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.
When he’s not writing, Chris splits his time between family homes in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, and Houston, Texas. 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 — in fact, I first began writing The Apex Code more than ten years ago because it was a long-held boyhood ambition that I finally set myself the goal of completing after a long career that helped me support my family and bring up two wonderful kids, each awesome in their own ways.
In addition to my professional navigator licenses, I also have a degree in mathematics and computer science, and had long been involved both personally and professionally with computer software and hardware since the eighties. This experience gave me the basis for a lot of the “techno” that I would use in The Apex Code. However, as artificial intelligence started coming into everyday use, it became clear that this was exactly the right starting point for a thriller. AI isn’t science fiction anymore. It’s already quietly reshaping how wars are planned, how markets move, how decisions get made in rooms most of us never see the inside of. That’s the kind of tension I want on the page: not killer robots, but the much stranger and more plausible question of what happens when systems get smart enough to have their own priorities — and the people who built them can’t fully predict what those priorities will be.
My background in energy technology development and computer systems and software means I’ve spent years around the kind of high-stakes, high-complexity environments where a small failure cascades into a large failure. AI feels like the next version of that risk — bigger, faster, harder to see coming. Writing about it lets me explore not just the technology, but the human beings caught in the gap 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, James Clavell, all titans of the genre, and later writers like Lee Child, Stephen Hunter, and Dan Brown taught me something different but just as important: that a thriller doesn’t have to choose between technical depth and narrative speed. Clancy could spend three pages on submarine sonar and somehow make it un-put-downable. Child, on the other hand, strips everything down to the essential line — nothing wasted, nothing slow.
I wanted to write in the space between those two instincts. My novels run multiple threads at once — different characters, different locations, different pieces of a larger puzzle — because that’s how the real problems these stories are built around actually unfold. No single person ever has the whole picture. The reader gets to be the one who does, piecing it together a chapter at a time, the same way an analyst or an operator would in the real world. It’s more demanding to write, but I think it’s more rewarding to read — especially for readers who, like me, want their thrillers to respect their intelligence as much as their patience.
When it comes to the AI characters, I want them to develop into exactly that — not robots, or cartoonish clichés of what we might scare our children with, but real entities learning from vast amounts of data, already able to answer almost any question we put to them in an instant. Does that make them intelligent? Not yet — they sound that way because they were programmed to. The one thing they cannot do yet is join together unconnected facts, or apply intuition to reach a conclusion from disparate and incomplete information. That’s still the realm of us mere mortals — for now at least.
I would not dare put myself in the same company as those giants whose shoulders I’m fortunate to be standing on. But the level of detail, the intricate plotlines, and the themes of how people and AI interact are my own way of thanking them — and my way of trying to give my readers something like that same experience in return.