My novel is almost finished. Kickstarter is in October. Then a simple thought arrives: promotion cannot wait for “someday.” It has to start now.

In a recent post, I examined the most popular advice on marketing a book. The conclusions were discouraging. So was my own experience.

I had landed in a predicament familiar to many writers: the novel is nearly finished, and only then do you realise it is time to find its future readers.

So I read. I researched. I worked through dozens of tips and recommendations. I nearly ruined my eyes reading post after post that prescribed exactly the same sequence of actions. Everyone said the same thing. Was there an alternative? Apparently not.

So was it necessary?

Then so be it.

Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Patreon, YouTube, X/Twitter, Threads, Substack, Beehiiv, and a couple of dozen Facebook groups for book promotion.

“Wow, I’m good,” I thought after a few days spent registering on every channel that promised a marketing breakthrough and a queue of potential subscribers. I have a formidable work ethic, after all. Surely I could conquer the market with it.

Then came hell. A daily twenty-hour production line began: making videos, posting videos, preparing material for more videos. Posts here, posts there, reposts somewhere else. Tracking views and subscribers, feeding prompts to AI, running more analysis to assess the situation and get the next piece of advice. Round and round it went.

A miserable, pointless conveyor belt that devoured every spare hour. I stopped writing. I stopped thinking. Life became the existence of an exhausted biological machine built to produce and publish content.

After ten days, my body said:

Stop.

Maybe I am a weakling.

Maybe I am not sufficiently evolved.

Maybe I committed serious sins in a previous life.

But this was clearly not for me. The hellish conveyor belt sold as an impossibly successful marketing strategy simply was not working.

Perhaps it works over the long term — with a team that promotes your novel across countless channels day and night. Or when you have enough time to do everything slowly and thoughtfully, rather than in permanent “right now” mode.

Click. Coffee. Cigarette.

To hell with everything except Substack. I kept Facebook out of pity — apparently, I still have an unintended tenderness for Zuckerberg and his now-archaic creation.

What was left?

I returned to life quickly and, having climbed out of the rabbit hole of advice, looked at the situation with a clear head.

The answer was simple.

Substack remains my main platform. Facebook is on hold, but not discarded. On Substack, I can write, read, follow the news, talk to people, and share the book’s journey. I do not have to drive myself mad trying to be an author, editor, social-media manager, analyst, and a twenty-four-hour content factory all at once.

Everything else can wait. It is secondary. Or tertiary.

It does not really matter.

What matters is this: the reader has the final word in a book’s fate. If people read your work, subscribe, reply, argue, and leave a like, then you are no longer writing in a vacuum. Someone is ready to take the next step with you.

Marketing can bring someone to the door. It cannot make them walk through it. And it certainly cannot make them finish a book that failed to connect — or recommend it to their friends.

I am not declaring war on marketing. I simply no longer want to confuse motion with progress, or endless busyness in an imaginary race with a real outcome.

Focus is not abandoning promotion. It is choosing the one form of promotion you can sustain without abandoning the work itself.

My novel launches on Kickstarter in October. Then the honest test begins. Not for the algorithms. Not for another guide to reach. For the book.

The clock is ticking.

The challenge is on.

And then come the countless bloggers and articles, naturally recommending — from personal experience, of course — the best and unquestionably most effective ways to promote it.

Want numbers?

I have them….

Shocked?

Not exactly, are you?

Let’s look at the main points.

Here’s the situation: you are an author with an idea that has taken hold. You have written half the novel. Or three quarters. Or a third. Or you are close to finishing a new — usually first, and long-awaited — book.

Promoting your book on Instagram. The undisputed leader of all advice, recommended in a remarkable 67% of posts.

What? You have never had Instagram? You did not start an account as a child and collect a couple of million followers in advance? I am sorry. You have missed so much in life.

I put the advice to promote a book through a brand-new Instagram account in the lethal category. Practical marketing benchmarks put Instagram’s average click-through rate somewhere around 0.3–0.5%. Let’s take 0.4%. To get one thousand visits to your book page, you need around 250,000 views. And those still are not purchases. Cold-traffic conversion to a sale is usually measured in low single-digit percentages.

Is that your goal? A magnificent outcome is waiting for you.

My verdict: no established Instagram account? Send this tactic to the trash heap. Unless, of course, you want to bury the work on your book and devote yourself entirely to Instagram.

And who is hiding in second place? TikTok, naturally, with 60% of the recommendations.

TikTok’s average click-through rate ranges from 0.1% to 0.5%. The lower end is even lower than Instagram’s. The consequences — and the potential returns — are obvious.

And the fanfare blares! An honorable third, at 57%, goes to advice telling authors to build both platforms at once.

From my point of view, that is a brilliant move. In practice, growing new Instagram and TikTok accounts to meaningful reach can take anything from nine months to forever. You might never hit 250,000 views on a single video.

YouTube is the outsider here. A measly 37% of the advice. Still a substantial result.

Do you think that putting all three promotional channels together will triple the result? That success and an endless stream of new followers are waiting for you in just a year?

I doubt it.

What I do not doubt is that you will lose an enormous amount of time running every channel at once, while completely forgetting your main goal: literary work. You will become someone who knows the algorithms of these platforms by heart. You will get lost writing copy for every video. Because each platform demands something different. Different formats. Different algorithms. Your time will become a nonstop stream of creating and posting videos, studying analytics, thinking about analytics, and making decisions to improve your reach. Your mind will be occupied by video formats, editing, and new and old ways of making content.

This is the problem. Ahead is an endless race against millions of competitors posting their content on these platforms. But you do enjoy a race for survival, don’t you?

And the result?

In my view, it is rather insubstantial. Time lost; burying yourself as a writer — yes.

The result is a ghost. Maybe even zero.

But wait. Bingo! You reach the top on every platform after a couple of weeks. Still, this is closer to winning at roulette after betting on zero. A couple of hundred dollars on zero every day. You do that all the time, right? Admit it — you are a regular at the casino.

If not, let us leave these tips behind for now. I classify them as harmful. Where would you put them? That is for you to decide. Everyone chooses their own path — and takes responsibility for their own mistakes.

Now for the second half of the list.

Share

Launch team / ARC team — 53%.

