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The Disco at the End of the World
Not yet published
Expected 16 Jun 26An alternate 1970s science fiction romance blending first contact and queer counterculture in the Los Angeles disco scene, perfect for readers of Vajra Chandraseker and Victor Manibo.
In 1977 - a world in which America launched its space program shortly after WWII - Mitch Ward followed Flynn, the lost love of his youth, into the US Space Guard. Now, he’s stuck on a backwater moon base with his only friend, Gloria, watching every shuttle in the hope Flynn will be on it.
After an inexplicable encounter with a strange, euphoric being, Mitch and Gloria find themselves dishonorably discharged, and stuck in a USA rapidly sliding into fascism with no plans and no future. There’s nothing for it but to move to Los Angeles to chase their dreams, and find their people in the discos of the city.
But when Flynn crashes back into their lives, claiming to be the host for an emissary of a utopian civilization approaching Earth, he offers Mitch the power to protect himself and friends across the queer community, so they never have to live in the shadows or face oppression again.
With the world on the brink of cataclysm, and Mitch and his friends being squeezed out of every space, it’s down to this community of disco-loving outcasts to stand up for what is beautiful and right.
In 1977 - a world in which America launched its space program shortly after WWII - Mitch Ward followed Flynn, the lost love of his youth, into the US Space Guard. Now, he’s stuck on a backwater moon base with his only friend, Gloria, watching every shuttle in the hope Flynn will be on it.
After an inexplicable encounter with a strange, euphoric being, Mitch and Gloria find themselves dishonorably discharged, and stuck in a USA rapidly sliding into fascism with no plans and no future. There’s nothing for it but to move to Los Angeles to chase their dreams, and find their people in the discos of the city.
But when Flynn crashes back into their lives, claiming to be the host for an emissary of a utopian civilization approaching Earth, he offers Mitch the power to protect himself and friends across the queer community, so they never have to live in the shadows or face oppression again.
With the world on the brink of cataclysm, and Mitch and his friends being squeezed out of every space, it’s down to this community of disco-loving outcasts to stand up for what is beautiful and right.
400 pages, Kindle Edition
Expected publication June 2, 2026
7 people are currently reading
522 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
April 10, 2026
For a queer space nerd this was a really interesting read! The alternative history that leads to there being a Spaceguard on the moon in the 1970s was an interesting setting. The topics explored feel very relevant today. I loved the joy of characters when they come together. Also the alien first contact was very unique.
Note: I received this book as an ARC through NetGalley.
Note: I received this book as an ARC through NetGalley.
April 21, 2026
Thanks NetGalley for the review copy! What a wild story! It’s an otherworldly tale that tackles the political struggles of our time. Flynn and Mitchell are star crossed lovers struggling against repressive governments and genocidal beings whose only way to resist is through the power of music and dance. So, can disco Dave the world? Read and find out!
I had such a fun time reading this story. The cast of characters was unique and fun with deep character reflection and growth. It’s a queer story that doesn’t shy aware from its queer identity. The world building and lore was vivid, incredibly vivid. There were points of sliding perspective and slips from the action to inner reflection or memory that were confusing, but Tavares uses dividers to break up the text and bracket off the changes. Overall, I had a great time in this version of our work and was touched by the found family and power of love and disco!
I had such a fun time reading this story. The cast of characters was unique and fun with deep character reflection and growth. It’s a queer story that doesn’t shy aware from its queer identity. The world building and lore was vivid, incredibly vivid. There were points of sliding perspective and slips from the action to inner reflection or memory that were confusing, but Tavares uses dividers to break up the text and bracket off the changes. Overall, I had a great time in this version of our work and was touched by the found family and power of love and disco!
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
No One Here Should Be Trusted with This Much Glitter, Power, or Theological Responsibility
“The Disco at the End of the World” by Nathan Tavares treats apocalypse with camp nerve and real feeling, arriving at the genuinely moving conclusion that the people mocked as excessive may be the ones doing the most necessary work.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | April 7th, 2026
A lone figure held at the threshold of refuge, where nightclub light becomes survival’s invitation and the novel’s private ache turns briefly gold.
Nathan Tavares writes “The Disco at the End of the World” as if the nightclub were the last functioning civic institution in America. That is the novel’s wildest idea, and also its most serious one. The club here is not backdrop, not camp garnish, not a glitter-bombed annex to the “real” action. It is shelter, switchboard, supply depot, choir loft, black market, warning network, flirtation engine, and emergency government. It stores hormones and contraband, passes messages, hides the hunted, stages drag, trains desire, teaches courage, and keeps the music going while official America tries to regulate breathing itself. Tavares gives us moon bases, alien adjudicators, Reaganite moral warfare, Studio Zones that operate like sovereign kingdoms, and disco as both sound and metaphysical technology, but the book’s deepest conviction is almost stubbornly material: people stay alive because other people make room for them.
Fort Founding Mothers imagined as a patched-together sanctuary where shelter, nightlife, logistics, and chosen family become the same room.
That conviction is what keeps the novel from becoming merely a fabulous premise in platform heels. On paper, the pitch sounds deliciously unmanageable. In an alternate 1970s America, Mitchell Ward – ex–Space Guard, horny wiseass, emotional evasive specialist, patron saint of bad decisions – lands in Los Angeles after catastrophe on the moon and falls into a city where queerness is policed through Moral Codes, studios function as privatized states, and public culture is being bleached into patriotic mush. Mitch reunites with Gloria, the novel’s incandescent diva-saint, whose nightclub world becomes the center of an underground network of queer survival. Then the scale blows open. Strange disco frequencies, Donna Summer–like star music, crashed alien craft, and a cosmic order called the Metronomes reveal that Earth is under judgment. The question is not only whether the world can be saved. It is who gets to decide what counts as a world worth saving.
