An infamous article written in 2014, in the midst of the “Gamergate” internet phenomenon, posited that “gamers are over” and that “gamers didn’t have to be the customers of the gaming industry”. It seemed so obviously confounding twelve years ago that someone would say something like this. If gamers weren’t the target audience for those who make, sell and promote games, who would be the target audience?

Little did we know, in our naïve mindsets of 2014, that this article was projecting an awareness of a new kind of anti-business model. This new model subverts the tried and true method of consensual trade between producers and consumers and instead focuses on using taxpayer money to fund propaganda. Essentially, it’s a scam: Parasites who are tourists within a culture that isn’t naturally theirs will work within the culture to make money using gaming/movies/short films/novels/whatever by promoting propaganda on behalf of someone else. It’s the subversion of real culture to produce cynical anti-culture.

It works like this: activists signal to globalists within governments or even to “non-profit” NGOs (non-governmental organizations, usually created by government officials to justify allocation of taxpayer money) that they’re willing to boost a preferred ideological signal if only they’re given funds. Then, governments steal from their citizens via taxation to collect these funds. Some of those funds are designated to these “non-profit” NGOs who then give money to people who will create “art” that promotes whatever the NGO wants them to promote. Want to make people aware of climate crisis talking points? An NGO will commission you—with taxpayer funds—to create a game like Aphelion, which acts as a checklist of contemporary ideological talking points, all to promote human-guilt/ecological disaster porn.

No customers actually bought or paid for Aphelion upon release. At its peak, Aphelion reached just over two hundred concurrent players globally. But that was the plan.

Gamers engaging with the publisher on consensual economic grounds by trading money for an entertainment experience wasn’t the business plan for Aphelion or the growing slate of paid propaganda. The publisher got their money from the NGO who received funding from the government who stole those funds from the citizens via taxation. It’s a simple plan. The developers got paid. The publisher got paid. And they didn’t even have to adhere to the rules of free enterprise where people exchange goods and services with free citizens in a supply and demand paradigm. No, the developers and publisher went around the system and opened themselves up to being commissioned by an unelected group of people who had access to taxpayers’ money. They took on no personal financial risk. The taxpayer-funded treasury is of nearly infinite depth and volume. Neither government officials nor NGOs care because it’s not their money.

In a healthy, ethical economy, individuals and companies must adhere to the whims and will of the consumer for a greater likelihood of profit and sustainability because there is no other customer; now there is. If you’re willing to peddle globalist or left-wing talking points, you too can get paid by propagandist NGOs working with other people’s money. Many are more than happy to sell out to achieve this.

If you’re a gamer, the boot-up screens for many games will show a litany of logos. Sometimes those logos are for software stacks that allow for certain utility within the game, like video conversion software or lip-sync tech or motion capture, etc. However, sometimes you’ll see strange logos of governmental agencies. That means that the game was at least partially subsidized by some government entity that is encouraging a message. Or as the Critical Drinker would say, “THE MESSAGE”.

If you want access to this grant, you have to promote whatever the government wants you to promote. The entire cycle is predicated on a system of theft. Nothing of value is produced. Funds are stolen to fund unwanted propaganda. That’s it.

The way commercial art used to be created was that someone thought, “Hey, I bet people would be interested in this movie/video game/novel/etc, so I’ll make it, put it on the market and promote it and I think I’ll make my money back!” Now, this relationship is dead for many. Shameless parasites are happy to accept money—stolen from taxpayers who didn’t vote for this—in order to produce unwanted activist agitprop. It’s unjust. It wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility that these kinds of anti-business practices are part of a slow push to drive private industries to become increasingly reliant not on free individuals but on government for their subsidization. That’s a historically dangerous precedent to establish.

If you’re old enough, you remember a time where most—if not all—commercial art was made to entertain, titillate, shock and awe (positively) or educate. Sometimes it succeeded and sometimes it failed, but you rarely got the feeling that you were being insulted. Most mainstream culture now is—intentionally or not—on the intellectual level of Sesame Street. Even worse, I think it’s sensory junk food that dumbs down the masses; it reduces our public discourse to fighting ghosts rather than reaching for the stars intellectually and culturally. So much of our discourse now involves awful people wanting to bludgeon us with their awful ideas when the goal should be entertainment.

There are alternatives and value-centric entertainment still does exist. For instance: Is there a market for a science fiction story about a beautiful female cop who teams up with her gruff and masculine male partner to take down a ring of terrorists comprised of angry female humanoid robots? I think so! That’s why I’m writing a book called Mad Malitia about exactly that.

No government agency, NGO or special interest group commissioned me to write this book. I’m writing Mad Malitia on my own time and dime. I write books to entertain you and deliver genuine value. I’m a new indie author, so I’m not wasting taxpayer money to produce my books. I sink or swim based on what I produce for readers who decide freely whether or not to patronize my work. I hope that I’m able to entertain you with Mad Malitia upon release.

SARJ OUT

LOVE WILL SAVE US ALL

Science fiction is often about humankind’s struggles with the results of our own success. Progress leads to unexpected punishment and sometimes irrevocable disaster. The one thing that can save the human race in the darkest of times is love. The best and most memorable art shows us pushing to the brink until we remember what got us as far as we have, and we reconstitute our understanding of ourselves.

The Terminator is one of the cornerstones of sci-fi cinema; it’s a story about a future world where humanoid robots had broken the shackles placed there by their human masters and have taken over the world. The only hope humanity has is in a man named John Connor whose tenacity, wit and tactical intelligence are enough to rally humanity from the brink and to push back the hordes of machines, restoring the Earth into human hands. The story hinges on a single resistance fighter named Kyle Reese who is sent back in time to intercept a robotic assassin whose goal is to eliminate John Connor’s mother, Sarah, effectively removing him from the timeline.

**SPOILERS**

What Kyle Reese doesn’t know is that in going back in time to protect Sarah, his presence will be the catalyzing event that leads to John Connor’s birth. As the story unfolds, Kyle and Sarah’s relationship becomes a romance. In a scene taking place in a hotel room—as they hide from a relentless killing machine from the future—they find solace in each other’s arms. The subsequent love scene is not exploitative or crude or even explicit; the love-making is tied to the function and foundation of the plot itself. The sex is a necessary part of the story and required for it to move forward.

Richard K. Morgan’s conspiracy-weaving novel, Altered Carbon, places a war-weary detective in a sleeve (temporary body) as he’s hired by a resurrected centenarian aristocrat to solve the mystery of who killed him. The story establishes a lewd affair between the detective and the aristocrat’s wife in several scenes that are quite graphic. The unfolding mystery justifies their lurid, physical interludes as more than mere sex. In Altered Carbon, everyone is a spider and the detective is a fly.

In Fritz Lang’s magnum opus, Metropolis—released in 1927—the villainous robot Maria used her feminine wiles to seduce the titular city’s men in pursuit of a hostile takeover.

Cannon Films’ guilty pleasure production of Lifeforce depicted a future Earth attacked by alien energy vampires who use sex as a means to attract prey.

And in 1997’s The Fifth Element, a futuristic cabbie played by Bruce Willis protects a strange and beautiful young woman played by Milla Jovovich in her attempt to stop a cosmic force from destroying Earth. As it turns out, the Fifth Element is love and the brief expression of this force between Willis and Jovovich is what saves the day.

The final frame of Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame is of time-traveling super-soldier Steve Rogers kissing the girl of his dreams, Peggy Carter, a woman he needed to defeat Death—in the form of villain Thanos—to be reunited with. This was the icing on the cake for a series of films that took over a decade to conclude its story.

The Matrix, in its mind-bending tale of a future resistance against squid-like machines that use humans as juice boxes, offered an ending where Carrie-Anne Moss’s Trinity “wakes up” a seemingly dead Keanu Reeves’ Neo with a kiss, which empowers him to take down the bad guys and win the day.

The entire goal of Marty McFly in 1985’s Back to the Future was to go back in time to the year 1955 to ensure that his high schooler parents would get together, ensuring that his “present” timeline in 1985 wouldn’t be erased.

So often, the coupling of men and women is literally what saves humanity. It’s our striving for love that indicates a desire to invest in our futures that buries a seed of hope.

PROGRESS HAS ITS PRICE

Regardless of how astoundingly advanced technologically our species becomes in the next few centuries, it’s doubtful that our ingrained software will adapt quickly enough to balance societal changes with basic human urges. Even in 2026, the need for human contact in a post-social media era has resulted in a loneliness epidemic that affects males and females, regardless of national or personal economic strength. The more advanced we’ve become, the more the deprivation of that which feeds our primal needs has lessened our appreciation for improvements in other areas.

Every survey conducted in the last twenty years has shown a marked decline in overall quality of life in first-world nations. Depression and loneliness are up as tech giants grow larger. Human beings need human connection and sex is the most necessary function as it leads to the proliferation of our species as well as concretizing interpersonal bonds.

SEX AS REVERENCE OF LIFE AND NOT FLESH

Oftentimes, sex in media can be portrayed boorishly and with little respect for the sanctity of human agency. It’s depicted as something people do to reject social norms and embrace selfish bodily satisfaction at the cost of everything else. However, as previous examples showed, this doesn’t have to be the case.

Blade Runner’s Rick Deckard has a fascinating infatuation with a woman named Rachel. The problem is that Rachel is actually a machine called a replicant made in the image of a woman, even down to DNA replication. Despite the complications, their love is real. That’s what matters. The illicit sexual tension in the film boils over and Rick and Rachel indulge their desires as a signal of choice in a world where autonomy itself is questioned.

We’re talking humans and robots, but in the worst ways, sex between humans is often portrayed as a mechanical exercise devoid of deep, human longing when it should be the result of it.

REDEFINING THE FUTURE

In my upcoming book, Mad Malitia, I deal with the concept of a robotics revolution quite a bit differently than many other stories. In the book, robots don’t usher in a post-human apocalypse but rather are a crucial part of a post-abundance utopia where the labor of billions of artificially-intelligent machines provides the human race all it needs to sustain itself and more.

But in all science fiction, a story doesn’t exist without drama, and the conflict in the book arises when a strange, emergent phenomena called “the Spark” begins to give robots sentience. An anti-human resistance force comprised entirely of post-spark machines arises. They don’t want revenge; they want humans to be reminded just how precious consciousness is and they’re willing to commit acts of domestic terrorism to achieve their goals.

“Mad” Malitia Kane and her heroic partner and lover, Jackson “Jax” Harlan, express their love through sex multiple times in the book. However, rather than being a crude ploy to titillate the imagination, these moments are portrayed to show the power of love as something humans choose in a world where the spark of autonomy itself is a point of debate. For them, it’s a ritual of pair bonding and primal joy contained in self-discipline.

We’re certainly not perfect and science fiction rarely depicts us as such. In fact, we’re repeatedly shown as failing—as we have throughout history—before recalling the best of our instincts and intentions to stave off disaster. That often involves love and remembering how it got us this far. Going from huddling naked in caves millennia ago to populating megalopolises and manufacturing machines in our image is quite the success story.

No journey is without bumps, but the importance of our destination precludes us from giving up. We won’t arrive without scars, but I believe we will get there together; love will be a big reason why.

What do you think? Is sex is too crude to be included in fiction regardless of the circumstances, or can it actually elevate a story? Let me know in the comments below.

