Opportunity doesn’t knock, says Terry Hayes; it’s not that clear-cut and obvious. “I say to my four kids, opportunity doesn’t make an appointment,” he says. “You turn around and it’s there, and you don’t even know where it came from. So, you have a choice: you either grab it or you don’t. I’m not saying I made all the right choices, but I did see opportunities and I did grab them as hard as I could. One opportunity was the chance to work with George Miller [on Mad Max 2].”
A decade ago, the now 72-year-old Hayes was dealing with stunning success. His debut spy thriller, I Am Pilgrim, was an overnight sensation. The 600-page techno-thriller was also a rich character study of a terrorist wielding a vaccine-resistant strain of smallpox and a legendary secret agent pulled back into the intelligence underground after a murder near Ground Zero.
“Technology develops much faster than our ability to foresee where it will lead,” says Hayes, his Australian accent resonating over video call from his family’s Lisbon, Portugal, apartment. “As a society, we’re always trying to play catch-up and the problem is the technology is accelerating but we can’t run any faster. So that’s been an interest of mine for a long time. Writing I had the opportunity to think about that and think about one man’s freedom fighter being
