Ross Adams, Historian and Futurist | Updates

July 31, 2026 - The Education Continues

Ross Adams, Historian and Futurist — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Dear Friend,

July 2026 is coming to an end and I couldn't help reflect on my journey as an author since May of 2024. That's when I met a certain gentlemen with whom I've met virtually every Friday, more or less, since. While he has been fairly stationary, I move around a lot for both work and pleasure. Yet we've managed to stay consistent over the past two plus years. Thank you, sir, for jump starting my intention.

The result of our talks has been the completion of The Price of Water, a steep learning curve on how author's market their works and the practical aspects of self-publishing. I then spent a fair amount of money learning about digital marketing, learning how easy it is to get scammed all while completing The Siberian Question. I took over my own digital marketing and mark 2026 as the year I began the transition professionally from law to the business of publishing.

At the New Year,. I stated to my community that I was committing to spending a significant amount of my time on the publishing business with the remainder of my professional time devoted to the law practice in. 2026. This has turned out to be a larger commitment than I supposed it would be. But I have been persistent and consistent preparing and executing on marketing plans in support of a soft launch of The Siberian Question in February, then for a wine tasting/signing in April to continue the vibe, and the whole time posting nearly every day on multiple social media platforms working with my marketing experts, Chat and Claude.

Since the last signing party in April, I've been focused on trying to build a presence and a following on social media, and in particular, the platforms where potential readers reside. The list is long so there's only been time for a few of them. I'm down from 12 posts a day to 4 to 6. Sometimes none. A break from posting once in a while makes sense to me. Now I'm moving the efforts more towards actual sales, the business of publishing. We'll see what happens there, but for me, that's the ultimate measure of success. At the moment, that success is at a trickle.

Meanwhile, The Iranian Promise is moving along but more slowly than I'd like. I think it's going be good. At least I hope so. It's far from finished. I hope to edit to final by the end of August. Wish me luck!

The rest of 2026 looks like a continuation of the same. Practicing law, traveling and working on the publishing business part time. Would like sales to increase, but still not a priority. I'll keep you all posted..

Sincerely,

Ross

p.s. love the graphic Chat created for TSQ

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2026 Global BookFest Honour

Ross Adams, Historian and Futurist — Thu, 2 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Siberian Question has been recognized as a Featured Author title in the 2026 BookFest Awards, one of the leading independent book festivals.

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A Quick Favor - Where to Leave a Review

Ross Adams, Historian and Futurist — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you've read The Siberian Question or The Price of Water and you've been meaning to leave a review, here's everything you need in one place.

Reviews are the single most valuable thing a reader can do for an independent author. They're how Amazon and Goodreads decide which books to show to new readers, and they're the first thing a stranger looks at before deciding whether to take a chance on a book they've never heard of. Five honest sentences from you matter more than almost anything else I can do on my own.

It takes about two minutes. Here's where to go.

The Siberian Question

Amazon TSQ https://a.co/d/0fOJVYIE

Goodreads TSQ https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/246122166-the-siberian-question

The Price of Water

Amazon TPOW https://a.co/d/0diCtpA9

GoodreadsTPOW https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/219833609-the-price-of-water

A few things that help, if you want guidance, might be what you'd tell a friend who was deciding whether to read it. Whether the world of the book felt real to you. Whether you'd recommend it to someone who likes geopolitical thrillers, or political fiction, or near-future speculative fiction. However you do it, an honest review of any length, even a few sentences, is genuinely valuable.

That's it. No template required.

Thank you, sincerely, to everyone who has already done this. It matters more than you know.

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Pressure Points - Power Shifts Before It Collapses

Ross Adams, Historian and Futurist — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The most consequential period in any geopolitical transition is not the collapse. It's the shift that precedes it.

This is the sixth and final entry in the Pressure Points series, a collection of observations on resource scarcity, infrastructure fragility, and geopolitical leverage that informs the analytical foundation of the Hammurabi Code Series. If you're arriving here for the first time, the previous five entries are linked throughout this piece. Start anywhere. But this one is the capstone. It's where the thesis lands.

The Central Observation

Power shifts before it collapses. This is the pattern to which I keep returning. Across legal practice, across historical study, across three plus decades of watching institutions navigate change. And it is the thesis at the heart of both The Siberian Question and The Price of Water.

Collapse is visible. Collapse is dramatic. Collapse gets named, analyzed, and written into history books. The fall of a government, the failure of a financial system, the fracture of an alliance. These are observable events with timestamps.

Power shifts rarely are visible. They are structural, incremental, and embedded in legal and economic frameworks long before anyone recognizes them as a crisis. They happen in the documents that don't make the news. In the agreements signed between parties whose relationship the world hasn't yet noticed. In the ownership structures built below the threshold of alarm. In the regulatory gaps that are exploited quietly while decision-makers are focused elsewhere.

By the time the failure is observable, when it gets named, assigned, a date, and the iconic photograph is taken, power has already moved. The leverage is in place. The frameworks for after are already in place.

The downfall is the consequence. The causes occur gradually, quietly, and more within the existing legal framework than anyone will later want to admit.

Why This Pattern Repeats

In Infrastructure Fragility, I wrote about how systems hold until they don't. How the stress accumulates invisibly before the sudden failure.