Do you have plenty of spare time to assemble a group of readers who will read your book before release, leave honest reviews, and help with reposts and comments at the start of the launch? If so, build one. Just do not forget: your work may not appeal to everyone. In any case, you will acquire plenty of extra work: joining relevant groups to offer your book to readers, learning several ARC services, and so on, and so on…

Oh right. We forgot. You still have plenty of free time left after running Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube every day — and after the daily work of writing or preparing your book for release.

But you must not sit idle, must you? Not every promotional channel has been covered yet. There is still plenty of free time, plenty of energy, and an immeasurable supply of creative power.

And where should you direct it?

Exactly!

Grow your Facebook! 43% of the recommendations!

By the way, if you did not start building your account as a personal brand at the age of ten, your chances are extremely slim.

The bleak numbers put Facebook’s organic view-to-purchase funnel at 0.001–0.02%. Close to zero? Disappointed?

But there is good news. With paid Facebook ads, you can achieve an impressive 0.015–0.1%.

Just remember to keep topping up your credit card. Advertising asks for money. Sometimes a lot of it. And it is not always effective. No result is still a result. Technically. The question is: at what cost?

But you believe in yourself. You have plenty of time. You are not tired. Your bank balance is still showing seven figures, and you are ready for further victories. Ready to bend fate and reality over your knee.

So…

The next step.

Author website / landing page — 40%.

Because you are a born professional at building websites and personal pages. A king of SEO and design. A master of Google promotion.

Then go ahead. But if you have never done this before, it will become a very engaging quest — one not everyone can complete. Of course, there is a quicker option: build a website with AI. But it is nowhere near as fast or easy as people make it sound.

And yes: Google ads have not gone anywhere, either. But your bank account is not completely empty yet, is it? Time to top up Google’s account.

Now let us draw a few conclusions.

Every one of these suggestions sounds sensible. Especially on its own. Sometimes it really works. Sometimes they work together.

The problem is that nobody tells you this: building an Instagram account from scratch is not a matter of posting a couple of videos. It is a separate project. It requires creating a visual identity, learning content formats, producing and regularly publishing material, mastering video, and dealing with a long list of smaller factors and nuances that determine success on the platform.

TikTok, meanwhile, is a completely different project with its own subtleties and nuances. YouTube and Facebook are entirely separate stories too.

And then, instead of doing what you love and writing a book, you will be learning several other professions and skills: photographer, video editor, social-media manager, analyst. You will have to study several AI tools closely — and remember to pay for them.

With some confidence, I can assume that after a couple of months you will completely forget your calling as a writer and turn into a beaten horse.

“They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” — Horace McCoy.

But this is not the end of our story. In a couple of days, I will write the continuation.

With new numbers. New facts. My observations. And personal experience.

You do enjoy a continuing story, don’t you?

I do.

Just like good coffee: the kind that gives life flavor.

Subscribe now

P.S. This is only my personal opinion. Any claim I make to objectivity collapses under the weight of my own subjectivity.

All figures cited in this post were drawn from publicly available sources with the help of ChatGPT.

The feed is overflowing with recommendations and advice on how to grow your subscriber count on Substack.

Different approaches. The same algorithms. Silence. My investigation had reached a dead end.

And, having a fairly cynical view of the world from time to time, I found myself wondering: why not give bad advice instead? When there is too much good advice, it starts to get tiresome. The same thing, over and over, only phrased differently.

The bad is always part of the good. The two are interconnected and cannot exist without each other. Without the bad, there is no good. And conversely, without the good, there is no bad.

The dialectical unity of opposites. Leaving us no chance of escape.

So I tried to put together my own list of bad advice in a concise, substantial form that anyone can understand:

How Not to Gain Subscribers on Substack

— Start with your profile. Fill in as little as possible. Leave the photo blank. If you absolutely must use one, go with Malevich’s Black Square or a fluffy pink rabbit. The mystery should begin from the very first minute.

— Never comment on other people’s posts or take part in discussions. That is not what you came to Substack for. Your job is to write, not to talk to people.

— In every Note, remind everyone that you are a writer. Do it as often as possible. Post at least five to seven Notes a day. Better still, space them out: one every hour, regardless of the day of the week or time of day. The reader must always remember who you are. They should fall asleep thinking about you. And wake up thinking about you too.

— Always post links to your articles. No text needed. No context either. You can even post one letter a day. A different letter every day. Switch alphabets. Chinese today, Hindi tomorrow. People love mysteries. Give them the chance to solve yours themselves. Teach them independence.

— Use the word “value.” Everywhere you can, in every possible situation. Especially where it makes no sense. What it actually means is irrelevant. The mystery is the important part. People need to understand that your level is beyond their reach. If they ask what you mean, answer with poorly concealed superiority. You are above them. You are something else entirely.

— Never answer questions. Not even in chat. If someone somehow forces you to respond, steer the conversation elsewhere. Tell them about the problems facing penguins in Antarctica. Or the difficulties of relocating a large family to Sri Lanka. Anything at all. Just never give a direct answer to the question you were asked.

— If a post gets no reaction within ten or fifteen minutes, delete it immediately. The algorithm needs to understand who is in charge. Five minutes later, publish a new, more absurd one. Algorithms respect persistence. Readers love updates. They should tremble with anticipation. Do not give them a reason to be disappointed.

— Rotate your topics every day. Twice a day is even better. Show the world that you are an expert in everything. Finance in the morning. Parenting in the evening. Politics tomorrow. They should understand your greatness, but they should never know why they subscribed to you. Narrow niches are restrictive. They restrict audiences too. Great minds have no boundaries.

— Follow every piece of growth advice relentlessly. Publish every day. Do not publish every day. Do not publish for a week. Adapt to your readers. Never adapt to your readers. Write short in the morning, long and incomprehensible in the evening. Gather every growth tip you can find and build a schedule for following them. The more crowded the schedule, the greater your chances of success. The important thing is to do everything at once. Can’t keep up? Hire an assistant. Collective creativity is ennobling.

— Analyze your statistics more often than you publish. Your writing does not matter. The numbers do. Keep refreshing the Stats section of your dashboard. Subscriber count unchanged? Refresh it again. The previous attempt clearly lacked conviction. Rest assured: your subscribers will feel the pressure and appear soon enough. Start a statistics diary. Carry it with you everywhere. It should always be by your side. In the car. Over coffee. In the bathroom. At dinner with friends.

