The Tyranny of the Butterfly

Cornucopia of wishes? Or Pandora’s box?

Luther Opoku is the sheriff of Sierra County, a sleepy gold mining region in the California Mountains, where he has to deal with petty crimes, the manufacture of illicit drugs and a constant lack of staff. Three hundred miles further west in the Silicon Valley, IT visionaries are competing for the creation of the first ultra-intelligent computer that is supposed to solve the major problems of humanity.

When a biologist gets killed in mysterious circumstances in the Sierra County forests, Luther comes to realize that his natural idyll has long since become a testing ground for idiosyncratic experiments. The investigation is taking on surreal features and he soon begins to doubt his own sanity. Dead people come to life, time is dissolving – and that is only the beginning of an odyssey beyond the limits of the imaginable...

In his new thriller Die Tyrannei des Schmetterlings (“The Tyranny of the Butterfly”), Frank Schätzing outlines the scenario of a technology that will radically change our lives, with the potential to dramatically improve it – or destroy us all: artificial intelligence.