Fiction Writing
Beyond my journalistic, OSINT, and geospatial work, I also write fiction. My writing is my antidote to the world of data that would otherwise dominate my life, and I see it as a cathartic way to explore the emotional and societal implications of many of the topics that I work with on a daily basis.
Backscatter (Novel)
I am currently working on my first full-length novel, tentatively titled ‘Backscatter’. The novel combines several of my favorite genres of fiction, including meta-fiction, political fiction, and science fiction. I am about 80,000 words in and should have it finished and fully typeset in LaTeX by the end of 2025. A sample of the first chapter can be read here.
Eastern Europe - 2532 - Civilisation collapsed, but no collapse lasts forever. From the ashes and flooded ruins of the old, a new State has been born. One dedicated to avoiding the mistakes of the past. Pollution has been eliminated, as have networked systems and nuclear weapons. But this is no paradise…
Enter Kommandant Yuriy of the State Intelligence Directive. He likes reading books, and he also likes reading people. But a chance discovery on the shores of the Black Sea will throw everything into question. A book that shouldn’t exist - one that tells a subtly different story of the past to that which he has been taught. Caught in an expanding web of political intrigue and violent factions, he is forced to re-examine the past before his superiors redact him from the future.
Yet, this history of our future raises a disturbing question: Is his present being held hostage to the whims of actors in a past long dead?
Short Stories
I also occasionally publish short stories, a selection of which can be read below.
In the winter of 2024, the General Staff started hearing reports of something unexplainable. Soldiers saying they had visited some kind of frozen hell. Somewhere that the dead did not fully die.
The first few reports were ignored, but they kept coming. There were initially concerns about the Russians deploying a new kind of chemical weapon, perhaps a hallucinogen. The GUR sent a team to investigate. Maksym was part of that team.
He was sent to the front. At Robotyne, they interviewed troops who had been affected by this suspected ‘weapon’. They all said the same thing: There had been a snowstorm, and everything was frozen. And out there, in the cold, grey shapes were moving.
If you don’t live in a high rise building, you might be forgiven for thinking we enjoy the view. The truth is the grime and dirt of the city build up so quickly on the windows that you are better off watching an 8K live feed on your latest Huawei tablet than trying to look down.
Of course the fact that I was actually looking out the window was novel only for the fact that this time I could see nothing at all. Officially today had an air pollution level of 459 PM2.5 — ‘hazardous’. Unofficially, according to feed from the US consulate, it was 754 PM2.5. ‘Catastrophic’.
For a catastrophe which occurred with such frequency, it was a sad irony that life went on more or less unchanged. Mostly anyway.