Cover image of "Bandwidth," an action-packed climate change techno-thriller

Bandwidth rules. A Silicon Valley-based consortium of tech companies called Commonwealth monopolizes “the feed” in the world’s most prosperous countries. And the feed provides a window into a personalized reality for every individual plugged into it. Which, in this world wracked by soaring temperatures, raging storms and wildfires, fast-rising seas, and erratic government policy, means everyone depends on it merely to survive. But not everyone is happy about it. Which offers Dag Calhoun, a high-powered K Street political lobbyist, plentiful opportunities for lucrative contracts to help Commonwealth’s founder, Rachel Leibovitz, to avoid or squash the opposition. But in Mexico City, where the cartels dominate the feed, his clever ploy to circumvent them explodes in a storm of bullets assassinating the Mexican Senator who’s fronting Commonwealth’s interests. So begins Eliot Peper’s action-filled climate change techno-thriller, Bandwidth.

A guilt-ridden energy industry lobbyist

Dag is a poor boy made good. Product of a series of abusive foster homes, he had been a scholarship student at Georgetown. There, he had caught the eye of the leading energy-industry lobbyist who had recruited him from a graduate seminar. Dag “had worked his way into the fold and up the chain of command at Apex, careful not to let scruples cloud his ambition. He had ridden in like a white knight to save Wall Street royalty from regulatory castration after yet another financial meltdown.” Yet this was only the beginning of Dag Calhoun’s story. And now, years later, the chickens are coming home to roost in his conscience. Guilt consumes him.

Bandwidth (Analog #1 of 3) by Eliot Peper (2018) 272 pages ★★★★☆

Photo of a server farm like those that power "the feed" in this climate change techno-thriller
Server farms (data centers) like this one power the Internet today. Eliot Peper writes of a future when facilities like this effectively rule the world. Image: Network Security

What makes Dag who he is and do what he does?

In Bandwidth, Peper effectively asks the question, what makes us who we are and shapes what we do? What are the roots of our identity? These become the driving questions in Dag’s life as he encounters a bewitching woman who draws him into the small group of revolutionaries she leads. On a private island off the coast of Washington State, Emily Kim commands a team that exploits a back door into the root of Commonwealth’s feed. Since the feed is personalized, and it’s ripe for manipulation, Emily and her colleagues can shift the worldview of anyone within Commonwealth’s reach. By altering what a person reads and thinks and feels over many years, they change the reality that person experiences. This, in turn, gradually shifts what they think about the world and how they confront it.

Emily’s goal is single-minded: to undo the government policies responsible for the rise in global temperatures. And her success threatens to destroy Dag’s most important client, Lowell Harding. Harding has made his billions directly as a result of Dag’s success in crafting an Arctic Circle treaty that opened up the region to oil production. And now the nations of the world are gathering to consider the universal carbon tax Emily’s team has advanced. Everything is on the line. And that Mexican senator may be only the first of those to fall along the way as the tax nears adoption.

Peper’s story hurtles along at breakneck speed. He writes well, and his treatment of the political maneuvering involved in corporate lobbying is insightful.

About the author

Photo of Eliot Peper, author of this climate change techno-thriller
Eliot Peper. Image: author’s website

Google Books describes Eliot Peper as “a novelist and strategist based in Oakland, CA. . . He’s helped build numerous technology businesses, survived dengue fever, translated Virgil’s Aeneid from the original Latin, worked as an entrepreneur-in-residence at a venture capital firm, and explored the ancient Himalayan kingdom of Mustang.” Peper has written at least a dozen novels, all thrillers that explore the intersection of technology and society.

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