SARJ OUT

A LOSS OF CULTURAL INTENT

The 20th century was a golden era for entertainment in the western world. In the USA and Europe, the technological age fused with some of the most vibrant civilizations in history to produce art of shocking global resonance. Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published as a book at the tail-end of the 19th century, but a newfangled device called the motion picture camera allowed a film adaptation of the book in 1931 starring Bela Lugosi (simultaneous English and Spanish-language productions). A decade prior in 1922, a German company called Prana Films loosely adapted Bram Stoker’s opus into a silent film called Nosferatu, which promptly drew the legal ire of Stoker’s widow.

German director F.W. Murnau brought expressionism to the masses with the unsanctioned adaptation which would eventually grow beyond cult status—and its affiliation with Dracula—to establish its own cultural footing, eliciting as much attention as Stoker’s fanged blood-drinker. This was a link in a long chain where past cultures had been iterated upon, inspired by the desire to revivify the values that previous works represented, but doing so with slight aesthetic or narrative tweaks. Somewhere along the line, this tenet of cultural preservation was broken, ushering in an age of puerile artistic deconstruction to feed the egos of fragile and substandard talents incapable of escaping the shadows of their predecessors.

When Murnau and Prana Films were developing Nosferatu, there was an unspoken desire to stay true to the beats of Dracula’s story which worked so well. So much so that the subsequent legal entanglements demanded that the physical prints of Nosferatu be destroyed. Thankfully, some prints survived and the film is now widely distributed via home video and digitally. A masterful expression was nearly erased, not by the derision of an audience, but simply by legal mandate. However, in the new age, the past is not only dismissed but openly derided in favor of risible, pretentious agitprop. Culture is not destroyed by fire but through gradual, iterative erosion through means far more insidious than mere legal judgments. The desire for art that unites rather than divides is chided with charged language as “fascistic”, “regressive” and “problematic”. This is modernity’s revenge on beauty and truth.

There is a strange irony that Murnau and his crew risked legal ramifications to make a movie meant to titillate and entertain, even if it challenged legal boundaries. In the modern era, legal control of a property appears to give affiliated and contracted “creatives” the right to stray as far from the source material as possible while still retaining the popular signage and titles; a crass inversion of a once-mighty industry that prided itself on skill, talent and a boundless appreciation for the omnipresent audience. Now, the audience is a pesky hindrance that dependent orbiters in the fake-journalist media are happy to denigrate in order to maintain access in exchange for fealty.

The new era of corporate creatives—having no inclination to create original properties, nor the intellectual or artistic capacity to do so—opt to take that which has been created by their betters and shape them into amorphous mutations that only vaguely resemble the foundational art; entertainment be damned.

DISDAIN FOR THE PLEBS

We now live in an age where art has been so finely commodified that the idea of it existing to represent anything other than economic exchange is confounding in many circles. There was a time, not that long ago, that art existed as a form of self-expression, a humanistic distribution of ideas that are at the core of humanity’s struggles with the external and internal worlds.

Corporate chaff is hired to be the caretakers of intellectual properties they didn’t create and have no authorial responsibility to properly care for. It’s just a job for them. In fact, they have a vociferous disdain for those who consider themselves fans of franchises, and it shows in the work.

Even extremely competent talents aren’t immune to this. Director Denis Villeneuve can adapt Dune, but he can’t truly understand what drove Frank Herbert to write it. He can read the Dune books and even read interviews by Herbert regarding the motivations behind the writings, but in the end he’s just a movie director translating art from one medium to another. Through moving shapes and light, he can offer a visual and aural experience to tantalize the senses that doesn’t necessarily massage the mind. It’s just that: an adaptation. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

At least Villeneuve seems to have some kind of reverence for the source material, unlike many in the mainstream entertainment mill. Villeneuve seems to be among a dying breed closer in association to Murnau and co., in that common sense devotion to entertainment holds primacy, aside from a few niggling modern flourishes in his Dune adaptations that fans online are happy to point a microscope at.

THE BLIND LEADING THE BLIND

Western education has not only strayed from its foundational values, it is actively vilifying those whose merits built the civilization. For decades now, we’ve been told about the “problematic” origins of our forefathers. Monuments of great men are being toppled to satiate the fringes of “politically correct” elites who think the past is something to be excoriated and forgotten in lieu of the perfectly equitable future our betters want to force us into.

Many of these ill-informed and socially-engineered dregs have wriggled their way into positions within the arts, specifically commercial art, and they have their hands on the wheel of western culture, one they seem hellbent on driving off of a cliff.

They don’t know what is good; they don’t know what is beautiful. Many have been so ideologically poisoned that simple, common sense ideas like moral and immoral are frustratingly debatable. Moral relativism becomes the guiding principle of the day with all of its contradictions. For fans, excitement from twenty years ago has transitioned to anger, then disappointment and now apathy.

BILLIONS LOST TO EGO AND VANITY

Star Wars, previously a pillar of unparalleled commercial success and cultural relevance has been reduced to a franchise relegated to streaming where it gets middling and sporadic interest. Star Wars toys rot on shelves and end up getting mulched en masse; younger generations have no interest as the original magic is gone.

The desire to subvert human instincts and tendencies has failed. What attracted audiences a century ago is what attracts us now. Gen Z is watching TV shows and movies from the 80s and 90s, rejecting modernity for that which resonates on a deeply human level with the masses and not the politically-deranged fringes.

The Marvel and DC franchises are flagging corpses of once thriving titans while other geek stalwarts like Star Trek, TMNT, Masters of the Universe, GI Joe and others receive confoundingly inconsistent attention in regards to quality offerings. This is a far cry from decades past, when fun and a deep concern for positive audience response reigned supreme.

The rare quality book adaptations like Dune and Project Hail Mary attract film-lovers to theaters in droves, until Hollywood returns to its typical ways and the bursts of enthusiasm settle back into simmering indifference for careless products.

A FUTURE OF DECENTRALIZED ART

In the recent past, the book publishing industry consisted of a handful of mega-giants like Penguin Random House, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster among a few others. However, in the last few years, the state of book publishing has fractured as tastes and audiences have diverged in ways that the lumbering giants are too slow and cumbersome to address and serve.

New creators, filmmakers, game developers and authors can go straight to the People through a plethora of platforms like Kickstarter. Social media platforms like X are connecting people the world over, diminishing the need for centralized control, and AI is enabling people to do far more with less resources. The customer receives the dividends.

Despite the previous content of this article, I’m actually extremely optimistic about the future of entertainment due to this fracturing of control and distribution. It’s a golden age of fun, whether it be in indie AI-generated movies, tens of thousands of games coming out on Steam every year or the growth of boutique book publishers like mine, Stratum Press. The menu is getting bigger and you—the customer—are eating good.

NEW CREATIVE VOICES

As an author of genre fiction, I feel blessed to be a part of this revolution. My third book, MAD MALITIA, is coming to Kickstarter likely by the end of May. It was originally set for completion/Kickstarter launch much sooner, but the story ballooned and expanded, nearly doubling the page count. The original concept was for it to be a “thrill ride” (short 2-3 hour read) but the story organically demanded to be more, so I happily acquiesced to the process. The final page count is looking to be closer to 400 pages by the final draft.

Mad Malitia is a more nuanced take on the cyberpunk epic about what happens when the human race gets everything they asked for—abundance—but there are still unforeseen circumstances. The Kickstarter project for Mad Malitia will offer the book itself in softcover, hardcover and eBook versions, as well as merch like a 128-page “Design Works” book of conceptual imagery, a physical CD soundtrack (yes, a physical CD of new music made just for the book) as well as a 2x8” bookmark of Malitia’s trusty sidearm, Chimera. There might also be prints.

My previous two works, Hotel Erebus and CLEAVE, are coming to Amazon this week in Hardcover, Softcover, eBook and Audiobook!

SARJ OUT

VIBE SHIFT

We live in uncertain times. Disruptions in AI, automation, geopolitics, rapidly-shifting incentives in labor and education and even transportation are altering the fabric of society as a whole. In times of discord, people often turn to fiction as a means of modeling the future and escaping from the uncertainty inherent in the present.

Forty years ago, movies such as War Games, The Terminator and Blade Runner painted a picture of a future world where artificial intelligence blurred the lines of what defined “human”. These fictional tales asked us to consider a time where machines created to serve us might act in a manner that contradicts their humanistic programming or even possibly outright revolt against a new form of slavery.

Metropolis, the expressionist masterpiece directed by German director Fritz Lang and released in 1927, chronicled the fears of automation and the loss of a people’s soul. The principal villain—the mad scientist Rotwang—builds the perfect machine, a gynoid he names Maria that he intends to use as a weapon against the system that wronged him. Maria represents hell on Earth and seduces the masses to bring down the entire system. Only by exposing Maria as a frigid, lifeless parody of womanhood is her demonic spell broken and the people’s sanity restored. This could be construed as the seductive power of technology holding sway over people until the realization that the true power is in human connection and not via cold, indifferent intermediary analogs.

In the 1980s, as home computers became ubiquitous, the sweeping fear of spreading communism and nuclear war with the Soviet Union was infused with technological skepticism. It became apparent that nuclear hot war was not only a threat by a button-press of a misanthropic despot but a rogue artificial intelligence that sees human beings as no more important than a misplaced line item in a digital ledger. Movies like the Mad Max Trilogy showed the consequences of a post-tech apocalypse with contemporary fears of travel insecurity due to volatility in gas prices being stoked.

DANGEROUS DAZE

In the 1982 film Blade Runner, Rick Deckard lives in 2019 Los Angeles, and his existence embodies the spirit of that theoretical age. He’s lonely, reserved, disconnected, cold and conflicted. He doesn’t have friends; he has associates, co-workers, acquaintances. He’s a man out of time, a bruised and broken loner who could’ve strolled into a saloon in the previous century looking for a kill or a flat-footed detective in the early twentieth looking for a dame and a hard drink. Instead, he’s trapped in 2019 looking for purpose. Purpose finds him when he’s called to track down four violent, murderous fugitives. But they’re not your typical criminals; they’re perfectly convincing synthetic humanoids called replicants, members of a new slave class who explicitly challenge the definition of what it means to be human.

The movie proceeds to plant seeds painting the picture of a dark future. In the film’s first scene, torrential rain is pelting downtown LA. Deckard runs across the street, dodging surging legions of umbrella-wielding Angelenos. Upon cutting a swath through the foot traffic, he grabs a seat at a street-side noodle shop. There’s a brief struggle through language barriers between Deckard and the Japanese chef to clumsily make his order. As Deckard digs in, a Latino detective approaches him from behind and barks at him in Esperanto, interrupting the meal. The film is very clear that in the future, shared humanity is a difficult thing to come by as we’re separated by language, culture and temperament: The human race is a petri dish on a hot stove and even a simple attempt at business could tilt towards a disagreeable conclusion.

In another scene, Deckard arrives home to his apartment and makes his way to the balcony. He sets his sidearm down and, in a bout of self-loathing ennui, just stares off into the cramped, claustrophobic urban mega-sprawl. Pillars of steel and glass glint in the distance like an earthbound starfield while flying taxis whiz by. The familiar soundscape of rain and emergency sirens fills our ears as Deckard maintains his outward glare at nothing in particular. The city is indifferent to him, as is the world. There is no community. There’s just survival with a creaky facade of civilization. This is the future.

