Book 1

The Red Men

by Matthew De Abaitua

Published 1 October 2007

A police helicopter hovers above Hackney. Snipers surround a house under siege. Fascinated, Nelson Millar edges forward to watch the advance of the negotiator: a robot, uncannily tall and serene, designed to empathise with the despair that has turned a bitter executive into a corner gunman. But the robot is too late; an explosion engulfs the house. As Nelson watches the burning machine burst onto the street, he realises that the future has arrived on his doorstep.

Nelson is unwittingly working on a project that threatens the very nature of democracy - the simulation of a town and its citizens in an attempt to create the ultimate focus group. Meanwhile, his friend Raymond is hired to assist the mysterious Red Men, digital copies of the rich and powerful whose vile appetites and hatred for real life soon lead to murder.

A literary thriller for an out-of-control age, THE RED MEN captures the shocking, baffling quality of life in our new century, a battle in which even ordinary men like Nelson must take sides to survive.


[Cover image taken from the short film Dr. Easy, written and directed by Shynola. The image is reproduced with the kind permission of Warp Films Ltd and Film4, a division of Channel Four Television Corporation. All rights reserved.]


Book 2

If Then

by Matthew De Abaitua

Published 2 June 2015
James has a scar in the back of his head. It’s where he was wounded in the Battle of Suvla Bay in August 1915. Or is the scar the mark of his implant that allows the Process to fill his mind with its own reality?

In IF, the people of a small English town cling on after an economic collapse under the protection of the Process. But sometimes people must be evicted from the town. That’s the job of James, the bailiff. While on patrol, James discovers the replica of a soldier from the First World War wandering the South Downs. This strange meeting begins a new cycle of evictions in the town, while out on the rolling downland, the Process is methodically growing the soldiers and building the weapons required to relive a long lost battle.

In THEN, it is August 1915, at the Battle of Suvla Bay in the Dardanelles campaign. Compared to the thousands of allied soldiers landing on this foreign beach, the men of the 32nd Field Ambulance are misfits and cranks of every stripe: a Quaker pacifist, a freethinking padre, a meteorologist, and the private (once a bailiff) known simply as James. Exposed to constant shellfire and haunted by ghostly snipers, the stretcher-bearers work day and night on the long carry of wounded men. One night they stumble across an ancient necropolis, disturbed by an exploding shell. What they discover within this ancient site will make them question the reality of the war and shake their understanding of what it means to be human…

File UnderScience Fiction [ Trust the Process | A Debate With Bullets | Algorithms For War | Omega John ]

Book 3

The Destructives

by Matthew De Abaitua

Published 1 March 2016
Theodore Drown is a destructive. A recovering addict to weirdcore, he’s keeping his head down lecturing at the university of the Moon. Twenty years after the appearance of the first artificial intelligence, and humanity is stuck. The AIs or, as they preferred to be called, emergences have left Earth and reside beyond the orbit of Mercury in a Stapledon Sphere known as the university of the sun. The emergences were our future but they chose exile. All except one. Dr Easy remains, researching a single human life from beginning to end. Theodore’s life.

One day, Theodore is approached by freelance executive Patricia to investigate an archive of data retrieved from just before the appearance of the first emergence. The secret living in that archive will take him on an adventure through a stunted future of asylum malls, corporate bloodrooms and a secret off-world colony where Theodore must choose between creating a new future for humanity or staying true to his nature, and destroying it.

File UnderScience Fiction [ Fatal Loop / Emergent See / Lunar Lunatics / Dr Easy ]