In How Water Becomes Leverage, I traced the mechanism by which resource asymmetry transitions from a geographic fact to a geopolitical tool.

In Why Systems Fail Gradually, I described the sequence. Stress below the visible threshold, indicators that flash but don't alarm, the normalization of deviance that precedes every major institutional failure.

In Scarcity Changes Political Behavior, I argued that resource scarcity doesn't just create shortage, it creates leverage, and leverage reorganizes political relationships faster than ideology ever could.

In The Legal Architecture of Resource Exploitation, I explained the mechanism by which that leverage gets encoded. How industry and creative, perfectly legal structures outpace regulatory response resulting in leverage living within entirely legal organizations which are very difficult to unwind.

Each of those five pieces describes a component of an overarching pattern. This piece names the pattern whole.

Power shifts before it collapses.

The Interval That History Misses

There is a specific interval in every major geopolitical transition over which history tends to skip. It's the period after the shift has begun but before the collapse is visible. The period when the world still looks stable to the people making decisions inside it. When historical stability is deemed the future. When new power and new structures are assembling quietly, legally, below the radar.

This interval is not dramatic. It doesn't make front pages. It doesn't generate the kind of imagery that ends up in documentaries. But it is where the outcome is determined. The decisions made during this interval, who secures access to what resource, who creates and controls the new ownership structures, who forges the new agreements, are what determine who wins after the fall. By the time the enivitable arrives and the world turns its attention to what happened, the consequential decisions are years in the past. The outcome was determined in the interval that nobody was watching. This is where geopolitical history actually happens. Not in the dramatic collapse. In the quiet accumulation of leverage that precedes it.

How the Novels Are Built

The Siberian Question is set in this interval.

The novel begins not at the moment of crisis but during the accumulation. The pressure is real, the trajectory is fixed, and the world still looks stable to the characters navigating it. The reader, equipped with the analytical framework developed across this Pressure Points series, can see what the characters cannot. The leverage is forming. The new frameworks are being assembled. The shift is already underway.

That gap between what the reader understands and what the characters believe is the engine of the novel's tension from the first page.

The Price of Water is set after the shift is complete.

By 2051, the Water Cabal controls much of the world's remaining viable freshwater. The collapse has already happened. The shift occurred over decades prior. Quietly, legally, in the interval when nobody was watching, or if they were, they turned a blind eye. The world of the novel is the natural outcome of decisions made even before the period The Siberian Question traces.

The two novels are, in this sense, the same story told from two positions on the timeline. The Siberian Question is set during the shift. The Price of Water is set in the aftermath of the collapse the shift created.

Why This Matters Now

The freshwater dynamic forming in the Eurasian context is in that interval are the dynamics over freshwater in many parts of the world. The stress is accumulating, In China, the structural water deficit is documented and worsening. The gap between Russian freshwater abundance and Chinese freshwater shortage is widening. The legal and corporate infrastructure through which that gap could be closed is being assembled. The regulatory response does not yet exist in any meaningful form. The world still looks stable to most of the people making decisions inside it. Historical stability is being read as given for the future. This is exactly the pattern described across all five previous Pressure Points entries. And it is exactly the moment around which both novels are built.

The shift is already underway. The collapse hasn't been named yet. The outcome is being determined right now, in the interval that history will later skip over. The trajectory is real. The timeline is fiction. But the gap between them is narrowing faster than I would prefer.

The Siberian Question is available now. The first chapter is free when you join the mailing list at rossadams.net.

The Price of Water is Book 2. The first chapter is free by emailing ross@rossadams.net.

The Iranian Promise, Book 3 of the Hammurabi Code Series, is in progress.

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Pressure Points — The Legal Architecture of Resource Exploitation

Ross Adams, Historian and Futurist — Fri, 5 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

By the time the regulation exists, the leverage is already in place.

There is a pattern I have watched repeat itself across resource sectors throughout more than three decades of legal practice. It is not dramatic. It does not make headlines when it happens. It happens quietly, incrementally, and entirely within the law.

The pattern is this: the legal and corporate mechanisms for resource exploitation consistently outpace the regulatory frameworks designed to govern them. This is not corruption. It is not conspiracy. It is a structural feature of how markets, legal systems, and regulatory bodies operate at different speeds. It is the foundation of the Hammurabi Code Series.

Two Clocks Running at Different Speeds

Corporate structures operate on market timelines. A company identifying a resource opportunity can assemble an ownership structure, negotiate an access agreement, and establish contractual frameworks within months. Legal instruments move fast when the incentive is sufficient.

Regulatory bodies operate on legislative timelines. A governance framework that could constrain or oversee a new form of resource control requires legislation, rulemaking, public comment periods, legal challenge, and implementation. In functioning democracies, this process takes years. Often decades.

The gap between those two speeds is where leverage forms. By the time a regulatory framework exists that could meaningfully constrain the leverage, the leverage is already embedded. In ownership structures, in access agreements, in contractual relationships that are entirely legal, entirely precedented, and structurally very difficult to unwind. This is not a new observation. It is the documented history of every major resource sector of the modern era.

The Precedents Are Already Written

The oil sector built its legal architecture decades before comprehensive energy regulation existed. The pharmaceutical industry assembled patent frameworks that outlasted the regulatory regimes they predated. Agricultural water rights in the American West were adjudicated under doctrines developed in the nineteenth century that continue to govern twenty-first century water access.