Never risk writing anything strange, personal, or real. Follow your own path. Or perhaps don’t follow your own path. The algorithm prefers what it already knows. It likes safety and dislikes surprises. People do too. Why frighten them with originality? Write about things everyone already knows. People love stability and mystery at the same time. By the time you become the five-hundredth person to write about the same subject, they may finally consider you dangerously original.

Or perhaps the best way to gain subscribers is simply to stop thinking about gaining them.

To write about what you actually want to say.

Maybe something strange. Something uncomfortable for someone. Something that does not fit neatly into the recommendations.

Algorithms change. People change them.

Interest in a real human being does not.

As AI has become more widely available, a growing number of writers have begun using AI-generated images and video in their work.

I am no exception — but only in a few specific ways:

· Creating promotional materials

· Developing preliminary visual versions of the main characters and supporting cast

· Visualising the world of the novel

· Preparing an initial visual brief for an artist who may later bring the work to its final form

Each of these areas has its advantages and disadvantages, and we could discuss them for a long time. But today I want to talk about something else.

I want to share my own experience of using AI to visualise my novel.

Let’s start with image generation. I will write separately about my experience with video later.

Until recently, Midjourney was unquestionably the market leader. Its main strengths are its cinematic quality and the high standard of the images it produces.

Its drawbacks? There are plenty. Starting with the sheer number of settings. Perhaps a Boeing pilot, already accustomed to complex interfaces, could work it out without serious damage to their mental health.

But a writer? Someone who lives through feeling and is, in most cases, not especially technical?

For them, it can be hell.

Once inside it, they may lose all interest in visualising their work.

My personal choice is ChatGPT.

Yes, to my eye it produces images that are slightly weaker than Midjourney’s. But creating prompts is far easier. You do not need to write technical instructions: you can simply describe what you need in plain language, or dictate it aloud. And ChatGPT can help with many other useful things. Midjourney, by contrast, is a highly specialised tool — rather like a hammer drill: excellent for making holes in walls, but not much use for anything else.

I work exclusively with ChatGPT, and I do not regret that choice at all.

Here are the main things that can help you work with ChatGPT.

Do not begin by generating scenes. That is the quickest route to failure. First, decide on the visual rules of your work. Fix the essentials. You need to be able to see its major stages yourself. Otherwise, the AI will invent everything for you.

First, understand exactly what you want to get. Do not torture it with prompts such as: ‘Make me a beautiful picture where a prince riding a war buffalo crashes into a terribly ugly dragon.’ I cannot say ChatGPT will die laughing. But you certainly will when you see the result. The buffalo will crash into something, that much is guaranteed.

Practise writing instructions for ChatGPT. Keep them short, focused and precise. Do not use vague, misty phrases that mean nothing. Every gap in your wording will be filled by the AI itself, and the result is unlikely to please you.

Decide on the image format. Do not forget the aspect ratio. Make it part of the project brief you give ChatGPT. Book illustrations, covers, horizontal video and Reels all require completely different proportions. A desperate attempt to stretch a square image almost always ends badly.

Do not give contradictory instructions or actions. The AI may interpret them incorrectly and produce a result that makes sense only to itself. Your instructions should be short, clear and relevant.

Choose an image style. It is often worth asking the AI for advice. Give it a short concept of your work. Do not be afraid to let it read a few chapters — it is not going to run off and sell them on Amazon.

Explain what you want and how you see the visual style. First, generate images in one style. Then try two or three others. Compare them. Ask for an assessment and recommendations. Make the AI criticise its own work.

Have you decided?

Excellent.

Now you can move on to the next stage.

If none of these options work for you, look online for visual parallels to your idea. See which style comes closest to what you need. Choose several references and use them as part of the generation brief. Once you have results, compare them and ask ChatGPT to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the concept.

Analyse them.

Draw conclusions.

Ask for another assessment and another critique.

Choose the final version.

Developing the main characters and supporting cast is one of the first priorities. Create canonical images of them from several angles. Once you have done that, ask ChatGPT to assemble a Project Bible using the information and finished illustrations already available.

The Project Bible should include:

· A brief description of the world and story

· The rules and lore of the universe

· Main and supporting characters

· Visual references for characters, locations and technology

· The approved style for illustrations and video

· Key scenes and atmosphere

Give it a section of text — even a single page — and ask it to create a storyboard for ten to twelve images in one document. Choose the strongest options, then develop them with the AI until they reach a final form.

Fight for the colour palette. If you are unhappy with the colours and ChatGPT cannot understand what you mean by the lilac-turquoise shade of your protagonist’s trousers, use an exact palette such as RAL. Find the shade you need, send a screenshot or its precise code and source, and you will get a much more accurate result.

If you use several AI tools at once — Claude, for example — you can give it the text and your idea for an image, then ask it to write a prompt for ChatGPT. Claude can structure the request well and give you a clear, organised prompt to use in ChatGPT. Just make sure you choose the right working mode first. This is one of the easier tasks for it, so there is no need to use its most powerful modes.

Save successful prompts and their results. Create a separate folder for the key elements: characters, locations, major scenes and so on. Under every successful image, save the prompt that produced it.

Make only one change per attempt. Trying to change everything at once almost always leads to failure.

Use separate chats within the same project. One chat thread should be dedicated to one character or one illustration. Otherwise, after a few dozen iterations and several different images, ChatGPT’s ‘mind’ will become a complete mess and it will start generating almost at random.

Check small details carefully: count the fingers, check whether the minor elements are correct, and so on. Have you seen AI illustrations with seven-fingered people? That is what happens when no one checks.

But do not turn visualisation into a profession of its own. You can become so absorbed in it that you forget your main work as a writer. AI’s task is to help you see what already exists in your imagination. And if an artist later brings your project to life, this preparation will save both of you time when discussing every image.

Incidentally, one of my favourite writers, Vladimir Nabokov, was completely banned in the USSR. His aristocratic background played a role, as did his flight from Bolshevik Russia to Germany and later to the United States.

And Daniil Andreev, in 1947, was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison.

But let us return to some fairly recent data on the literary market.

If we look at Dostoevsky’s major works as a whole, then according to NielsenIQ, since 2023 about two out of every five purchases of his books in the United Kingdom have been made by buyers under twenty-five.

This is not a typo. Perhaps it is the strangest thing I have learned about Russian literature over the past year.

And about classical Russian literature, at that. About one of the most “difficult” Russian writers.

