Project April 2026
The Outbound
A satirical novel about a one-way exodus to space — the billionaires who sell it, the strivers who buy it, and the rogue ship that turns around when its crew figures out the con.
A satirical near-future novel set across an Earth in slow collapse and a fleet of “salvation ships” built and sold by a small group of Silicon Valley architects to the world’s wealthiest. The pitch: a fresh start on a habitable world, far from the climate, the regulators, and the people whose labor built the fortune. The truth, eventually: there is no destination. The ships are a population-engineering scheme dressed up as eschatology, and a handful of program masterminds are skimming off it.
Premise
The first ships launch. The friends and family left behind get told, in time, that their loved ones reached the new world. Skeptical relatives insist on cryptographically secure live conversations; those work for a while. Then they are quietly replaced by AI.
The novel turns when the crew of one ship figures out they were never going to arrive.
What it’s about
Less the spaceships than the people on either side of them. The book is interested in the strivers who sell everything — including the people whose work built their wealth — for a coveted seat on a ship; in the billionaires and program architects whose conviction is half delusion, half grift; in the outsiders who barely register that the whole machinery exists; and in the mavens who see the con clearly and survive by working its seams.
The unifying epigram, lifted from one of the working notes: wealth is other people. The richest people on Earth sign one-way contracts that none of the worlds they’re heading toward have any reason to honor. That’s the joke and the engine.
Voice
Third-person, multiple POV — at minimum a striver, an architect, a maven, and one of the rogue crew. Comic-satirical register at sentence level; the structural register stays straight. References running in the background: Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan especially; the Silicon-Valley-as-eschatology sub-genre; Mr. Robot for the corporate-conspiracy mechanics; the LDS frontier mythos for the territorial breakaway plot.
Status
Currently in archetypal-notes stage. The premise and the climactic turn are stable. The cast is being built up from a small shortlist of plot archetypes — Power & Corruption, Secret Society, Forbidden Knowledge — interleaved with the character types above. Story-shape work, including the running order across multiple POVs, is the next problem.
The working notes live in a private notebook; what survives selection will surface here as fragments and occasional process essays under the Essays section.