Press
Media kit
Boilerplate, bios, quick facts, and contact for Cleartext.
Boilerplate
Cleartext is a near-future techno-thriller by Andreas Renz, a Switzerland-based cryptologist & cybersecurity researcher. The novel follows an Austin security engineer and an NSA cryptanalyst who discover, from opposite ends of the same machine, that the mathematical assumptions underneath modern cryptography have quietly stopped holding. It is a debut, written from primary research into post-quantum cryptography and US surveillance oversight. Print and ebook publication are targeted for late 2026. Press and interview inquiries: contact@cleartextnovel.com.
Quick facts
| Title | Cleartext |
|---|---|
| Author | Andreas Renz |
| Genre | Near-future techno-thriller |
| Amazon categories (planned) | Hard science fiction · Technothrillers |
| Length | ~74,000 words · 30 chapters · dual POV (alternating) |
| Status | In beta reading · revision begins mid-May 2026 |
| Release window | Targeted late 2026 (date not set) |
| Formats at launch | Paperback and ebook (hardcover and audio under evaluation) |
| ISBN | TBA |
| Publisher | Andreas Renz (independent) |
| Rights | English worldwide · translation and audio available |
| Comparable authors | Daniel Suarez · Neal Stephenson · Blake Crouch |
| Contact | contact@cleartextnovel.com |
Author bio — three lengths
Andreas Renz is a cryptologist & cybersecurity researcher based in Switzerland. He writes fiction about systems that shouldn't break, and the people who break them. Cleartext is his debut novel. As 0xLoopTheory, he writes about post-quantum cryptography at encryptorium.com.
Andreas Renz is a cryptologist & cybersecurity researcher based in Switzerland. He writes fiction about systems that shouldn't break, and the people who break them.
His debut novel, Cleartext, is a near-future thriller set against the migration to post-quantum cryptography. It follows the people who spend their careers securing the infrastructure most of the world never thinks about until it fails. The book draws on his work in applied cryptography and cybersecurity, where the gap between theoretical soundness and deployed reality is where most of the interesting problems live.
As 0xLoopTheory, he writes nonfiction about post-quantum cryptography at encryptorium.com: signatures, key exchange, protocol analysis, and the practical side of systems that shouldn't break.
Cleartext is his debut novel.
Andreas Renz is a cryptologist & cybersecurity researcher based in Switzerland. He writes fiction about systems that shouldn't break, and the people who break them.
His debut novel, Cleartext, is a near-future thriller set against the migration to post-quantum cryptography. It follows the people who spend their careers securing the infrastructure most of the world never thinks about until it fails. The book draws on his work in applied cryptography and cybersecurity, where the gap between theoretical soundness and deployed reality is where most of the interesting problems live, and where the consequences of that gap rarely reach the public before they are already in motion.
The novel was written in parallel with his nonfiction work at Encryptorium, and the two projects share a single concern: the long migration from the cryptography the internet was built on to the cryptography the internet now requires. Fiction is the format for the human-scale questions of that transition; nonfiction handles the technical ones.
As 0xLoopTheory, he writes at encryptorium.com about signatures, key exchange, protocol analysis, harvest-now-decrypt-later attacks, and the practical side of systems that shouldn't break.
Cleartext is his debut novel.
Interview topics
The author can speak to:
- Post-quantum cryptography migration. Why the 2024 NIST standards matter, which industries are on track, which are not, and what "transition" actually means inside organizations that have not started.
- Harvest now, decrypt later. What the long tail of encrypted traffic collected over the past decade becomes worth once large-scale quantum decryption is possible. Why this changes threat models for journalists, lawyers, and dissidents, not just governments.
- Bitcoin and the quantum migration that still hasn't started. What recent resource-estimate work (the 2026 Google paper) actually shows about near-term Bitcoin exposure, how proposals like BIP-360 and the QSB "escape-hatch" approach differ, and why the migration path inside blockchains is harder than inside TLS.
- Quantum hype vs. cryptographic reality. Why most "quantum breaks everything tomorrow" headlines misread the resource estimates, what the realistic threat surface actually looks like under current fault-tolerant-qubit projections, and how practitioners should separate vendor fear-marketing from the work that genuinely matters.
- Writing technical fiction without a teaching voice. Craft choices in Cleartext: no glossary, no expository lectures, trust in the reader. What this costs and what it buys.
- Anonymity as an operational practice. How small groups of security researchers actually work when the threat model includes real adversaries, drawn from public reporting and the structure of the hacker collective in the novel.
Assets
High-resolution cover art and a one-sheet will be published here once the cover is commissioned and finalized. For early-access assets or alternate crops, email contact@cleartextnovel.com.
Contact
Press, reviews, podcasts, interview requests, and everything else: contact@cleartextnovel.com.