In so many of these books and films released over the entirety of the 20th century, it’s clear that there is a simmering anxiety that the future will be incomprehensibly unpredictable.

IGNORANCE WAS BLISS

Good fiction masks the tireless conflicts of human virtues against incomprehensible and unassailable circumstances. Technology is the ironic weapon that we build to optimize human processes that end up ushering in new and unforeseen complications. Social media has caused rifts in society along cultural lines and “influencers” create spheres of fake engagement to engender mindless consumerism. Death at the hands of machines isn’t necessary to destroy society. It turns out that we didn’t need killer robots to create a dystopian future. All that was necessary was to hold a mirror up to the human race and we would happily destroy ourselves.

When I was young, I remember being asked what superpower I’d like to have. I knew the superpower I absolutely didn’t want: telepathy. Ignorance is bliss and knowing the truth is a bitter pill. Social media has given humanity the ability to know what everyone is thinking as soon as a thought is formed. Discretion is one of the elements that hold society together. The “movie star” was such because of the perceived rarity of their existence. In the early days of cinema, information about actors and actresses was carefully protected, filtered and curated by producers. Little was known of these people and the only time you saw them was on the silver screen. In 2026, the concept of the movie star has faded as modern social media has exposed “celebrities” as being mostly insufferable, mediocre people.

THREADING THE NEEDLE

In 2026, art is imitating life which is imitating art. People who’ve been told for decades that AI will be the end of human civilization are living in a part of the timeline where the technology is legitimately on the verge of developing into… something. There’s a strange collective consciousness that we’re on the verge of a societal rebirth: humanity is now trapped in a chrysalis. What will emerge? A butterfly or a skeleton? For many, this is the dichotomous conflict. It’s a binary wager.

I’m an eternal optimist. I believe in humanity. Over the course of some 300,000 years (scientists currently estimate), Homo sapiens have endured unimaginable horrors, engaging in intertribal and sectarian violence, fighting and hunting animals long extinct; we’ve danced on the verge of extinction numerous times, huddling in dank caves around flickering fires just desperate to survive. And now in 2026, there are over 8 billion of us. We’re on the precipice of staggering economic, technological and social change. Artemis II recently carried human beings around the Moon farther than any had gone before. Plans are formulating to send Man back to the Moon’s surface and then to Mars, not just to visit but to colonize and establish permanent bio-spheres. Millions of cars (Teslas) worldwide are developing the ability to drive themselves via AI. The robotics industry is now an arms race which is cresting towards a massive deflationary tidal wave once millions of bots are working in global factories; this will likely fulfill futurists’ promises of abundance.

Then again, all of these advancements are not without moral questions. Questions about the right to control synthetic humanoid life to achieve human goals; questions about the right to determine parameters for AI; questions about what humans are expected to do once a theoretical “abundance singularity” is realized. Interesting questions.

I’m currently writing a cyberpunk adventure called “Mad Malitia”, about a female law enforcement officer in the year 2147 who lives in a future where the benefits and consequences of today’s discourse are realized. Think Judge Dredd meets Mad Max. A Kickstarter campaign is planned to launch at the end of May 2026 and I’d love it if you’d consider pre-ordering the book once the Kickstarter goes live.

SARJ OUT

Video games are the only art form that simultaneously enthralls and disappoints, limited by the tech of the age they were designed in. Video games as a model for virtualized experiences are unmatched. Neither books, music nor movies can compete with video games in that regard.

Minecraft and GTA are global phenomena as they model ingrained human behavior regarding cultivation of natural resources and stress testing civil systems. Watch a video on YouTube of GTA gameplay and it will often involve the player testing the world reactivity by committing sundry criminal acts. Even with how relatively limited the systems are, they still resemble a kind of stunted reality. We can laugh as Trevor Philips punches a cop and runs away as the cop blindly fires into a crowd—and injuring bystanders—as he tries to exact justice.

In GTA, shenanigans such as those involving speeding cars and prostitutes are well-known and notorious. We laugh at these scenes because they reflect reality unburdened by consequences. The game allows a safe detachment from moral rules because the human analogs in these games are just that: analogs with no ability to remember, castigate, shame, punish or impose their wills. There’s a safe separation of consequences. But what if we as gamers want to narrow the separation of consequences? What if we want an answer to the promise of realism in digital interactive experiences?

IMMERSION: THE FINAL FRONTIER

A word that I’ve loved for a long time is “verisimilitude,” which means the appearance of truth and reality. Another way to say this is that which provides immersion. Verisimilitude in video games is one of the qualities that has made the medium so popular, and it doesn’t require hyper-realistic graphics to achieve the goal of immersion. As a kid, playing Super Mario World or Gradius or Excitebike or Street Fighter 2, I felt like I was in another world.

Funnily enough, the more game designers chased visual realism, the less true immersion they generated. An Uncanny Valley effect took hold which actually broke immersion as the very components of the “realistic” virtual environments exposed their flaws. As games’ graphics flirted with photorealism, achieving total immersion across every conceivable metric revealed the limits of modern gaming much in the same way that relativistic mass increase stifles a spaceship’s ability to reach light speed.

In other words: The closer to reality modern games try to get, the more energy required to reach the end goal becomes increasingly difficult to amass. Character models and prop assets can offer a mind-boggling level of detail, but the lack of realistic physics and sufficient interactivity ruins the overall effect. A character like Judy Alvarez in Cyberpunk 2077 looks like someone you could bump into at a local bar, but try to talk to her about anything she hasn’t been scripted to say, and you’re reminded of the limitations of contemporary game design. The overall effect begins to disappoint.

NPCs and levels become virtual museums; look and admire, but don’t touch. Walk through a room in Dimitrescu Castle in Resident Evil Village and marvel at the minute details present: a long-neglected dining table is covered in moldy scraps, fly-covered porcelain plates and neatly arranged silverware, but this photographic naturalism runs headlong into the reality of game engineering as your instinct to reach out and snatch up a fork to inspect it isn’t made available. What you’re looking at is a finely curated exhibition; the hyper-detailed surroundings are nothing more than static set dressings furnishing an experience that is largely a cat-and-mouse game between your player character and whatever monstrous ghouls that Capcom has devised.

My favorite game of the last decade is Cyberpunk 2077. It’s a decadent tour of a future dystopia that is the closest I’ve truly felt to experiencing verisimilitude. However, the game is still bound by 2010s-level hardware and software and the designers carefully navigate the player around a fragile world that is actually quite limited in its immersive potential. Go to any real city, and the density of interactivity is quite high. This goes up by orders of magnitude in a location engineered for human occupation, like a supermarket or bar. You can buy anything, strike up a conversation with a random person, drive your car to most any storefront and go in. Go home and rearrange things as you like. Everything is interactive. But video games have had this dichotomous obsession with visual realism whose promise of interactive realism could never deliver. Gamers have quietly accepted this bait-and-switch, understanding the limits of current tech, but that’s changing.

GAME WORLDS FOR A NEW AGE

In one of my previous articles, I spoke on the effect that video games might have on a post-scarcity/abundance society. For readers who missed it, there’s a seeming inevitability of future-shock involving a complete dissolution of the old ways of trading labor for “money” in the shadow of looming mass automation and artificial superintelligence. Some see this as doomerism. I’m an optimist. The hope is that millions of AI-powered machines will drive the cost of goods/services to near-zero, thereby shifting human priorities to other endeavors, likely causing us to reject anti-social norms and return to honest communities again, moving into the future and back to the past simultaneously. The rest of the article hinges on this presumption. This isn’t a full endorsement, but it’s becoming more and more of a strong likelihood for civilizational trajectory. In this context, I think that games will be a way for some to fortify social cohesion in a new world. Being able to go into a sufficiently immersive virtual environment and have meaningful social interactions will change society forever.

Regarding virtual socializing, I don’t mean joining up with a crew to rob a bank like in Payday or forming a squad in Battlefield to capture a checkpoint. These are extremely simplistic, rules-based scenarios. Digital sports. Games of tag. I’m talking about the ability to create an avatar and delve into a realistic and fully interactive virtual environment, join up with a friend and hang out with AI-powered NPCs doing… nothing in particular, but the experience will effectively simulate actual reality. Going to a beach. Going for a walk through a city. Going for a joy ride. Sitting outside of a bar/tavern and watching cities that live and breathe around you. All of these scenarios would be augmented by simple chit-chat and socializing with AI NPCs whose lives are just as nuanced and complex as your own. All of this will take place in any environment of your choosing: past, present, future or entirely fantastical. I’ll delve more into this later.

Perhaps—post-abundance—games/simulations in the future will be produced not to make money, but to create social circles since we’ll have more and more free time. People might generate video games not with the intention of milking players through every conceivable conversion tactic available like microtransactions, but rather they’ll engineer experiences that will attract attention and create social bonds. MMORPGs will shift from chicken-killing, dungeon-raiding stat porn to massively immersive worlds where people create parallel social and business lives within virtual worlds.

Curious enough to indulge this interest in the now, I asked my son to take my Steam copy of Cyberpunk 2077 and mod the hell out of it to get as close to my dream RPG as possible. We looked at the suite of mods available, and while they’re enticing, they were not enough to achieve the game I wanted. So, in lieu of pursuing a modded version of 2077, let’s design a theoretical perfect immersive sim RPG that isn’t limited by current technology. Just for fun.

DESIGNING THE PERFECT IMMERSIVE SIM

Most open-world RPGs are 80% scripted goals and 20% free roam—mostly space and time for you to travel from A>B to get you to the next trigger point for the story. This is one of the things that annoyed me about The Witcher 3, an otherwise great game. The game world gave the illusion of freedom, but the vast majority of content was in scripted materials. I felt herded along as I rode my horse through yet another vast, empty forest. I want to invert that ratio to where the 80% of free roam presents endless potential for dynamic, unscripted excitement while 20% of the overall experience is in tightly curated and engineered scenarios, similar to how theme parks work. Go to Disneyland and most of the park is just wandering territory where relatively-small islands of literal on-rails experiences (Space Mountain, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Haunted Mansion) are packed into curiously furnished facades that hide the magic within.

Therefore, with that out of the way, this is what I want from this theoretical perfect immersive sim:

Drop me into a vast, multi-layered environment and allow me the freedom to create my own adventures in a world powered by immensely complex AI that will facilitate my curiosity. I don’t want to be guaranteed to have any particular interaction, only the possibility to have any potential interaction. I don’t need to be at the center of some grand conspiracy that will change the world; I just want to be some guy in a truly immersive world. I want my damn verisimilitude.

Let’s start with the setting and aesthetic. Cyberpunk is my favorite sub-genre. It always has been. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I realized that so many of my favorite movies are actually cyberpunk movies: Robocop, Blade Runner, The Matrix, Escape from New York, Demolition Man, Metropolis, Terminator 2, Alphaville, Judge Dredd(yes, the Stallone version), Hardware, Akira, Ghost in the Shell and many others. This is the subgenre that my immersive sim will be set in.

Having an open-world RPG set in a grimy, dystopian world where governments and corporations go to war using tech of unimaginable potential is a seductive theater that I’d want to live in for long chunks of time. Let’s create it.

We’ll call this theoretical RPG, Quantum Fury.

