Are you sitting uncomfortably? Get set for the rise of the tech thriller

There's never been a better time for Mark Twain's maxim that "truth is stranger than fiction".

- WILLIAM HOSIE

Our day and age is punctuated by futuristic, often alarming technological breakthroughs that outdo the plot of a dystopian novel: robots which mimic the voices of loved ones to defraud people, chatbots that can whip up screenplays to rival those by Aaron Sorkin, and mind-reading machines capable of interpreting human emotion to their advantage.

Where, then, does this leave those who have built a career on exactly that sort of storyline - and whose stories foreshadowed a new world order in which the human hand feels increasingly irrelevant? In the same way that Donald Trump broke satire, has the modern age transcended the dystopian novel? A new school of writers are taking this in their stride and tackling a potentially generation-defining subject that is rooted in reality: the tech thriller. These novels struggle between those who wish to use AI for the betterment of humankind and those using it for personal gain. The line between the two, as in all good fiction, is often blurry.