I’m one of those people who reads geopolitics for pleasure. I wrote an eight-book series called Enemies of You, and several of those books turn on geopolitical questions. Shield of Ashes came out of that same long interest, and out of one idea I couldn’t stop turning over.
When most people picture nuclear war, they picture a bipolar one. Two superpowers, the United States and Russia, maybe China, staring each other down across the Cold War board, and then one catastrophic exchange and it’s over.
That’s the image almost everyone inherited, and it’s out of date. The world isn’t bipolar anymore. Many countries have nuclear weapons or are actively building them. They’re building militaries. They’re already fighting wars, right now, all over the map.
I built the book on one question: what does a real nuclear war look like in a world of many nuclear powers, some of them already fighting?
That question still scares me. I think most people carry a Cold War picture of the danger around in their heads, and a picture that old tells them to watch the wrong places while the risk builds somewhere nobody’s looking.
How does a short story about one launch become the biggest book I’ve written?
It was supposed to be a short story. Just the opening. A single launch, an attempt to shoot it down, and out.
I took the idea to the Clearwater writing critique group, the one I founded and later handed off.
A friend and I went to the hall where the group met and sat there two hours talking through the plot. We couldn’t resolve it. It was too complicated, and I didn’t yet have the answers on the technology, the interceptors, the yields, the systems. We left it unresolved. Eventually I decided to just sit down and finish the thing, and I had no idea it would grow the way it did.
It couldn’t stay a short story, and the reason it couldn’t is the point of the book. A single nuclear launch in a multipolar world doesn’t produce a single event. It produces the next question, and the next, and the next. One launch.
Then who responds. Then what that response triggers. Then what the automated systems do while everyone is still trying to understand the first thing that happened. Every answer forced another. The premise itself refused to be small.
By the time I was done it was the biggest book I’d ever written. It hit the page limit on the printer, and I had to go back and cut words out to make it fit between two covers.
How does the war start in Shield of Ashes?
Not where the Cold War taught you to look. The war doesn’t begin with Russia and America, or with the flashpoints that lead every news cycle. It begins with two nuclear missiles launched from North Korea at China.
That choice is the thesis in miniature. The relationship between China and North Korea is among the most unstable arrangements on earth, and almost no one thinks about it as a nuclear trigger. China keeps North Korea fed for cold, practical reasons. If the regime collapsed or starved, millions of refugees would pour across the Chinese border, and that could mean war. China doesn’t want that catastrophe. China also doesn’t want North Korea drifting toward another power. So China props up a state it doesn’t control.
And North Korea is the wildcard, a rule-breaking country that runs on bravado. Into that seam, the most unstable dependency on the board, the launch comes, and the world starts down the chain. The first domino is the one relationship nobody was watching closely enough, exploited at exactly the wrong moment.
China responds. Beijing is gone, its government decapitated in the opening move. The automated systems and the surviving commanders act on the assumption that the United States is responsible. That assumption is wrong, and it doesn’t matter that it’s wrong, because the missiles are already flying. From there it cascades, region into region, each collapse pulling in the next. The reader rides a chain nobody inside the book can stop.
The book on this: Shield of Ashes is a near-future geopolitical thriller about what a full-scale nuclear war would look like in a multipolar world.
Why put a hidden hand behind a nuclear war plot?
Most nuclear-war fiction runs on accident. A stuck relay, a misread radar, a false alarm, a machine or a man making a fatal mistake. Shield of Ashes has something underneath the chaos that most of those books don’t. There’s a mind behind it. The opening isn’t a random terrorist attack. There’s an intelligence directing events from the very start, patient and deliberate, and the reader catches only hints of it as the book goes.
I won’t say who it is. Part of the pleasure of the book is watching the shape of that intelligence slowly become visible under the noise. But the choice matters thematically. An authored catastrophe is a different kind of frightening than an accidental one. It says that in a world full of loose arsenals and unstable dependencies, a patient actor doesn’t need to build a weapon or launch a war directly.
They only need to understand the seams, put a match to the right one, and let the machinery of a multipolar world do the rest. The cascade takes over. The hand that starts it can stay hidden the whole way through. I find that version much harder to shrug off. An accident you can blame on bad luck. A patient actor who reads the board better than the people who built it is somebody’s fault, and the fault runs to every government that left those seams open and called it stability.