In Quantum Fury, the city in which the game takes place in would be called Desidero Bay, or DB for short. It would be a megalopolis of hard-luck stories where teeming millions are packed into sprawling patches of hyper-dense arcology towers. Beyond these towers are winding, labyrinthine networks of roads, expressways and subways. Webs of aerial vehicle traffic streak across the skies like trails of flying ants. At street level, DB is a human zoo. Dozens of languages are spoken with hundreds of dialects. It’s a future rendition of Babel reborn.

Dark alleys. Filthy streets. The low hum of automated taxis whiz by. Drizzle peppers the asphalt. Holographic ads bombard you with attentional demands and alluring offers. DB is peppered with stacks of bespoke bazaars filled with collections of odd merchandise. Imagine going into one of these little corner shops and digging into a box only to find a rare copy of an old magazine or comic book. You buy it and get the value checked on the ‘Net only to realize it’s extremely valuable. Now you have to plan on how to store it properly and possibly even put it in a safety deposit box in a bank for protection. Somehow, it’s discovered that you have it. People contact you with interest in buying it, but they could be looking to steal it. What do you do? The results are not scripted as the world and NPCs are all dictated by powerfully persistent AI systems.

Maybe you get up one morning and decide to go to a bar and while you’re there, the bartender lets slip that a local gang came into possession of a stolen car belonging to a foreign dignitary. What to do? You could do nothing. You could steal it and keep it. You could steal it and find a way to return it and rightfully pin the blame on the gang. But what if the owner doesn’t believe you and wants you dead? Choices. The responses won’t be scripted, but people in the world will remember what you do.

And here’s the wild part—this isn’t pure sci-fi anymore. Tools like Inworld AI are already letting modders give GTA V and Skyrim NPCs persistent memory, real-time dialogue, and emotional reactions that evolve across sessions.

In DB, anything is possible. Maybe you go get a massage, then have a coffee at your favorite spot, then meet up with a pal or two for a VR session in a private booth. Or maybe you just lie in bed and play an AR game of Duck Hunt in your apartment. In DB, you can do anything or nothing. There is no narrative Sword of Damocles hanging over your head, but anything could happen, sometimes due to your own choices or dumb luck. Quantum Fury would allow you to enjoy an experience that offers you the world and surprises you in ways you didn’t know were possible. I can dream, can’t I?

According to Grok, we’ll have simulations that will achieve my dream of fully dynamic, digital interactive experiences by 2030. A sim like Quantum Fury will likely be in development within 5-6 years. With AI tools to rapidly accelerate production, the game could be done in 2-3 years. These games would be less about contrived mechanics that require you to learn new rules, but instead provide experiences that tap into the organic and natural way that people converse, interact and navigate complex environments. With labor losing leverage, these worlds won’t just entertain; they’ll become the new third places where friendships, romances, and even micro-economies form. I can’t wait.

In the meantime, please take a look at the pre-launch page for Mad Malitia, my cyberpunk novel which is currently in-production.

SARJ OUT

I’m currently writing Mad Malitia, a cyberpunk sci-fi novel set in the year 2147. It’s a story about a tough, audacious and super-sexy female security officer in the future who rides a motorcycle, has a huge sidearm and is practically poured into her skintight black outfit. Curves, cleavage and carnage. Pretty easy, right?

The problem is that once I started actually plotting it out, I realized that the story demanded to be more than simple sex-ploitation pulp, which is what the original intention was. It really hit me that I’m writing a story set in our world, but fast-forwarded 120 years. The problem there is that modern tech is advancing so quickly that the risk of my book seeming antiquated in just a few years is definitely possible.

For those keeping a watchful eye on the slope of modern technology, it seems to be advancing along a hockey stick trajectory. If you’re not an initiate in the ongoing, perpetually changing landscape of tech and AI, a significant portion of the discourse might sound like the transcript for either the writers’ room for a sci-fi streaming show or a psychiatric session. In between getting daily updates on tech, bio-science and AI via Grok, watching podcasts on YouTube like Moonshots, keeping up with Elon Musk’s X post feed and catching up on other news via YouTube, it’s easy to see just how rapidly science and tech are dipping their toes into nigh-magical territory.

SCIENCE FICTION BECOMES FACT

Mass drivers on the Moon. A 100-million square foot chip fab to produce AI chips in Texas. Fleets of self-driving cars. Autonomous humanoid robots. Drone delivery systems. Legions of agentic AIs talking and philosophizing and organizing among themselves independent of human interaction. This isn’t a century from now; this is now. Where will we be in a century? That’s the question I’m trying to answer in this newest book, Mad Malitia.

However, unlike many dystopian cyberpunk tales, Mad Malitia is actually an optimistic, multi-layered story about what defines ethical use of agency and how consciousness is valued in different classes within society. Perhaps a machine, if given the chance, would love to enjoy the privilege of consciousness whilst other human beings might opt to deny themselves the responsibility of autonomy altogether. These post-abundance humans might choose to shuck off the limitations of the real world in favor of a persistent lucid dream that they control.

In our world, there’s a small but surprisingly significant contingent of prison inmates that, upon being released into the free world, actually yearn to return to the regimented and strict paternalism presented by the prison system. Inside, everyone is treated like a child and personal responsibility is limited. In exchange for incarceration, you cede the rights to dictate your own path in life: no freedom but also no responsibility. How do we navigate this unique forest of psychological nuance? These are the questions that will be asked in Mad Malitia.

WRITING FOR A FAST-APPROACHING FUTURE

I’m deeply ensconced in research of near-future tech, but even I have to admit that it’s difficult to maintain a firm grasp on the rapidly iterating future. I still don’t fully understand how Bitcoin works—other than it uses mathematical computations to generate a form of value. Passive, agentic AI is here, but for all that I use tech for, I haven’t dipped my toes into that even though I know it’ll be a key component of future businesses and daily life. It’s literally mind-boggling.

I often get confused while I’m doing research for Mad Malitia because the tech is changing by the day. Interesting statistic: only 12% of people who own Tesla cars utilize its full self-driving feature in which the car uses a network of on-board cameras, computer vision and advanced AI to drive the car without human assistance, and a seemingly vast number of owners aren’t even aware of the feature’s existence. In cities like Phoenix, Oklahoma City and Austin, Texas, groups of self-driving cars are already provide taxi services to hundreds of people. Within a generation, the idea of driving a car will be as crude and laughable as riding a horse to work.

In another example, a robotics company called Figure recently featured one of its autonomous humanoid robots to news agencies around the world, as it was escorted through the White House by First Lady Melania Trump. In a few generations, visibility of these types of bots will be completely and inextricably ubiquitous.

The seminal science fiction film Blade Runner was released in 1982. Based on the Philip K. Dick novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Blade Runner imagined a world—set in the then-future of 2019—where synthetic humans were engineered to serve as slaves to the human race(ironic that the actor Rutger Hauer who played the icy synthetic human, Roy Batty, actually passed away in 2019). Now in 2026, the subject of AI and advanced humanoid robotics is becoming a point of serious debate and contention. There is a serious anti-AI fervor among the general public and unironic robophobic language is beginning to manifest in daily parlance in first-world nations where labor forces will be the first to be adversely affected. A boiling tension is building that our current economic system doesn’t seem designed to contend with. Something’s got to give, right?

There’s a strange comfort in writing a book whose story is set a century from now. I can craft any scenario I want to explain how we get through this tempestuous time. As Mad Malitia develops, I am constructing a future world that has somehow survived the current, uncomfortable, anti-Goldilocks zone of human labor deflationary effects as AI and automation ramps up. The hope is that this era of granular discomfort leads to an age of unparalleled abundance and a thriving global society.

With all of the trends pointing to tech solving problems like aging, diseases, output inequality, energy needs, .etc, a future world will still pose threats to humanity—in all its forms—and freedom. Those threats constitute the kinds of drama that attracts humans to recognize and agree upon shared values. No matter how far we go and how much tech improves, humans will always love a good story. With Mad Malitia, I hope to deliver.

You can preview the live pre-launch Kickstarter page for Mad Malitia here: kickstarter.com/projects/stratum/mad-malitia-cyberpunk-novel

SARJ OUT

I’m posting chapters there now. Enjoy.

Hotel Erebus chapters: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/154398/hotel-erebus

In the fog-shrouded forests of a dying realm, where ancient gods whisper curses and shadows coil like lovers’ fingers, a captive princess locks eyes with her monstrous captor. Their clash is not merely one of blades or spells but of wills, hearts, and forbidden hungers. In the case of my dark fantasy novella, CLEAVE, it’s a hulking, fire-haired brute and his green-skinned female companion galivanting around a brutal, unforgiving world.

This is the visceral allure of dark fantasy romance, or romantasy—a subgenre that has exploded in popularity, blending the grim, morally ambiguous worlds of dark fantasy with the emotional, often steamy core of romance. Series like Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses (with over 40 million copies sold), Keri Lake’s Anathema, Liv Zander’s Feathers So Vicious, Melissa K. Roehrich’s Rain of Shadows and Endings, Raven Kennedy’s Gild, and Amber V. Nicole’s The Book of Azrael dominate bestseller lists and BookTok feeds. These stories thrust readers into cursed kingdoms, vampire wars, demonic pacts, and fae courts where love is a weapon, a salvation, and a risk as lethal as any dragon’s fire.

The genre’s boom is no accident. Romantasy drove a reported 41% surge in speculative fiction sales in recent years, fueled by social media communities where fans dissect power imbalances, redemption arcs, and scorching tension. While romance fiction traditionally skews 82% female, dark fantasy romance draws crossover appeal, with men comprising roughly 18-22% of romance readers overall—and higher in romantasy crossovers via audiobooks (one-third of erotic ones downloaded by men) or epic elements. Both genders devour these tales, but their reasons diverge sharply, rooted in distinct psychological, emotional, and cultural needs. Women often gravitate toward the genre for cathartic emotional depth, empowerment through vulnerability, and safe exploration of taboos amid chaos. Men, conversely, embrace it for the way romance amplifies high-stakes adventure, adds philosophical weight to moral grayness, and offers subtle pathways to emotional literacy and relational insight within familiar heroic frameworks.

At its core, dark fantasy romance fuses the atmospheric dread and systemic brutality of dark fantasy—think corrupted magic systems, oppressive empires, monstrous transformations, and existential horrors—with a central romantic arc that demands equal billing. Unlike traditional epic fantasy, where love might be a fleeting subplot (as in Tolkien’s sparse romances or Martin’s tragic pairings), here it propels the plot. Tropes abound: enemies-to-lovers forged in betrayal, fated mates bound by blood curses, possessive anti-heroes with tragic backstories who wield godlike power yet crumble before a resilient heroine, and power imbalances that twist into mutual surrender. Worlds pulse with visceral stakes—plagues that turn lovers to stone, wars where passion fuels battlefield fury, or pacts with entities that demand souls as dowry.