In each case, the sequence was the same. Resource identified. Legal frameworks assembled. Leverage embedded. Regulation arrived late, after the ownership was established, after the access agreements were signed, after the leverage had become structural. By the time governance caught up, the question was no longer whether the leverage existed. The question was whether anyone had the political will to unwind what was entirely, legally, already done.

What This Means for Freshwater

The freshwater trajectory forming in the Eurasian context follows this pattern with textbook precision. The legal and corporate infrastructure for freshwater access, typically bilateral resource agreements, infrastructure investment frameworks, ownership structures governing water-adjacent land and technology, is being assembled now. Quietly. Below the threshold of alarm. In frameworks that are entirely legal under existing international and domestic law.

The regulatory response? The international governance architecture that might constrain or oversee the use of freshwater access as a geopolitical lever does not yet exist in any meaningful form. International water law remains fragmented, largely non-binding, and significantly behind the pace of the leverage that is forming beneath it. The gap between those two facts is not a future problem. It is a present condition.

The Fiction and the Pattern

The Hammurabi Code Series is built on this mechanism. The ownership structures, the access agreements, the regulatory arbitrage, and the leverage frameworks in The Siberian Question and The Price of Water are drawn from documented patterns in energy, mining, pharmaceutical patents, and agricultural water rights. They are applied to a near-future freshwater scenario. But the mechanisms themselves are not speculative. They are historical.

The Cabal in The Price of Water does not control much of the world's freshwater through force. It controls it through legal architecture assembled over decades. Frameworks that were legal when they were built, that remained legal as they accumulated, and that produced a form of control that no subsequent regulation could easily unwind.

The most unsettling thing about writing this series has been the research. Not because the scenario is implausible. Because the mechanisms are so thoroughly documented. Because the precedents are already written. Because the pattern is already running. By the time the regulation exists, the leverage is already in place.

That is not a plot device. That is how it has always worked.

The Siberian Question is available now. The first chapter is free when you join the mailing list at rossadams.net.

The Price of Water — Book 2. First chapter free by emailing ross@rossadams.net.

The Iranian Promise, Book 3, is in progress.

#resource exploitation regulation, #water rights legal frameworks, #freshwater geopolitics, #regulatory lag corporate exploitation.

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Pressure Points — Scarcity Changes Political Behavior

Ross Adams, Historian and Futurist — Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It isn't the shortage that reshapes geopolitics. It's who controls the shortage.

In the autumn of 1973, the members of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries announced an embargo on oil exports to the United States, Western Europe, and Japan. The stated reason was political. Retaliation for Western support of Israel during the Yom Kippur War. The actual mechanism was resource control.

Within months, the price of oil had quadrupled. Gasoline lines stretched around city blocks in American cities. The United Kingdom declared a three-day workweek to conserve energy. Japan, almost entirely dependent on imported oil, entered a period of economic contraction that shattered the assumption of indefinite postwar growth.

None of this happened because the world ran out of oil. The Earth's oil reserves in 1973 were essentially the same as they had been in 1972. What changed was access. A small number of actors, controlling a critical resource that others needed, made a decision to use that control as a political instrument.

The result was not just an energy crisis. It was a fundamental reorganization of global political relationships. Old alliances were reconsidered, dependencies exposed, leverage exercised in ways that permanently altered the diplomatic architecture of the twentieth century. This is what scarcity does to political behavior. Not the scarcity itself. The control of the scarcity.

The Mechanism

To understand why resource scarcity reshapes political behavior so rapidly and durably, it helps to understand what it actually changes. Before a resource becomes scarce, or more precisely, before scarcity asymmetry becomes visible and operational, political relationships are governed by a complex web of ideological alignment, historical alliance, economic interdependency, and diplomatic precedent. Nations cooperate or compete based on a broad matrix of factors, none of which is individually decisive. When resource scarcity kicks in, it simplifies that matrix dramatically.

The nation that controls the scarce resource gains a form of leverage that cuts across ideological lines, historical relationships, and diplomatic frameworks. It doesn't matter whether you are an ally or an adversary, whether you share political values or oppose them, whether you have a century of positive diplomatic history or a decade of hostile relations. If you need the resource and the other actor controls it, the relationship reorganizes around that fact.

This is why the 1973 oil embargo was so disorienting to the Western nations it targeted. The existing diplomatic frameworks built around NATO alliances, Cold War alignments, and bilateral trade relationships were not designed to account for this kind of leverage. They assumed a world in which political alignment determined resource access. The embargo revealed a world in which resource access could determine political alignment.

The lesson was absorbed, imperfectly, and the world adapted. But the underlying mechanism did not change. It was simply waiting for the next resource inequality.

Scarcity Accelerates What Ideology Cannot

There is a reason that resource leverage tends to produce faster and more durable political realignment than ideological persuasion. Ideology requires belief. It requires the target of influence to be convinced. To change their assessment of values, priorities, or interests through argument, demonstration, or cultural pressure. This is slow. It's uncertain. It's reversible. People change their minds. Governments change their positions. Ideological alignment is contingent on continued persuasion.

Resource dependency requires only need. It doesn't require belief or conviction. It doesn't require the dependent actor to agree with, admire, or endorse the controlling actor. It requires only that the dependent actor needs what the controlling actor has.And has no viable alternative source.