That last question gives the novel its real voltage. Tavares is not satisfied by the familiar opposition between grubby earthly fascism and enlightened cosmic order. He wants to know how authority prettifies itself. The U.S. government does it with patriotism, moral hygiene, family rhetoric, curfews, raids, surveillance, and the soft-pedaled violence of “public order.” Hollywood does it with image management, glamour, nostalgia, and private security wrapped in dream-factory varnish. The Metronomes do it with harmony, beauty, transcendence, and the rhetoric of balance. They may speak in celestial shimmer rather than bureaucratic sludge, but they are still deciding who is admissible. They aestheticize hierarchy so elegantly that even they can mistake sentencing for mercy.
That is one of the novel’s sharpest intellectual moves. The Metronomes are not benevolent aliens whose grandeur throws human pettiness into relief. They are imperial harmonizers. Their universalism comes with fuel demands, rules of worthiness, and a chilling confidence that they can hear the right music of civilization better than the people living inside it. Tavares understands, to the novel’s benefit, that domination often arrives dressed as refinement. “The Disco at the End of the World” is full of people insisting they know how to protect the vulnerable while building systems that classify, contain, and erase them. In that sense, the book’s speculative machinery is not a decorative superstructure placed atop queer history. It is the pressure chamber that lets Tavares ask how control moves from the bedroom to the city, from the city to the nation, from the nation to the cosmos.
Mitch’s first-person voice is what makes all this not only legible but alive. He is not a solemn guide through apocalypse. He is lascivious, frightened, loyal, petty, self-mocking, romantic, strategic, and forever cracking a joke half a second before a feeling can catch him in the throat. Tavares is exceptionally good at the kind of comic line that is doing three jobs at once: making us laugh, sketching social texture, and showing a man improvising his own emotional life in real time. Mitch’s jokes are not decorative flair. They are the gearwork of survival. They let him test danger, deflect humiliation, flirt with disaster, and keep his selfhood moving when stasis would mean suffocation. The wisecracks are not garnish but breathing equipment.
That verbal energy shapes the prose at every level. Tavares writes in a register that slides happily between streetwise banter, erotic camp, military bark, gospel uplift, cosmic melodrama, and real grief. He likes a sentence with hips. He likes a phrase that can glitter and sneer in the same breath. He likes the ridiculous word or image that reveals a whole social world rather than merely decorating it. The style is not polished flat. It is shiny in the right places and scuffed in useful ones. Even the book’s excesses belong to its temperament. This is a novel that trusts amplification. It wants more bodies, more lights, more jokes, more noise, more fear, more hunger, more song. When it works, and it often does, that excess becomes method. Tavares is writing about people dismissed as too loud, too sexual, too theatrical, too much, and he gives them a prose that refuses tasteful diminishment.
He is also smart about bodies. The book’s politics do not hover above experience as thesis. They arrive through lungs, sweat, bruises, panic, arousal, exhaustion, outfits, cigarettes, breathlessness, and the choreography of rooms. A curfew is not just a law; it is a rearrangement of desire. A raid is not just a plot point; it is a forced rewrite of what bodies may do in proximity. Even the cosmic plot gets translated into flesh. Music rattles the ribs. Tempo moves through hands, throats, skin, and breath. Healing, corruption, ecstasy, and command all become bodily states before they become ideas. That keeps the novel from floating away on its own speculative exuberance. No matter how wild the cosmology gets, someone still has to pass the sandwich, hide the pills, prop open the safe house, and check whether another person can breathe.
This is where Gloria becomes the book’s secret center. Mitch may narrate and Flynn may carry the grand cosmic reveal, but Gloria is the figure who tells the novel what power ought to look like. She is not merely conscience, sidekick, muse, or drag-divine ornament. She is a competing model of authority. Where Kern commands by narrowing the room, and the Metronomes adjudicate by sorting and scaling, Gloria enlarges. She makes performance useful. She makes charisma infrastructural. She turns style into invitation, invitation into shelter, shelter into collective action. Lady Moondust does not simply entertain the crowd. She reorganizes what the crowd can become. The book eventually knows this, and its ending gets stronger the moment it fully admits it.
Lady Moondust as performer-saint, where charisma stops being ornament and becomes a form of collective protection.
Formally, “The Disco at the End of the World” is built less like a clock than like a set list. Tracks bleed into one another. Motifs come back louder, stranger, and more charged. Refrains, remixes, reprises, callbacks, costume changes, reveals, and escalations do a great deal of the structural work. That is not cute ornamentation. It is how the novel thinks. Information is delayed not to create puzzle-box cleverness but to make revelation feel like a beat drop – the thing has been there in the mix all along and suddenly the whole room hears it. Tavares is especially good at letting motifs accrue practical, emotional, and metaphysical force at once. The sewing room is a workroom, refuge, theater annex, and political cell. The disco is pleasure palace, mutual-aid hub, alternate state, and cosmological relay station. “I Feel Love” is a song, a code, an engine, a prayer, and eventually an ontology.
Still, the structure does not always deepen meaning as much as hold too much material in motion at once. The novel’s central limitation is the cost of its appetite. Tavares wants queer nightlife novel, alternate-history satire, apocalyptic sci-fi, first-love story, friendship novel, anti-fascist fantasia, metaphysical melodrama, and camp liturgy under one roof. Much of the time that ambition is the source of the book’s singularity. At other moments, it produces drag in the less flattering sense. A motif returns once too often. An opposition that has already been dramatized gets named again in larger letters. A lore passage arrives with a trace of “just to be clear.” A climactic turn occasionally comes after the emotional and intellectual point has already landed. The book’s imagination is ahead of its pruning instinct.
That unevenness matters, but it does not cancel the feat. In fact, a more ruthlessly disciplined version of this novel might have been less alive. Tavares’s messiest impulses are often the same ones that make the book feel inhabited rather than manufactured. He has a gift for turning a room into a system, a gag into a worldview, a crush into a metaphysics, a party into a counterstate. The bars and back rooms do actual work here. So do cots, sewing machines, phone trees, speed pills, makeup, demos, cigarettes, stage lights, and cheap booze. The novel’s queer spaces are not romanticized into perfect havens, but neither are they reduced to nightlife chic. They are labor-intensive places where people keep one another from disappearing.