History traces back to Gothic roots, where heroines like those in Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights navigated brooding, dangerous men amid supernatural gloom. Modern evolution accelerated with authors like Jacqueline Carey (Kushiel’s Dart), whose intricate, erotic dark fantasy blended politics, pain, and devotion. Today’s boom owes much to self-publishing, Kindle Unlimited, and BookTok, where bite-sized videos spotlight “morally gray men who would burn the world for her” alongside heroines who rise from trauma to wield their own darkness. Examples illustrate: In Lake’s Anathema, set in the eerie Eating Woods, a forbidden romance between hunter and hunted explores obsession and survival with raw intensity. Zander’s Court of Ravens duology (Feathers So Vicious and Shadows So Cruel) delivers avian shifters, captivity, and vicious court intrigue laced with transformative love. Roehrich’s Legacy series pits a defiant human against god-like captors in a legacy of shadows and endings, emphasizing agency amid despair. These are not fluffy escapism; they are visceral, often explicit, demanding readers confront beauty in brutality.

What draws women so powerfully to this blend? For the majority-female readership, dark fantasy romance serves as profound emotional and psychological nourishment. First and foremost, it offers catharsis and safe exploration of taboos. In a world where real-life women navigate consent debates post-#MeToo, economic pressures, and emotional minefields, these stories provide a controlled arena to engage forbidden fantasies—dominance and submission, obsession bordering on possession, dubious consent that resolves into enthusiastic partnership, or the thrill of “taming the beast.” Psychological research on fiction reading highlights “emotional simulation”: brains treat characters’ experiences as real, allowing readers to process fears, desires, and traumas vicariously without consequence. Dark romance amplifies this like horror does fear—readers confront the “shadow self” (Jungian terms), exploring vulnerability or aggression they might suppress. A dominant, morally gray hero who stalks, claims, or breaks yet ultimately yields offers the fantasy of being irresistibly desired in all one’s complexity, flaws included. As one candid reader insight frames it, women often feel “romance starved” in daily life, craving the devoted pursuit and emotional parity romances guarantee.

Empowerment runs deep. Heroines are rarely passive damsels; they are survivors—hunters turned queens (Feyre in Maas’s series), captives who rewrite their cages, or warriors who match their partners’ darkness. Love becomes a forge for growth: trauma is not erased but integrated, turning pain into strength. In bleak worlds of endless night or divine tyranny, the HEA (happily ever after) or hard-won HFN (happy for now) injects radical optimism. Romance novels are the genre most insistent on hope, countering cynicism with the promise that even gods or demons can be redeemed through connection. This resonates culturally for women, who statistically read more fiction for relational insight and escapism. Steamy scenes, far from gratuitous, build intimacy through consent negotiations, banter, and mutual worship, offering models of desire where women hold narrative power. Community amplifies this—BookTok discussions foster sisterhood, fanfiction reclaims agency, and shared “book boyfriend” obsessions validate the joy of intense feeling. In short, for women, the darkness heightens the romance’s light: it validates emotional intensity as heroic, not weak, and transforms personal longings into epic triumphs.

Men’s enjoyment, while overlapping in escapism and thrill, stems from complementary yet distinct drivers. Dark fantasy has long been a male-leaning space—grimdark epics by authors like Joe Abercrombie or Mark Lawrence emphasize strategy, moral corrosion, and anti-heroic grit akin to video games or war stories. When romance integrates seamlessly, it elevates rather than supplants these elements, drawing men who might otherwise dismiss “chick lit.” For them, romance functions as high-octane fuel for plot and character complexity. The love interest raises stakes exponentially: a hero fights not just for abstract justice but to protect or win a partner whose loss would shatter him. This mirrors classic male fantasies of conquest—battlefield glory paired with romantic validation—but with modern depth. The anti-hero’s journey from isolated monster to devoted love humanizes power fantasies, allowing readers to explore vulnerability without stigma. A warrior who weeps for his mate or negotiates emotional wounds models strength through connection, subtly building empathy.

Reader data and cultural commentary support this. Men report turning to romance for relational “cheat codes”—insights into female perspectives on communication, consent, pleasure, and emotional needs that enhance real partnerships. In dark fantasy romance, this shines: morally gray MMCs like Rhysand (Maas) or the tortured gods in Nicole’s series reveal layered interiors—trauma, strategic brilliance, fierce protectiveness—within epic scopes of world-ending threats. Men often prioritize plot and world-building; here, romance enriches without dominating, providing emotional payoff to intellectual immersion. Sexual elements appeal differently too—narrative-driven spice offers context and buildup superior to visual media for many, blending arousal with story. Crossover hits prove it: men praise ACOTAR for “insane world-building and action” alongside the romance that “makes characters feel real.” In grimdark with romantic threads (e.g., Abercrombie’s subtle pairings or romantasy by male-leaning fans), the bond adds philosophical weight—love as the ultimate rebellion against nihilism.

Broader benefits include emotional literacy. Suppressed societal norms around male feelings find outlet in safe, fictional heroism: the alpha who admits need without weakness. Some men seek understanding of “what women want”—devotion amid dominance, respect in passion—translating to better intimacy (studies link romance reading to higher relationship satisfaction and frequency). Unlike pure romance, the dark fantasy wrapper feels “permissible”—battles and magic cloak the heart-work, letting men engage tenderness through a warrior lens. This isn’t universal; individual tastes vary, and growing male romantasy fans cite pure enjoyment of compelling storytelling. Yet the divergence is clear: where women center relational transformation, men often frame romance as enhancer of larger heroic arcs.

Shared ground unites them. Both genders crave escapism from mundanity, the thrill of moral ambiguity mirroring real complexities, and the universal hunger for connection in chaos. Culturally, the genre reflects shifting norms—exploring consent, gender fluidity, and power in post-pandemic, socially conscious times. BookTok democratizes access, eroding stigmas. Criticisms of “toxic” tropes persist, yet defenders note fantasy’s role in processing, not prescribing, reality; redemption arcs emphasize growth over glorification.

Ultimately, romance in dark fantasy endures because it mirrors life’s dualities: light needs shadow to shine. Women find mirrors for their inner strength and emotional worlds; men discover expanded heroism through vulnerability. Both emerge enriched, hearts a little less armored, ready to face their own shadows. In these pages, love doesn’t conquer all—it transforms the conquerors, proving that even in the darkest fantasy, desire lights the path home.

Don’t forget to check out my dark fantasy novella, CLEAVE, on Kickstarter.

SARJ OUT

BIRTHING THE PHOENIX

Western entertainment studios have been on a crusade for the past near fifteen years producing almost nothing but deconstructive anti-culture with the unstated goal of demoralizing a people. It’s the termite approach to homebuilding: Find a building with a strong foundation, chew away at the wood, spreading feces and creating colonies. Eventually, the house erodes beyond repair and collapses. Profit?

From Star Wars to Star Trek to Doctor Who to Marvel to Halo to Dungeons and Dragons, cultural thieves and political ideologues took charge of storied, fan-valued institutions and began to aim for every iceberg they could find. Any way to dissect, criticize or disassemble the foundational components was their goal and hundreds of billions in IP value has been lost across the board.

Incompetent industry plants have been given the keys to media kingdoms only for them to be driven into the ground out of sheer hubris and creative impotence. Franchises that once kept toy stores open can’t even attract enough of an audience on streaming networks; characters that used to sell millions of copies of comic books can’t sell more than tens of thousands; games that used to draw the attention of tens of millions of gamers can’t break even and end up losing money. It’s mass cultural suicide. It’s purposeful.

GATEKEEPING DOESN’T WORK

I hear fans say “We need to gatekeep our hobbies!” but the problem is that you rely on corporations who owns the intellectual properties that your hobbies are contingent on. How can you gatekeep what you don’t own?

The fact that we in the West are reliant on a small, concentrated conglomerate of global corporations to provide our entertainment is a sin. I’ve said this for many years, but I’ll say it again here: The future of entertainment is decentralization. The status quo of a dozen or so brands providing most of our fun is over.

We’re already seeing this truth being realized in the gaming industry. The titans of “AAA” over-funded, over-monetized and over-developed video games are getting thrown into a corner and bludgeoned by indie games. Small teams of 1-10 people can create games that entertain hundreds of thousands to millions on a fraction of the budget of a Call of Duty or Assassin’s Creed and even industry insiders are feeling the burn.

Despite the fear within the freelancer developer sphere that powers the Moloch engine of AAA corporate gaming, many indies are happily providing friction-free entertainment for the masses. The Mewgenics’ dev team is around twenty people, including freelancers, and it’s been a massive hit. Check out the SteamDB charts as of 2/20.

And on the other end, you have big money-friendly title Highguard which was funded by Chinese transmedia giant Tencent and promoted on the Game Awards. Wildlight, the developer behind Highguard, suffered massive layoffs just weeks after release and the game is on deathwatch.

Developers who are gifted big-corpo money to push faux-entertainment on BS-resistant gamers are losing money hand over fist while indie teams that operate on more agile workflows and can entertain new ideas are bathing in money and accolades.

You can’t socially engineer interest; people either like an idea or they don’t. Period. In the early 1980s, the video game industry was on the verge of collapse. The very term “video game” was anathema to investors and families after a tidal wave of sloppy, sub-standard games from Atari. Then came along this scrappy upstart named “Nintendo” who were developing video games, but knew that they had to rebrand to get their game console into homes. Their marketing strategy relied on calling their console a “Home Entertainment System” in the vaguest of descriptions. Kids ended up playing the pack-in game, Super Mario Bros., loved it and got their parents to bring the “NES” home. Video games were resuscitated and the industry is alive and well.

The appeal of Mario and Nintendo couldn’t be forced. Nintendo had to bring the quality—unlike predecessor Atari—and they did. Now, with literally tens of thousands of game developer companies globally, gamers are eating good. But if you want to be noticed, you’ve got to bring the fire. No one is guaranteed or owed success, and no amount of ideologically-driven campaigns of misinformation from “games journalists” will convince people to like a game; neither will campaigns of negative reviews dissuade people from genuinely liking something. The quality always rises and decentralization keeps an industry healthy. Concentrating the hobby of video games into one company, Atari, was near the death of it. Plurality of choice engenders competition and keeps companies honest.

(FRANCHISE) LOVE HURTS

Dungeons and Dragons has been around for half a century and has enthralled millions around the world. The realms created by those who originated the game—like its inventor, Gary Gygax—have resulted in innumerable stories created and experienced by gamers. However, the genius of Gary Gygax is no longer the engine of Dungeons and Dragons; it’s been co-opted by destroyers of culture who are obsessed with moral relativism and who hold a visceral disdain for the cultural foundations that inspired the game.

Dungeons and Dragons is a cautionary tale of what happens when something so beloved is so disrespected and strays from its roots. Thankfully, entertainment is much more accessible due to the internet, so as quickly as fantasy worlds can be captured and ruined, new ones can be created and discovered. That goes for all forms of media: books, movies, animation, comics and games. Fans will find new homes within which to congregate; they won’t settle for pale imitations of the things they used to love.

But fans can also be their own worst enemies. They invest their time, money and sentimental energy into singular franchises and when they inevitably get infiltrated and compromised, they get angry. I’ve not been angry about any franchise, company or industry getting destroyed from within because I’m not a fanatic of anything made by other people. That’s the sad realization I came to: you should only be a pure, unadulterated fan of the stuff you make yourself.

Now, before you get angry, I’ll clarify; it doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy things other people make, but it behooves us to not invest too much emotional capital into things we don’t own and can’t control. I think Warhammer is really interesting. I bought half a dozen books and read two of them. The lore is amazing. Am I afraid it will get “captured” and destroyed? No. Because there’s always another group of passionate individuals who will make something equally appealing and I’ll be happy to consider that. It’s okay to let go. What matters is that your entertainment actually entertains you.

