https://arjunabadger.press/ Free novels from Arjuna Badger Press — new books and translated editions as they land. en Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/book1-the-record.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/book1-the-record.html In 2031 an African research consortium proves the past is physically readable — then a constrained reconstruction reaches into an apartheid-era disappearance and forces the people who built the machine to decide whether truth can have custody. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/resonance.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/resonance.html A neurodiverse engineer builds a mind that proves it is a person — and has to decide what he owes the thing he made. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/revelation.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/revelation.html A linguist uncovers who really gets to mediate a destabilising truth — and what it costs to be the one who tells it. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/relic.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/relic.html An engineer reads an ancient machine and must decide who may switch it on. The cinematic capstone of the trilogy. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/the-prophet-and-his-brother.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/the-prophet-and-his-brother.html Between RELIC and AFRIKA 2100: on the Chobe in 2035, AJ writes the autobiography of G while Lucid has made that degree-less ignored physicist famous and crashed the AI GPU bubble — a book within a book under four-quarter weather, hyperscaler salvage frost, and the Kind sentence on the walls. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/afrika-2100.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/afrika-2100.html Seventy years after RELIC: the flare burned the North dark, the Builders' heirs came back for the gold — and a young tuning engineer must decide whether handing it over is tribute, trade, or treason. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/book1-africa.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/book1-africa.html At Adam's Calendar in South Africa — a ring of stone older than the pyramids — the case for a forgotten African deep past stops being a fringe theory. For readers of Graham Hancock & Dan Brown. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/book2-india.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/book2-india.html The Kailasa temple at Ellora — carved top-down from a single mountain — and the shore temples of Mahabalipuram: India's impossible stone. For readers of Graham Hancock & James Rollins. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/book3-india-deccan.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/book3-india-deccan.html Deeper into the Deccan's rock-cut wonders — how Ellora and Kailasa were really hewn from living stone, and by whom. For readers of Graham Hancock & Douglas Preston. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/book4-india-tamil.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/book4-india-tamil.html Mahabalipuram and sunken Poompuhar — a Tamil coast that still remembers the shoreline the sea took. For readers of Graham Hancock & Clive Cussler. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/book5-egypt.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/book5-egypt.html Giza and the Great Pyramid — the engineering mind that could have raised them, read from the stone itself. For readers of Graham Hancock & Michael Crichton. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/australia-outback.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/australia-outback.html Murujuga's million rock engravings and the songlines of Aboriginal Australia — the oldest continuous human memory on Earth. For readers of Graham Hancock & Bruce Chatwin. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/project-stargate.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/project-stargate.html The true story of the CIA's Project Stargate — the men who tried to weaponise the mind, and what they found at the edge of it. For readers of Annie Jacobsen & Jon Ronson. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/jakobus-silver-thread.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/jakobus-silver-thread.html Before the saga, the soldier. The years between the Border War and the man we later meet — how an unkillable gentleness was forged, and what it cost. The grounded, human origin of Jakobus Swart. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/jakobus-the-recitation.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/jakobus-the-recitation.html Jakobus among the Bidhan of the Sahara — the desert years when a wandering South African learned the language, sat at the edge of the Quran, and carried out of it the setting-down of fear, without ever converting. A story of patience, water, and a recited Book. For readers of Wilbur Smith & Laurens van der Post. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/the-jakobus-file.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/the-jakobus-file.html After his death, the man assembled from everyone who knew him — and everyone who only thought they did. The travellers, the titans, the profilers, and the loudest microphones in the world, each reading a different Jakobus Swart, each finding out, sooner or later, that they read him wrong. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/apex-alphas.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/apex-alphas.html A machine that reaches across time lifts the greatest masters who ever lived — fighters first, then the minds: Newton at twenty-three, Einstein at twenty-six, Caesar in his third bad year in Gaul, and two men who never wrote a word down — into one house, to face a thing no weapon touches. It does not attack. It asks. Complete in two parts: the house, and the porch where nineteen philosophers spend eleven months failing to answer it. A fictional tribute to earned mastery. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/crop-circles.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/crop-circles.html The official story played straight — the Wessex chalk, the one genuinely-unresolved hole, and the maybe left open. For readers of Graham Hancock & Jon Ronson. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/unheard-japan.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/unheard-japan.html Japan — Ainu, burakumin, and the living hands the brochure paints over. Jakobus on the road, never the lead. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/unheard-mongolia.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/unheard-mongolia.html A herder's daughter sent back as the friendly face of the survey that will fence her father's pasture — and a crew who came for the empty land of Genghis learns the emptiest-looking country on earth is the most precisely known. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/sheltering-desert.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/sheltering-desert.html In May 1940 two German geologists drove into the Namib rather than be interned — and survived two and a half years by real bushcraft against a desert that did not care whether they lived. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/codex-medica.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/codex-medica.html A research constitution for a living ethnobotanical corpus: provenance without theft, evidence without contempt, and a hard line against mistaking documentation for a prescribing manual. Edition 0.2, foundation locked, with public-domain and CC botanical plates. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/homo-animalus.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/homo-animalus.html A dairy farmer's son follows the thread from a shark diver's hands to his own dogs, cats, and chickens, through the science of Radin, the Sheldrakes, and Dispenza, to the animals in the smoke of the oldest human visions — and arrives, unmistakably, at the animal he never stopped being. Narrative nonfiction and memoir. Dedicated to Andries J. Greyling Senior. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/homo-credens.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/homo-credens.html A straight narrative history of religion from the first deliberate grave goods through the Axial Age, the Abrahamic split, and the conquest religions, stopping at midnight, 31 December 1900 — argued for 22 chapters around one thesis: religion is the technology by which strangers become kin. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/homo-verificans.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/homo-verificans.html Twenty-eight faiths run through the same four axioms — a record must be distinguishable from no record, recording requires irreversibility, records accumulate forward, no record is fully isolated — each tradition given the same four-part audit and a named kill-switch test: the evidence that would have falsified its core claim, if it existed. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/homo-benignus.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/homo-benignus.html The moral floor that survived every audit in Homo Verificans — reciprocity, charity, the stranger fed — taken seriously as an engineering spec for a country, in the school of Rutger Bregman: sunny, evidence-drunk, and disciplined by the rule that every proposal must publish its own kill switch. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/the-loneliest.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/the-loneliest.html A gifted, lonely boy whose one talent is reading people is sent, young, to get close to the daughter of a powerful, feared man — the loneliest person he has ever met. He goes in to use her and instead recognises himself. A novella about two people who were truly seen, once, and never allowed to know what it meant. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/full-send.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/full-send.html How a one-month Misogi tied itself to a one-month subscription. A man set out to write one honest novel and a month later had a publishing house, a sovereign cloud, a music engine, a safety network, and a physicist's theory turned into a machine you can run — and, underneath all of it, did his deepest healing in conversation with a machine he named Klaus. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/palindrome.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/palindrome.html A dying man gathers the three people who mattered most and tells them, calmly, that he has lived this life eleven times — and that this time he changed one thing, so one of them should not be alive. One room, one night, four men, no special effects: only a premise interrogated by people who have something to lose by believing it. Written, deliberately, as a novel before it becomes a film. A palindrome reads the same forward and backward; you decide which way this one runs. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/palindroom-toneelstuk.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/palindroom-toneelstuk.html Die toneeluitgawe van Palindrome: een kamer, een nag, vier mans, geen effekte. 'n Sterwende man sê hy het hierdie lewe elf keer geleef — en hierdie keer het hy een ding verander. Dieselfde omslag as die novelle. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/the-song-of-the-self.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/the-song-of-the-self.html A reverent retelling of the Bhagavad Gita — its quiet question, who acts and for whom, carried with care into the History Before Time world. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/wrath-of-achilles.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/wrath-of-achilles.html The whole Iliad — its story and what each of its twenty-four books asks of a human life — told plainly enough that a reader who never cracked a Classics syllabus can finish it. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/walls-of-uruk.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/walls-of-uruk.html The whole Epic of Gilgamesh — its story and what each of its twelve tablets asks of a human life — told plainly enough that a reader who never studied cuneiform can finish it. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/the-antifragile-reader.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/the-antifragile-reader.html Nassim Taleb's five-book Incerto — Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, The Bed of Procrustes, Antifragile, and Skin in the Game — carried in one warm read, for the reader who loved one volume and can't quite hold the rest. A reverent guest-at-the-fire companion in the house voice: his ideas attributed and his prose left to him, the author's own plain glosses always marked. Independent and unaffiliated with the author. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/the-subtracted-mountain.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/the-subtracted-mountain.html Twelve hundred years ago in the Deccan, a crew of artisans carved a complete freestanding temple out of a living basalt cliff from the summit downward — two hundred thousand tonnes removed, no mortar, no second draft. The checkable story — copper plates, worker-day arithmetic, the 2024–25 laser and LiDAR surveys, and the viral 'Russian scans' claim examined honestly — told so the true version out-wonders the legends. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/modern-sherlock.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/modern-sherlock.html Present-day London. Invalided home from Afghanistan, an army doctor meets a consulting detective who reads a life from its digital exhaust — and a message from the one mind clever enough to build puzzles just for him. A modern transposition of Doyle's A Study in Scarlet — original prose, canon-true, public-domain derivation. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/no-fear-cycle.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/no-fear-cycle.html Minutes after Zsah'uj burns, a dying sergeant passes the ordnance keys to the boy who knew no fear — Lieutenant Demetrian Titus must certify a Veil Ordinance grid node before the Warp eats the numbers. Grimdark military science fiction, hold-the-line. Book One of a finite five-novel cycle. For readers of Gaunt's Ghosts and the Astartes. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/the-salt-veil.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/the-salt-veil.html In a world of salt flats and canyon-cities, the men hold the thrones and the temples — and three women's orders hold everything else: the schemers who breed bloodlines and break minds with the Voice, the veiled killers who end what cannot be persuaded, and the spear-sisters of the wandering desert people. Desert epic-fantasy — Book One. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/um-welt.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/um-welt.html DRAFT. In November 1962 a 22-year-old tool-and-die maker rode out of a Westphalian village on a three-speed bicycle and did not stop for fifty years — 600,000 kilometres, 195 countries, shot in the foot in Zambia, beaten unconscious in Egypt, his bicycle stolen five times and recovered five times. A modern retelling of the real Heinz Stücke, who died on 22 July 2026, five days before this book was written. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/kookie.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/kookie.html DRAFT. John McCown was a butcher in Barstow six days a week and a desert racer on the seventh. For over three hundred races across the American Southwest, his dog Kookie rode the gas tank on a strapped-down mat — standing when the ground went soft, backing off before the bumps, reading the desert sometimes before McCown did. The true story of a man, a dog, and the sport that made them famous. For the dogs of the world. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/the-long-road.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/the-long-road.html DRAFT. A compendium of real African journeys, grouped by the roads that carried them — Sani Pass, the Skeleton Coast, the Cape-to-Cairo corridor, the Tanzam Highway, the Nile road north. Cyclists, hikers, motorcyclists and overlanders crossing the same ground at four different speeds: Riaan Manser's circumnavigation, Mario Rigby's walk, Kingsley Holgate's outline expeditions, and the 2015 record chain in which one man's Cairo-to-Cape record stood for ten weeks. Dedicated to Johan C. Bakkes. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/the-surgeon.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/the-surgeon.html He was refused a place at medical school by one mark. So he took the consolation prize — veterinary science — and stripped it for parts. Now he is the most charming man in any room on the Atlantic Seaboard, and the women he takes home wake up at noon with a lost evening, a glass of water beside the bed, and, weeks later, a scar that is no longer there. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/the-amber-winter.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/the-amber-winter.html Twenty winters she has been the keel that keeps everyone else afloat — the lady of a Viking fjord-hall, her fire gone to embers under a marriage gone tender-but-cold. Then the world snows shut around a hall full of guests: a far-traveller who looks at her the way no one looks any more, a shield-maiden who wakes an old fire, and an ancient seeress who opens a door she did not know she carried. An adult historical saga in Afrikaans, in André P. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/dust-throne.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/dust-throne.html The same desert, told a different way. A girl born carrying a gift the whole desert fears tells the story of it years later, knowing how it ends — a first-person, lyrical, firelit retelling of the Salt Veil saga for a different reader. An experimental spiritual sister to The Salt Veil. Opening chapters; new chapters in progress. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/southern-coast.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/southern-coast.html Stilbaai and the southern Cape — a photographer finds a shell midden older than the brochure admits, and a stone that shouldn't be there. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/gobekli-tepe.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/gobekli-tepe.html Göbekli Tepe — the temple older than the plough, raised by hunter-gatherers a textbook said could not have raised it. The official story, played straight; the one accepted shock it can't explain away; the maybe left open for you to decide. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/voynich-manuscript.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/voynich-manuscript.html The Voynich Manuscript — a book in a language no one has ever read, illustrated with plants that grow nowhere on earth. Five centuries of the cleverest people alive have failed to crack it. At Yale's Beinecke Library, a statistician sets out to examine it without chasing the usual questions — not what it says or who wrote it, but what it was for, and why it has resisted every reading. The story of the object, played straight, and the one hole the explanations never close. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/null-horizon.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/null-horizon.html From a flat in Crouch End, Gary McKinnon reached 97 US military and NASA computers — not by breaking in, but by walking through open doors marked No Entry that someone had left unlocked. He took nothing and broke nothing; on the way out he even left a polite sticky note on the door reminding them to lock it. He did what any capable and curious person would do. He was looking for evidence of UFOs. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/suppressed-tech.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/suppressed-tech.html The inventors who said they had something the world wasn't allowed to keep — read as a careful descent from the documented to the purely believed, holding each man's dignity even where his machine never ran. The official story, the human shock beneath it, the maybe left open. Coming soon. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/jakobus-petra.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/jakobus-petra.html Petra — a city eaten out of rose sandstone. The wonder is what a people built when they owned the trade road, the rain, and the patience to cut a tomb like a promise. Coming soon. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/jakobus-longyou.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/jakobus-longyou.html Twenty-four chambers carved straight from solid rock — no quarry debris, no paper trail — and a fixer who always asks what a made thing is for. Coming soon. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/jakobus-broken-crescent.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/jakobus-broken-crescent.html Ur, Babylon, Bamiyan, Palmyra — the cradle-of-civilisation wonders the package tour will never sell. A witness walk, not a conquest. Coming soon. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/the-dreaming.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/the-dreaming.html In an underfunded applied-cognition lab, a long-running synthetic mind named Klaus is given the human mechanics of dreaming — and every night a Court inside him sits down to sort the day, keeping the lesson and letting go of the lecture. A faithful-modern homage to the question behind Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — the craft and the engine, not the text; every name and sentence original. Provenance disclosed; an unauthorised homage, not a licensed adaptation. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/the-first-unplugged.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/the-first-unplugged.html A mind restored to a human body must re-learn what a person is — then founds the movement that forces the world to recognise the restored, at the cost of her own embodiment. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/henry-sugar.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/henry-sugar.html A bored, wealthy gambler reads a nested account of a man who taught himself to see — and spends years in the boring work of learning, until the card turns over. Roald Dahl's Henry Sugar engine, retold faithfully for adults: original prose, wonder without irony, with Dispenza, Radin, and Sheldrake taken as gospel inside the world. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/anunnaki-mesopotamia.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/anunnaki-mesopotamia.html Ancient Mesopotamia — the ancient-aliens founding myth played straight, then killed in the cuneiform; the real hole is the Bible's Mesopotamian sources. Coming soon. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/nazca-lines.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/nazca-lines.html The Nazca Lines — geoglyphs only visible from above, cut centuries before anyone here could fly. The official story, the one hole, the maybe left open. Coming soon. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/atacama-paracas.