That, finally, is the novel’s central achievement. It takes forms of life often dismissed as unserious – drag banter, disco excess, sexual adventurousness, gossip networks, flamboyance, chosen family, style itself – and reveals them as practical intelligence. Tavares insists that what official culture calls noise may be knowledge, and what it calls excess may be the only thing flexible enough to answer catastrophe without becoming catastrophe. There are lines of inheritance here from queer nightlife fiction and queer speculative fiction alike – one sometimes thinks of Andrew Holleran’s “Dancer from the Dance” for the ache and the after-hours intelligence, or Samuel R. Delany’s “Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand” for the braiding of erotic life and speculative architecture – but Tavares is less elegiac than Holleran and far grimier, funnier, and more logistic-minded than Delany. His great interest is not just queer feeling but queer operation.
The ending sharpens that interest beautifully. It does not simply resolve the alien plot. It reassigns the book’s center of gravity. What begins as Mitch’s voice, Flynn’s mystery, and a cosmic chosen-two story becomes something more collective and more persuasive. Gloria’s ascendance, and the novel’s final turn toward the Army of Lovers as an actual distributed power, rescues the book from the danger of making salvation the property of exceptional beings alone. “Love multiplies” is a sentimental sentence in lesser hands. Here it becomes an organizational principle. The ending argues that survival will not come from purity, hierarchy, or abstract harmony, but from people who can convert hurt into music, music into force, and force into protection without forgetting mercy. That is a huge claim. Tavares earns more of it than I expected he would.
Two figures held in the pause between ruin and dawn, where love, secrecy, and near-forgiveness share the same damaged roofline.
For all its overreach, and there is overreach, I found the novel hard to shake. What lingers is not only the premise, though the premise has a lovely deranged confidence to it. It is the furniture. The cot by the wall. The altar of pop divas. The sewing machine in the corner. The stash of contraband. The spotlight. The joke told in danger because silence would be worse. The room with rules and routes and supplies. The sense that while the nation is busy choreographing obedience, somebody else is still pinning the hem, checking the tank, passing the warning, cueing the next track, and keeping the speakers on.
“The Disco at the End of the World” is not a flawless book. It is a rangy, overclocked, intermittently baggy, fiercely alive one. Its 89/100 rating and corresponding 4-star Goodreads verdict reflect exactly that mix of admiration and reservation: this is not a polished masterpiece, but it is too inventive, too heartfelt, too politically alert, and too gloriously itself to count as anything less than a major success on its own wild terms. Tavares understands that the people most often told they are too loud, too queer, too soft, too much may be the very ones who know how to hold a room together when everything else goes dark. By the end, the novel has made its case. History is not kept alive by the men who speak most piously about order. It is kept alive by the ones still dancing through the wreckage, passing the bottle, lifting the fallen, stealing the mic, and turning the music back on before the dead air wins.
Early compositional searches for the threshold image, testing how solitude, invitation, and negative space could carry the book’s emotional argument.
The scene before color – just enough graphite to locate the doorway, the body, and the hush between isolation and belonging.
The first diluted washes laying in dusk, shadow, and doorway heat, when the image begins to choose atmosphere before detail.
The working palette behind the review’s visual world – bruised blues, ember reds, worn ambers, and nightclub shadow translated into hand-painted notation.
All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.
“The Disco at the End of the World” by Nathan Tavares treats apocalypse with camp nerve and real feeling, arriving at the genuinely moving conclusion that the people mocked as excessive may be the ones doing the most necessary work.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | April 7th, 2026
A lone figure held at the threshold of refuge, where nightclub light becomes survival’s invitation and the novel’s private ache turns briefly gold.
Nathan Tavares writes “The Disco at the End of the World” as if the nightclub were the last functioning civic institution in America. That is the novel’s wildest idea, and also its most serious one. The club here is not backdrop, not camp garnish, not a glitter-bombed annex to the “real” action. It is shelter, switchboard, supply depot, choir loft, black market, warning network, flirtation engine, and emergency government. It stores hormones and contraband, passes messages, hides the hunted, stages drag, trains desire, teaches courage, and keeps the music going while official America tries to regulate breathing itself. Tavares gives us moon bases, alien adjudicators, Reaganite moral warfare, Studio Zones that operate like sovereign kingdoms, and disco as both sound and metaphysical technology, but the book’s deepest conviction is almost stubbornly material: people stay alive because other people make room for them.
Fort Founding Mothers imagined as a patched-together sanctuary where shelter, nightlife, logistics, and chosen family become the same room.
That conviction is what keeps the novel from becoming merely a fabulous premise in platform heels. On paper, the pitch sounds deliciously unmanageable. In an alternate 1970s America, Mitchell Ward – ex–Space Guard, horny wiseass, emotional evasive specialist, patron saint of bad decisions – lands in Los Angeles after catastrophe on the moon and falls into a city where queerness is policed through Moral Codes, studios function as privatized states, and public culture is being bleached into patriotic mush. Mitch reunites with Gloria, the novel’s incandescent diva-saint, whose nightclub world becomes the center of an underground network of queer survival. Then the scale blows open. Strange disco frequencies, Donna Summer–like star music, crashed alien craft, and a cosmic order called the Metronomes reveal that Earth is under judgment. The question is not only whether the world can be saved. It is who gets to decide what counts as a world worth saving.