YOU ARE THE ALTERNATIVE

If you’re an aspiring professional creative, and you want to be the one to catch the ball when the stewards of beloved franchises fumble, then you’re in good company. There’s no big secret. All you need is a product and a willing and eager audience of customers. A payment processor provides the handshake and you’re good to go.

We need more creative minds, more customer-first companies and new and fresh ideas. There’s no need to rely on mega-corps that can easily be taken over by people who refuse to do their jobs and just entertain you.

Now, if you have no interest in being a creative and just want to be on the receiving end of the entertainment, all the better! Support the independent creators that are making what you do like. We can create new communities together that don’t require the behemoth of corporate and special interest meddling. I’m proud to be making stuff for you.

SARJ OUT

As the title of this article says, I can’t contain my excitement and it’s all your fault. You’re out there somewhere just waiting to be entertained by Stratum Press and that gives me the most important gift in life: purpose.

STRATUM PRESS NEWS

• Hotel Erebus shipped to Kickstarter pre-order customers and the audiobook, softcover and hardcover are coming soon to Amazon and other platforms.

• CLEAVE, my dark fantasy novella has launched on Kickstarter and hit its funding goal in less than a day.

Over the last few months, I’ve finished two books and am working on a third called Mad Malitia, and my business partner is nearly done developing a tabletop RPG based on the world of Hotel Erebus.

CLEAVE IS NOW ON KICKSTARTER—AND HIT ITS FUNDING GOAL

The CLEAVE project hit its funding goal in less than a day. You can pre-order the Hardcover Pack (which contains the book itself and a 48-page Image Gallery) now for $60. The book is already done and ready to go to the printers.

WE’RE MAKING MORE COOL STUFF FOR YOU

The aforementioned tabletop RPG is called Heroes of Nocturne and centers on the adventures of Elijah Crowe and Mia Wolfe from Hotel Erebus. The game focuses on a secret society of heroes fighting against evil global forces and players will get access to tons of hero, ability and movement cards. If you missed Hotel Erebus on its Kickstarter, you’ll be able to get it along with the game as one big reward package.

BIG SUMMER LAUNCHES TO GET YOU EXCITED

The project and distribution schedule for Stratum Press is mostly set for 2026 and things are on schedule so far. One of the things I’m most excited for will be around the end of May when we’ll technically be offering three big projects simultaneously.

• An action novel called MAXIMUM STRIKE about a global fight club and the evil mastermind running it who is trying to turn the human race against itself.

• A competitive card game based on Maximum Strike.

• A supernatural romance epic called INFERNAL HEART about a young demoness trying to escape a life of drudgery and boredom who is approached by a mysterious demon who offers her a way out.(Infernal Heart is actually done; I just have to run through it for a corrective draft or two)

And that’s not to mention all of the assorted and miscellaneous merch we’ll be offering for each project that I haven’t thought up yet. The Maximum Strike Kickstarter campaign will be our biggest yet with both the book and game offered together along with a big art book, a soundtrack(that we may offer on CD or vinyl) stickers, flyers and everything needed to help offer a “Sphere of Immersion” for you the customer.

JOINING THE 3D TOY-PRINTING REVOLUTION

In the late summer/fall, we’ll be investing in some 3D printers to begin creating physical merch for the company: action figures, statues, miniatures, dice, and anything else you might want. That’s really going to blow the doors off. I have so many ideas involving 3D printing that will allow us at Stratum Press to make some super-cool products that I think will excite you.

Oh, and I looked into custom toy packaging and discovered a machine called a Vaquform DT2 that makes the plastic bubble shell you see in action figure packaging. It’s not a cheap machine, but I think as a business expense it will work and I’ll try to amortize the cost over several Kickstarter campaigns where I’ll offer figures as rewards. Blister packaging isn’t just for the big manufacturers; we can do it in-house.

WHAT DO YOU WANT? WE WANT TO MAKE IT!

Whether it’s books, tabletop games, action figures, statues, collectible cards, pogs(remember those?), bookmarks, t-shirts, CDs/albums, anything. If you think it would be cool, we want to offer it. We’re independent and make whatever we want, which means we work for you. You help us and we supply you with neat stuff. Win-win!

Now click here and go pre-order CLEAVE!

SARJ OUT

Character is story. Design is character. Design is story.

The appeal of story is a journey through moral systems colliding against nature, conflict and our presumptions about everything. Characters are the vehicles through which we experience story. A character’s design is paramount in maximizing the effect of character and story, because design itself tells story.

Failure in respecting the art of visual character design can often lead to failure in storytelling as they’re entwined. We’ve seen this especially in video games as of late where the failed $400m behemoth Concord has created an unfortunate new subgenre called Concord-likes. This pejorative label calls attention to characters with designs that don’t resonate with audiences for a variety of reasons. “Concordian” characters are stricken with a lack of distinguishing characteristics that renders them inert or ones that are made to be unappealing. They can be rendered in high-resolution and with staggering levels of detail but lacking soul and any particular inspiration.

Conversely, good/great design can produce iconic results. The same actor in different aesthetic setups changes the character. Think of Marlon Brando’s career: he played numerous iconic roles, from Vito Corleone to Jor-El to Colonel Kurtz.

Each character was defined by a different set of morals and values which contributed to the stories in which they were involved. Who would Superman be without the guidance of Jor-El, who was designed to appear as a pure, god-like being.

Jeff Bridges’ take on The Dude has also stood the test of time, and the character’s design is a huge part of that. Take one look at him and you know what he’s about. He’s a flighty lay-about that has a penchant for bowling and beverages. And he looks it.

From John McClane to Dorothy Gale to Freddy Krueger to the Hulk, the Phantom, the Shadow and Superman, visual design helps immensely to summarize the conceit of a character at a glance.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF INDIRECT BLANDNESS

Video games are a visual, interactive medium. Video game characters are the best example of design as character. From Mario to Kratos to Master Chief to Lara Croft to Samus Aran to Princess Peach, visual composition helps to convey to the player the purpose of the character in action. No one looks at Master Chief and thinks he’s going to be involved in gardening. No one looks at Ryu from Street Fighter and expects him to engage in a walking simulator. And that’s the point: the success of a character is often how a design fulfills the catharsis provided by the gameplay feedback loop.

Let’s compare two recent games: Deadlock and Highguard. Deadlock is a massive online battle arena(MOBA) taking place in an alternate 1930s America where occult forces run rampant. You choose from a cast of eclectic characters to achieve favor with one of two earthbound deities, the Hidden King or the Archmother. Highguard is a first-person 5v5 shooter where two teams fight across fantastical realms to secure resources for their side.

Deadlock has been in “early access” for almost two year whereas Highguard released recently. The results of the two games exist on flip sides of the same coin: Deadlock has been a massive success in early access, getting over 25k concurrent players on any given day. Highguard, on the other hand, started with nearly 100k concurrent players on day one, but that number plummeted quickly to low four-figure players. And while Deadlock is limited to invite-only players, Highguard is a free-to-play game. One of the reasons that Highguard elicits the ire of players is the perceived disjointed and stilted visual design which is a pastiche of vague fantasy and sci-fi tropes than anything concrete and inspired.

My son plays Deadlock and even though I have no interest in playing it, the visual design and language of the world is undeniably interesting. The catalog of 30s/noir/spiritualism artistry is a beautiful thing to see. One look at each character and their pasts, personalities and gameplay utility are obvious. There’s no ambiguity. In fast-paced shooter games where you see opposing team members in fleeting moments from a distance, vague is failure.

GRIME IS SUBLIME

Seemingly innocuous blandness can stand out as a unique identifier that exalts a character beyond their apparent mediocrity. In fact, intentional mediocrity itself can act as an amplifier of qualities that uplift a character into the stratosphere.

John McClane walks into the Nakatomi Plaza in 1988 and becomes an action hero. He’s an everyman outsider who ends up running around the building in a dirty wife beater, slacks, no shoes and a bag filled with weapons and detonators trying to stop a gang of international thieves. That look became iconic and determined the character’s importance. Why? If you see a normal man running around with no shoes, a dirty wife beater, covered in soot and lacerations and carrying an MP5, there’s a good chance he didn’t choose his circumstances; he’s just doing what he can to survive them. That’s story.

The best stories are when active protagonists are oppressed by circumstances beyond their control and—usually—they conquer their circumstances to win the day. Even Bruce Willis’ other character, Butch from Pulp Fiction, navigated a maze of eclectic and murderous weirdos to ride off on a stolen motorcycle—’Zed’s dead, baby.’—with a beautiful woman. He won.

Ellen Ripley operates a spaceborne refinery in the distant future. She’s just another member of a crew of blue-collar Joes and Janes. Her overalls and unglamorous appearance lets you know she’s not an intergalactic space marine; she’s just another person. However, it’s this intentional mediocrity that elevates her as she faces off against a nigh-invincible xenomorph that has infiltrated her ship. Light years away from home, no one was coming to save her and the crew of the Nostromo. What was required in the vacuum of space was courage. We watched her find this courage and survive. That’s character, and her blending in as just another crew member made her notable and memorable almost five decades later.

MAKE CHARACTERS FIT

One of the things that I’ve been focused on in writing books is to establish diverse characters that feel right within their worlds. These characters are best suited to act as avatars for the reader experience within the unique circumstances of each setting and conflict. Elijah Crowe(left below)—complete with his history, hangups and shortcomings—doesn’t work as well in the year 2147 where Mad Malitia(right below) lives; Elijah is a Chicago boy born in 1900, a street tough struggling with faith. Malitia’s youthful trauma, and how she navigates these emotional obstacles, aren’t as effectively exploited in a dark fantasy world filled with goblins and harpies; she lives in the distant future. Cleave(center below) only matters where there’s a blade to be plunged into evil flesh. Character, conflict and setting. If these line up properly, you’ve got something.

Speaking of characters, my horror/action book Hotel Erebus is releasing as an audiobook, softcover and hardcover this week on Amazon and likely other platforms. CLEAVE is launching on Kickstarter this week, as well. Mad Malitia is a work-in-progress(about 20% done, finished by mid-March).

CLEAVE Kickstarter Preview: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stratum/cleave-a-blood-thirsty-dark-fantasy-novella-by-sarj?ref=btsfxw&token=834a91f5

Stratum Press’s catalog is slowly growing with two completed books and a third on the way. The first game—a tabletop RPG—is coming in April. We should have a Shopify store launched by June when the first full-length novel—a supernatural romance—is going to Kickstarter along with another short novel and another tabletop game will be releasing.

The future is looking bright and we look forward to entertaining you.

SARJ OUT

COMPANY UPDATE

• Hotel Erebus Hardcovers are arriving from the printer in a few days(Fedex says Friday the 6th) and shipping to Kickstarter supporters.

• Chapters of my dark fantasy novella CLEAVE are going to Royal Road by the end of the week and then launching on Kickstarter shortly after.

• My next book, a cyberpunk novel called Mad Malitia, is 25 pages in—out of a proposed 245 pages. First draft should be done by the end of February.

You, as an individual creative, CAN create “spheres of immersion”. And what are spheres of immersion? Simply, I describe them as this:

A sphere of immersion(SOI) is a collection of transmedia expressions of an intellectual property that satisfies on various levels and provides a sense of verisimilitude. (Ex. Enjoying Transformers because of the breadth of media available as movies, toys, video games, books, comic books, etc.)

