By the late 1990s, Eric James Fullilove had published his first novel and subsequently signed a two-book deal. He could feel the excitement of a career taking off. “I thought I was all that,” Fullilove says now with a laugh, but soon after the excitement had abated, lackluster marketing, a change of agents, and slow hardback sales grounded his upward momentum. After that, Fullilove turned to self-publishing, and with 2025’s View to a Kill, he was able to bring some of those very first ideas back to life on his own terms.

“I started writing as a kid and was terrible at it, but I always wanted to tell a story,” Fullilove explains. It was actually the Michael Jackson song “Smooth Criminal” that inspired his breakthrough story; while listening to it, he began to wonder what would make the perfect crime. He came up with the idea that it would be committed by a telepath and then started wondering what it would look like if another telepath was also investigating that perfect crime. Fullilove set to work on a screenplay, and after what he remembers feeling like 50,000 revisions, the idea morphed into his first novel, 1996’s Circle of One.

In that novel, Fullilove introduced readers to Jenny Sixa and envisioned a futuristic society where people had chips implanted in their heads. By 2019, with rapid advancements in technology and AI on the horizon, Fullilove found himself returning to that concept as he realized that the smartphones of today had nearly caught up to his imagination. He reasoned that in order for the government to let an industry put chips into people’s heads, they would have to be unhackable. “But if that’s the case,” Fullilove explains, “What if it could be hacked? Then, I built a murder mystery around that [idea] for View to a Kill.”

In its review, Kirkus Reviews calls View to a Kill a “smart and twisty SF thriller” and highlights Jenny Sixa as a “truly unique protagonist.” In 2052, Sixa is brought in by the Los Angeles police to use her powers to solve murders, as she explains in the novel’s noir opening, which also begins to hint at the deeper dynamics at play in Fullilove’s world:

I am a telepath, former piggy backer, and my cruel talent is that I can retrieve the last thoughts from murder victims to catch a glimpse at who or what killed them if the timing is right and if someone cares enough about the victim. That last is important, because crime in the mid-twenty-first is about costs and benefits, and most of the great unwashed don’t merit the cost of an investigation, at least not by LAPD and capables like me.

Against this backdrop of psychic investigation and neural implants, Fullilove layers pointed social commentary, imagining a future in which the most advanced brain chips are available only to the wealthy, while poorer citizens, largely people of color, are forced to live in segregation in cordoned-off areas called “the Zone.” There, they rely on cheap knockoff chips to be able to do their jobs—which Fullilove imagines as being in “Amazon warehouses on steroids”—but these necessary, cheaper implants carry serious health risks compared to the designer versions available on the other side of the Zone’s walls.

While technology has advanced to a point where it’s close to catching up with Fullilove’s ideas from nearly 30 years ago, his instincts about social justice once seemed even more far-fetched. In light of today’s political turmoil, however, he found that this, too, had started to seem more plausible, and it was time to revisit and flesh out his ideas about a segregated 2052.

“It hit me that, like anything else, this technology would not be a one-size-fits-all proposition,” Fullilove says. He explains that he took his ideas for futuristic tech—which was increasingly resembling what billionaires like Elon Musk were starting to experiment on—to the logical conclusion that what such technology would most likely augment were existing social inequalities. “Really wealthy people would get the best technology. And really poor people would not only get poor technology, but they would [also] pay disproportionately more for it.”

Fullilove has impressive credentials and experience to back up that assumption. After growing up in New Jersey, Fullilove attended MIT, where he studied urban planning and economics. A certified CPA, he went on to hold senior financial leadership roles at both nonprofit and corporate organizations. While he never abandoned writing, he also built an impressive career, working across the country and internationally for 18 years with organizations like Housing Works, Teach for America, the Boys & Girls Clubs of Santa Monica, and World Vision International, where he was the global CFO.

“I was the CFO of a multi-billion-dollar entity that was in 70-plus countries and legitimately claimed to help over 100 million people a year,” Fullilove says about his time with World Vision. After that, he lived and worked in both Los Angeles and London before moving to his current home in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he works with an affordable housing provider called Casa. Across these diverse experiences, Fullilove has contributed to causes ranging from inclusion and education to displaced people and HIV/AIDS—some of society’s greatest challenges, all of which have certainly informed his writing.

Based on what he knows, Fullilove sees little reason to believe technological progress will slow for ethical concerns, believing that the poor will always bear the risk of advancements. He remembers a particular moment in Los Angeles when he saw the dangers of technology’s rapid pace: early testing of driverless cars. He was struck by the idea that companies would potentially sacrifice pedestrian safety to improve profits. “It wouldn’t surprise me if people literally paid with their lives to perfect technology,” he says. “It would be a footnote in a corporate report.”

Within View to a Kill, Jenny Sixa’s inability to see a murder victim’s final moments opens the door to the police unjustly charging a Black man with a criminal record, Jamal Smith, for the crime. Jenny, who is white, ends up racing against time to try and save Jamal from execution, further highlighting the novel’s themes of inequality and social justice. “I wanted somebody who was part of privilege questioning why things were the way they were,” Fullilove says of his tough-but-endearing protagonist.

Fullilove’s other recent work also reflects his global experience. His latest novel, Angels 37, released in October, is a murder mystery set in Uganda. “It’s loosely based on a true story,” he says, noting that it was directly influenced by work he’d done with nonprofits internationally. He’s also planning a sequel to Overlord, his climate-change thriller, and is currently working on a near-future assassination novel centered on a complicated love story.

Fullilove plans to eventually return to the world of View to a Kill at least once more, to again explore his dystopic vision, which he hopes remains far from reality. But Fullilove says that, all things considered, his view is not entirely negative about the way technology is progressing and about the future that’s in store for us. What does scare him—and what hasn’t changed since he first created Jenny Sixa’s Los Angeles 30 years ago—is what could be done in the name of the bottom line. “Capitalist society will sell its soul for something that makes money,” Fullilove says. “If it’s good for the bottom line, we will do it.”