It is worth noting that Dostoevsky is not an exception. In 2025, 52% of all translated fiction in the United Kingdom was bought by people under thirty-five. Overall, 72.8% of translated-fiction purchases were made by people under forty-five. Meanwhile, the largest group of buyers of ordinary fiction is between sixty and eighty-four years old.

The current trend tells us that the younger generation has a clip-based way of thinking. That young people in the twenty-first century are incapable of reading difficult books. They are called the “six-second generation.” That what they need is, quite literally, literary chewing gum — short chapters, a fast and tense plot, simple sentences and constant action.

And serious, profound literature — Fyodor Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka, Daniil Andreev, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hermann Hesse, Kobo Abe — is supposed to remain the territory of serious adults. Preferably those who have lived long enough to acquire reading glasses, several bookcases, warm slippers, a couple of cats or dogs, and the habit of complaining about the modern world.

But the trouble is that the numbers do not agree with this theory.

It turns out that the so-called TikTok generation simply throws aside the stereotypes imposed on it.

Dostoevsky, born in distant 1821, in the era of serfdom and flogging in the Russian Empire, is becoming an author whom young people today love and read. And the generation that is regularly diagnosed with an “inability to concentrate” voluntarily buys and reads him.

Let me stress that — one of the most difficult Russian writers.

I find it hard to imagine a clearer contradiction.

This is quite interesting against the background of the ongoing discussion about the decline in reading. Yes, the data shows that the number of readers is decreasing. But at the same time, the average number of books read is increasing. The audience is splitting. It is changing and transforming, acquiring new characteristics that may soon become a new trend in the contemporary literary market.

So the question “are young people capable of reading?” seems less relevant.

A much more interesting way to put the question is this: what do the young people who continue to read prefer to choose?

And why are there so many texts among those books that, until recently, were considered the territory of the “serious” reader?

There is another figure that seems more important to me than sales.

Data from Nielsen Books & Consumers, in a report for the Booker Prize Foundation, says that 53.4% of buyers of translated fiction said they preferred challenging reading.

And that fits very poorly with the idea of a reader who needs everything simplified.

What if complexity itself was never the problem?

Maybe the problem was meaningless complexity?

A good, profound book, sometimes difficult to read, makes an extremely honest deal with the reader. You give me your attention. And I will reward you for the effort.

A bad difficult book simply sends you the bill. With nothing in return.

And here it is worth talking about another distinction. A difficult book does not have to be slow. And a fast book does not have to be simple, or easy to understand.

You can write a dynamic novel or short story about a primitive thing or situation, or you can raise a question in just a few pages that you may return to again and again.

Many people are used to measuring complexity by external signs they have invented themselves. By the length of a chapter, the length of a sentence, or the number of terms they often do not understand.

But real complexity is not hidden there. Those are only technical characteristics. The complexity of a work appears when it requires the reader not simply to follow events, but perhaps to become part of them and to change a familiar point of view.

And one more unusual figure.

According to NielsenIQ, sales of printed translated fiction in the United Kingdom grew at a double-digit rate in 2025 and reached £40 million. Or 3.7 million books sold. The top ten bestsellers represent five original languages — Japanese, Swedish, Russian, French and Norwegian.

To me, that says a great deal.

Of course not.

And yet, many still don’t seem to take it seriously. They keep producing essentially faceless content, betting on a literal assembly-line model.

The math is simple. Two-dollar house slippers sell more often than twenty-dollar ones. Amazon is already flooded with this kind of “creativity.” So is pretty much any online platform worth mentioning that sells books.

What comes next? It gets worse. We are entering an era where AI detectors are pitted against AI itself. And who said the detectors themselves are being built without AI?

The age of knightly tournaments is beginning. In AI. Only this time, it is also a very profitable business. For every detector, someone will build an anti-detector. A company wants to use a detector to screen content?

Pay.

Want to get around the detector? Pay.

And so the race begins. A technology race. Its speed is extraordinary. Something hailed as “Wow” three months ago is already obsolete by the fourth. Books teaching people how to work with AI are outdated before they are even finished. It is a new business, and it has a beginning.

But does it have an end? I’m sure it doesn’t.

And that raises a question. What do you do? Sit on the sidelines like a loser? Write for the drawer?

Seriously? Have you already given up, or are you planning to? Then stop here. Don’t read any further.

But if you still believe in yourself, answer one simple question: what makes your text different from a text created by AI?

The answer is simple: your soul. Your style. Your voice. Your life experience. The things you inevitably carry into your work, one way or another. Anything else? Of course. The list is so long I’m afraid for my fingers.

And how does AI write? Do I really need to tell you? I’m sure you already know.

So don’t lose heart. In the end, it is all in your hands. And the only true judge of your work is the reader. Another human being, just like you.

No detector—ever—will be able to stand between you and your reader. Only you. And your reader.

That is the only measure of truth that matters.

He smiled broadly at the sight of Milavsky. They greeted each other and shook hands.

Otto had shaved carefully, and now looked less like a submariner who had spent a long stretch adrift on a raft in the middle of the ocean than a lean, shaggy-haired, sun-browned surfer, who by some quirk of fate had found himself in a Kriegsmarine officer’s uniform.

Having smoked in the fresh air, they went down to the saloon. Milavsky prepared breakfast in silence. Nelly, now awake, made coffee.

The clink of forks against plates, the smell of fragrant bacon fried with egg, and the aroma of steaming arabica lent breakfast a warm, homely atmosphere.

‘It rather looks, Otto, as though you — or we — have fallen into a black hole,’ Milavsky said reasonably.

‘What is that?’ Otto asked.

‘You see, modern science knows that black holes exist in the universe — they draw space itself into themselves. But what’s inside them, no scientist knows.’

‘Black holes are one of the greatest mysteries of modern science. Something inexplicable happens inside them. But scientists simply cannot get any information about what’s in there.’

‘And that leads everyone to think that humanity’s level of knowledge is close to zero. Or has strayed only slightly from zero, in one direction or the other.’

‘When it comes to understanding matter, modern science has only recently discovered the quantum world. And its laws don’t correspond at all to the laws of physics the rest of humanity lives by,’ Milavsky went on.

‘No one has ever seen a quantum. It has no mass. It has no fixed location. And it can, for the most part, only be studied through mathematical modelling, or theoretical calculation.’

Milavsky tapped off some ash and went on, unhurried. ‘As it happens, my friend, the existence of quanta was first proposed by a countryman of yours — the German physicist Max Planck, back in 1900.’