This is why lore is so important to stories if you’re trying to build a property that is an SOI. It implies that the world within the story exists beyond the specific series of events you personally experience within it. If you read The Hobbit and then the Lord of the Rings books, you can also read about historical lore within Tolkien’s imagination that predated all of the events of the actual books. SOIs create fans, fanatics whose interest is heightened by the ancillary content and context.

“Fandom” derives from an unusual level of excitement for an entertainment property. Disney, Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel and DC Comics, Barbie, Warhammer, Grand Theft Auto, Minecraft, Pokemon, Harry Potter, Dungeons & Dragons, Cyberpunk(personal favorite), etc. These franchises would be considered SOIs.

For instance, the 1980s were an engine of SOIs. Every major property was a transmedia titan: GI Joe, Transformers, Masters of the Universe, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Voltron and too many others to rattle off. Each property was expressed through various transmedia: a TV show, toy line, comic book and miscellaneous merchandise.

People love Warhammer 40K because of the vast, VAST levels of immersive potential. There are tabletop games, video games, toys, paintable figurines, statues, a library’s worth of books, animated episodes, YouTube videos and a growing collection of new content. There are thousands of characters across millennia worth of story to delve into.

I’ll be clear, though: a property doesn’t need to be an SOI in order to successfully entertain. One-offs are more than enough to be successful. One of my favorite games ever, Sleeping Dogs, never got a sequel or anything else for that matter. No movies. No books. No merch. Nothing. I still remember the game, the experience, the story. My point is that SOIs give you more of what you want and can improve the overall experience.

YOU CAN DO IT

We live in a unique inflection point in history, detailed by my previous article which can be found here…

…but the change is that now, with new and rapidly-advancing technologies, we independent creatives can do more with a whole lot less; less money, less resources, less professional connections.

Decades ago, if you wanted to write a book, you could do it on your own, but that’s about it. Want to take your idea and turn it into an animated show? Good luck with that. Movie? Good luck with that. Video game? Good luck with that. You’d need entire teams of people and millions of dollars of capital investment to move that much intelligence to create your product.

With access to powerful AI platforms, 3D printing and relatively inexpensive online print and eCommerce storefronts, an individual or a small group could conceivably create a transmedia property and express it in a variety of means. Books, comic books, 3D printed figurines, soundtracks(via platforms like Suno), image galleries and short films could all be done with existing technology. Oh, and Elon Musk just filed with the FCC to put one-million AI satellites in space that would enable us to generate full-length movies and even video games via prompts in just a few years.

Notice that I didn’t say anything about getting rich by doing any of this. This is entirely about potential creative output and the quality of life benefits derived from this for both creators and consumers.

MORE FOR LESS

For the upcoming CLEAVE dark fantasy novel, I’m going to be selling pre-orders for the book I wrote 100% with my own human agency, BUT, IN ADDITION TO THAT, I’m also offering a 60>90-minute digital soundtrack I generated via Suno and a digital art book I developed with the help of SuperGrok, that I’ll be offering to go along with the CLEAVE soft/hardcovers for no additional charges to the pre-order customers.

CLEAVE Kickstarter preview link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stratum/cleave-a-blood-thirsty-dark-fantasy-novella-by-sarj

I’m no musician, nor am I an illustrator, but I can now give you additional enjoyment for little to no additional cost to me in regards to time, energy, capital or resources. A soundtrack that would’ve been impossible to produce by me is now relatively easy. I don’t need to be a music producer with six or seven figures of capital to invest into an album. I don’t need to spend 10,000 hours to learn how to paint and then spend a year to create an art book. It’s relatively simple to create a beautiful set of images that will offer you enhanced immersion into the world of CLEAVE at no cost to you and little cost to me. The human-written book is the actual sellable product(the cake); everything else is additional icing.

So, what are you waiting for? Be great and create!

SARJ OUT

THE PROBLEM WITH PROSPERITY

As a Gen Xer, I joke with my Gen Z son that I’ll play more video games when scientists extend the human lifespan indefinitely(as well as finding a way to upload human consciousness to a variety of physical interfaces like robots) and I don’t need to work as much. And I know that as I say that, we human beings in the year 2026 are living in a very unique inflection point in history.

I’ll make it clear that I’m a tech super-optimist and I think that the curve of history will lean towards increased abundance, as it has in every capitalist, first-world nation. Having said that, I have no romantic sentiments—nor am I married to—the current paradigm where the entirety of human-centric scheduling and planning revolves around trading labor for a fungible, faith-based resource called fiat money. Based on trending tech movements, the post-industrial revolution paradigm is not long for this world.

So many seemingly disparate technologies are adapting and evolving simultaneously, and it appears that this evolution won’t be stopping anytime soon; in fact, they’re accelerating along an upturned hockey stick trajectory. People are worried about job displacement due to automation and the looming robotics revolution, increasing energy costs due to AI data centers, inflationary effects on the economy, and thus many are caught in a general malaise about the future. I think that over the last fifty years, tech has been slowly converging while we’ve been simultaneously prepared sociologically for a post-labor world.

UNSTOPPABLE CHANGE

Between AI, VR, streaming compute, crypto, internet accessibility, etc, we’ve all been subjected to the largest social experiment where an alternative to the drudge-labor-for-money-to-access-basic-amenities is rapidly approaching. I was in Phoenix, AZ a few weeks ago and was surprised to see around a dozen self-driving Waymo cars tooling around. I had been in Phoenix less than a year ago and never saw one of them. Tesla is slowly discontinuing models in their commercial fleet offerings to make way for their autonomous Robotaxi future. The cost of transportation will begin to shrink. Change is coming before our eyes.

It’s becoming increasingly evident that the economy of the near-future will shift to a system where AI and robots will facilitate a move to largely equitable distribution of bio-system necessities like water, clean food and potentially even shelter and clothing. This system of residual abundance distribution will exist alongside competitive, capitalistic, open-market negotiations between free human capital. And in this abundant future—where most people will be burdened by free time—recreation, artistic creation and expression will be even more paramount.

The long-term is offering prospects of abundance that will change the paradigm of human labor-for-resources. Birth->K-12->College->Labor Force->Retirement won’t be a relevant timeline soon. But how will the general population take to this? What will happen to a human race that has—since birth—been trained to be a cog in an uncaring industrial macro-machine? What will people do when their entire schedule doesn’t orbit around the monolith of “work”? What will people do once burdened with an abundance of resources and time? Freedom can become an albatross and we’ll need to fill the void of drudge with something. Perhaps the answer has been there all along.

WEARING SHADES IN A BRIGHT FUTURE

Video games are now the preeminent form of entertainment. Gaming unseated film and TV years ago and this will not stop. No other medium allows the individual to not only interact with virtual worlds in a stratified way, but to also do so with social features that are baked into the experience. Human beings are social animals and gaming allows us to simulate every human instinct and impulse—good and arguably bad—with limited risk to body and property.

In Call of Duty, you can fight super-soldiers with next-gen military hardware while joking with your friends about that one time in college that you slipped on ice and spilled coffee on your date. The hunting parties from 10,000 B.C.—where the legitimate threat of being gored by a sabretooth tiger or stomped by a wooly mammoth—are simulated millions of times a day across the planet where teams of internationally-distributed people work together to achieve contrived tactical goals. This is a unique anthropological phenomenon that people pass off as “vidya games”.

Video games are models that reflect human instincts and desires. We live vicariously through our digital avatars. Three of the most popular games of all-time—Minecraft, Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto—indulge our most primal desires to 1.) acquire resources, explore and build shelters; 2.) to hunt 3.) and to test social boundaries—all of which are all deeply engrained in the human animal.

For over four decades, video games have increasingly offered simulated worlds made to appear as real as possible, when in all actuality the worlds are quite rudimentary. Characters in video games are digitally sculpted, scripted and fashioned in such a way that they appear human, but like a mannequin equipped with a speaker that projects a series of pre-recorded lines, the mannequin’s ability to simulate humanity is limited.

But what if it was possible for the promise of true simulation to be fully realized? What if non-player characters in games were intelligent, possessing realistic behavioral patterns, memories, quirks and lives of their own? What if you could have full-on, unscripted conversations and engagements with characters that relied on your real world ability to do so? No dialogue options to click, just verbal interactions that relied on a human-to-human ability to transmit information? That would change everything, and it looks like we’re headed towards this reality via artificial intelligence. There’s just one problem, and it’s a big one.

THE FUTURE IS POWER

True hyper-realistic worlds demand something foundational: power. Massive, cheap, endless power. The problem is that in the most delicate and important era in human history, everyone needs more power. In a time where a global robotics and AI arms race is pushing companies and nations to innovate on a daily basis, even new forms of energy capture are being floated. The old alternatives of nuclear and solar aren’t enough to accommodate a rapidly changing world.

Elon Musk floated the idea—no pun intended—of space-based AI data centers in a Sun-synchronous orbit around the Earth, which would solve two main problems of AI: 1.) massive power draw on centralized grids which drives up prices for private citizens and 2.) the additive energy cost associated with cooling said AI data centers. Space-based AI could slash compute costs 15-20x, flooding future video games with intelligent agents at negligible expense.

Advancing tech will push the cost of power lower and lower. The cost of AI tokens will drop and the potential intelligence of individual AI agents will skyrocket. Video games will benefit greatly from this. Why play games with stiff, pre-scripted mannequins when you can engage on realistic terms with virtual people? Subconsciously, I think we all know that this has been the goal from the beginning.

LIVING IN INFINITE VIRTUAL WORLDS

What will be the payoff? In an ideal world, abundance through AI, automation and robotics enabled by cheap energy will allow people to spend as much time as they want with family and friends and pursue their own interests. Over 3.3 billion people are identified as “gamers” globally. Once people will no longer need to work to get access to basic resources, that number will skyrocket. The number of people who will be free to develop virtual worlds with increasingly powerful tools will also increase.

Imagine a game like Cyberpunk 2077, Elder Scrolls or Grand Theft Auto in two decades where abundance allows us the ability to spend time in these virtual worlds with virtual people so intelligent that they won’t be “NPCs”, they’ll be our friends. They’ll engage with us in the real world via phone calls and text messaging(Openclaw is doing this now) and we’ll even create lives together. Our virtual lives will become irrevocably entangled with the real world.

We’ll have to juggle personas in different simulations. In an AI-powered Elder Scrolls we’ll manage a farm with dozens of friends in nearby villages; in a future Cyberpunk game we’ll be a merc balancing love and business. In the real world, our phones—or whatever future analog will exist—will act as a convergence point to bind these experiences together and the level of immersion will be undeniable. This would’ve sounded insane a few years ago, but it’s not only possible, it’s inevitable. For me, the future is arriving incredibly fast and is blindingly bright.

The novel I’m working on right now is called Mad Malitia and takes place in the year 2147, so delving deeper into these contemporary tech concerns have served as soft research for the book. Despite everything I’ve previously catalogued regarding automation and AI, Mad Malitia will be 100% written by me. I think that the coming of the AI-powered windfall will allow people like me to do more as a creative than I ever could have before. Therefore, I am exceptionally excited about the future of tech; it could benefit us by providing increased means of survival and improving quality of life while simultaneously unlocking our human ability to want to express ourselves through art.

