a four-letter password, LIRA.

In American pop fiction, the heyday of this kind of excessive computer info ran from approximately the late 1980s until about 2010. Sometime around the mid 1980s, perhaps in part because of the AIDS crisis, American pop fiction became less sexual and more technological. After the censorship battles of the 1950s and early 1960s had been won, the pages of American pop fiction – as exemplified by the works of Jacqueline Susann and Harold Robbins – began to fill up with excessive sexual description. This trend in pop fiction lasted from about 1965 to the early 1980s, eventually becoming nearly as tedious as excessive computer detail has since become. But a lot of that old sexual content remains (often unintentionally) extremely fun to read. Consider for instance this passage from Shane Stevens’s 1979 thriller By Reason of Insanity: “She had a roller-coaster body and he had the ticket right in his pants. He would ride her as long as the park was open.” Or consider these lines, collected from various pulp novels by Bill Pronzini in his anthology Son of Gun in Cheek:

“In the dim light of the room, we pulled apart. But we were still as close as consecutive weekdays.”

“The nakedness of her inner thighs graduated enticingly, sensuously slow up to the danger zone.”

“She laughed and the best parts of her jiggled.”

“She urged me closer, the invitation plainer than if engraved on vellum.”

“I looked at her breasts jutting against the soft fabric of her dress, nipples like split infinitives.”

“The confused, naked girl lay there and struggled to get free, her breasts moving violently from side to side, like one-eyed spectators at a very fast tennis game.”

You won’t find any pop-fiction technobabble that can equal the entertainment value of the above passages. Sex remains largely unchanged through the years. Naked breasts in 2025 look pretty much the same as they did in 1965. But a description of a defunct 1992 computer-operating system is nowadays almost guaranteed to be both impenetrable and dull. And you will find a lot of this stuff cluttering the pop fiction that was published between, say, 1988 and 2010.

Plenty of tedious computer detail still gets published in popular thrillers, but rarely does a writer waste whole paragraphs explaining things like web cookies or search histories or email hacking. Sadly, pop culture now appears to have gone too far in the opposite direction. Nowadays, instead of explaining how a particular computer hack is executed, we get computer nerds with laptops who can apparently access any information – the whereabouts of a secret government weapons cache, a billionaire’s hidden assets, a bomb hidden among the 20,000 cargo containers aboard an ocean-going ship – in seconds. This “magical computer” trope mars some of Frederick Forsyth’s final novels. But it is particularly ubiquitous on film and television. In the 2024 film Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (horrible title!), Tom Cruise runs around an international airport looking for…a bomb(? – I can’t remember any longer) while his teammates whisper information into his earpiece that they are gleaning in real time on their laptop computers. Later they do the same thing while Cruise runs around Venice, Italy, looking for…a bomb again? In the Netflix action series FUBAR, a character named Uncle Barry (played by Milan Carter) combines the magical Negro trope with the magical computer trope. He is an African American and he can access just about any piece of electronic equipment in the world with his laptop computer. He can reverse the current in an underwater intake valve located miles away. He can open the gates of top-secret military installations just by tapping on a few computer keys. This kind of stuff goes on all the time now in Hollywood productions. In the Amazon Prime series Bosch: Legacy, Harry Bosch has a buddy named Maurice – a magic Asian, played by Stephen A. Chang – whose computer skills are largely indistinguishable from magic. Among other things, “Mo” can find security video of just about anything Harry wants him to locate. Needless to say, none of these magic computer experts are ever stumped by anything as basic as a password.

If I were forced to chose between a pop-culture product that frequently employs the magic computer trope and one that frequently employs old-school excessive computer info, I think I would chose the latter. The magic computer trope is a product of laziness, used by writers too indolent to do any research whatsoever. Writers like Patrick Lynch, Nancy Rogan, and Alafair Burke may have gone a bit overboard on their computer research, but at least they did the research in the first place. One gets the feeling, reading their books, that the computers are doing things that are entirely possible. Watching Mission: Impossible, FUBAR, Bosch: Legacy, etc., one gets the feeling that the scripts are written by people who possess nothing but disdain for the intelligence of their audience.