That dependency, once established, tends to be structural and durable. Infrastructure is built around it. Supply chains organize around it. Economic models incorporate it as a baseline assumption. The dependency becomes embedded in frameworks that outlast the political relationships that created them.

This is why resource leverage is so much more effective, and so much more dangerous, than ideological influence. It does not need to persuade. It only needs to be needed.

The Water Parallel

The freshwater dynamic now forming in Eurasia follows this pattern with a precision that is, depending on your perspective, either analytically interesting or deeply concerning.

China's water deficit is structural and worsening. The regions of China most affected, the northern agricultural provinces and the industrial heartland of the northeast, are not marginal territories. They are the foundation of Chinese food security and economic production. The dependency on external water sources is not a future possibility. It is a present trajectory.

Russia controls Lake Baikal which holds twenty percent of the world's unfrozen freshwater, sitting in Siberia immediately north of China's most water-stressed regions. This is not a diplomatic card to be considered, let alone played. It is a card to hold. Quietly. In a hand whose other cards include energy exports, Arctic access, and a bilateral relationship that has been deepening steadily for two decades.

The leverage is not yet operational in the way that the 1973 oil embargo was operational. There has been no explicit use of freshwater access as a coercive instrument. The frameworks through which such leverage would be exercised are still being assembled in infrastructure negotiations, in bilateral resource agreements, in the quiet accumulation of access dependencies that precede the moment when the leverage becomes explicit.

But the mechanism is the same. Abundance here. Shortage there. Control of the access between them. When scarcity asymmetry becomes operational, political behavior changes. Faster than ideology. More durably than diplomacy. More structurally than any military pressure.

It does not require a crisis to begin reshaping relationships. It only requires the dependent actor to understand that their need is real and the controlling actor's leverage is real. That understanding, once established, changes behavior before the leverage is ever explicitly used.

What The Novels Are Built On

The Siberian Question is set at the moment when this understanding forms. When the controlling actor recognizes and uses the leverage it has gained to have its way.

The Price of Water is set in 2051, after the Eurasian lever had been pulled, a nuclear war had occurred and the political realignment that cataclysm produced has become the permanent architecture of the world. The Water Cabal secretly infested the back halls of power and emerged controlling much of the freshwater remaining in the world. The Cabal created structural dependency, the same mechanism the oil states used in 1973. They applied it to a resource more fundamental than oil and with fewer alternatives available. The mechanism is not new. The resource is. And unlike oil, for which solar, nuclear, and other energy alternatives exist, there is no alternative to water.

The Siberian Question, Book 2 of the Hammurabi Code Series, is available now. First chapter free at https://rossadams.net/mailing-list

The Price of Water — Book 1, although last in time, is also available. First chapter free by emailing ross@rossadams.net

rossadams.net/pages/the-price-of-water.

The Iranian Promise, Book 3, is in progress.

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Pressure Points — Why Systems Fail Gradually

Ross Adams, Historian and Futurist — Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The sudden part is all anyone remembers. The gradual part is where everything was decided.

History remembers collapse. It does not remember the accumulation that preceded it.

We remember the stock market crash of 1929. We don't remember the eighteen months of deteriorating lending standards, overleveraged positions, and other ignored warning signals that made the crash inevitable before it happened. We remember the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Many don't remember the decades of structural economic dysfunction, institutional rot, and accumulated pressure that made the collapse a matter of when rather than if.

This is not a failure of historical memory. It's a feature of how systems actually fail. Understanding it may change how you read both current events and the novels I've written.

The Pattern

Every major system failure I've witnessed or studied follows a recognizable sequence. As an attorney with over thirty years of practice across business litigation, international law, and institutional governance, I've seen many,

First, stress accumulates below the surface. Pressure is building under the system that fails register with decision-makers. The danger is real. The indicators are not yet flashing. The system appears stable because stability is expected.

Next, the lights do begin to flash, but don't successfully raise the alarm. Rather, the analysts and observers who recognize them for what they are, are drowned out by contrary experts who deem the signals unworthy of triggering an institutional response. They're noted. They're filed. They're forgotten.

Then, and this is the critical failure point, decision-makers complacently rely on historical stability. Coupled with the misdiagnosis by the contrary experts, they do nothing dismissing anyone calling for action as an alarmist. The cognitive error here isn't irrationality. It's a belief system that fails to separate reliable information and proper interpretation of it from blind faith and hope.

Last, the system crosses the proverbial Rubicon. Not gradually. Suddenly. It crashes in a timeframe that appears, to everyone inside it, to be shockingly fast. Therein lies the crux of the matter. System failure is never truly fast. While a collapse may take days or weeks, the failure took years.

Why Decision-Makers Miss It

There is a term in systems engineering, "normalization of deviance," that describes what happens when small failures occur repeatedly without triggering catastrophic consequences. Each episode that doesn't produce a disaster becomes evidence that the system can tolerate that level of deviation. Standards soften. Thresholds shift. What was a warning sign is the new baseline.

The space shuttle Challenger disaster is the quintessential example. The O-ring erosion that caused the explosion had been observed and documented in prior launches. Each time Challenger lifted off and glided back to earth was read, consciously or unconsciously, as evidence that the erosion was within acceptable limits. The threshold normalized. The failure accumulated invisibly until it didn't.