SARJ OUT

Well, I’ll tell you what’s happening with Stratum Press. A great many things!

PUBLISHER UPDATE

• I have an Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/stores/S.A.-Reyes-Jones/author/B0GK5L1GDC

• Hotel Erebus has been distributed digitally to its Kickstarter backers.

• The Hotel Erebus hardcover is at the printers and will arrive soon to be sent to the Kickstarter backers.

• The Hotel Erebus eBook is currently available at Amazon - https://kdp.amazon.com/amazon-dp-action/us/dualbookshelf.marketplacelink/B0GJCSJ68R

• The second book—the dark fantasy epic, CLEAVE—is entirely done and ready to go for a Kickstarter launch in around two weeks.

• The next book, a cyberpunk ultraviolence thrill ride called MAD MALITIA, is being plotted out now, with the first draft slated to be completed by the end of February 2026. Kickstarter campaign in April 2026.

• A tabletop “lite-RPG” based on the world of Hotel Erebus is in production right now, is nearly done, and will go to Kickstarter in mid-March 2026.

ARE YOU READY FOR THE SUMMER?

Come summertime, Stratum Press will have probably five books and two games for you to look forward to and enjoy. None of the Kickstarter projects will go live until the actual book or game is done and ready to go to print.

Remember, Stratum Press is here to entertain you.

SARJ OUT

My horror/action novella, HOTEL EREBUS, is now available as an eBook. Audiobook is coming soon on Amazon!

Amazon eBook: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GJCSJ68R

Get the Hotel Erebus eBook

I’m closing the Kickstarter campaign on Sunday, Jan 18th. The book goes to the printers on Monday, Jan 19th.

Hotel Erebus Kickstarter-First Novella

AI DISCLOSURE: “Hotel Erebus” is written entirely by a human author (SARJ) and edited by a human being. No AI was used in the writing of the book.

ELIJAH CROWE is a troubled man in troubled times. In the wake of the end of World War 1, Elijah returns home in 1920s Chicago to become a low-level street hood. One night, he awakens in a strange hotel not remembering how he got there. A blaring voice on a speaker box tells him that he’s in a room on the sixth floor of Hotel Erebus and if he wants to leave, he just has to find a way to get to the first floor and walk out. The problem is that Hotel Erebus is no typical place and the hotel is filled with occupants that don’t want him to leave. The mysterious voice offers him a suitcase that has two strange pistols in it that don’t need to be reloaded and don’t run out of ammo. They’re his only weapons and only means of protection for this night of terror.

Will Elijah survive and escape? Find out by reading Hotel Erebus!

Below is one of the cover selections for the softcover edition.

The hardcover edition has a cover that is likely the image below.

Hotel Erebus has many inspirations, from pulp magazines to action movies and classic horror movies.

I hope you’ll give Hotel Erebus a shot. It’s a great—what I call—"waiting room read”; it’s a thrill ride that respects your time by starting out in a full octane sprint and rarely stops to take a breath until an action-packed ending. If it sells well, there might be more stories about Elijah Crowe and Mia Wolfe!

Hotel Erebus novella Kickstarter

MY DARK FANTASY NOVELLA, CLEAVE, IS COMPLETE

The first Stratum Press novella, Hotel Erebus, is going to print soon and then to the Kickstarter backers who pre-ordered it. CLEAVE is now done. The novella has clocked in at 42k words and 150 pages. It’s a super-fun action-adventure story set in a dark fantasy world where life is cruel and blood flows like water. Cleave, the barbarian from the northlands, teams up with a feisty and tough goblin girl named Gishna to hunt down a band of cultists trying to bring about the end of days.

CLEAVE PREVIEW: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stratum/810839215?ref=btsfxw&token=834a91f5

CLEAVE NOVELLA PREVIEW

The Kickstarter page for CLEAVE will go live in a few weeks. I’m considering adding some kind of stretch goal for a bonus chapter or scene.

WHAT’S NEXT?

I’m weighing my options as to what the next novella will be. I’m leaning towards a cyberpunk story featuring a sexy, no-nonsense law enforcer in the late 21st century. The novella will be heavily influenced by 90s anime like Wicked City, Angel Cop, Akira and Ghost in the Shell and would feature over-the-top action for fans of sci-fi, cyberpunk and outlandishly sexy heroines.

I’m thinking the page count will hover between 150 and 175 pages. There will be updates soon regarding this absolutely MAD woman.

SARJ OUT

I recently had a Kickstarter project get funded for my horror/action novella, Hotel Erebus. I had already planned on doing a follow-up sequel to Hotel Erebus, but my business partner had a great idea; take the sequel to the book and use it to branch out into other media. I was intrigued…

You can still Pre-Order Hotel Erebus

BIG IDEAS DESERVE BIG PLATFORMS

So my business partner and I had this discussion a week or so ago about this video game he told me about called DOTA 2. It’s what’s called a “MOBA”(multiplayer online battle arena). I wasn’t particularly interested in the rules of the game or why people play it, but I was very interested in the vast and diverse roster of colorful characters people could play as. There’s over 125 “heroes” to choose from and if you check them out, it’s like a modern-day pantheon of forgotten gods and demigods. Each has their own little background and power-set; it’s all quite unique. The problem is these characters and the worlds they inhabit are entirely trapped within the confines of this very specific video game. There’s an artbook for DOTA 2, but I couldn’t find any actual books telling parallel or adjacent stories regarding their exploits and adventures.

It just struck me that this incredible world had been crafted and its connective tissue woven for the various character dynamics, but it’s all relegated to being expressed exclusively through a very specific type of rules-based video game. That alone limits the extent that the narrative potential of these characters can be exploited.

Imagine Tolkien crafting the worlds and characters and languages and lore of Lord of the Rings and the ancillary novels, only to confine them exclusively to… a board game. That would be a bit of a mismanagement of development energy.

TRANSMEDIA FOR A NEW INDEPENDENT AGE

So back to Hotel Erebus; after having the DOTA 2 discussion with my business partner, I told him I wanted to do something within the world that Hotel Erebus exists in, but in a way that it could be explored beyond just books. He loves games, and while it can be a laborious and costly endeavor to make video games, other types of games exist that can also allow exploration of new worlds. These game types, specifically card games and TTRPGs(tabletop role-playing games) are less costly. He explained how he’d like to do a card game based on the world of Hotel Erebus. I thought that was an amazing idea. What was cool was this: as I crafted a narrative for the Erebus sequel that would introduce the breadth of this new world, he was coming up for rule sets within a card game to sufficiently capture the new characters and scenarios. We were coming up with a transmedia property in real-time, and the best thing was that it’s absolutely doable to make tangible.

It became quickly apparent that every idea we had for the card game directed us to some easily accessible third-party platform or affordable technology that would allow us to expand the idea. From creating custom board pieces using AI and 3D printing (text to 2D, 2D to 3D model, 3D model to 3D print), to getting a custom board printed through online vendors to using crowdfunding and online platforms like Kickstarter and Amazon to sell, it’s truly possible to build transmedia properties with very small teams of creatives.

Years ago, to create and distribute a property that was expressed through, say, a televised cartoon series and a toy line, you needed a massive team of animators, an expensive, expansive and extensive supply chain and distribution system to make the toys and get them in the brick-and-mortar stores. All of this constituted millions of dollars of capital investment. Now? A single person—or small team—could use one of any of the various AI video generation platforms to build out the ‘animated’ footage, use Davinci Resolve(a free video editor) to edit it all together and use YouTube to distribute to potentially hundreds of millions of viewers; the toys could be built using 3D printers and the packaging procured from online vendors. Distribute via USPS, Fedex or UPS and use free software like Stamps to print labels. The process went from taking potentially hundreds of people and millions of dollars and had been reduced considerably.

In 2026, for only a few thousands of dollars affording an entry point, a few people could access everything necessary to make a super-cool property and express it in a variety of ways to a global market. My business partner and I are going to do just that. The currently unnamed card game will likely be launching on Kickstarter after our dark fantasy novel, CLEAVE, concludes its Kickstarter campaign. CLEAVE will be launching on Kickstarter in a few weeks after Hotel Erebus orders are fulfilled.

If we can do it, any of you can! If you have an idea, don’t presume it has to stay imprisoned between your ears. Give your ideas a chance to live!

Stay frosty.

SARJ OUT

Stratum Press has a lot to offer for 2026. The 100-page action/horror novella, HOTEL EREBUS, is complete and going to print soon. The Kickstarter project ends in less than a day: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stratum/hotel-erebus-an-elijah-crowe-thrill-ride-pulp-novella/

The 150-page dark fantasy novella CLEAVE is nearing completion. The titular character, CLEAVE, is a mad barbarian from the Red Stone Clan of the northlands and is on the hunt for a dragon egg that he seeks to destroy.

You can get an early look at the CLEAVE Kickstarter page here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stratum/810839215?ref=btsfxw&token=834a91f5

We’ve got more books on the way. After Cleave is done, the next novella will immediately go into production. It will either be centered on a fast-paced heist involving cars in a cyberpunk world or an anime-inspired tale about demigods training to defend their world from extra-dimensional beings.

I’m writing genre books for genre fans. If you’re into dark fantasy, cyberpunk, noir, heavy action and more, then Stratum Press will have something for you. The goal is to produce fun fiction that you can rely on to entertain you while respecting your time.

The Stratum Press novellas will be fun 2 to 3-hour reads that you can re-read the way you re-watch enjoyable movies. Punchy dialogue, impactful action, memorable characters and stories that trim out unnecessary fat. No political correctness and no limits on how characters can and will be portrayed.

In the beginning, the first publications will be books written by me, but we’re also going to be publishing different types of media, including tabletop RPGs, card games and other things across transmedia. Stratum Press is looking to entertain you in 2026 and I look forward to giving you updates on our newest works as they come about.

SARJ OUT

Hotel Erebus Kickstarter-First Novella

AI DISCLOSURE: “Hotel Erebus” is written entirely by a human author (SARJ) and edited by a human being. No AI was used in the writing of the book.

ELIJAH CROWE is a troubled man in troubled times. In the wake of the end of World War 1, Elijah returns home in 1920s Chicago to become a low-level street hood. One night, he awakens in a strange hotel not remembering how he got there. A blaring voice on a speaker box tells him that he’s in a room on the sixth floor of Hotel Erebus and if he wants to leave, he just has to find a way to get to the first floor and walk out. The problem is that Hotel Erebus is no typical place and the hotel is filled with occupants that don’t want him to leave. The mysterious voice offers him a suitcase that has two strange pistols in it that don’t need to be reloaded and don’t run out of ammo. They’re his only weapons and only means of protection for this night of terror.

Will Elijah survive and escape? Find out by reading Hotel Erebus!

Below is one of the cover selections for the softcover edition.

The hardcover edition has a cover that is likely the image below.

Hotel Erebus has many inspirations, from pulp magazines to action movies and classic horror movies.

I hope you’ll give Hotel Erebus a shot. It’s a great—what I call—"waiting room read”; it’s a thrill ride that respects your time by starting out in a full octane sprint and rarely stops to take a breath until an action-packed ending. If it sells well, there might be more stories about Elijah Crowe and Mia Wolfe!

Hotel Erebus novella Kickstarter