The real-life events that informed Columbia's plot

The movie 300 is based upon the real-life Battle of Thermopylae.  

Columbia is poised to pass 300 pre-orders! I am so thankful to everyone who has bought a book, or a couple of books, or invested in hosting a book party.

500 is the goal! If you have not bought a book yet, I hope today's update gives you reason to click over to the campaign page and make a buy.

The spy thriller genre is well-known for pulling plot lines from the headlines. For example, 9/11 spawned a whole new subgenre. And, after the 2016 elections, there was a resurgence of titles focused on Russian ops and some of the genre's great heroes found themselves up against the FSB and conspirators in the US.

While some thrillers exist in the real world (I'll use Grisham's Pelican Brief as a familiar example: real Washington, real institutions like the Supreme Court), they recreate that real world from whole cloth (fake justices, fake President, etc.).

Other thrillers rely on the reader's sense of real-life events to inform the book's plot. In other words, the author invents characters and some events, but those plug themselves into the periphery of well-known real happenings.

Columbia splits the difference (real Washington, real former Presidents, but fictional current President and other officials), but relies heavily on recapping some significant global geo-political happenings to ground its main characters and its story. So not only does the story take place in a real Washington that will be familiar to readers from today's headlines, it also takes place in a world that has felt the implications of 9/11, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Arab Spring, and even the partition of British India into modern-day Pakistan and India.

I thought it would be interesting to summarize some of the events that pop up in the story in today's update:

• 9/11 - The events of 9/11 appear as early as the Prologue. This is not accidental. It is very fair that some historians and commentators have identified 9/11 as a transformative date in US foreign and domestic policy and in 21st century geopolitics. As the creator of Columbia, 9/11 was always going to be at the center of my thinking in developing the story. It is the seminal day of my life, doing more to define my future (including spurring me to become an intelligence officer) than any other event. 9/11 plays a role in the story in several ways. 
• Sami's team of unofficial agents is possible because "government’s black budgets skyrocketed after 9/11,"
• The novel discusses the post-9/11 fallout in DC's bureaucratic turf wars: "In seeking a scapegoat for the 9/11 attacks, the media had instigated a circular firing squad that was immense in scale even for Washington. Every three-letter agency had their knives out for the others. The narrative that emerged was one of bureaucratic stove piping,"
• The events of 9/11 shifted attention and spending toward radical Islamists and away from the radical white nationalist militias that defined the 90s threat to the homeland, a factor which is central to Columbia's plot.

• The Arab Spring
• The events that began in 2011 in Egypt are central to the development of Hasan Khalifa's character in the book. The following description, taken from the book, takes very little license in describing what a young American studying abroad in Cairo might have experienced as the Arab Spring was born:
• "On January 25, 2011, Hasan joined tens of thousands that descended on Tahrir Square to sue for their freedom. The police came, and he stayed. The plainclothes baltagiya came, with their truncheons, and he stayed. The government shut down the internet. They opened the prisons. Mubarak went on TV to promise a new government. And Hasan stayed. He was witnessing a dream come to life. Still, it was not until the Army defied orders to engage the protesters with live ammunition that there seemed a glimmer of hope that this uprising would end differently than many past movements across the Arab world that were recorded in history books as mere challenges to the authority of their targeted strongman. On February 10, Mubarak made further concessions, but still he refused to resign. The protesters stayed. On February 11, Mubarak was forced out. Hasan and his brothers won. Or so it seemed."

• Indian Independence of 1947 and the Creation of India and Pakistan
• Abu Muhammad is the main character's grandfather, an immigrant from Pakistan who arrived in the US in the 1960s. In that sense, his life has been split in two: an upbringing in a typical Muslim Muhajir family that was struggling with the partition of India and Pakistan and both countries' rapid development and urbanization; and a life in the US that watched his religious community transform from a barely-noticed oddity to an increasingly mainstream American sect and then to a widely-misunderstood and sometimes hated scapegoat in American culture. The following is from a section of the book that introduces Abu Muhammad:
• "But, more than any other city, Karachi bore the brunt of the religious-political upheaval of India’s immediate post-independence period. With the split of the British Indian Empire into two independent countries that have been enemies ever since, Muslim Muhajirs were driven from secular India and settled in Karachi by the millions. They eventually outnumbered native Sindhis and the city became the center of Pakistani Sufism. A land that had been largely unchanged for millennia, and then experienced the violent influence of the British Raj over the course of 100 years, suddenly experienced kaleidoscopic urbanization, modernization and globalization in a single generation. Tahir’s family were not spared. His parents had been simple subsistence farmers under the Raj but spent his childhood working in factories. Neither occupation invested them with much aptitude for educating their son to live in modern world that they barely understood themselves. So they turned him over to the most well-funded school in their area, a Hanafi madrassa."

There are so many other important historical moments that play into Columbia's characters and the story. I worked hard and long to incorporate these events and to develop characters who represent the real human beings that would have felt the effects of these important moments and movements. I want Columbia to entertain, inform and challenge readers. I hope you will enjoy reading the book and I cannot wait to attend some of the book parties to answer your questions!