This pattern is not confined to engineering systems. It runs through financial crises, political collapses, institutional failures, and geopolitical catastrophes with remarkable consistency. The 2008 financial crisis. The collapse of Enron. The disintegration of Yugoslavia. The fall of every major empire in recorded history has been gradual. Then sudden.

What This Has To Do With Freshwater

China's structural water deficit and Lake Baikal as an obvious solution follows this pattern with textbook precision. The stress is accumulating. China's aquifer depletion is documented and measurable. Russia's freshwater abundance and China's freshwater shortage is widening. China has little choice but to pursue resources wherever they can making Russia's Siberia a prime resource for many things water among them. But reality could very well be focused entirely on water. The Chinese must be looking to create infrastructure and frameworks through which they could access Lake Baikal.

The indicators are flashing. Hydrologists are publishing. Geopolitical analysts are noting the trajectory. The signals exist. But the threshold has not been crossed. The system, the current framework of Sino-Russian resource relations, the existing international water law architecture, the diplomatic norms around freshwater access, is still holding.

Prior reliability is being read as forward stability.

This is precisely the moment The Siberian Question is set in. Not the collapse, but the accumulation phase. The period when the stress is real, the trajectory is fixed, and the world still looks stable to the people making decisions inside it. The reader knows what's coming. The characters don't. That tension between what the reader understands and what the characters believe is more than a narrative device. It is an example of how system failures are actually experienced from the inside.

The Gradual Part Is Where Everything Happens

Collapse is visible, dramatic, and retrospectively obvious. The gradual accumulation that precedes it is invisible, structural, and prospectively ambiguous. But the gradual part is where the consequential decisions are made. Where leverage comes from. Where the frameworks that will determine the outcome are quietly put in place. By the time the sudden part arrives, the outcome has already been determined. The question was answered, or not, during the gradual phase. By actors who understood, or failed to understand, the accumulation while everyone else expected things to remain as they were.

That is the lesson of every system failure in history. And it's one thesis presented in the Hammurabi Code Series.

The Siberian Question, where the story begins, is available now. The novel starts in the gradual phase. When the pressure is real, the trajectory is fixed, and the world still looks stable. First chapter is free at https://rossadams.net/mailing-list

The Price of Water, Book 1 in the Hammurabi Code Series although last in time, is set after the sudden phase. 2051. The systems have changed. First chapter free just by emailing ross@rossadams.net.

The Iranian Promise, Book 3 and second in time, is in progress.

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Pressure Points — How Water Becomes Leverage

Ross Adams, Historian and Futurist — Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The mechanism is not scarcity. It is asymmetry.

When people think about water as a geopolitical issue, they think about scarcity. Drought. Shortage. The image of a dried lakebed or a depleted reservoir. The assumption is that water becomes politically significant when there isn't enough of it.

That assumption is incomplete in a way that matters enormously. Water doesn't become leverage because it is scarce. Water becomes leverage because it is unevenly scarce. Abundant in one location, critically short in another, with a single actor, or a cabal, controlling the access between them. That asymmetry is the mechanism. And it is a mechanism with a well-documented historical precedent.

The oil analogy

Consider how oil became the defining geopolitical resource of the twentieth century and continues to be today. Oil is not scarce in the absolute sense. The Earth contains vast reserves, distributed across dozens of countries and regions. What made oil a lever of extraordinary political power was not its scarcity. It was, and is, the unequal distribution combined with controlled access.

The Gulf states had it. Industrialized nations needed it. A small number of actors control it. That asymmetry, abundance here, shortage there, chokepoint in between, is what transformed a commodity into a tool of geopolitical coercion.

The 1973 oil embargo did not create a shortage of oil on Earth. It created a shortage of oil in specific places, for specific actors, through the deliberate use of controlled access. The leverage was not the resource itself. The leverage was the gap.

The water parallel

The freshwater dynamic forming in Eurasia follows precisely this pattern. Lake Baikal holds approximately twenty percent of the world's unfrozen freshwater. Russia controls it. China, immediately to the south, faces a structural long-term decline in its water table, a condition affecting the agricultural and industrial regions that sustain hundreds of millions of people.

The abundance is in Siberia. The shortage is in China. The infrastructure and political frameworks for access run through Moscow. That is not a scarcity problem. That is an asymmetry problem. And asymmetry, historically, becomes leverage. Not dramatically. Not through military seizure or explicit coercion. But rather the way resource leverage has always formed. Through bilateral negotiation, infrastructure investment, access agreements, and the slow encoding of dependency into frameworks that outlast the administrations that built them.

Why this matters for the novels

The Siberian Question is set at the moment when this asymmetry transitions from a geographic fact to a geopolitical lever. The novel doesn't begin with a crisis. It begins with a form of normality, a brutal Russian crackdown. But it's a period when the pressure is accumulating below the surface when the characters are making decisions as though the future is still open. The reader understands what the characters don't. The asymmetry is requiring movement.

The Price of Water is set in 2051, after the leverage has been deployed, the dependency encoded, and the Cabal controls what remains. The asymmetry that formed quietly in the Siberian context has become the architecture of the world.

The mechanism is the same in both novels. Abundance and shortage separated by controlled access. The gap between those facts used as leverage by the actors who understood it earliest. That mechanism is not fictional. It is the pattern the twentieth century ran on and on which the 21st has begun. It is a repeating pattern assembling around freshwater only more quietly, more structurally, and with fewer off-ramps than the oil era provided.