That last question gives the novel its real voltage. Tavares is not satisfied by the familiar opposition between grubby earthly fascism and enlightened cosmic order. He wants to know how authority prettifies itself. The U.S. government does it with patriotism, moral hygiene, family rhetoric, curfews, raids, surveillance, and the soft-pedaled violence of “public order.” Hollywood does it with image management, glamour, nostalgia, and private security wrapped in dream-factory varnish. The Metronomes do it with harmony, beauty, transcendence, and the rhetoric of balance. They may speak in celestial shimmer rather than bureaucratic sludge, but they are still deciding who is admissible. They aestheticize hierarchy so elegantly that even they can mistake sentencing for mercy.
That is one of the novel’s sharpest intellectual moves. The Metronomes are not benevolent aliens whose grandeur throws human pettiness into relief. They are imperial harmonizers. Their universalism comes with fuel demands, rules of worthiness, and a chilling confidence that they can hear the right music of civilization better than the people living inside it. Tavares understands, to the novel’s benefit, that domination often arrives dressed as refinement. “The Disco at the End of the World” is full of people insisting they know how to protect the vulnerable while building systems that classify, contain, and erase them. In that sense, the book’s speculative machinery is not a decorative superstructure placed atop queer history. It is the pressure chamber that lets Tavares ask how control moves from the bedroom to the city, from the city to the nation, from the nation to the cosmos.
Mitch’s first-person voice is what makes all this not only legible but alive. He is not a solemn guide through apocalypse. He is lascivious, frightened, loyal, petty, self-mocking, romantic, strategic, and forever cracking a joke half a second before a feeling can catch him in the throat. Tavares is exceptionally good at the kind of comic line that is doing three jobs at once: making us laugh, sketching social texture, and showing a man improvising his own emotional life in real time. Mitch’s jokes are not decorative flair. They are the gearwork of survival. They let him test danger, deflect humiliation, flirt with disaster, and keep his selfhood moving when stasis would mean suffocation. The wisecracks are not garnish but breathing equipment.
That verbal energy shapes the prose at every level. Tavares writes in a register that slides happily between streetwise banter, erotic camp, military bark, gospel uplift, cosmic melodrama, and real grief. He likes a sentence with hips. He likes a phrase that can glitter and sneer in the same breath. He likes the ridiculous word or image that reveals a whole social world rather than merely decorating it. The style is not polished flat. It is shiny in the right places and scuffed in useful ones. Even the book’s excesses belong to its temperament. This is a novel that trusts amplification. It wants more bodies, more lights, more jokes, more noise, more fear, more hunger, more song. When it works, and it often does, that excess becomes method. Tavares is writing about people dismissed as too loud, too sexual, too theatrical, too much, and he gives them a prose that refuses tasteful diminishment.
He is also smart about bodies. The book’s politics do not hover above experience as thesis. They arrive through lungs, sweat, bruises, panic, arousal, exhaustion, outfits, cigarettes, breathlessness, and the choreography of rooms. A curfew is not just a law; it is a rearrangement of desire. A raid is not just a plot point; it is a forced rewrite of what bodies may do in proximity. Even the cosmic plot gets translated into flesh. Music rattles the ribs. Tempo moves through hands, throats, skin, and breath. Healing, corruption, ecstasy, and command all become bodily states before they become ideas. That keeps the novel from floating away on its own speculative exuberance. No matter how wild the cosmology gets, someone still has to pass the sandwich, hide the pills, prop open the safe house, and check whether another person can breathe.
This is where Gloria becomes the book’s secret center. Mitch may narrate and Flynn may carry the grand cosmic reveal, but Gloria is the figure who tells the novel what power ought to look like. She is not merely conscience, sidekick, muse, or drag-divine ornament. She is a competing model of authority. Where Kern commands by narrowing the room, and the Metronomes adjudicate by sorting and scaling, Gloria enlarges. She makes performance useful. She makes charisma infrastructural. She turns style into invitation, invitation into shelter, shelter into collective action. Lady Moondust does not simply entertain the crowd. She reorganizes what the crowd can become. The book eventually knows this, and its ending gets stronger the moment it fully admits it.
Lady Moondust as performer-saint, where charisma stops being ornament and becomes a form of collective protection.
Formally, “The Disco at the End of the World” is built less like a clock than like a set list. Tracks bleed into one another. Motifs come back louder, stranger, and more charged. Refrains, remixes, reprises, callbacks, costume changes, reveals, and escalations do a great deal of the structural work. That is not cute ornamentation. It is how the novel thinks. Information is delayed not to create puzzle-box cleverness but to make revelation feel like a beat drop – the thing has been there in the mix all along and suddenly the whole room hears it. Tavares is especially good at letting motifs accrue practical, emotional, and metaphysical force at once. The sewing room is a workroom, refuge, theater annex, and political cell. The disco is pleasure palace, mutual-aid hub, alternate state, and cosmological relay station. “I Feel Love” is a song, a code, an engine, a prayer, and eventually an ontology.
Still, the structure does not always deepen meaning as much as hold too much material in motion at once. The novel’s central limitation is the cost of its appetite. Tavares wants queer nightlife novel, alternate-history satire, apocalyptic sci-fi, first-love story, friendship novel, anti-fascist fantasia, metaphysical melodrama, and camp liturgy under one roof. Much of the time that ambition is the source of the book’s singularity. At other moments, it produces drag in the less flattering sense. A motif returns once too often. An opposition that has already been dramatized gets named again in larger letters. A lore passage arrives with a trace of “just to be clear.” A climactic turn occasionally comes after the emotional and intellectual point has already landed. The book’s imagination is ahead of its pruning instinct.
That unevenness matters, but it does not cancel the feat. In fact, a more ruthlessly disciplined version of this novel might have been less alive. Tavares’s messiest impulses are often the same ones that make the book feel inhabited rather than manufactured. He has a gift for turning a room into a system, a gag into a worldview, a crush into a metaphysics, a party into a counterstate. The bars and back rooms do actual work here. So do cots, sewing machines, phone trees, speed pills, makeup, demos, cigarettes, stage lights, and cheap booze. The novel’s queer spaces are not romanticized into perfect havens, but neither are they reduced to nightlife chic. They are labor-intensive places where people keep one another from disappearing.