‘In short, modern science is only just starting to draw back the curtain on how the world is put together.’

‘For instance, one new theory, put forward by the Canadian physicist Günther Kletetschka, holds that time is not one-dimensional, as classical physics assumes, but three-dimensional.’

‘And space itself is merely a secondary effect, arising from the interaction of these flows of time.’

‘How do you know all this?’ Nelly looked at Milavsky closely.

‘I hold a doctorate in astrophysics, and besides, it’s a lifelong interest of mine — how the world and the universe are put together.’

‘I can’t quite think of myself as a creature descended from apes, which in turn descended from fish. And the fish, at some point in the distant past, somehow contrived to start living on dry land,’ Milavsky parried, with a smile.

‘What’s clear is that nothing’s clear,’ Otto said thoughtfully. ‘As it happens, I’m not entirely convinced my own distant ancestors were apes either. But if they were, then somewhere in the jungles of far-off Africa, a whole troop of apes has every reason to be proud of its modern descendant. Namely me, of course,’ Otto laughed.

‘And how would you yourself explain being carried from 1943 to 2030, safe and sound?’ Milavsky asked.

‘I can’t, not at all,’ Otto answered thoughtfully. ‘Can you go on with your theories about the situation?’ he asked Milavsky.

‘Well, look. Take the Vedic picture of the world, for instance — it assumes the existence of sixty-four spatio-temporal continua. Modern string theory assumes eleven dimensions, which is likewise incompatible with the laws of physics as we know them.’

‘So my hypothesis — that you’ve fallen into some local black hole — strikes me as the only possible explanation for the situation we’re all in.’

‘Nobody knows how a black hole works. Nobody knows how one forms. Nobody knows what’s inside one.’

‘And hell, for all we know, our own Earth might be sitting inside a black hole itself, and all we can observe is one limited fragment of the world. Perhaps we’re living under physical laws quite different from those of our own universe.’

‘After all, the laws of the quantum world don’t correspond at all with the laws of physics we’re familiar with.’

‘And if everything around us is, at bottom, made up of quanta, how can two sets of mutually contradictory laws possibly coexist?’

‘One might reasonably suppose that there’s some higher power holding it all together. In which case, our materialist picture of the world, in which matter comes first, is wrong at its very root.’

‘Whereas the Vedic picture of the world, in which consciousness comes first, is the correct one.’ Milavsky’s answer visibly baffled both Otto and Nelly.

Exchanging a glance, Otto and Nelly thanked Milavsky. Otto put on a jacket and made his way up to the cockpit without hurrying. Milavsky and Nelly followed him up. Milavsky brought a bottle of whisky and a couple of glasses. Nelly brought sliced cheese with slivers of French ham.

‘Won’t you tell us your story?’

Milavsky splashed whisky into both glasses and looked hard at Otto.

‘My boat, as part of a wolf pack of eleven submarines, was lying in wait for a convoy at around 55 degrees north. It was to be my last patrol as a commanding officer — on my return, I was to take command of the newly formed 12th Flotilla, based at Bergen, in Norway.’

‘In the evening, the signal came through that a convoy was on its way. A big convoy. A damned big, heavily escorted convoy.’ Otto took a swallow and went on.

‘By night, nine of our boats had taken up position, with two standing off in reserve a little further out. A calm sea, without the slightest swell, a moonless night — not exactly ideal conditions for a torpedo attack, of course. But all the same, the absence of a moon is a submariner’s best friend.’

‘The boat was running on the surface. I was up in the conning tower with the first officer, the signalman, and the bosun, when the sonar operator reported propeller noise — a destroyer.’

‘I gave the order to crash-dive, we battened down the hatches and levelled off at periscope depth. Then we raised the periscope, and I took a calm look around. An escorting destroyer, and behind it several transports — big ones, heavily laden, Liberty ships.’

‘And then that fucking whore of a moon came out from behind the clouds. I spent a few minutes at the periscope picking my target. The convoy was enormous — the formation ran to well over ten columns, with eight or nine ships in each.’

‘They were holding a tight line-ahead formation. It would have been hard to miss. But the destroyers spoiled everything. On my side there were two Fletcher-class destroyers, and that’s the strongest, most dangerous opponent there is. If a Fletcher with a full load of depth charges finds you, your chances of making it back to port are close to zero. It’ll take your boat apart, atom by atom, in a couple of minutes.’

‘I picked a transport loaded with matériel, and gave the order to ready two bow torpedo tubes for firing. After that — it was a matter of routine. The eels went. We brought in the periscope and began a crash dive, with a circling withdrawal manoeuvre and a move to the next attack position.’

‘What are eels?’ Nelly asked.

‘That’s what we called torpedoes,’ Otto answered.

‘In our slang, to “spit out an eel” meant to fire a torpedo salvo at a convoy. To “clean an eel” was to service the tube and the torpedo itself. And “the eel’s away” meant the torpedo had left the tube.’

‘We had “Wrens” — the newest acoustic homing torpedoes, the T5,’ Otto went on. ‘We began our dive. The sonar operator reported two hits, and the sound of a hull breaking up.’

‘We went down to fifty metres and went to silent running. Everyone kept quiet, nothing was operating. Stale air, the unbearable stink of sweat and engine oil. The sonar operator reported the approaching noise of a Fletcher’s propellers, then the drop of depth charges. Three close explosions followed shortly after.’

‘We were shaken so hard that rivets flew out of the hull, pipes burst, and the electrics short-circuited. A fire started.’

‘They reported heavy flooding from the second compartment. The boat started taking on water. I gave the order to seal off the second compartment. There was too much water — we went into an uncontrolled dive. We were dropping like a weight thrown into a swimming pool.’

‘Past the hundred-metre mark, I gave the order to start the electric motors, blow the ballast tanks, and make an emergency surface. Within a couple of minutes we shot up onto the surface like a champagne cork hitting the ceiling.’

‘There was no choice — either drop into the abyss and be crushed, or surface at once, fight, and try to survive.’

‘I chose the second.’

‘The boat surfaced, and the gun crew came pouring out onto the deck and began bringing our 105mm gun into action. We’d taken on so much water in the second compartment that the boat was listing badly.’