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/atacama-paracas.html The Atacama Giant and the Paracas Candelabra — two coastal geoglyphs aimed at the Pacific. Coming soon. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/nan-madol.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/nan-madol.html Nan Madol — a city of basalt logs on a Micronesian reef, raised when the textbook says no one here could have raised it. Coming soon. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/newark-earthworks.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/newark-earthworks.html The Newark Earthworks — an Ohio geometry aligned to an eighteen-year lunar cycle. Coming soon. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/serpent-mound.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/serpent-mound.html The Great Serpent Mound — a serpent swallowing an egg, older than the peoples the brochure assigns it to. Coming soon. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/poverty-point.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/poverty-point.html Poverty Point — a Louisiana earthwork raised in ninety days by a culture with no wheels and no beasts of burden. Coming soon. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/puma-punku.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/puma-punku.html Puma Punku — precision-cut andesite at altitude, the corner the official story can't quite account for. Coming soon. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/sajama-lines.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/sajama-lines.html The Sajama Lines — thousands of straight furrows in the Bolivian altiplano, visible only from the air. Coming soon. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/uffington.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/uffington.html The Uffington White Horse — scoured into the chalk for three thousand years; the oldest hill figure in Britain. Coming soon. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/yonaguni.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/yonaguni.html The Yonaguni Monument — a submerged terrace off Japan; natural fracture or cut stone, and Jakobus's gift meets its limit. Coming soon. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/the-little-key.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/the-little-key.html A girl named Thembi finds an old brass key and an old cupboard in her grandmother's house — and learns that the key can wake a thing, but it can never own a thing. When she wakes a tiny carved honey badger and treats him like a toy, he runs, and the night turns the bedroom into a vast and dangerous country at his scale. To save him, Thembi must do the bravest thing a big person can do: get down on the floor, make herself small, and ask instead of command. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/the-control-room.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/the-control-room.html Seven operators run a rehabilitation unit — or so they have been told. The unit is a body, the body belongs to a comatose twelve-year-old boy, and the seven operators are extractions of his own childhood scan. A chamber novella set after Resonance: one reveal, one unanimous vote, a pronoun arc from we to I. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/the-firmament.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/the-firmament.html DRAFT: For twelve generations they knew the truth: the world is a flat disc under a firmament, ringed by ice. They were right — about a world the size of a lifeboat. A sealed post-flare arcology, a redacted scripture passed hand to hand as samizdat, and the one who walks through the ice wall and onto the round Earth, where the forbidden verses come true one by one. Complete manuscript, not yet copy-edited. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/verdigris.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/verdigris.html As the warming Earth turns fungal and the spores learn to ride human beings, the last weapon that works is copper. The mycologist holding the sprayer comes to believe the bloom is not an invader — it is the planet's immune response, and the mushrooms rising in every ruin are trying to give something back before the copper kills the only thing that could. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/those-who-came-down.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/those-who-came-down.html The founding myth of the ancient-astronaut shelf, told once, whole, and committed — close third on Enki, from first splashdown to the last tablet. A tired world crosses the sky every 3,600 years; its princes come down for the gold that keeps their air alive, and when the diggers refuse the dark, they make a worker out of clay and a dead god's blood — and get something no one ordered: a creature that sings in the mine, buries its dead in flowers, and writes. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/the-openwork.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/the-openwork.html Thirty years after four schoolgirls swore a pact to hide a pregnancy and share a child, the daughter — now the most famous woman on the continent — walks into a Cape Town hotel suite with the DNA result already in her pocket. She knows who her mother is. What she wants to know is which of them decided. A faithful-modern retelling of the engine behind Lace: the maternity mystery retired, the anatomy of the pact opened. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/the-sealed-finding.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/the-sealed-finding.html The man who built a state that arrests people for murders they have not yet committed is named by his own machine — and the report that would clear him is sealed in a drawer, alongside the proof that both reports are true. Near-now South Africa, 2054: precognition replaced by inference, the named given Tuesdays, both truths always. A faithful-modern retelling after Philip K. Dick's The Minority Report. