GOING ZERO BY ANTHONY McCARTEN
If Michael Crichton were alive today, he may have written a book about one the biggest threats to humanity: surveillance. 4-time Oscar nominee Anthony McCarten’s breakneck paced, wickedly entertaining novel GOING ZERO (Harper, $30.00; Hardcover; ISBN: 9780063227071; on-sale: 4/11/2023) is that technothriller for the times we live in.
The premise: ten Americans have been carefully selected to Beta test a ground-breaking piece of spyware. Pioneered by tech-wunderkind Cy Baxter in collaboration with the CIA, FUSION can track anyone on earth. But does it work?
Each participant to this test is given two hours to ‘Go Zero’ – to go off-grid and disappear - and then thirty days to elude the highly sophisticated Capture Teams sent to find them. Any “Zero” that beats FUSION will receive $3 million. If Cy’s system prevails, he wins a $90 billion-dollar government contract to revolutionize surveillance forever.
But one of the contestants may have been underestimated. Kaitlyn Day is an unassuming Boston librarian with some secrets up her sleeves. Her stakes are far higher than money, and more personal than anyone imagines. Kaitlyn needs to win as badly as Cy needs to realize his own ambitions. They have no choice but to finish the game and when the timer hits zero, there will only be one winner…
This unique thriller is written by four-time Oscar nominee Anthony McCarten, one of the most in-demand writer-producers at work today. The New Zealand born screenwriter, playwright, novelist, and journalist known for his work on The Theory of Everything, Darkest Hour, The Two Popes, and Bohemian Rhapsody, has a very big fall coming. His Neil Diamond Broadway musical A Beautiful Noise ran starting on December 4th, his play The Collaboration about the relationship between Andy Warhol and Jean-Michele Basquiat opens on Broadway on December 20th, and the world premiere of his Oscar buzzworthy feature film I Wanna Dance With Somebody about Whitney Houston released on December 22nd. GOING ZERO - which has already been sold into over twenty two countries – will be adapted by McCarten for the screen.
Q&A with Anthony McCarten on GOING ZERO:
1. Please tell us about your latest novel, Going Zero.
The first pang of this thriller began in the summer of 2016, around a dinner table with friends, where – as it will often do – the subject of the ever-changing nature of modern life came up. The question arose: if you had to evade all detection, literally disappear off the map for some reason, how would you do so and could there be a way that nobody, no matter how well equipped, could find you?
I am old enough to remember a time where one could more easily slip off the radar. These days, not only governments but private corporations, controlled by unregulated individuals, have the power to know almost more about us that we know about ourselves. The benefits of a surveillance state (the one we all now find ourselves living in) and the attendant threat to personal privacy, has emerged as a major theme of our time. But beneath that lies an even deeper question: How is our personal information being used to influence our views and attitudes, without our knowledge, or permission? Are we any longer in total control of who we are?
I was off to the races, and the more I read and learned on this subject the more irritated I became. The list of positive changes the digital age has ushered in is vast and need no enumeration, but the need for new laws that will force companies to be less dominant and do less damage with the weapons of mass instruction and detection and influence they now possess is urgent and great.
Going Zero is a work of fiction but I think not unrealistic. It is meant to scare you, because most of the surveillance tools you will read about are already, and most often secretly, in widespread use.
2. Your background clearly shows that you write in a number of different forms – plays, screenplays, books, both fiction and non-fiction – do you have a favorite form, and if not, what do you like about each?
All three forms now feel relatively natural to me (if sitting in a room for years making stuff up is natural.) And each form offers a variety of pleasures as well as technical and emotional challenges and creative anguish.The skills you learn are in part transferable between the mediums. Play writing for example taught me how much of the action could be contained purely in what is said. Screenplays, on the other hand, are more about action than dialogue and from this you learn how character can also be revealed by what a character does, rather than what they say. So, in my novel, a extended section of dialogue, may be followed by a purely action-based sequence. I like that contrast, having the reader only hear at one point and then only see at an other.
3. You were born in New Zealand, live in the UK, and often work in the US – what are your favorite things about each and where is home to you now?
Although I now live in England much of the time, and work a lot in the US, I keep a beach house in New Zealand and try to go back there once a year, to be among my own kind. I first left in my twenties and perhaps there was an element of frustration in my reasons for doing so. But there was also simple curiosity: as I writer I felt in need to be in conversation with a larger sample of the human race. Britain offered me a more intense cross-section of humanity. The great pressure of numbers creates social phenomenon not found so obviously in a smaller population. It served as a new inspiration and now is my home. The United States delights me, and has done since my first visits here in my late 20’s. I had great fun back then, and even now some part of my brain releases a shot of endorphin whenever I land at JFK or LAX. You quickly love a country that puts a smile on your face.
4. What’s next in terms of your fiction? Are you planning a sequel to Going Zero? And when will a film of the novel come out?
I generally don’t believe in sequels, unless they were planned at the outset, which doesn’t really make them sequels so much as the next act in a larger, pee-conceived story. But I am already at work on the screenplay for Going Zero – more very soon.
