Coming Soon!

A brand new noir thriller set in Hong Kong. Brand new characters. Brand new everything. Keep your eyes open for:

*drumroll*

All Blood is Red

Set to hit e-shops near you on August 1st.

HV2?

Getting my excuses in: Recently, I've been abducted by David Icke, hit by Russian meteors, and you don't even want to know about the North Koreans.

Or maybe you do.

HV2 is on it's way. Slowly. Very, very slowly, but it's coming:

“You’re a hard man to find, Harry Vee,” said the woman.

Clearly not hard enough, thought Harry.

He didn’t turn around but sat at the bar staring into the depths of his Dry Martini. Oil from the single olive had formed a slick on the surface. He’d been playing with this drink, his last, for twenty minutes or more and it was warm.

Nothing worse than a warm Martini.

The woman spoke again. “I was told you could help me.”

An English accent, cultured, delicate. Harry stared into the flashing neon tubelights that provided most of the illumination in the bar. He stared into the clock which so proudly declared it Miller Time, although if he’d bothered to glance round at the lack of other clientele in the place, he might have felt inclined to disagree. “I don’t know why anyone would tell you that,” he said.  

“I’m looking for someone,” she said.

Harry pushed against the bar to swing himself unsteadily round on his stool. He faced a young woman who didn’t belong, in so many ways. She didn’t belong in Hong Kong, in this district, in this bar, and certainly not at half-past one in the morning. Her blonde hair was curled too delicately at the ends, her wire-frame glasses too carefully chosen for a late night out in eastern Wan Chai, the red light district on the northern edge of Hong Kong Island. The conservative suit was too warm for the weather, and her face showed uncertainty at her surroundings. Uncomfortable. But apparently determined.

“I’m looking for someone. I was told you do that sort of thing.” She held out a business card. “Rebecca Phillips.”

Harry tried to focus on the card. It wasn’t easy. “Tell me, Rebecca Phillips, Freelance Journalist: do you know what Humphrey Bogart’s last words were?”

Confusion on her face, “No, Mr Vee, I can’t say that I do.”

Harry swung back around and called to the Chinese girl polishing glasses in the corner. “Kimmy,” he said, pushing the Martini back across the bar, “Never serve me one of these again, you understand?”

Welcome to Asimov World

And so, the present has finally caught up with the future. Not only do we have hover bikes, but the science of psychohistory has now been born. Learn the future, right here (free login required) or here. 

PETER TURCHIN thinks he can see the future. Unlike the fortune teller you might find at a seaside carnival, he needs no crystal ball. Instead, the tools of his trade are mathematics and testable theories. Armed with these, his goal is nothing less than to revolutionise the study of history, turning it from a mass of anecdotes into a rigorous, predictive science.

Turchin calls his new discipline cliodynamics, after Clio, the classical Greek muse of history, and so far its biggest focus has been the fate of empires. Now Turchin is using patterns he has found underlying their rise and fall to make predictions of political changes to come. 

As usual, Asimov has (finally) been proved a visionary. And if you want your new born boy to grow up famous, you might want to name him Hari Seldon.