Every now and then you hear about a cyber-attack that takes down a power-system or other bit of infrastructure. Sometimes it’s even our side that did it. But imagine if all the countries that ever felt slighted by us stored up their best cyber-weapons and released them all at once. That’s what Sam Boush puts forth in his debut novel, weaving an all too possible tale about the day everything went dark and the few courageous individuals that stepped up to the challenge. Fast paced, full of engaging characters and chillingly well thought out.
Sam Boush’s debut novel is a fast-paced tale of cyber-apocalypse in the vein of William R. Forstchen’s One Second After and Tom Clancy’s best work. It’s not an easy book to put down, thanks to a solid cast of characters on a collision course. In the end, there’s more at stake for these folks than survival, but it’s going to take courage they didn’t know they had to take the fight to an enemy that has effectively wiped out western civilization as we know it in one act of cyberwar.
Pak Han-Yong’s is a North Korean junior lieutenant in a special cyber-warfare unit which has been developing code to take down the entire US power grid, exploiting its aging technology and lax security. But he’s not the alone. Across the world coders have been readying their viruses and malware for a massive, coordinated strike on the US, Europe, and Japan…and All Systems Down opens on the day the free world plunges into darkness and chaos.
Brendan Chogan is an out of work parking enforcer for the city of Portland. When an automated system took over his job, he went hunting for anything he could find, even sitting at the security desk of a tech company, and though he didn’t get the job, it put him on the front line when the internet began to fail and everything fell apart. Brendan’s got good instincts about bad things, and while the rest of the city is scratching its head, he’s hoofing it for home, a job made harder by the drawbridges all being stuck in the up position and him on the wrong side of the river. A former boxer and dedicated family man you can be sure he’ll make it home to his wife and daughters. The end of the world is where toughness comes in handy when there’s fighting to be done to protect your loved ones.
Before the end of the book, he’s going to find himself fighting for more than just his family.
There’s also Kelly, a fighter jock whose plane went dark along with everything else, but doesn’t know when to quit. And there’s Xandra, an elite cyber expert from our side. Given what might be the only working laptop left in the Pentagon, packed with captured enemy code and our best bad code, she’s stuffed into an aging Cessna with its civilian pilot and his young daughter and sent to the west coast to wreak what havoc she can on the invading naval forces. As Xandra hates children, this might be worse the worst consequence of the attack.
It all comes together in a last-ditch attempt to take the war to the enemy, each player a critical piece of the puzzle, risking everything for their one shot at bringing the war to a stalemate, if not victory.
All Systems Down is a fast-paced end of the world as we know it read in what promises to be the first of a series. While the US has suffered major infrastructure damage, it seems like a lot of systems could be bootstrapped back into service, and the end leaves open a lot of possibilities for the author to explore with the core cast he’s assembled.