Broken Utopia
by Ryan Boudinot
Ryan Boudinot's first new novel since 2012's Blueprints of the Afterlife 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. This is the 18th book in the Fellow Travelers Series.
Ryan Boudinot is the author of five previous books, including the novel Blueprints of the Afterlife and the story collection The Octopus Rises. Boudinot conceived and led the effort to designate Seattle as a UNESCO City of Literature. Self-funded, he established the project with the City of Seattle and the US State Department, and met with officials in Paris, Norwich, Edinburgh, Dublin, Reykjavik, and Chengdu to lay the groundwork for the city’s successful bid. As part of this campaign, he edited the anthology, Seattle City of Literature, published by Sasquatch Books in 2015.
