Former Fighter Pilot's Novel Imagines World Running Out of Oil

Entrepreneur Geoff Hammond has used his business savvy and military research experience to pen an espionage thriller that imagines a covert fuel-source experiment gone wrong, the discovery drawing hot pursuit from a Chinese corporation that wants to use it for destructive purposes.

Hammond told Newsmax.TV in an exclusive interview that while “The Last Khan” is fiction but the future scenario it outlines is not farfetched. He said he can envision chaos erupting out of the struggle for energy sources in the future.

“I think the book is sprinkled with enough reality to make people start to think about that,” Hammond said.

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“We haven’t really fully examined it if you look carefully. What would happen if we run out of carbon-based fuels today?" Hammond explained. "What is the solution? What is a renewable source? I don’t think we’ve examined that. I don’t think we’ve examined the ramifications of that process. Obviously, who controls that solution is going to dictate some terms that we may not as a country or as a world be satisfied with.”

A Citadel graduate and former fighter pilot who worked in a research lab, Hammond said these experiences helped shape the book. “I witnessed, in a pure research environment, kind of the process of understanding how this could actually happen,” he said. “Pure research is different from flight research in that you have really no boundaries. Think about it. You’ve got very smart guys working witch technical equipment that is the very highest end and things do happen, things can happen and often is the case, as I witnessed, it goes without a lot of controls.”

“So in that event, if this did take place, and it’s not unlikely, maybe improbable to some extent, but there is some likelihood that would happen,” he continued. “The question is the ‘what if’ story. What if that gets out? What if that changes things to the point where the balance of power is shifted?”

A former AT&T vice president and founder of CSI International, Hammond said he had been thinking about writing books for a long time. “There’s an anecdotal story about my wife saying she needed a book so I decided to write one,” he said. “But, in fact, I’d been thinking about doing this for a long time. Most novels come out of lifetime experience and reality issues. My experiences in the military, with research environment, gave me some ideas about the story of ‘what if.’ What if certain things begin to happen in the state of the world today?”

Hammond continued, “The book’s setting is in the very near future, about a decade from where we are now. But what would happen if we run out of oil? What would happen if, in the event in the book, you have a terrible accident within a laboratory and a substance is found that could change the future of mankind? But it soon becomes controlled by a very menacing, powerful entity that has world domination in mind. Happens to be a Chinese entity and, thus, the Chinese mogul is the last descendant of Kahn.”

As far as the overall message of “The Last Khan,” Hammond said the takeaway is “the notion of looking at where we are today and the possibilities that could erupt if a technological solution or a solution that we have not thought about is brought into the process and is not controlled.”