BOUDINOT, Ryan
Broken Utopias

Boudinot’s novel follows a cast of mystics, frauds, and profoundly incompetent cult leaders through Iceland, Seattle, black holes, and a few blown minds on a quest to reboot reality itself.
Lee is one of the most celebrated American novelists of the 1980s, not to mention an obnoxious, womanizing jerk. His body of work happens to have been created by artificial intelligence in the future and delivered to him by some guy named Max. Broken Utopia locates Lee and Max in a cosmos divided into three interdependent layers—the eternal Town, the User Platform and the Substrate—all ruled by Vicarious, a company that converts human experiences into drugs. Residents of the Town enjoy lives on a loop of endless enrichment and wonder, as inhabitants of the User Platform eke out harrowing routines of addiction and delusion. Meanwhile, in the Substrate, a near future earth teeters at the edge of a mass extinction event that—for better or worse—is only temporary. [publisher's note]

Published by Publication Studio, 2026
Literature