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Seeding Sweden
When you’re representing your company and country in an international
setting, you can’t very well sell books to your foreign hosts. On
the other hand, you can give a few copies away as gifts. Bill gave a signed
copy of No Outward Sign to his host, Torsten Bernström of the Swedish
Defense Materiel Administration (Försvarets materielwerk) and also
to Professor Erland Jonsson, who teaches computer security at Chalmers
University of Technology in Göteborg. He also penned a note in each
copy offering to give his cyberterrorism talk on a future visit.
The Advisory Panel of which Bill was a member met at a military garrison
in Enköping, on the site of a Swedish conference that takes place
every three years. This year, with heightened concern about terrorism
and public safety, the conference brought together civilian and military
technology and took its name from the combination: CIMI, Civil & Militär
Beredskap. But the terrorist threat and this civil-military preparedness
lie central to Bill’s novel. So as he visited the booths of security
vendors such as LynuxWorks, Ovesta, and Pointsec to learn of their products,
he left them with copies of his business card promoting a novel that might
help them sell their products. Spring is, after all, the time for planting
seeds. A Swedish member of the Advisory Panel said that “Swedes
love Americans, they love your language.” And Swedes do speak English.
So who knows? Maybe a few of the seeds will find fertile turf.
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