That, finally, is the novel’s central achievement. It takes forms of life often dismissed as unserious – drag banter, disco excess, sexual adventurousness, gossip networks, flamboyance, chosen family, style itself – and reveals them as practical intelligence. Tavares insists that what official culture calls noise may be knowledge, and what it calls excess may be the only thing flexible enough to answer catastrophe without becoming catastrophe. There are lines of inheritance here from queer nightlife fiction and queer speculative fiction alike – one sometimes thinks of Andrew Holleran’s “Dancer from the Dance” for the ache and the after-hours intelligence, or Samuel R. Delany’s “Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand” for the braiding of erotic life and speculative architecture – but Tavares is less elegiac than Holleran and far grimier, funnier, and more logistic-minded than Delany. His great interest is not just queer feeling but queer operation.
The ending sharpens that interest beautifully. It does not simply resolve the alien plot. It reassigns the book’s center of gravity. What begins as Mitch’s voice, Flynn’s mystery, and a cosmic chosen-two story becomes something more collective and more persuasive. Gloria’s ascendance, and the novel’s final turn toward the Army of Lovers as an actual distributed power, rescues the book from the danger of making salvation the property of exceptional beings alone. “Love multiplies” is a sentimental sentence in lesser hands. Here it becomes an organizational principle. The ending argues that survival will not come from purity, hierarchy, or abstract harmony, but from people who can convert hurt into music, music into force, and force into protection without forgetting mercy. That is a huge claim. Tavares earns more of it than I expected he would.
Two figures held in the pause between ruin and dawn, where love, secrecy, and near-forgiveness share the same damaged roofline.
For all its overreach, and there is overreach, I found the novel hard to shake. What lingers is not only the premise, though the premise has a lovely deranged confidence to it. It is the furniture. The cot by the wall. The altar of pop divas. The sewing machine in the corner. The stash of contraband. The spotlight. The joke told in danger because silence would be worse. The room with rules and routes and supplies. The sense that while the nation is busy choreographing obedience, somebody else is still pinning the hem, checking the tank, passing the warning, cueing the next track, and keeping the speakers on.
“The Disco at the End of the World” is not a flawless book. It is a rangy, overclocked, intermittently baggy, fiercely alive one. Its 89/100 rating and corresponding 4-star Goodreads verdict reflect exactly that mix of admiration and reservation: this is not a polished masterpiece, but it is too inventive, too heartfelt, too politically alert, and too gloriously itself to count as anything less than a major success on its own wild terms. Tavares understands that the people most often told they are too loud, too queer, too soft, too much may be the very ones who know how to hold a room together when everything else goes dark. By the end, the novel has made its case. History is not kept alive by the men who speak most piously about order. It is kept alive by the ones still dancing through the wreckage, passing the bottle, lifting the fallen, stealing the mic, and turning the music back on before the dead air wins.
Early compositional searches for the threshold image, testing how solitude, invitation, and negative space could carry the book’s emotional argument.
The scene before color – just enough graphite to locate the doorway, the body, and the hush between isolation and belonging.
The first diluted washes laying in dusk, shadow, and doorway heat, when the image begins to choose atmosphere before detail.
The working palette behind the review’s visual world – bruised blues, ember reds, worn ambers, and nightclub shadow translated into hand-painted notation.
All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Thank you to Nathan Tavares, Titan Books, and NetGalley for the e-arc in exchange for an honest review.
THEY! WANT! YOU!
Who me? What am I gonna do on a spaceship?
The Disco at the End of the World is a queer romance set in a dystopian sci-fi version of the Reagan era, where the film studios control large swathes of LA and everything is space themed.
The novel primarily follows Mitch, a 25-year old gay man, and Gloria, a trans woman who also performs as a drag queen, Lady Moondust. The story begins with both Mitch and Gloria coming to the end of their 5-year stint in the Space Guard on the moon, with Gloria performing drag shows, and Mitch smuggling illicit alcohol, porn, deodorant, cigarettes etc, for the base. Both are tolerated for who they are for the entertainment value they bring.
After Gloria and Mitch rescue Flynn, Mitch’s school crush, from an alien encounter, both are dishonourably discharged under newly formed Morality Laws and returned to Earth. On Earth, they rejoin their community in LA and, soon, the fight against fascism through disco. Flynn then crash lands back into their lives, claiming to be an alien host.
I really loved the characterisation of Mitch and Gloria alongside all the side characters. The romance subplot was sweet and the yearning whilst on the moon was lovely. The world-building was descriptive and I enjoyed the film-studios-turned-Mafia-Reagan-dystopian-feel. The nods towards the gay panic, morality laws, general societal expectation of the 70s were executed well too. I loved the disco scenes and building and supporting the queer community. I loved, loved, loved the music and cultural references too.
However, once Flynn returned back on Earth and started spouting shite about Tempo and Metronomes, it lost me. It’s a shame that I enjoyed all of the sci-fi elements up until then and it was the concept of the aliens themselves that let it down. They go off vibes? No thank you. The book felt disjointed from then on.
I wish I loved the book the whole way through but I have to dnf at 50%. Hoping someone else will love this the whole way through.
THEY! WANT! YOU!
Who me? What am I gonna do on a spaceship?
The Disco at the End of the World is a queer romance set in a dystopian sci-fi version of the Reagan era, where the film studios control large swathes of LA and everything is space themed.
The novel primarily follows Mitch, a 25-year old gay man, and Gloria, a trans woman who also performs as a drag queen, Lady Moondust. The story begins with both Mitch and Gloria coming to the end of their 5-year stint in the Space Guard on the moon, with Gloria performing drag shows, and Mitch smuggling illicit alcohol, porn, deodorant, cigarettes etc, for the base. Both are tolerated for who they are for the entertainment value they bring.