‘The convoy was a proper slaughterhouse. Several ships were burning; one had turned into a giant firework — must have been carrying shells. All in all, it was quite a light show. Terrible, but mesmerising. A dark night, the glow of burning transports, the roar of exploding shells, and a dead calm. The sea itself was on fire, with spilled oil and fuel from the sinking ships.’

‘And then that damned Fletcher. They saw we’d surfaced, and came at us flat out. They started shooting us up from under a mile off. The destroyer opened up with everything — the quadruple 40mm Bofors, the five-inch guns of the main battery, all of it.’

‘It was hell. Quick, but hell all the same. They just flat-out took us apart, atom by atom, with everything the Fletcher had. Several main-calibre shells hit the hull, and it broke in two. One shell went straight into the base of the conning tower. I was thrown into the air, and after that I remember nothing.’

‘I came to in a life raft. Beside me lay a wounded sailor.’

‘An American. His stomach was torn open, and he was delirious. I lifted his head and tried to give him water. I had never seen eyes like his.’

‘Big, expressive eyes — the eyes of a man close to death. A man who understood he was dying, who stood right on the border between life and death.’

‘Eyes full of tears and the pain of it all. Eyes on the threshold of death. He tried to drink, but the water just ran down his chin. He managed a few swallows, closed his eyes, and died quietly, without convulsions. I understood that this man had saved my life.’

‘Saved it, no question. And I — quite possibly I, by sinking his ship — had killed him. That’s the absurdity of it: the victim saved his own murderer.’

‘I was never a Nazi, and I was never an admirer of that war. I was always a naval officer, honestly doing his duty.’

‘And in that moment, this dead young American sailor was, in my eyes, a kind of Christ — not by giving his own life, but by saving mine, hauling my lifeless body out of the water and into his life raft.’

‘War is a strange thing altogether. As a submariner, you don’t do the killing yourself. The torpedoes do it for you. You give the order, and the men carry it out. You never see your enemy — and if we’re talking about merchant ships, those are ordinary sailors, simply carrying cargo. But that cargo is weapons for your country’s enemies, and men will be killed with them.’

‘It’s the damned problem of existence. None of it’s the way the Bible would have it.’

‘He lay in the raft for several days. I couldn’t throw him overboard. I simply couldn’t. Then, on the third day, I committed his body to the deep. I parted from him as from a brother, as from my closest friend and my saviour.’

‘The strange collisions of fate — a Kriegsmarine officer mourning an American sailor. But that’s life. Now I know that in this life there are no clean lines, no fixed boundaries to how a man behaves inside himself.’

‘Afterwards, having committed his body to the deep, I went through the raft carefully. All I had on me was the Luger, with two spare magazines.’

‘The raft was reasonably well equipped — tinned stew, a few signal flares, a fishing kit, water in tins, hardtack, chocolate. The Americans had even packed a Bible, out of concern for the salvation of sailors’ souls.’

‘I don’t know how many days I spent on that raft — my last count came to twenty-seven. I tried fishing. Sometimes it worked. Then I simply ate the fish raw. Something close to sashimi, in that improvised, fate-given floating ocean restaurant of mine.’

‘I was lucky with the weather — a couple of small storms. Mostly it was flat calm, or a light chop.’

‘Somewhere around the twenty-fifth day, everything changed. It was as if I’d stepped into another reality.’

‘This damned orange fog appeared. The sea turned an impossible blue-violet colour, like jacaranda blossom. And then — then I blacked out completely, and woke up aboard your boat,’ Otto finished calmly.

Nelly and Milavsky stood there, stunned by Otto’s account.

‘It seems I was right — somehow, we’ve fallen into a black hole, or into some place where time and space themselves shift.’

‘The same sign of entry, every time — the orange fog. And here we are, together. People from different times, different eras, thrown together in one and the same place.’ Milavsky finished his thought, refilled the glasses, and knocked back a full measure of Macallan.

‘There’s plenty to think about there,’ Otto remarked, philosophically.

Time stood still. A deafening silence, combined with the total absence of wind and the fog, suggested that the travellers now found themselves in another reality altogether.

Adelaide stood rooted to the spot. And yet her newly enlarged crew could not shake the strange sensation that the yacht, together with everyone aboard her, was somehow moving through space all the same.

There was no physical evidence of it. Nothing worked. Nothing happened. Nothing changed.

All that operated was a strange sense of the inevitable, the unavoidable. Things were happening that they had no inkling of, and no way of influencing.

It was inexorable, and merciless.

Milavsky stood at the wheel. Nelly, dressed in a bright yellow oilskin, her hair streaming and tangled, watched an albatross gliding ahead of the yacht in search of its long-awaited prey.

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‘Under sail at last,’ Nelly said, smiling.

As if by a wave of a magic wand, a calm descended. It was the second day of the calm. Adelaide, her diesel rumbling businesslike, glided smoothly over the flat surface of the ocean.

Some thousand miles of ocean still lay between them and the shore, and the waters through which the yacht was passing saw comparatively few ships. Having weighed up the situation, Milavsky put the yacht on autopilot, switched on the automatic collision-warning system, and, with the satisfaction of duty done, went to bed.

Up at six, and barely rubbing the sleep from his eyes, Milavsky climbed out on deck. The sea lay in the same dead calm. A strange mist hung over the ocean, like the evening smog of exhaust fumes over a New York choked with traffic.

Only the colour of the mist was like nothing Milavsky had ever seen in all his many sea voyages. It was the colour of the petals of the tipuana tree, which generously carpet the streets and roads of Spain at the very start of summer. A loud, dense orange, turning the surrounding reality into a strange and mystical world.

The yacht gave a jolt, and Milavsky caught sight of an old life raft flash past along Adelaide‘s starboard side. The raft, holding its position, rocked slowly on the smooth surface of the ocean.

Throttling back the engine and calling for Nelly, Milavsky began a gentle turn to bring them alongside the raft. A couple of minutes later, Adelaide drew up close beside it.

It was an old-looking balsa-wood life raft, considerably battered by wind and waves. Inside it lay a man, unconscious.

Milavsky jumped down into the raft and touched the man. He, who a moment before had shown no sign of life, suddenly stirred. Opening his eyes, he stared at Milavsky in astonishment.

The stranger was dressed in an officer’s uniform, an Iron Cross on a considerably battered tunic. The crown of his cap looked as though it had spent a couple of weeks lying in the mud of a decent English pigsty from the days of the English Civil War. Scattered inside the raft lay the remains of provisions — a couple of unopened tins of stewed meat, several packets of hardtack, and a half-eaten bar of chocolate.

