We are very excited to sit and down and talk with Robert T. Kelley. Robert’s debut novel, Raven, has just been published. We had a chance to talk to Robert recently about his novel!

Thriller Magazine: What drew you to the last days of the Cold War as the setting, and how did you balance fact with fiction in portraying technology and espionage of the era?

What really drew me to 1990 as the setting for Raven was that transformational moment. I was an early internet user and recall how amazing it was watching this early technology evolve and change. I was also fascinated by the social constructs it enabled: early chat rooms, message threads, and newsgroups full of curious engineers, programmers, and hackers. This was also an interesting time because the geopolitical balance was evolving just as rapidly. I also like the “near history” aspect of the moment. Everything seems familiar at first—cars, desktop computers, even laptops—but only the earliest analog cell phones and no smart phones. And the lower-tech environment made it easier to hide in 1990, which made spying, and evading your enemies, much easier.

TM: How did you develop Mev Hayes as a character, and what qualities did you most want readers to see in her?

I was trained as an engineer in the 1980’s and was well aware how hard women in the sciences had to work to be taken seriously. But also, I liked the idea of a character who enters a world she thinks she understands—a university—only to find that little is as she expected. I wanted readers to accompany her on her journey, starting, like her, a little naïve about what challenges she might encounter, but quickly developing the skills and the confidence to face a growing number of threats.

TM: Was the hacker Raven inspired by real figures from hacker or espionage history, or purely from your imagination?

I drew a number of elements of my novel from that early internet era. Raven was inspired by many early hackers, such as Kevin Mitnick and Markus Hess. And the technology Mev creates was inspired by the work of what we would now call a “white hat” hacker, a good guy trying to make things safer by identifying vulnerable systems. In 1995, Dan Farmer, then a researcher at Silicon Graphics International, released a security testing tool called SATAN (Security Analysis Tool for Auditing Networks). The program would look for vulnerabilities on a network: default passwords still in place, known bugs that could be exploited to become an administrator on a system, etc. Now we would consider a tool checking for such things standard practice when securing an environment. But in that moment, it was seen as a tool hackers could use to break into a network. This was in the early days of computer hacker panic, and SATAN caused quite the furor, ultimately resulting in Farmer losing his job at SGI.

TM: How much research did you do into early hacker communities, and what surprised you most during that process?

I did a ton of hacker research. It was helpful that I was on some of those early newsgroups and chatboards like alt.2600, so I knew what to look for. And many of the artifacts from that moment are still available. Although this is pre-world wide web, these communities were plugged in and connected. ‘Zines were popular, and their archives are searchable. And some sources, like 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, still publish digitally. What was most interesting, I think, was getting a view into the mindset of these early computer pioneers. They saw a future in which technology could liberate us, could make us better. It was a counterculture like many others before, one that distrusted authority (only here it was not “the man” but “Ma Bell” or IBM). What surprised me is the consistency of the concerns, the distrust of IBM and Microsoft by the hackers in that moment has echoes today in the criticism of tech giants, surveillance capitalism, toxic social media, and AI slop.

TM: What message did you want to convey about power, trust, and ambition through the story?

Power is an important theme in my work generally. It’s the nature of capitalism to maximally exploit value—in technology, in people, in society. That was true in 1990, it’s true 35 years later. And the early hackers were in many ways innocent, believing in the power of technology for good, distrustful of anyone using it for profit. That’s probably a healthy attitude. Trust, too, remains a key concern with regard to technology. We worry about “fake news,” about media companies bowing down to political and economic threats; the early hackers did the same. They dreamed of a techno-utopia where we would share what we learned and be better online than we were in real life. That didn’t quite work out. “Don’t be evil” hasn’t aged particularly well.

TM: Do you see Raven as a standalone novel, or the beginning of a series?

While my next book Critical State (High Frequency Press, 2026) is the first in a series, I see Raven as a standalone. But if readers tell me otherwise, we might have to follow Mev’s next adventure!