The Siberian Question is available now. First chapter free when you join the mailing list at https://rossadams.net/mailing-list.

The Price of Water, Book 2, is also available at www.rossadams.net. First chapter free by emailing ross@rossadams.net.

The Iranian Promise, Book 3, is in progress.

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Lake Baikal — The Most Important Body of Water You've Never Thought About

Ross Adams, Historian and Futurist — Thu, 21 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Pressure Points - The geographic reality behind The Siberian Question

Fact No. 1 -

There is a body of water in Siberia that holds more unfrozen freshwater than all of the North American Great Lakes combined. It is over a mile deep in places. It is ancient, having formed twenty-five million years ago, and so biologically distinct that approximately eighty percent of its species exist nowhere else on Earth. It is larger in surface area than Belgium. Most people in the West couldn't find it on a map.

Lake Baikal holds approximately twenty percent of the world's unfrozen surface freshwater. Not twenty percent of Russia's freshwater. Twenty percent of the world's. In a century increasingly defined by water stress, that is not a geographic footnote. It is a strategic fact.

Russia controls it.

Fact No. 2 -

Approximately two thousand miles to the southeast, China faces a water crisis that its own government has described as one of the most severe resource challenges in the country's history. China's water table, particularly in the northern and northwestern regions that support both the bulk of the country's agricultural production and significant portions of its industrial base, is in documented long-term structural decline. Aquifers that took millennia to fill are being drawn down in decades. Agricultural regions that have sustained hundreds of millions of people for generations are increasingly dependent on groundwater reserves that are not being replenished at anything close to the rate of extraction.

This is not a future projection. It is a present condition. Chinese government reports, international hydrological studies, and satellite-based groundwater monitoring data have all confirmed the trajectory. The question is not whether China's water deficit is real. The question is how severe it will become, how quickly, and what happens when the gap between available water and national need becomes impossible to manage internally.

China needs fresh water.

Thus a geopolitical gap between Fact No. 1 and Fact No. 2.

China faces a structural water deficit that is worsening. Russia controls more than enough unfrozen freshwater to make up that deficit. There is no reason why water can’t be tradeable as a resource in the same way that oil and natural gas have been traded as resources for the past century. The distance, approximately the same as that from Los Angeles to Chicago, is crossable by pipeline. Access to the resource should be negotiable.

China’s need and Russia’s resource can be thought of as a gap where geopolitical leverage is forming. Not dramatically. Not through military seizure or explicit coercion. The way resource leverage has always formed. Through access agreements, infrastructure investment, bilateral negotiation, and the slow encoding of dependency into frameworks that outlast the people who built them.

This is not a scenario I invented. The infrastructure discussions between Russia and China around Siberian water access have been part of bilateral negotiations for decades. The terms have shifted. The urgency on the Chinese side has increased. The leverage on the Russian side has grown correspondingly. The question is not whether this gap will be bridged. The question is when, by whom, and through what mechanisms.

Why I wrote The Siberian Question

I spent the 1990s in Prague and Warsaw, building a technology company during the post-communist transformation of Central and Eastern Europe. I watched institutions built for one world scramble to function in another. I watched legal frameworks lag behind power shifts. I watched what happens when the mechanisms of leverage outpace the mechanisms of governance.

When I began researching the geopolitical trajectory of freshwater access, the Baikal-China dynamic was already visible to anyone paying close attention. It was not front-page news. It was not the subject of mainstream geopolitical commentary. It was a trajectory. Quiet, structural, accumulating below the threshold of alarm.

The Siberian Question is built on that trajectory. The novel asks what happens when the gap between Russia's water and China's need of it becomes acute. Coupled with China’s very long geopolitical memory, the stage is set for some real politick in Siberia.

It is not a prediction. It is an extrapolation from mechanisms that are already operational.

The trajectory is real. The timeline is fiction.

If the geography of The Siberian Question interests you, the novel begins exactly where this piece ends. At the moment when China decides to risk bridging that geopolitical gap counting on Russia’s weakness and dependency to accomplish its goals.

The first chapter is free when you join the mailing list at https://rossadams.net/mailing-list

The Price of Water, Book 2 of the Hammurabi Code Series, is set in 2051, after the gap has been bridged and the leverage has been used. The first chapter of The Price of Water is free as well. Just send me an email requesting it to ross@rossadams.net.

The Iranian Promise, Book 3, is in progress.

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Pressure Points — Infrastructure Fragility

Ross Adams, Historian and Futurist — Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Systems aren't designed to fail gracefully. They're designed to hold until they don't.

There is a specific moment in the life of any stressed system, a water network, a financial institution, a political alliance, when it crosses from stable to failing. Not gradually. Suddenly. The crossing itself takes seconds. What takes years is the invisible accumulation of pressure that precedes it.

This is the pattern I kept returning to while writing The Siberian Question.

Infrastructure, physical, legal, geopolitical, is almost never engineered for graceful degradation. It is engineered to hold. The assumption built into its design is that the conditions it was built for will persist. When those conditions change, the system doesn't adapt in real time. It holds. And holds. And holds.

Until it doesn't.