A couple of minutes later, with Nelly’s help, Milavsky hauled his find up onto Adelaide‘s deck. The submariner, sprawled across the deck, tried to get to his feet, but after a couple of failed attempts collapsed, exhausted, at the travellers’ feet.

Hauling the rescued man inside the yacht, they laid him on the bunk in the spare cabin. Milavsky pulled a Luger from the pocket of the officer’s tunic and went back up on deck with Nelly.

The raft, tied by a line to the guardrail, knocked unhurriedly against the yacht’s hull. Milavsky dropped back down into it, examined it carefully, and hauled all its contents up onto Adelaide‘s deck.

The raft itself was American, and so was its contents — the tins, the hardtack, the flare pistol, and the half-eaten bar of chocolate.

The passenger, however, was German — and, what was more, in the uniform of a Kriegsmarine officer, with an Iron Cross on his tunic. This suggested something about his rank, perhaps even that he was a U-boat commander.

‘Do you understand any of this?’ Nelly asked.

‘Not a thing,’ Milavsky replied.

Some kind of hellish nonsense — orange fog, an American life raft, and a living submariner out of the Second World War.

‘I don’t understand any of it,’ Milavsky went on, thoughtfully.

‘I need a drink. Will you have one?’ he asked Nelly.

‘I won’t say no to a cold can of lager,’ Nelly answered.

Milavsky went down into the cabin, opened the fridge, took out a cold can of beer, poured himself a double measure of whisky, and went back up on deck.

‘This is genuinely some kind of inexplicable situation,’ Milavsky mused.

I’d have thought it was some sort of prank, if I were somewhere near the coast in the Med. But out here, a good thousand miles from land, in this part of the Atlantic, where a stray ship passes by once a week if you’re lucky?

I don’t understand it. I genuinely don’t understand it,’ Milavsky fretted.

For a couple of hours they tried to make sense of their sudden discovery. The orange fog did not lift. The surrounding reality had taken on a mystical quality. The air was fairly steeped in uncertainty. The sea was silent; not even the cry of a passing bird could be heard.

Nothing.

It was as if an empty orange silence had swallowed Adelaide whole, together with her small crew, hollowed out by their own obsessive thoughts. Sounds came from inside the yacht. Milavsky quickly checked over the Luger taken from the submariner, chambered a round, and thumbed off the safety. Slipping the loaded pistol into his pocket, he stepped back and sat down on the edge of the cockpit.

The submariner appeared from the open companionway hatch.

‘Americans?’ To the surprise of both travellers, he asked the question in excellent English.

‘No — I’m Russian, but with a British passport. Nelly’s American, but she lives in Berlin,’ Milavsky answered.

The submariner’s eyes went blank with bewilderment.

‘You’re Russian, with a British passport, and she’s an American from Berlin?’ he asked, a note of forlorn hope in his voice.

‘That’s about the size of it,’ Milavsky replied, startling the unshaven submariner even further.

‘Fancy a whisky?’ The question came out of nowhere.

The submariner nodded gratefully and, with considerable effort, crawled out into the cockpit, leaning wearily against its varnished wooden coaming. Nelly, understanding the situation without further words, hurried below into Adelaide. A couple of minutes later she came back up with a few sandwiches and a nearly full bottle of Macallan.

‘What month is it?’ the submariner asked, after taking a good swallow of whisky.

‘July,’ Nelly answered.

‘Don’t you want to ask about the year?’ Milavsky looked at him.

‘What year is it, then?’

When the figure 2030 was spoken aloud, the submariner’s eyes came to resemble those of a startled lemur.

‘Verdammte Scheiße!’ The German plainly had no idea what was happening.

Milavsky and Nelly were themselves in a state of complete bewilderment at what was happening. Not only did the whole situation lack anything resembling a sane, logical explanation, but the inexplicable weather, combined with the orange fog, only added to the sense of unreality.

‘This can’t be,’ the German whispered. ‘My boat was sunk in the autumn of ‘43. How can this be?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Milavsky answered, ‘but something inexplicable is happening.’

‘What’s your name?’ he asked the officer.

The German tried to straighten up and, saluting, announced: ‘Kapitänleutnant Otto Kreis, commanding officer of a Type VII-C submarine. Hull number Q917.’

‘Former commanding officer, that is. Of a former submarine,’ he added quietly.

Nelly went below to the saloon again, and a few minutes later returned with a plate of fried cod, caught, as chance would have it, a couple of days before.

Otto ate greedily with his hands, washing it down now and then with water and periodically returning to his fast-emptying glass of Macallan. It was plain that he had been badly starved, and was in the grip of an overpowering thirst.

‘Not too much at once,’ Nelly said, reaching a hand towards his plate.

‘2030,’ Otto muttered. ‘But I couldn’t have been drifting about the Atlantic in this damned raft for eighty-seven years, could I?’ he asked Milavsky, a barely perceptible note of hope in his voice.

‘Clearly not.’ Milavsky’s reasonable answer only plunged Otto into a deeper stupor.

Otto tried again to get to his feet. This time he managed it. Standing on legs trembling with the effort, he looked at his battered raft, still slapping against Adelaide‘s hull.

After the introductions, a hearty supper, and a good measure of Macallan, Otto had now been asleep for the best part of two days.

In that time, Nelly had managed to wash and clean all his things, including the tunic and the officer’s cap, once as filthy as a station tramp. To no small surprise, everything turned out to be in relatively good condition. The reason, apparently, was the good German wool and the quality of the tailoring. Yes, the submariner’s whole uniform was of splendid quality — in the last century, the Germans had genuinely looked after their servicemen.

Andrew and Nelly tried to make sense of what was happening. Their unease grew still further when Adelaide‘s engine suddenly died, all communications — including Starlink — dropped out completely, and the compass needle, as if glued in place, froze pointing due north.

The barometer showed one and the same atmospheric pressure. The hygrometer, one constant level of humidity. The thermometer stood fixed at 24 degrees. Wind speed was zero; current speed, likewise. In a last, forlorn hope, Milavsky rigged up an antiquated hand log. But the readings came back at zero.

Everything came to nothing. Orange fog, total isolation, and no change of any kind. It seemed as though they had fallen into some other space entirely — the reality of their familiar world had vanished. A powerful sense of uncertainty arose, mingled with an inexplicable calm and serenity, broken only now and again by Otto’s contented snoring.

