EXCLUSIVE: When Power Hides in Data

The most unsettling dystopias are the ones that feel less like warnings and more like forecasts. Set just two decades in the future, Ashes of the Republic does not imagine some distant technological rupture. It takes systems that already exist (data collection, predictive monitoring, algorithmic governance) and asks what happens when the political restraints around them give way.

In this conversation with the Wyoming Star, James Chesterton explains why he placed the story so close to the present, how data can become a tool of social control, and why satire is essential when writing about authoritarianism. He also reflects on the responsibility of technologists, drawing on his own experience in industries that began with useful intentions but evolved into systems with far-reaching consequences.

At the core of the novel is a simple but unsettling premise: the machinery is already here. What remains uncertain is who gets to operate it.