Broken Utopia

by Ryan Boudinot

Ryan Boudinot's first new novel since 2012's Blueprints of the Afterlife follows a cast of mystics, frauds, and profoundly incompetent cult leaders through Iceland, Seattle, black holes, and a few blown minds on a quest to reboot reality itself. Lee is one of the most celebrated American novelists of the 1980s, not to mention an obnoxious, womanizing jerk. His body of work happens to have been created by artificial intelligence in the future and delivered to him by some guy named Max. Broken Utopia locates Lee and Max in a cosmos divided into three interdependent layers—the eternal Town, the User Platform and the Substrate—all ruled by Vicarious, a company that converts human experiences into drugs. Residents of the Town enjoy lives on a loop of endless enrichment and wonder, as inhabitants of the User Platform eke out harrowing routines of addiction and delusion. Meanwhile, in the Substrate, a near future earth teeters at the edge of a mass extinction event that—for better or worse—is only temporary. This is the 18th book in the Fellow Travelers Series.

500 pages, Paperback

Published November 1, 2025

About the author

Ryan Boudinot is the author of the novels BROKEN UTOPIA, BLUEPRINTS OF THE AFTERLIFE, and MISCONCEPTION and the story collections THE OCTOPUS RISES and THE LITTLEST HITLER. His work has been shortlisted for the PEN/USA Award and the Philip K Dick Award and published in translation in Germany, Spain, and the Czech Republic.