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  • 09/07/2025
The Coming Fire offers a tale of global cyber-terrorism where a cabal of dark forces are determined to plunge the world into destruction.

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Transcript
00:00Good morning. My name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor at Sussex Newspapers.
00:06Lovely, as always, to speak to Greg Moss. Really, really exciting moment.
00:09Greg, you have completed your trilogy.
00:12I know. Isn't that incredible?
00:14I'll tell you what, there's two things, though, aren't there?
00:17There's completing the trilogy in the sense that here I am at my desk,
00:21writing at my computer, and I type the end for the third time,
00:25the coming darkness, the coming storm, the coming fire.
00:28But then there's the fact that I send it to my publisher,
00:30and they tell me how I should rewrite it before they send it out into the world.
00:35That is the actual moment of completion, this July, when the coming fire is in bookshops.
00:40And what does it all amount to?
00:43It's incredibly...
00:44It's a dystopian near future we're talking about with massive threat from an evil organisation.
00:50That's exactly right. Could you write that down and send it to me so I can use it for publicity?
00:55I'm just repeating what you've talked about.
00:58I tell you what, there is...
01:00I didn't know that the publisher would want another two books.
01:03The Coming Darkness stands alone as a thriller set in 2037,
01:07and published back in 2022 when that was 15 years away.
01:11The Coming Fire, the third book, is now only 12 years away.
01:15Everything that we feel so urgently about, climate change, movement of refugees, damage to crops, loss of habitat, extinction,
01:25all of these things feel more in play today than they did three years ago when the first book came out.
01:31Every so often I will post on social media an article that I've seen in a newspaper or a journal and saying,
01:38this happens in my future dystopian novel.
01:43Because it turns out that if you pay attention to all of this stuff, it's not actually hard to predict the future.
01:49So what is it that's at stake in this third book?
01:53This is the big build-up, isn't it?
01:54Finally confronting the heart of the...
01:57That's right.
01:58That's right.
02:00Alex Lamarck must get to the heart of the terrorist organisation whose goal he discovers,
02:07centred on the Citadel Island in the Caribbean Sea off the coast of Haiti,
02:11he discovers that their purpose is to destroy the globally hyper-connected world
02:18and set humankind back, maybe by 80 or 100 years,
02:25to take out all of the computer technology,
02:29to stop satellites running weather stations,
02:32to essentially undo all of that technological process,
02:37in which many of us have developed enormous distrust.
02:41The trouble is, even if we thought that was a good idea,
02:44the way that the terrorist organisation has chosen to do it
02:47will result in terrible loss of life.
02:51And so Alex cannot let that happen.
02:53Wow.
02:54It sounds thrilling.
02:56Obviously...
02:56That's the word.
02:58It's great that you've reached this point,
03:00but are you going to feel bereft when the final one in the trilogy comes out?
03:04No, no.
03:04I'm going to be quietly talking to the publisher about the idea that I've got for a fourth novel
03:10to turn the trilogy into a quartet.
03:12That's what I'm going to be doing.
03:14And then a quintet.
03:16Hey, why not?
03:17I mean, now you say it.
03:19Why not?
03:19To be truthful, because Alex's triumph at the end of The Coming Fire is mitigated by disaster,
03:29the fourth novel would be almost a survivor novel.
03:35The circumstances will have completely changed because of those things he could not prevent.
03:41You have got your pitch ready, haven't you?
03:43There you go.
03:43Exactly.
03:44Yeah.
03:45It's After the Fire, survivor novel as yet unwritten, but imagined.
03:51Brilliant.
03:51Well, congratulations on completing the trilogy for the moment.
03:55And as always, lovely to speak to you.
03:57You too, Phil.

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