Can a novel have more than one prologue?
Shield of Ashes opens with a nuclear detonation in Iran, and that detonation is near the end of it.
I opened there on purpose. It’s a technique I use often. Start at a moment of maximum tension, then flash back and build the story that leads to it. The reader begins inside the crisis, then watches the whole terrible machine assemble itself.
Underneath that, the book is held up by four prologues, and they’re the most deliberate piece of architecture in it.
They’re four pillars. Read them closely and they lay out the four great threads the book will follow. Together they tell you what the book is about before the cascade begins. One of them even carries a hint of who the hidden mind is, placed in plain sight for a reader paying attention.
I wanted the frame delivered up front, in four movements, and then the rest of the book fills it in. A story this large needs that kind of scaffolding, or it flies apart.
Why put Donald Trump, a real and controversial figure, at the center?
Two reasons, and the second matters more to the craft.
The first is that I wanted a controversial figure at the center of it, and I can’t think of anyone more controversial than Donald Trump. That charge is useful. It sits under every scene he’s in before he opens his mouth. In the book he’s reached a third term, and I built a plausible road to get him there instead of hand-waving it.
An assassination attempt in his second term. A recovery. A wave of public sympathy. And a constitutional change, the Twenty-Eighth Amendment, which I make explicit is required for any of it to be possible. It sits right at the edge of the real. A president who’s shot and survives can ride that sympathy a long way. Add a few changes to the constitution and a third term moves from impossible to barely possible. I kept it barely possible on purpose.
The second reason is the important one. I didn’t want a fictional president, because a fictional president is too easy. A made-up leader can be written to be as decisive, as capable, as heroic as the plot needs him to be. I didn’t want the West Wing president, that idealized figure who would have risen to every moment and taken command. I wanted the constraints of a real person.
Using the actual Trump, older now in his third term and a little more sedate, imposes limits I can’t write my way around. The reader already knows this man. They have a fixed sense of how he moves and talks and thinks, and I have to stay inside it. And that constraint is exactly what produces the most unusual thing about the book.
Why is the most powerful man in the world a passive protagonist?
Because that’s what the real person, and the real situation, demanded. Trump is the closest thing the book has to a protagonist, and he’s reactive. He’s horrified at what’s unfolding. He does everything he can think of to steer it right.
He takes step after step to solve it. And it’s gone beyond his control, beyond anyone’s control, from very early on.
This is the opposite of the thriller the reader expects. In the usual version, a capable protagonist is out there bending events back toward order, a Jack Ryan winning the day. There’s none of that here. The most powerful man on earth sits behind his shields, trying to direct a war that no longer obeys any hand on any lever. He’s as swept along as the schoolteacher in Moscow or the mother in Lahore.
I think that makes it far more interesting than the usual hero story, because it’s far more honest. In a real multipolar nuclear cascade, there’s no protagonist who can save the day. The point is that the machinery outruns every human being touching it, and that includes the one at the top.
How do you use a medical device as a plot device?
Trump survives his assassination on an advanced artificial heart, an AI-driven machine that keeps him alive and monitors him constantly. It carries three threads of the story at once, more than any other single device in the book, and it was one of my favorite things to write.
First, it’s a clock ticking inside the protagonist.
The heart runs hot under stress, and the war is nothing but stress. As the crisis deepens, the device climbs through its own warnings. If his physiological load goes too high, the AI triggers a controlled cardiac arrest to save itself. It shuts him down. So the worse the war gets, the closer the most powerful man on earth comes to being switched off by his own chest. He carries his own countdown, and it tightens exactly when the world needs him most.
Second, it’s a second axis of danger running alongside the missiles.
If the heart fails, the succession falls to a man who would steer the country somewhere very different in the middle of humanity’s worst hour. The fragility of one machine in one chest becomes a strategic fact that other people, including his enemies, watch and calculate around. A president who might drop dead at any moment is a variable in everyone else’s planning.
Third, the heart is the whole book in miniature, and I designed it that way. It works at ninety-seven percent capacity.
The missile shield that everyone trusts to keep them safe tested at ninety-seven percent, and I gave them the same number on purpose. Two AI systems, both near-perfect, both relied on absolutely, and the entire novel lives in the missing few percent that no one wants to think about.