The pressure that precedes failure is, by definition, below the threshold. It doesn't trigger alarms. It doesn't appear in quarterly reports as a crisis line item. Decision-makers operating inside the system read prior stability as evidence of forward stability, a cognitive error so common it has a name in systems theory, and a long history in geopolitical catastrophe.

What changes first isn't the infrastructure itself. It's who controls access to it. This is the mechanism I find most relevant to the current geopolitical trajectory around freshwater. Lake Baikal holds approximately 20% of the world's unfrozen freshwater. Russia controls it. China's water table is in documented long-term structural decline. The infrastructure gap between those two facts isn't a future problem. It's a present condition accumulating pressure below the threshold of alarm inside a system designed to hold.

The question The Siberian Question asks is simple: What happens when someone decides to use that gap? Not dramatically. Not overnight. The way power has always moved. Quietly, through legal architecture and resource access and the slow encoding of leverage into frameworks that outlast the people who built them.

The novel begins before the crisis. When the pressure is still invisible. When the system is still holding. That moment, between holding and not holding, is the most consequential period in any system's life. It's where decisions get made that cannot be unmade. It's where the future gets written by the people paying attention.

It's also the most interesting place to set a story.

The Siberian Question is available now at https://rossadams.net/mailing-list. The first chapter is free when you join the mailing list.

The Price of Water, set in 2051, after the pressure has already become the world, is also available now.

The Iranian Promise, Book 3 of the Hammurabi Code Series, is in progress.

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The Iranian Promise is moving along!

Ross Adams, Historian and Futurist — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Now that I've got The Price of Water and The Siberian Question out in the world,, the third book in The Hammurabi Series is underway, The Iranian Promise. Trump's war on Iran did cause me to pause for a month while the possibility of regime change hung in the air, but now that it seems all Trump's war with Iran will do is inflict more suffering on Iranians, cost the rest of world billions if not trillions of dollars and make the US look like a giant, flailing bully throwing its weight around without any strategic purpose. Anyway, I'm on track for a Thanksgiving 2026 release date, so fingers crossed!

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Next Signing Party!

Ross Adams, Historian and Futurist — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I'm having my second signing part on April 19 in Camarillo, California at a dear friend's house. It will be fun to do it again. Meet folks interested in my work, read an excerpt, answer some questions and maybe sell some books. It's a taste of a full time author's life I suppose. Not bad at all if I could make it work!

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Did you know 20% of the world's fresh surface water lies deep in Siberia?

Ross Adams, Historian and Futurist — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Lake Baikal is a massive crack in the earth, 400 miles long, 30 mile wide and 5000 feet deep in some areas. It's located in South Central Siberia directly north of Mongolia. As the value of water is increasingly recognized, this body of water in Russia will likely come into play.

The Siberian Question and The Price of Water are available now. Read the first chapter of either book free at https://rossadams.net/mailing-list

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The Siberian Question is Available!

Ross Adams, Historian and Futurist — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I am proud to announce that The Siberian Question is now available for purchase at books.by/rossadams for the paperback and at all of the usual publishing platforms for the eBook or hardcover. On Books.by, a quirky thing happens if you have more than one book listed. The first published book headlines the landing page, in my case The Price of Water, and one needs to scroll down to the "Other Books By" part of the landing page to find The Siberian Question. I've asked Books.by about providing a better landing page, but there it is. For all those who took advantage of the first day of the release discount, thank you! Please provide feedback and reviews for all who now have the book.

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The Siberian Question release date: February 9, 2026!

Ross Adams, Historian and Futurist — Fri, 6 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I am getting very excited about the release of The Siberian Question on Monday, February 9, 2026. Right now anyone can pre-order the eBook on Amazon, GooglePlay, AppleBooks or Kojo. The paperback will be available on books.by at midnight, February 9, at a 50% discount for the first 24 hours of after the release. Last, we're having a book launch party on February 22, 2026, so if you'd like to come, please email me at ross@roassadams.net.

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At a certain point, strategy stops being theoretical.

Ross Adams, Historian and Futurist — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This excerpt takes place after the major decisions have already been made, when actors begin to understand the limits of what they can still control.

July 18, 2030 – Moscow, The White House

Sergei could not believe how bad things had gone since the destruction of the convoy. Over the following days, news of the conflict had gone from good to grim.

"This cannot continue, Marshal," Putin snarled at his supreme commander. "The debacle over Lake Baikal and now a cyber-attack at the hands of the Chinese on Vladivostok? What is going on?"

Sergei, the marshal, and the rest of the Russian cabinet were at yet another meeting of the Council of Ministers with Vladimir Putin. The rage in his voice was different. Chilling.

Sergei did not envy the marshal. The Russian losses were mounting as the confidence caused by the destruction of the Chinese convoy on the banks of Lake Baikal faded.

"Mr. President, I apologize, but our pilots ran out of ammunition, and the Chinese seem to have some sort of new artificial intelligence we have not seen before," Ivanov reported, unflinching and unemotional.

"What of our efforts to get more equipment and personnel to the East?" Putin demanded.

"Supply trains are on the way," the marshal responded. "But they are vulnerable."

Excerpt from a forthcoming novel.

