POTUS

POTUS is a new page-turner by USA Today bestselling author David Alexander. It's a thriller that's full of surprises ... it is also a warning of what might happen tomorrow if America grows careless again. David Alexander, dubbed "the best damn thriller author in the business," has a gift for extrapolating tomorrow's history from today's events. 


As with other great and era-defining novels, this one too has a message, in fact several messages, accessible on many parallel and overlapping levels of meaning. Alexander sounds a warning about the threat posed by artificial intelligence, and human dependence on machines to do its thinking, acting and fighting. 



A warning that the US could fall like other great empires, when contemporary barbarians assail its gates, only here those barbarians, named after those who brought down ancient Rome, are robotic weapons of incredible destructive power coupled with artificial intelligence far beyond humanity's. 



While many of the scenes in the novel bear an eerie resemblance to contemporary events -- the hunt for and killing of a terrorist chieftain guilty of genocidal crimes, the waging of war against new, hybrid threats, the political conflicts in Congress, the White House and the Pentagon as the nation struggles to cope with the growing threat to its security -- the story is no shopworn reworking of the commonplace.



The fast-paced, riveting plot of POTUS is as exciting as it is precisely because it mirrors rather than apes headlines or regurgitates current events. Nor is this some hurriedly written episode from a weekly television drama whose conclusion is already obvious before the first commercial break, based on a superficial and often laughably naive grasp of military, political, geostrategic, technological and cultural developments that are the very core of this spectacular thriller.



Then too, there are new barbaric forces gathering strength and preparing for an attack on the American homeland. Like ISIS, the fictional Terror Nexus holds nation-states, those centerpieces of the world order, as outmoded systems now ripe for plunder and for violently taking apart into smaller units controlled by criminal warlords. POTUS shows graphically and powerfully how this dark goal might actually achieved, and how terrorists may already be planning to achieve it. 



POTUS is a technothriller that should be on every thriller fan's bookshelf simply for the sake of great reading entertainment, but it's also a thriller that sounds a warning cry we dare not ignore.