Andrew and Nelly sat at the table in the saloon. Inside, Adelaide was no less luxurious than she was outside. Furniture and panelling in fine hardwoods. The meticulous care of the design, the unrivalled taste of English craftsmanship, lent the yacht’s saloon a particular sense of luxury.

But the yacht’s luxury and aesthetics had been pushed into the background by this baffling sense of the inexplicable. The puzzle simply refused to come together, logically or in any way that could be justified from a scientific point of view.

What was happening ran counter not only to common sense and logic, but to the entire stock of knowledge and skill they had accumulated over lives that were, by any measure of experience, decidedly out of the ordinary.

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Milavsky was sitting in a morning café on the Gosler quay, next to a marina that was still drowsy, home to several hundred yachts and motor cruisers.

A waitress, with the remnants of a beauty that had been hers some twenty years before, brought him another cup of coffee. It could not be said that at fifty Milavsky had lost all interest in women.

Far from it.

But now, as he entered what might be called his mature years, Milavsky viewed such creatures — those striving to remain attractive at any age — with a certain scepticism. And although his readiness for a shag remained as constant as the piers of Brooklyn Bridge, inside himself he preserved a damned remarkable composure, even at the sight of an exceptional and thoroughly attractive specimen.

As the coffee cooled slightly, its foam dried in the shade and settled along the curved sides of the cup. Time flowed slow and unhurried.

Today Milavsky was melancholy, and a little critical in his mood towards the voyage ahead. He was waiting for Nelly — his sole companion for the planned Atlantic crossing aboard his magnificent fifty-foot beauty, Adelaide.

This time he had planned the crossing from French Arcachon to Newport in splendid solitude. But a chance acquaintance at a party in Berlin, with the unpredictable and beautiful Nelly, had unexpectedly thrown all his plans into disarray.

Nelly was one of those women who know precisely what they want, and precisely how to get it.

And so, a couple of cocktails together and a light, intriguing conversation had done their work. Nelly had asked to join him on the Atlantic crossing, sweeping aside entirely his original plans for a difficult but exhilarating solo passage.

The iPhone lying beside the coffee cup buzzed. Milavsky answered.

‘Hi, Andrew, I’m downstairs with my things,’ came Nelly’s pleasant voice.

Having paid for breakfast, Milavsky went downstairs without hurrying. Nelly, a sports bag at her side, was waiting for him at the edge of the pier.

‘Hi, how was the trip?’ Milavsky asked.

‘Great — quick, no problems, no fuss, no inner turmoil, and no pangs of conscience,’ Nelly answered, smiling.

‘A bit ascetic,’ Milavsky said, smiling, and nodded at the sports bag lying at Nelly’s feet.

‘Not quite.’ Nelly turned playfully, revealing the rucksack slung across her back.

She really was quite something, it occurred to Milavsky.

Nelly really was good-looking. Tall, slender, with fine features and blue eyes, she belonged to that category of clever, educated, self-sufficient modern women. In her character there was, remarkably, a symbiosis of good sense and an undying inclination towards risky, at times reckless, adventures.

At thirty-two, Nelly had already climbed several eight-thousanders and completed a transoceanic yacht crossing. She had lived a couple of years in Vietnam, and spent several months in the depths of the Siberian taiga, running river rapids by catamaran in the company of astonishingly reckless Russians.

Nelly was well provided for, well educated, independent, and divorced. She was one of those rare women who make themselves, whatever difficulties come their way. No — not at all — she was no bulldozer, flattening everything in her path. But she knew exactly what she wanted, and, more importantly, she knew how to get it.

Nelly had set off on this voyage with Milavsky unexpectedly, even to herself. Having met him in one of Berlin’s bars, she was instantly taken with the idea of crossing the Atlantic by an unusual and risky route. And now, barely a couple of weeks after their historic meeting, she stood on the pier awaiting Milavsky’s next move.

‘I’m ready to cast off — you haven’t changed your mind?’ Andrew asked, with a touch of acid.

‘The main thing is that you haven’t,’ Nelly parried, and with immediate readiness and remarkable grace, picked up her bag.

‘Then let’s go,’ he replied.

They set off unhurriedly towards the marina, where his yacht, Adelaide — entirely handmade and launched at Ipswich only two years before — stood waiting.

It was the twelfth day of their voyage.

In that time, having skirted the dangerous and unpredictable Bay of Biscay, they had made their way north along the French coast as far as Brest. Crossing the Celtic Sea, they had put in at Dublin for a couple of days, taking on fuel and provisions at its small coastal suburb of Dún Laoghaire.

Nelly had not wanted to go into Dublin. Milavsky had called a taxi and gone off to what he called an important meeting. The meeting had indeed been important. Late in the evening, to the cries of restless gulls, Milavsky, wreathed in the fumes of Guinness, had lurched aboard the yacht thoroughly the worse for drink. In silence, without undressing, he had collapsed onto the bunk in his cabin.

Having left Dún Laoghaire and passed through the sullen, gloomy waters of the Irish Sea, Adelaide rounded the northern tip of Ireland. Emerging into the open Atlantic, they set course for North America.

Ireland — or rather, the little of it Nelly had managed to see — she had not liked. The grim, forbidding shores, the constant drizzle, and the raw damp made the country, in Nelly’s view, an unappealing place to live. And the low clouds, as though poured full of lead, hanging directly overhead, made the picture gloomier still. Space itself seemed to contract, leaving only a small fragment for the eye to take in.

‘Cold, gloomy, rainy, and dismal,’ Nelly delivered her discouraging verdict.

In this short stretch of the voyage, Nelly had grown used to Adelaide. Delighted with the yacht, she had taken on the role of a caring, house-proud mistress, keeping a careful eye on cleanliness and order.

To Nelly’s surprise, Milavsky cooked extremely well, so that her hypothetical role as permanent cook crumbled to dust before it had even begun. At sea they stood watches of four hours on, four off. And by right of seniority and experience, the night watches fell to Milavsky.

Having drawn away from the Irish coast and set a course along the arc, Adelaide made her way towards Nova Scotia.

In July, the weather at these latitudes pleased only those who preferred sailing of the quiet kind. Predominantly light winds forced them to run under motor. But there was ample opportunity to enjoy a suntan and some sea fishing.

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