After Gloria and Mitch rescue Flynn, Mitch’s school crush, from an alien encounter, both are dishonourably discharged under newly formed Morality Laws and returned to Earth. On Earth, they rejoin their community in LA and, soon, the fight against fascism through disco. Flynn then crash lands back into their lives, claiming to be an alien host.
I really loved the characterisation of Mitch and Gloria alongside all the side characters. The romance subplot was sweet and the yearning whilst on the moon was lovely. The world-building was descriptive and I enjoyed the film-studios-turned-Mafia-Reagan-dystopian-feel. The nods towards the gay panic, morality laws, general societal expectation of the 70s were executed well too. I loved the disco scenes and building and supporting the queer community. I loved, loved, loved the music and cultural references too.
However, once Flynn returned back on Earth and started spouting shite about Tempo and Metronomes, it lost me. It’s a shame that I enjoyed all of the sci-fi elements up until then and it was the concept of the aliens themselves that let it down. They go off vibes? No thank you. The book felt disjointed from then on.
I wish I loved the book the whole way through but I have to dnf at 50%. Hoping someone else will love this the whole way through.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
A new science fiction novel, from an author whose previous works I found super interesting. As with his previous work, it´s definitely science fiction, but this time in an alternate version of the 70s where the USA has veered very fascist but space exploration started earlier. The music and cultural references stay the same cross universes, though. And it’s up to a group of queer people, banding together, and feeling the power of music (disco, baby!) to resist and combat fascism. And not just on Earth! There is a lot of fascinating queer history (which feels very well researched) and queer rage here and the parallels to our 2026 are inevitable.
Very voicy point of view character, very colorful. Many many groovy vibes (literally!). The book has an almost magical realism tone, if one can apply that term to an alternate history with moonbases, shuttles, and eventually aliens.
On the downside, it felt a little too long, and maybe a little bit lost in the details which are so good, but there is a lot of historical details and trivia and build-up! The slang is also intensive - not sure what is historical and what is invented, but I often had to carefully parse meaning and it made it slower. The ultimate resolution is grand and epic but not the type of plot that resonates with me, sadly.
Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the chance to read an ARC of The Disco at the End of the World by Nathan Tavares. I requested it because I had enjoyed author's previous work, and this is (again) interesting and fresh.
Very voicy point of view character, very colorful. Many many groovy vibes (literally!). The book has an almost magical realism tone, if one can apply that term to an alternate history with moonbases, shuttles, and eventually aliens.
On the downside, it felt a little too long, and maybe a little bit lost in the details which are so good, but there is a lot of historical details and trivia and build-up! The slang is also intensive - not sure what is historical and what is invented, but I often had to carefully parse meaning and it made it slower. The ultimate resolution is grand and epic but not the type of plot that resonates with me, sadly.
Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the chance to read an ARC of The Disco at the End of the World by Nathan Tavares. I requested it because I had enjoyed author's previous work, and this is (again) interesting and fresh.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Your Disco needs you!
This is a truly trippy book with sentient space beings mixed with Disco and the true love and frienship found within a community.
Being young and gay is a lonely place to be, and Mitch always makes his stand by arguing with his fists.
But one day a new boy shows up at his school and turns his world up side down. As Flynn get sent away to military camp Mitch once again find himself alone. only this time he has a plan. Soon Mitch finds himself enlisted and stationed on the moon waiting for the day Flynn might arrive on the shuttle. When the day finally arrives is also the day when the true adventure begins. now the big question is if we are able to hold enough love within us to save the world and how big does the disco need to be?
The maine part of this story is set in the 70's in a alternate USA where they didn't only fly to the moon, they also built a base up there. And as the worlds is on the brink of war the American government uses propaganda and strikt morality codes to keep their citizens in check, making members of "deviant" community's an enemy of the state.
I feel this book is both critical of todays political climate and the historical struggle of gay and trans persons.
This is a truly trippy book with sentient space beings mixed with Disco and the true love and frienship found within a community.
This is a truly trippy book with sentient space beings mixed with Disco and the true love and frienship found within a community.
Being young and gay is a lonely place to be, and Mitch always makes his stand by arguing with his fists.
But one day a new boy shows up at his school and turns his world up side down. As Flynn get sent away to military camp Mitch once again find himself alone. only this time he has a plan. Soon Mitch finds himself enlisted and stationed on the moon waiting for the day Flynn might arrive on the shuttle. When the day finally arrives is also the day when the true adventure begins. now the big question is if we are able to hold enough love within us to save the world and how big does the disco need to be?
The maine part of this story is set in the 70's in a alternate USA where they didn't only fly to the moon, they also built a base up there. And as the worlds is on the brink of war the American government uses propaganda and strikt morality codes to keep their citizens in check, making members of "deviant" community's an enemy of the state.
I feel this book is both critical of todays political climate and the historical struggle of gay and trans persons.
This is a truly trippy book with sentient space beings mixed with Disco and the true love and frienship found within a community.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
This book is the queer space fantasy I didn't know I needed.
The writing style is very polarizing. There's not going to be much lukewarm feelings towards it. Its definitely not for everyone, but I absolutely loved it! The run on, clipped sentence, stream of consciousness style is something I really love. I used to write like that when I was younger so, in a way, it felt like going back home.
The descriptions and metaphors are so rich and vivid. I don't really picture things in my mind when I read, but the way the emotions, colors, and lights were described brought to mind the perfect vision of a queer space disco. For someone who pictures things and enjoys this writing style, I bet it would be even better.
It wasn't exactly what I was expecting at first, but as the story unfolded I found myself completely drawn in. I loved the concept of the Metronomes and glittery space beings made of mist and song. The idea of star crossed lovers spending billions of years together, weaving through the galaxy and living countless lifetimes, is exactly my jam.
I was a little unsure how I felt at about the 70% mark, but I love how it ended. A tale of queer joy and queer resistance healing not only our family but being used to help better the world around us is so inspiring. It hit me very deeply.
Thanks so much to NetGalley for the eARC!