Curiously, computer technology seems to suffer from this phenomenon more than any other type of technology. I believe there are several reasons for this. Automobiles in 2025 are infinitely more sophisticated than the automobiles of 1935, but they still do pretty much the same thing the old ones did. Any fifteen-year-old, looking at a film made in 1935, won’t have any trouble figuring out what the automobiles are. But I’ve seen fifteen-year-olds at flea markets struggling to understand how a rotary dial phone worked. Show a contemporary teenager an Apple IIc, circa 1984, and he’ll probably be able to identify it as a computer. But ask him to use it and he’ll likely be at a loss. What’s more, plenty of old automobiles are still on the road. Drive around town for a few hours and you’re likely to encounter a few Mustangs and Barracudas and other classic muscle cars of the 1960s and 70s still tooling around. Classic auto shows are fairly commonplace. Lowrider automobile clubs – ubiquitous here in Northern California – generally keep older cars running for decades after they have gone out of production. No American teenager would be stumped by the sight of a 1964 Chevy Impala. But show a kid a UNIVAC I computer and he probably won’t know what he is looking at.

Presumably, medical technology advances nearly as rapidly as computer technology does (the two technologies, of course, are closely related), but I regularly read medical thrillers published in the 1990s, 1980s, and earlier, and don’t find them at all dated. Obviously, a major reason for this is the fact that I am not a medical professional and know almost nothing about high-tech medical advances. But another major reason for this phenomenon is the fact that the human body hasn’t changed any in the last fifty years. A lot of what makes a medical thriller interesting is the explanations it contains of what various diseases, viruses, bacteria, toxins, and so forth can do to the human body. A passage in a 1985 novel that explains how the pancreas works probably remains as relevant today as it was forty years ago. But a passage in a 1985 novel that explains how some long-forgotten computer software worked isn’t likely to be all that interesting to anyone who isn’t passionate about the history of computers.

I am currently reading Phillip Margolin’s 1993 legal thriller Gone, But Not Forgotten. Although the book makes no mention of the internet or email or computer viruses, it feels far less dated than books like The Policy and Suspicion, which were published several years later. It also feels far less dated than Crichton’s Rising Sun, a “technologically riveting” thriller which was published just a year earlier. Margolin’s novel references word processing and computer databases, but it doesn’t lean too heavily on any type of technology. The American judicial system doesn’t appear to have altered too dramatically since 1993. The police investigation leans slightly less heavily on forensics than most contemporary crime dramas, but DNA and fiber technology are still a part of the mix. As the case moves slowly towards a trial, the process seems identical to what it is in good contemporary legal thrillers, such as those written by Alafair Burke.

Among the many elements that can be found in the modern pop fiction novel, it is references to computer technology that seem to grow old and stale the most quickly. And this is what causes a lot of slightly older books to feel dated and tired before their time. My advice to thriller writers is to keep this phenomenon in mind when writing about computer technology. In a contemporary novel, when a character gets into an automobile, no author feels the need to explain how an internal-combustion engine works. Most readers, such as myself, don’t fully understand the workings of an internal-combustion engine, but we don’t need it explained to us either. These engines have been around long enough that we can accept the fact that they work. If, however, an automobile in a novel suddenly takes to the air and flies all over town, we will definitely need an explanation of how it is able to do that. Similarly, if your protagonist is dealing with fairly routine computer operations, we do not need detailed explanations of how cookies or browser histories work. Give us only as much computer detail as an average reader might need in order to accept the plausibility of a particular computer function. If your protagonist is able to access the POTUS’s private emails with his computer, you sure as hell better explain to us how he does it.

And, as for sex, please give us a lot more of it, the sleazier the better. I kind of miss all those jiggling breasts.