Sharjah
Best-selling writer Eric Van Lustbader, who had foreseen Russia’s involvement in Syria years before it actually happened, said he is “extrapolating” from his coming thriller a “frightening” scenario of cyberwarfare that could inflict the real world.
In an interview on the sidelines of the Sharjah International Book Fair (SIBF), Van Lustbader told Gulf News on Friday that The Bourne Initiative, expected for release in June 2017, is “about the kind of cyberwarfare that we have only started to see”.
The book’s description on Amazon.com, which is taking pre-orders, novelises a top Russian security official who “has reached out from the grave with an unstoppable cyber operation he conceived before his murder, aimed at the heart of the United States — a way to steal the president’s nuclear launch codes”.
Van Lustbader is a New York Times Bestselling novelist famous for the Jason Bourne series whose namesake lead character is also a popular Hollywood anti-hero played by Matt Damon.
The American author said since “thrillers by definition have to be very current, what I’ve developed is to read about what’s going on now and try to extrapolate what might happen a year in the future, because no matter what I’m writing now, that book isn’t going to come out for a year”.
His latest book, The Bourne Enigma, was released in June.
“The Bourne Enigma that came out this year, which I wrote actually two years ago, was about [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and the Russian incursion into Syria — that hadn’t happened when I wrote the book. But it looked to me like it was going to happen. That’s an ability I’ve developed over the years and [The Bourne Enigma] makes for a pretty exciting book because it [the Russian involvement in Syria] is happening at the moment, when people are reading the book,” Van Lustbader said.
He added that he writes about “things that terrify me”, and his coming thriller, The Bourne Initiative, is no different. Van Lustbader is again extrapolating in the novel — and could again be right.
“The [Bourne] Initiative is really about cyberwarfare but it’s about the kind of cyberwarfare that we have only started to see. That hasn’t really made itself prevalent so I’m trying to, again, extrapolate from what we have now. Unfortunately, it’s actually very frightening.” Before the interview, Van Lustbader had presented a talk on his life and work to fans at SIBF, which ends on November 12 at Expo Centre Sharjah. He revealed that he would be returning to the UAE in March 2017 for the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature in Dubai.
Van Lustbader praised SIBF and “the philosophy of learning and reading” in Sharjah, whose people he described as “most warm and fascinating”.
Though Van Lustbader has written several Bourne books, the character was created by the late novelist Robert Ludlum, who wrote The Bourne Trilogy novels that spawned three successful Bourne movies.
In 2003, Van Lustbader was asked by the Estate of Ludlum to continue the series based on the fictional international assassin