The writing style is very polarizing. There's not going to be much lukewarm feelings towards it. Its definitely not for everyone, but I absolutely loved it! The run on, clipped sentence, stream of consciousness style is something I really love. I used to write like that when I was younger so, in a way, it felt like going back home.
The descriptions and metaphors are so rich and vivid. I don't really picture things in my mind when I read, but the way the emotions, colors, and lights were described brought to mind the perfect vision of a queer space disco. For someone who pictures things and enjoys this writing style, I bet it would be even better.
It wasn't exactly what I was expecting at first, but as the story unfolded I found myself completely drawn in. I loved the concept of the Metronomes and glittery space beings made of mist and song. The idea of star crossed lovers spending billions of years together, weaving through the galaxy and living countless lifetimes, is exactly my jam.
I was a little unsure how I felt at about the 70% mark, but I love how it ended. A tale of queer joy and queer resistance healing not only our family but being used to help better the world around us is so inspiring. It hit me very deeply.
Thanks so much to NetGalley for the eARC!
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 26, 2026
Advance reader copy provided by NetGalley and Titan Books which does not influence my opinions or review.
UNIQUE! This is a retro futuristic space disco sent down on a moonbeam for the age of Beyoncé’s Renaissance.
My biggest issue with this book is the clarity of writing. Written from first person perspective, establishing details are often introduced way too late or after the fact. A narrator voice outside of Mitch’s body could have made this a better read- the lack of this made characters and action harder to invest in. Thoughts and asides interrupt action in a distracting, not a deepening way. This is just a composition arrangement change.
Also, the first half is heavy on the theme of propaganda, leading me to think these characters would be fighting an information battle. Kind of! But a mid-book curveball changes the entire tone and trajectory of the book. I learned to just vibe and enjoy the ride.
And it is a vibe! The characters are fab and worth rooting for, the setting is immaculate, and the alternate history commentary is well done. The author went weird, bold, and deeply disco. My favorite parts were when the author delved into poetics and let the rhythm of the words take over. Absolutely beautiful and stunning prose sprinkled in. I wanted more of that.
UNIQUE! This is a retro futuristic space disco sent down on a moonbeam for the age of Beyoncé’s Renaissance.
My biggest issue with this book is the clarity of writing. Written from first person perspective, establishing details are often introduced way too late or after the fact. A narrator voice outside of Mitch’s body could have made this a better read- the lack of this made characters and action harder to invest in. Thoughts and asides interrupt action in a distracting, not a deepening way. This is just a composition arrangement change.
Also, the first half is heavy on the theme of propaganda, leading me to think these characters would be fighting an information battle. Kind of! But a mid-book curveball changes the entire tone and trajectory of the book. I learned to just vibe and enjoy the ride.
And it is a vibe! The characters are fab and worth rooting for, the setting is immaculate, and the alternate history commentary is well done. The author went weird, bold, and deeply disco. My favorite parts were when the author delved into poetics and let the rhythm of the words take over. Absolutely beautiful and stunning prose sprinkled in. I wanted more of that.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
A bunch of times I asked myself, "what the hell am I reading?" in the very best possible way.
Calling this book a scifi romance is like saying the Handmaids Tale is a workplace romance about a woman in a red cloak who falls in love with her boss's driver. It's basically true, but misses the whole point. Tavares packs political satire, a surprise civics lesson, and creates a "how to start a revolution in a nightclub" cookbook, while illegal disco tunes blast in the background. People who are looking for an easy/entertaining candy bar read (which this is billed as) are likely to be surprised when they open the wrapper and find a razor blade. Or, really, an anti-imperialist gonzo ride that detours into real history and imagined cosmic wonder and does ask you to sit up and pay attention.
Main character Mitch is foul-mouthed Han Solo with a wounded heart and a knack for the worst decisions. Flynn is Captain America with PTSD. Gloria (GLORIA!) is Dianna Ross as Cleopatra.
The characters are messy, interesting, real. Extra star for the fact that the book is centered on not only white gays saving the day.
Calling this book a scifi romance is like saying the Handmaids Tale is a workplace romance about a woman in a red cloak who falls in love with her boss's driver. It's basically true, but misses the whole point. Tavares packs political satire, a surprise civics lesson, and creates a "how to start a revolution in a nightclub" cookbook, while illegal disco tunes blast in the background. People who are looking for an easy/entertaining candy bar read (which this is billed as) are likely to be surprised when they open the wrapper and find a razor blade. Or, really, an anti-imperialist gonzo ride that detours into real history and imagined cosmic wonder and does ask you to sit up and pay attention.
Main character Mitch is foul-mouthed Han Solo with a wounded heart and a knack for the worst decisions. Flynn is Captain America with PTSD. Gloria (GLORIA!) is Dianna Ross as Cleopatra.
The characters are messy, interesting, real. Extra star for the fact that the book is centered on not only white gays saving the day.
April 23, 2026
Thank you NetGalley, and Nathan Tavares for an ARC of 'The Disco at the End of the World'.
This alternate history of 1970s America follows Mitch, a queer teen chasing his star-crossed lover across the skies. With colourful characters, groovy tunes, and a whole lot of queer rage / joy, this book is simultaneously a well-researched portrayal of queer history and important commentary on the socio-political landscape of current day America.
I particularly enjoyed Mitch's distinctive voice, Tavares' world-building, and his rich prose. A (more) fascist and space-obsessed America is something I can well believe. I also liked the themes of found family, queer joy, music as power, and how ordinary individuals can come together to fight oppression / top-down persecution, and save the world.
Unfortunately, once Mitch left the space station I left less connected to the narrative. The story became disjointed and the prose too heavy - I felt myself getting distracted as I read. Overall, I thought the story was too long and convoluted for what the book was trying to say. It's a shame, as I really did like the concept.
