How much are we in control of our online presence? To what extent does our tech control us? Is social media the modern equivalent of a baying mob that sends people to the guillotine? The Passengers, this spring’s must-read tech thriller by John Marrs, has a horrible plausibility as it imagines a scenario where eight driverless cars are hacked and the public has to vote on which of the passengers gets to survive. It builds on the world created by John in 2016’s The One, a ferociously gripping future-world dystopia about online dating, which is currently being adapted for a Netflix series.
‘I’m on social media and you see how nasty things can get, and I wanted to use that, and reality TV – we sit in front of that and comment on what we’re watching on our phones or social media,’ says John. ‘I would describe them as speculative fiction. Five minutes into the future. I think they have the basis of potentially happening. We’ll have driverless cars in a couple of decades. So much of it is based on how much the internet affects our daily lives. It can be a force for positivity – a lot of my career has been built up through word of mouth – but there is a nasty side and I wanted to see how far I could go with that in The Passengers.’