ABOUT ME

Botond MARKOVICS (Brandon Hackett)

Contact:

markovicsbotond_at_gmail.com

https://www.facebook.com/BrandonHackettscifi

Instagram

I am a Hungarian science fiction author and economist. Since 2012, my books have been published by Agave Books in Hungary.

My work explores themes of posthumanism, the nature of humanity, and how technology—or encounters with alien civilizations—reshape that definition. (I formerly used the penname Brandon Hakcett in Hungarian).

Notable Works:

• Devoured Cosmos (2023) follows three siblings across centuries and light-years, blending wild technologies, altered physical laws, and deep philosophical questions about free will. It also won the Zsoldos Péter Award.

• Disposable Bodies (2020) envisions a future where synthetic bodies can be printed and exchanged like clothing, triggering profound social and political upheaval. It won the Zsoldos Péter Award (including the Readers' Choice Award) and the Monolit Award in 2021.

• Machines of God (originally published earlier, reissued in 2018 with new short stories) is a transhumanist collection exploring artificial intelligence.

• Xeno (2017) delves into bizarre alien civilizations, cosmology, and the darker aspects of human nature, such as hatred and racism. It won the Zsoldos Péter Award in 2018.

• Time Travel Day (2014) is a mind-bending exploration of time travel and its consequences. It was hailed as one of the best Hungarian sci-fi novels of the new millennium and was followed by Time Travel Yesterday (2015).

Awards:

- Zsoldos Péter Readers' Choice Award 2023 - Devoured Cosmos (2023)

- Zsoldos Péter Award for Best Novel in 2020 - Disposable Bodies (2021)

- Zsoldos Péter Readers' Choice Award 2020 - Disposable Bodies (2021)

- Monolit Award for the Best Sf Novel in 2019 and 2020 - Disposable Bodies (2021)

- SFF Vektor Readers' Award 2021 - Best science fiction novel published in Hungarian: Disposable Bodies (2021)

- Zsoldos Péter Award for Best Novel in 2017 - Xeno (2018)

- Zsoldos Péter Award for Best Novel in 2010 - Machines of God

- Zsoldos Péter Award for Best Short Story in 2003 - I, immortal - Outswarm

Blurbs:

DEVOURED COSMOS

(novel, 2023 -  Zsoldos Péter Award in 2024)

On the distant planet Tanzer, aspiring scientist Emily Schroeder and her two younger siblings—Kaito, who dreams of interstellar exploration, and Diali, who is passionate about dance—are among the first to witness a cosmic phenomenon flaring across the sky like a supernova. But instead of fading, it continues to grow, as if intent on consuming the entire universe.

Some believe this is the first observable moment of the Universe’s death. The theory fills many with terror, while others spiral into religious fanaticism—because no one knows what will happen when the blinding light reaches Earth. Emily, Kaito, and Diali each fight against the looming apocalypse in their own way, forcing them to question everything they thought they knew about the Universe, existence, and free will.

Spanning centuries and light-years, Markovics Botond’s (Brandon Hackett) novel weaves together astonishing cosmological theories, vast super-technologies, and deep-space expeditions to unthinkable worlds—all in the battle to preserve civilization. Meanwhile, brilliant scientists, immortal dictators, and determined religious leaders clash over their own visions of truth.

DISPOSABLE BODIES

(novel, 2020 - Zsoldos Péter Award, Monolit Award in 2021)

An English excerpt of the translated novel.

The year is 2338, and Earth is a distant memory. The world is living in the future of Melvin Kadek, the richest man in the Solar System and savior of humanity. Centuries earlier, the threat of drastic changes in solar activity drove the billionaire tech investor to launch the Exodus, a space project of astounding vision through which humanity terraformed the moons of Jupiter and Saturn and created artificial livings spaces in the interiors of thousands of asteroids.

Prosecutor Vireni Orlando, however, is preparing to arrest the man everyone believes to be a hero. She claims Kadek was responsible for the scorching of Earth and the super solar flare which not only rendered it uninhabitable, but also claimed the lives of billions still stuck on the planet. Now some of the victims have returned as digitized, new human consciousnesses, with an extraordinary leader at their head. She is spreading a new kind of technology throughout the Solar System: disposable bodies which give everyone the chance to escape the millennia-long prison of their body, and in doing so overcome death, humanity’s final enemy.

The temptation of an existence both deathless and limitless, however, will shake the Solar System to its core.

XENO

(novel, 2017 - Zsoldos Péter Award, 2018)

It's 2117, and the population of Earth is fifteen billion: six billion humans, and nine billion aliens, otherwise known as xenos.

The planet, mired in economic, environmental, and political chaos, is beset by water shortages, poverty, and local wars. People suffer under the domination of a highly civilized alien race, the migrators, who connected our planet with three other alien worlds using wormholes, and who forced the different cultures of these worlds to live together.

Fifty billion doodles, living for their irrepressible artistic urges, cram overpopulated Spectrum. Hydras live their lives of high energy consumption under the crust of their frozen ocean moon, but the radioactive atomic waste they buried in the deep will slowly boil their seas. The once highly developed flagellates are dying, and their last survivors slowly forget who they really are, even as they dig for their past in the asteroid chain built on the remains of their former home planet.

