Brian Nelson. The Last Sword Maker. Blackstone, 2019.

At one point in The Last Sword Maker there is an epigraph that quotes H.G. Wells writing about “atomic bombs” in 1914. Thirty years before the first actual atomic bomb and only a few years after Einstein discovered the significance of E=mc², Wells was imagining the potential destructive power of atomic energy.

The Last Sword Maker does something similar with nanotechnology. As Wells turned some of his speculation into popular fiction, so author Brian Nelson speculates on possibilities of nanotechnology as a weapon. In doing so, he has created a real techno-thriller.

As I write, I am still waiting out the coronavirus scare.

We read in the novel that hundreds of villagers in Tibet are dying of a mysterious disease that seems to be very selective about who is killed. It is as if the virus is political. We soon discover that the Chinese have created what amounts to man-made viruses, like invisible drones, that identify their victims by their DNA, enter their bodies, and duplicate themselves till the host dies.

At one point the author tells us “If you sat twelve Tibetan men down, all but two or three of them would have served time in Chinese jails” (87). He insists that what he shares about Chinese history is accurate, even if it is not well known.

Just this week I read an article, originally published in Foreign Policy, about Chinese abductions of political enemies from foreign soils. Nelson has the Chinese abduct a number of his main characters from the United States, not because they are political enemies but because the Chinese want their technical know-how. They want to beat the United States in creating a sophisticated man-made nanovirus weapon.

Their cause? The same cause that has been the cause for all brutal regimes in the last century and a half: “the tide of history” (268). But we realize its force comes not so much historical inevitability as it does from something else.

Yet, there was a powerful system controlling these people. And that was the other thing he felt in the Great Lab: fear. (316, Italics in original)

Why do we hear little about such things in the West? We all know the answer: “They were all too afraid of upsetting the great economic behemoth” (54).

The Last Sword Maker, though, is not a political tract.

Wunderkind Eric Hill, Admiral James Curtiss, and others are working on an American top secret project to create microscopic nanocomputers called nanosites that can replicate themselves, acquire information, and perhaps be used as a sophisticated and virtually invisible weapon.

There are many twists and turns. Admiral Curtiss carries some guilt for the loss of life in a successful war operation years ago in the Middle East. Now he may be faced with something similar. The Americans have spies in the Chinese facility; the Chinese have spies in the American facility. Will the Chinese steal American technology for their weapons the way the Soviets stole plans for the atomic bomb during the Cold War?

This is a big deal. Like some of Wells’ writings, there is an element of science fiction here, but this is not far-out technology like Star Wars hyperspace. We know that nanotechnology is real. Chips are getting smaller and more powerful. They make information-gathering drones that resemble insects. We really do not have much further to go.

The story is set in 2025, only five years away. Will there be such a weapon then? It is plausible. No, no one ever built a submarine like Red October, but the technology was plausible in 1984. It is scarily not much different now with the technology Nelson is looking into.

There is one term associated with artificial intelligence in this novel that is new to me. We have heard people like Ray Kurzweil speak of singularity—the point in history when artificial intelligence will behave identically to human intelligence. Here the computer techies speak of the Big Bang (268): When they develop artificial intelligence that communicates with human intelligence so that the brain can absorb and access all the information on the World Wide Web. That appears to be a step beyond singularity. Will we be able to handle it? Or will people like the X-Men actually come into existence?

Yes, The Last Sword Maker is a thriller, and most readers who read it for that will not be disappointed. But it surely raises a lot of other interesting questions and ideas as well. Read it for the adventure; think about it afterwards for the significance of the story.