About Chris
Chris Chia was born in London and has spent his career at sea and in the energy industry — first as a professional maritime navigator, later as an energy industry executive and management consultant. That career has taken him to more than sixty countries, experiences that quietly shape the technical detail and global settings in his novels.
The Apex Code is his first novel, and he is currently at work on the second book in the series, The Axion Code, due later this year.
Why AI Techno-Thrillers
I didn’t set out to write about artificial intelligence because it was trending. I began The Apex Code more than ten years ago — a long-held boyhood ambition I finally gave myself permission to pursue after a career spent supporting my family and raising two wonderful kids, each awesome in their own way.
Beyond my professional navigator licenses, I hold a degree in mathematics and computer science, and I’ve worked with computer software and hardware since the eighties. That background gave me the technical grounding for the “techno” in The Apex Code. As AI moved into everyday life, it became clear this was the perfect premise for a thriller. AI isn’t science fiction anymore — it’s already shaping how wars are planned, how markets move, how decisions get made in rooms most of us never see the inside of. The tension I wanted on the page isn’t killer robots; it’s the stranger, more plausible question of what happens when systems grow smart enough to develop their own priorities — priorities their own creators can’t fully predict.
My background in energy technology development over the years also put me in a position to understand high-stakes, high-complexity environments where a small problem can cascade into a large and costly failure. AI feels like a newer version of that type of risk: bigger, faster, harder to see coming. Writing about it lets me explore not just the technology, but the people caught between what a system was built to do and what it starts doing on its own.
Why the Techno-Thriller Genre
I grew up on Tom Clancy, Robert Ludlum, and James Clavell; later, Lee Child, Stephen Hunter, and Dan Brown taught me a thriller doesn’t have to choose between technical depth and narrative speed. Clancy could spend three pages on submarine sonar and make it un-put-downable; Child strips everything down to the essential line — nothing wasted, nothing slow.
I write in the space between those two instincts. My novels run multiple threads at once — different characters, locations, pieces of a larger puzzle — because that’s how these stories’ real problems actually unfold. No single person has the whole picture; the reader does, piecing it together the way an analyst or operator would in the real world. It’s more demanding to write, but more rewarding to read — for readers who want their thrillers to respect their intelligence as much as their patience.
My AI characters aren’t robots or cartoonish clichés, but real entities learning from vast amounts of data, able to answer almost any question instantly. Does that make them intelligent? Not yet — they sound that way because they’re programmed to. What they can’t yet do is join unconnected facts or apply intuition to incomplete information. That’s still in the realm of us mere mortals, for now.
So, the detail, plotlines, and themes of how people and AI interact is also my way of thanking those techno-thriller greats — wanting to tell entertaining stories, and trying to give readers something like that same experience in return.