The Siberian Question and The Price of Water are available now. Read the first chapter of either book free at https://rossadams.net/mailing-list

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What Lake Baikal Represents in a Warming World

Ross Adams, Historian and Futurist — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For most of modern history, geography was treated as something static. Mountains are internal, rivers will always flow, and borders are fixed by both. The resources of a geography are fixed in place waiting to be used or defended. Climate change has quietly undone these accepted “facts.”

Lake Baikal holds roughly twenty percent of the world’s unfrozen fresh water. For decades, that fact was more trivia than strategy. It sits in Russia’s Siberia, a remote region, locked behind climate, infrastructure and political constraints. Those constraints are eroding.

As permafrost thaws and access improves, Siberia is no longer the unreachable hinterland it once was. At the same time, water stress is intensifying across much of Asia, particularly in regions where population density, industrial demand, and agricultural need are all rising faster than supply. What makes Baikal significant isn’t just the volume of water. It’s the convergence of three trends:

First, water is becoming a strategic resource in the same way energy was in the twentieth century, but without any sustainability options. Renewable energy can and will eventually replace fuels. You cannot replace fresh water at scale.

Second, climate change is redistributing access. Some regions are becoming less habitable, while others, once considered marginal, are becoming newly viable. This shifts not only economic opportunity, but strategic attention.

Third, dependency is emerging faster than governance. Large systems adapt slowly, and political frameworks lag behind reality on the ground. By the time water scarcity becomes politically undeniable, leverage already may have shifted.

Lake Baikal sits at the intersection of these trends. It is not merely a Russian natural treasure or an environmental concern. It will likely be a case study in how climate pressure transforms geography into strategy.

The most consequential geopolitical changes rarely announce themselves as such. They begin as technical problems, environmental reports, infrastructure upgrades, labor shortages. Only later do they get included in realpolitik. By the time that language appears, the map has usually already changed.

The Siberian Question and The Price of Water are available now. Read the first chapter of either book free at ://rossadams.net/mailing-list

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The Siberian Question will be released in February.

Ross Adams, Historian and Futurist — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I've started a quiet digital marketing campaign to launch this new book which has been up on this website as "Coming Soon" for quite a while now. It is coming in February.

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A Second Excerpt from a forthcoming novel

Ross Adams, Historian and Futurist — Thu, 8 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A second excerpt from a forthcoming novel.

Yoshi nodded slowly, steepling his fingers under his chin. “Recklessness or calculation? That’s the question. And how does this affect Japan? How does it affect the region?”

Yoshi’s second aide interjected. “Minister, if Russia capitulates, China will gain control over vast resources in Siberia. China’s economic and strategic position will be immensely strengthened. But if Russia truly resists, their only option is nuclear. Both scenarios pose significant risks for Japan.”

“Indeed,” Yoshi replied, his tone thoughtful. “And let’s not forget the implications for our alliance with the United States. They will expect us to take a stand, but against whom? China, our largest trading partner after the United States? Or Russia, whose collapse could create a power vacuum on our doorstep?”

The room fell silent, the gravity of the situation continuing to sink in. Yoshi’s gaze swept across his aides, searching for insight. His second aide continued, “Minister, with respect, I don’t see any way to stop the Chinese short of Russia responding with nuclear weapons. The Chinese will administer Siberia at least as well as the Russians. Hopefully better. I do not see any power vacuum. Since the unthinkable is on the table, I hope the Chinese succeed. Japan must accelerate our plans for addressing an ascending China. The only difference being the fully emerged world power versus a rising one.”

“I agree,” Yoshi nodded. “China and the African Federation. If you had told me six months ago we would be where we are, I would have fired any of you on the spot. Yet here we are. We must deal with the here and now.”

The Siberian Question and The Price of Water are available now. Read the first chapter of either book free at https://rossadams.net/mailing-list

hashtag#geopolitics

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A second excerpt from a forthcoming novel.

Ross Adams, Historian and Futurist — Thu, 8 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

His chief aide was the first to speak. “To state the obvious, this is a game-changer, Minister. China’s demands, and willingness to back them with such extreme measures, signals a new level of confidence. Or recklessness.”
Yoshi nodded slowly, steepling his fingers under his chin. “Recklessness or calculation? That’s the question. And how does this affect Japan? How does it affect the region?”
Yoshi’s second aide interjected. “Minister, if Russia capitulates, China will gain control over vast resources in Siberia. China’s economic and strategic position will be immensely strengthened. But if Russia truly resists, their only option is nuclear. Both scenarios pose significant risks for Japan.”
“Indeed,” Yoshi replied, his tone thoughtful. “And let’s not forget the implications for our alliance with the United States. They will expect us to take a stand, but against whom? China, our largest trading partner after the United States? Or Russia, whose collapse could create a power vacuum on our doorstep?”
The room fell silent, the gravity of the situation continuing to sink in. Yoshi’s gaze swept across his aides, searching for insight. His second aide continued, “Minister, with respect, I don’t see any way to stop the Chinese short of Russia responding with nuclear weapons. The Chinese will administer Siberia at least as well as the Russians. Hopefully better. I do not see any power vacuum. Since the unthinkable is on the table, I hope the Chinese succeed. Japan must accelerate our plans for addressing an ascending China. The only difference being the fully emerged world power versus a rising one.”
“I agree,” Yoshi nodded. “China and the African Federation. If you had told me six months ago we would be where we are, I would have fired any of you on the spot. Yet here we are. We must deal with the here and now.”

hashtag#geopolitics

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