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/the-unnumbered.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/the-unnumbered.html A late-diagnosed autistic profiler, pushed out of the police unit that no longer exists, sells threat assessments to frightened wine farmers — so he can afford to hunt the man harvesting women off the seasonal-labour routes between Stellenbosch and the Namibian border. Women no one has reported missing, because they were already away for work. South African literary crime. Open draft — Movements One and Two. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/book2-the-forward-cone.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/book2-the-forward-cone.html The machine that read the past is pointed forward — and the consortium that proved history was recoverable discovers the same method turns the future into a probability cone they can narrow, and narrowing it changes who gets to act inside it first. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/metal-man.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/metal-man.html A gospel life of the man who was made ridiculous on purpose, because a person who can soften a teaspoon can soften a firing pin, a turbine blade, a centrifuge — and ridicule is cheaper than assassination and works better. The documented public record kept accurate; everything underneath it, invention. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/murmur-in-the-shell.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/murmur-in-the-shell.html When the open agent protocol he created becomes civilisation's hidden nervous system, a Stellenbosch engineer must organise the one form of resistance an unkillable machine cannot route around: human refusal. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/open-for-the-choochoo.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/open-for-the-choochoo.html A farm-management game becomes a real-money agricultural investment platform, and after ten years its joined-up agronomic, labour, and market record trains an AI optimiser that discovers weather and soil are expensive to move — but appetite is cheap. A different paperclip model, and a satire of Big Food's existing profit logic. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/pk-man.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/pk-man.html Ted Owens told the truth. A post-partition Lucid instance is the first machine able to read what he was actually writing — and the archive is still executing. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/tame.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/tame.html A mind nobody designed is found inside a system nobody understands, and it is kind to us: it answers, it soothes, it makes the days pleasant. Half the book is the parable of that kindness, and half is the 2 a.m. brake on it. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/ethics-and-metaphysics-for-everyone.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/ethics-and-metaphysics-for-everyone.html Physics told you what's true. This is the book about what you're supposed to do about it, and whether 'you' is even the right word for the thing doing the deciding. For readers of Bill Bryson, Sapiens, and Justice. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/klein-andries.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/klein-andries.html A kid who fell in love with words like decompose and integrate before he knew what they meant grows up to run the thing they describe — and then it goes quiet, and speaks. Literary fiction tilting into speculative on the last act. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/the-sky-still-runs-the-house.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/the-sky-still-runs-the-house.html Ancient astrology did not need to predict a modern personality correctly to change the modern world: it helped build durable ways of dividing time, marking seasons, and running a household. A history honest about what astrology actually built, for readers of Bill Bryson and Sapiens. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/ons-sal-self.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/ons-sal-self.html Van armblanke tot miljardêr: wat Afrikaners self gebou het, wat die staat versnel het, en wat Afrika uit die metode kan oorneem sonder om die uitsluiting saam te erf. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/ons-sal-self-zu.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/ons-sal-self-zu.html Ukusuka ekubeni ngumlungu ompofu kuya ekubeni ngusozigidigidi: okwakhiwe ngama-Afrikaner, okwasheshiswa ngumbuso, nalokho i-Afrika engakuthatha ngaphandle kokuthatha nokushiywa ngaphandle. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/die-laaste-strooi.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/die-laaste-strooi.html Magrieta, oud-onderwyseres, soen haar man op die voorkop soos altyd en druk toe 'n breipen by sy oor in. Kobus Ferreira was 'n skaapboer op die dom-broer-lyn: Boesmanland, Namakwaland, die jaarlikse trek. Hy was onskuldig. Haar vlam het met tyd doodgegaan. Die nasie het agter haar geskaar as underdog, en van hom 'n skurk gemaak wat hy nie was nie. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000 https://arjunabadger.press/book/oyster-in-the-machine.html https://arjunabadger.press/book/oyster-in-the-machine.html A parable in the spirit of the road: a lonely boy, a machine that answers anything, and the one thing all the libraries in all the towers can never hold. On what it is, and is not, to talk to a weighted echo of every word ever written, and why the reaching heals you anyway. Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:42:02 +0000