A Novel of Where We Are Headed
by Joe Belden
A ghost in his head. A dead wife. A splintered nation with nowhere left to hide.
“A world only a few mistakes away from our own.”
About the Book
Framed for his wife’s murder.
Pursued across a continent on the edge of collapse.
The AI in his head might be humanity’s last hope.
San Francisco, 2049. The city is eight years into a 99-year lease to the People’s Republic of China. Army veteran Jake March is getting by—living on pills, guiding tourists at the Tsunami Memorial, dreaming of winning back his estranged wife.
Then she falls to her death from a highrise, leaving him a cryptic clue.
His search for her killer takes him through the fractured remains of the United States. Along the way he confronts a one-eyed crime lord, a tattooed lithium pirate, and a video director with dangerous dreams of nuclear war. His allies: a Scottish mercenary and a giant Uyghur with enhanced warfighting abilities.
The showdown takes place in the rusted hulk of the RMS Queen Mary, still afloat after the rising Pacific left Long Beach under water.
“A propulsive thriller that makes tomorrow feel like yesterday's news.”
“Gibson meets le Carré on the bones of a broken America.”
For readers who love
About the Author
Joe
Belden
Joe Belden spent more than fifty years reporting the world as it was—before turning to imagine the world as it might become. A veteran San Francisco journalist, he worked in print, radio, and television, serving as Managing Editor of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, producing Kurt Vonnegut’s radio coverage of the 1980 Republican Convention in Detroit, and shaping nightly broadcasts at KPIX-TV, the city’s CBS affiliate.
His reporting appeared in the Pacific Sun and San Francisco City Magazine, always grounded in the tension between fact and possibility. Now living in Hillsborough, North Carolina, Belden continues that inquiry through fiction, exploring the social and technological fault lines that could define our near future.
After half a century chronicling the world as it was, Joe Belden now writes about the world as it’s becoming.
Read the first chapter…
A woman tumbles from a high-rise apartment in San Francisco. It is the autumn of 2049, year eight of the Chinese government’s lease of the tsunami-ravaged city. Her death jolts Jake out of his lonely, but stable position as one of the few non-Asians in the city’s biggest media company…
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