This alternate history of 1970s America follows Mitch, a queer teen chasing his star-crossed lover across the skies. With colourful characters, groovy tunes, and a whole lot of queer rage / joy, this book is simultaneously a well-researched portrayal of queer history and important commentary on the socio-political landscape of current day America.
I particularly enjoyed Mitch's distinctive voice, Tavares' world-building, and his rich prose. A (more) fascist and space-obsessed America is something I can well believe. I also liked the themes of found family, queer joy, music as power, and how ordinary individuals can come together to fight oppression / top-down persecution, and save the world.
Unfortunately, once Mitch left the space station I left less connected to the narrative. The story became disjointed and the prose too heavy - I felt myself getting distracted as I read. Overall, I thought the story was too long and convoluted for what the book was trying to say. It's a shame, as I really did like the concept.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for providing an eARC of this book for review!
The description of this very much gave me the vibe of, "What if campy 80s cartoons, the movie Priscilla Queen of the Desert, and the TV series For All Mankind all had a hybrid lovechild together?"
So, I couldn't resist picking it up, because I thought that sounded awesome, and I have no regrets. It got little bit slow towards the middle, and kind of weird towards the end (suspension of disbelief definitely required), but overall I had a great time with this funky queer sci-fi read.
Mitch's internal monologue full of self-deprecating humor and general irreverance was my favorite part of the book. I'm not usually a fan of first-person POV, but this character is so distinct and unique that I can't imagine the story being told any other way.
The description of this very much gave me the vibe of, "What if campy 80s cartoons, the movie Priscilla Queen of the Desert, and the TV series For All Mankind all had a hybrid lovechild together?"
So, I couldn't resist picking it up, because I thought that sounded awesome, and I have no regrets. It got little bit slow towards the middle, and kind of weird towards the end (suspension of disbelief definitely required), but overall I had a great time with this funky queer sci-fi read.
Mitch's internal monologue full of self-deprecating humor and general irreverance was my favorite part of the book. I'm not usually a fan of first-person POV, but this character is so distinct and unique that I can't imagine the story being told any other way.
April 23, 2026
The impact that is “I Feel Love” by Donna Summer
I saw the cover of this book on NetGalley and it looked so interesting I needed to see what it was about. Disco? Space? Sign me up.
I thought this was a powerful story overall although it felt disjointed. I did not like the lack of dialogue and I did not like the ending. Suddenly our MC was always an alien and he was meant to adjudicate this world. I do not like the “suddenly remembering who you are” trope. It makes me feel lied to as a reader and weakens the impact of the story.
As a lover of disco music, the middle was the best part. Family coming together with the love of music. Circus Disco is where I would want to be in the 70’s. It is in your best interest to listen to the songs mentioned in this story.
Nathan did an incredible job in research for this book and that knowledge showed.
I saw the cover of this book on NetGalley and it looked so interesting I needed to see what it was about. Disco? Space? Sign me up.
I thought this was a powerful story overall although it felt disjointed. I did not like the lack of dialogue and I did not like the ending. Suddenly our MC was always an alien and he was meant to adjudicate this world. I do not like the “suddenly remembering who you are” trope. It makes me feel lied to as a reader and weakens the impact of the story.
As a lover of disco music, the middle was the best part. Family coming together with the love of music. Circus Disco is where I would want to be in the 70’s. It is in your best interest to listen to the songs mentioned in this story.
Nathan did an incredible job in research for this book and that knowledge showed.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Titan Books provided an early galley for review.
The 1970's and disco? That was enough to put this on my radar. Throw in the sci-fi genre, and color me very interested.
It is easy to be pulled into a book when the POV main character has a distinctive voice that shines through right from the start. I found Mitch to be very likable and fun.
Tavares does a fine job in those opening chapters to acclimate the reader into this world (his prose is rich and evocative without overpowering). The worldbuilding continues to unfold as the story moves planetside, layering in the political topics and themes that echo much of the current landscape as it does for the story's 70's setting.
While not exactly what I was expecting, the story took me on an interesting ride to be sure.
The 1970's and disco? That was enough to put this on my radar. Throw in the sci-fi genre, and color me very interested.
It is easy to be pulled into a book when the POV main character has a distinctive voice that shines through right from the start. I found Mitch to be very likable and fun.
Tavares does a fine job in those opening chapters to acclimate the reader into this world (his prose is rich and evocative without overpowering). The worldbuilding continues to unfold as the story moves planetside, layering in the political topics and themes that echo much of the current landscape as it does for the story's 70's setting.
While not exactly what I was expecting, the story took me on an interesting ride to be sure.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
3.75 🌟
Have you ever been at a disco/rave/concert and been completely taken over by a feeling of joy and connection to the music and those around you? Lost in the music.
Well what if that feeling was actually a real energy that could be harnessed?
Although set in a parallel universe where the USA is further along in its space programme in the 1970s the culture for queer people at the time hasn't changed.
This book is a love letter to the qieer community, the family and love that can be found there and disco. Also weird space aliens.
One of the.more.unique books I've read from the SciFi genre.
This book doesn't hold your hand, you are going to need to concentrate to have any idea what's going on at points and maybe could have been a little bit shorter.
Have you ever been at a disco/rave/concert and been completely taken over by a feeling of joy and connection to the music and those around you? Lost in the music.
Well what if that feeling was actually a real energy that could be harnessed?
Although set in a parallel universe where the USA is further along in its space programme in the 1970s the culture for queer people at the time hasn't changed.
This book is a love letter to the qieer community, the family and love that can be found there and disco. Also weird space aliens.
One of the.more.unique books I've read from the SciFi genre.
This book doesn't hold your hand, you are going to need to concentrate to have any idea what's going on at points and maybe could have been a little bit shorter.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
3.75⭐️
Some important commentary regarding arts and politics in the US, and was sat for the disco vibes, but I just didn’t feel connected to the story itself
Some important commentary regarding arts and politics in the US, and was sat for the disco vibes, but I just didn’t feel connected to the story itself
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