Dr. Olga Ballard, a xenologist studying alien cultures, finds herself caught up in a vast conspiracy, one which will take her on an interstellar journey across alien civilizations and extraordinary worlds... And down a path of cruel decisions and difficult answers.

MACHINES OF GOD AND OTHER STORIES ABOIT ARTIFICAL INTELLIGENCES

(new edition of the novel and collected short stories, 2018 - Zsoldos Péter Awars, 2009 - the original novel)

It happened from one moment to the next: in 2028, the Sun disappeared from the sky. It was replaced by a red dwarf shining its crimson rays on the light side of the Earth, while strange constellations blaze above the dark and frozen side of our planet.  Nobody knows the reason for the phenomenon known as the Jump, and human civilization is rattled by the shock. The countries on the light side are flooded by millions of refugees, global economy collapses, and humanity fights for survival.

But from the destruction, a new world is born. Twenty years later, technical development accelerates at a pace never seen before, life is fresh and modern, and the new generations only know old Earth from legends. Szofia Kerti, a genetically modified girl from Budapest, together with her friends looks to the future, where a new turning point awaits humanity: the technological singularity. Beyond this event, the curve of technological evolution becomes vertical, and no prognostics can see beyond it. This is when humanity may become its own gods.

But are the Jump of 2028 and the dizzying pace of technological advancement really independent of one another?

Four additional short stories about the future of artifical intelligences.

TIME TRAVEL DAY

(novel, 2014)

November 2021. When the first time machine is activated, two hundred billion time travellers appear on Earth. They are celebrating Time Travel Day, the very first moment in which it is possible to travel back in time.

This event destroys the world as we know it: money ceases to exist, governments lose their function, and everyone can access all future technologies, including time travel. People can travel to any time in the future they want to see, right to the end of time flow. But this has an enormous price: time is a dangerous toy to play with.

Ádám Beregi lives for his family, but on Time Travel Day, somebody from the future kidnaps his son and his wife, Enikő. Ádám tries to find them in the chaotic and ever-changing time flow, in a realm of mad technologies and artificial micro-universes.

The inventor of the time machine, Neil Jarrison, is a strange loner. Even though he is executed in 2612, many people want to find him, because he possesses knowledge that can save the world. Or destroy it completely. But the inventor is always one step ahead of his pursuers, and it seems he is only interested in one thing: an enigmatic woman, Rebeca, who might be the key to all mysteries.

TIME TRAVEL YESTERDAY

(novel, 2015)

Most people know that it is impossible to travel back in time before the moment the first time machine started to operate. But there is another time technology that reached Earth considerably earlier, thanks to a more advanced, alien civilisation that managed to escape the collapse of their own time flow, but paid a great price for it.

About fifteen years after the events of Time Travel Day, Rebeca Satoshi uses this alien technology to go back to the past and find his father, a physicist lost in time. She involuntarily launches a chain of events that could lead to the annihilation of the present, the past and the future of human civilisation.

Aided by his younger self, Bálint Beregi, the inventor of the time machine, labours to understand the nature of time travel and to stop the collapse of the time flow. They struggle against impossible odds even though they enlist the help of a team of scientists plucked from the 20th century, including Albert Einstein and John von Neumann. Time is running out, and both the alien civilisation of the Maxwell demons and the posthuman organisation created in the micro-universe of the Haugen dimension try to thwart them.

BOOK OF THE MAN

(novel, 2012)

Three thousand people were taken simultaneously from different parts of our Earth. Attila, a teenager from Budapest, Yuri Vitkov, a Russian businessman, and his eleven-year-old daughter, Aurora are among them.

Three thousand people travel inside a living spaceship, drifting further and further away from Earth. The ship is crowded and depressing, and its prisoners have no idea why they were taken, where they are heading or what their kidnappers plan to do with them. The journey forges them into an immoral and lawless community.

Soon enough they reach a strange world incomprehensible to them. Its inhabitants communicate with scents: evolution chose a different path there, and their arrival upset the lives of hundreds of species and cultures. Attila, Yuri and the others only want to stay alive, but sooner or later they have to face a much more important question. Can they retain their humanity?

MACHINES OF GOD

(novel, 2008)

It happened from one moment to the next: in 2028, the Sun disappeared from the sky. It was replaced by a red dwarf shining its crimson rays on the light side of the Earth, while strange constellations blaze above the dark and frozen side of our planet. Nobody knows the reason for the phenomenon known as the Jump and human civilisation is shaken by the shock. The countries on the light side are flooded by millions of refugees, global economy collapses, and humanity fights for survival.

But a new world is born out of the destruction. Twenty years later, technical development accelerates at a pace never seen before, life is fresh and modern, and the new generations only know old Earth from legends. Szofia Kerti, a genetically modified girl from Budapest, and her friends look to the future, where a new turning point awaits humanity: technological singularity. Beyond this event, the curve of technological evolution becomes vertical, and no prognostics can see beyond it. This is when humanity may become its own gods.

But are the Jump of 2028 and the dizzying pace of technological advancement really independent of one another?

THE POSTHUMAN DECISION

(novel, 2007)

Coming soon.