#birchpunk

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in SAN DIEGO at MYSTERIOUS GALAXY next MONDAY (Mar 24), and in CHICAGO with PETER SAGAL on Apr 2. More tour dates here.

Ray Nayler's Where the Axe Is Buried is an intense, claustrophobic novel of a world run by "rational" AIs that purport to solve all of our squishy political problems with empirical, neutral mathematics:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374615369/wheretheaxeisburied/

In Naylor's world, we there are two blocs. "The west," where the heads of state have been replaced with chatbots called "PMs." These PMs propose policy to tame, rubberstamp legislatures, creating jobs programs, setting monetary and environmental policies, and ruling on other tricky areas where it's nearly impossible to make everyone happy. These countries are said to be "rationalized," and they are peaceful and moderately prosperous, and have finally tackled the seemingly intractable problems of decarbonization, extreme poverty, and political instability.

In "the Republic" – a thinly veiled version of Russia – the state is ruled by an immortal tyrant who periodically has his consciousness decanted into a blank body after his own body falls apart. The state maintains the fiction that each president is a new person, manufacturing families, friends, teachers and political comrades who can attest to the new president's long history in the country. People in the Republic pretend to believe this story, but in practice, everyone knows that it's the same mind running the country, albeit sometimes with ill-advised modifications, such as an overclocking module that runs the president's mind at triple human speeds.

The Republic is a totalitarian nightmare of ubiquitous surveillance and social control, in which every movement and word is monitored, and where social credit scores are adjusted continuously to reflect the political compliance of each citizen. Low social credit scores mean fewer rations, a proscribed circle of places you can go, reduced access to medical care, and social exclusion. The Republic has crushed every popular uprising, acting on the key realization that the only way to cling to power is to refuse to yield it, even (especially) if that means murdering every single person who takes part in a street demonstration against the government.

A year ago one of the S1 Cyberfarm writers offered me to illustrate a New Year’s holiday special script he made for the series - that didn’t make it into Final Cut - into a comic. I agreed, because CF is actually one of my favourite series ever…Unfortunately, this project didn’t make it either, with one of the higher ups rejecting the idea

The comic is, at best, on a hiatus - and, at worst - cancelled. That said - the NDA is now over, and I can finally show the cover art and the first five pages I made this August. Reblogs and comments are highly appreciated 🙏💖

RUSSIAN SPACETRAIN // РУССКИЙ КОСМОПОЕЗД feat. BadComedian

Cyberfarm is a series about two ex business partners - Konstantin Baragosin, who continued their corporate business, and Nikolai Kulibin, who made a small village on Mars, became a farmer, and lives a peaceful life there…a life that starts crumbling down after years later old friends meet again, to share out a piece of land they both need. Of course it doesn’t lead to anything good, and in mere seconds Kolya loses his home while Kostya loses…well, everything. Now, these two have no choice, but to forget their old grudges and help each other out, making friends and foes along their way.

• SEASON 1 EPISODES 1&2 [ENG SUBS]

• SEASON 1 EPISODE 3 [ENG SUBS]

• SEASON 1 EPISODE 4 [ENG SUBS]

• SEASON 1 EPISODE 5 [ENG SUBS]

• SEASON 1 EPISODE 6 [ENG SUBS]

• SEASON 1 EPISODE 7 [ENG SUBS]

• SEASON 1 EPISODE 8 [ENG SUBS]

• SEASON 1 EPISODE 9 [ENG SUBS]

• SEASON 1 EPISODE 10 [ENG SUBS]

My silly ass made subs for the first two episodes in Power Director, but the rest of the episodes have subs that you can turn on by pressing CC button and choosing "English" in that Google Doc I gave you a link to