Third, and this is the part I built on purpose, the heart is the whole book in miniature.Share on X
A man kept alive by a machine. Sitting behind a shield run by a machine. Directing a war increasingly fought by automated systems. None of it finally under any human hand. I put the theme of the book inside the protagonist’s chest and let it beat there for six hundred pages.
Why spend so much of a war novel in ordinary kitchens?
Most war fiction, and most nuclear-war fiction, stays with the war and the soldiers, and often not even the soldiers, just the armies and the maps and the strategy. Even a book I admire, Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, narrows to a single soldier’s experience of the fighting. That book is very good up to about two-thirds through, and then I think the ending falls apart. But even at its best it stays inside the military.
My conviction is that war is about people.
Yes, it’s about armies, and yes, it’s about leaders, but underneath all of it, it’s about people. So the book refuses to stay in the situation room. It puts you inside the terrorist attack in India, not watching it on a monitor but standing in it. You stand where the bombs land, among the people they land on. It shows the intercept attempts, and it shows them failing, because in real life they’d fail.
A mother named Fatima is making biryani in Lahore, toasting the spices her own mother taught her thirty years ago, telling her son to do his math homework, when the world changes.
She’s the point. She’s what the missile counts mean. The leaders and the arsenals are real, but the war is only true when you’re standing in the kitchen as the power flickers.
What should a novel about modern war show readers?
That a real war, in the modern age, would be far more terrible than we let ourselves imagine, and that it’s something we need to control and need to not do, because no one comes out on top. Nobody wins this. That’s the argument the book exists to make, and I tried to make it by refusing to look away from any part of it.
So the book doesn’t stop at the blasts.
It follows the consequences most war stories skip. When enough weapons go off and enough satellites are destroyed, the debris begins to cascade in orbit until space itself becomes unusable, no satellites, no space operations, for a long time. I show that. I show the nuclear winter. I show the long chain of side effects that turn a war between governments into a wound in the whole environment that humanity depends on. The fighting ends and the damage keeps going.
That’s why the epilogue runs deep, and why it’s about what happens after. Most war books end at the ceasefire. This one keeps going, because the aftermath is the real argument. The major powers that have kept a lid on the world are gone or crippled. The war distracts the United States, which sits safe behind its own shields, its attention withdrawn. Russia is a rump state bleeding from its amputations. China has taken a hit it may never recover from.
And into that vacuum move the patient players, the careful ones who waited, taking advantage of the weakness of powers that used to hold the order together. The war doesn’t produce peace. It produces a world with no one holding the lid down, where the next round is already being planned in a quiet room by someone who was patient enough to survive the first one. The survivors don’t inherit safety. They inherit the conditions for it to happen again.
That aftermath makes me angriest whenever I hear anyone talk about a limited or winnable nuclear exchange. The people who’d pay for it are the mothers in their kitchens and the children who inherit the dead orbits and the long winter, and none of them ever got a vote.
How do you keep a long multi-POV novel from falling apart?
It was a pain, and I won’t pretend otherwise. The book sprawls across dozens of points of view and dozens of countries and clusters of countries, with wars breaking out everywhere, and I don’t even show the smaller wars that obviously would have ignited alongside the big ones.
I built it the way I build my largest books, by a method I think of as dropping inkblots and letting them grow, but here pure consequence drove the growth. This event would cause that one, so I wrote that one, and it led to the next, and it kept propagating outward.
A leads to B leads to C leads to F leads to Z, and then Z circles back and collapses C in a new way, and the branches feed into each other until the whole interlocking thing exists on the page. I didn’t outline a tidy chain in advance. I followed the logic of consequence wherever it went, and the book is the record of where it went.
And the difficulty became the theme. The hardest part of writing it, holding a war too big for any one mind to track, is exactly what the people inside the war are living. That’s the fog of war, and I embraced it fully. Even with all their advanced technology, the generals often don’t know what’s happening. Who launched this? Where did it come from? What just happened? Especially with weapons going off across multiple continents and no one able to see clearly through the noise.
The reader’s own disorientation inside a cascade too large to hold is the same disorientation the leaders feel. No one gets a clear view, not the generals, not the president, not the reader, because in a real war of this kind there’s no clear view to be had. That’s the most honest thing the book has to say.
It’s the biggest book I’ve written, and the second most significant. It cost me more to build than anything else I’ve made, and it’s the one where the size of the thing and the weight of the thing came out matched.
