Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future cover art

Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future

Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future

By: Douglas Stuart McDaniel
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Welcome to Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future. I’m Douglas Stuart McDaniel—author, innovation veteran, and accidental urbanist—exploring the forces shaping the cities of tomorrow. It’s not just a conversation—it’s a call to action. Here, we challenge assumptions, explore bold ideas, and rethink what cities can be—both now and in the future.

multiversethinking.substack.comDouglas Stuart McDaniel Science
Episodes
  • Introducing the Book Trailer for Scions of the Last Hope, by M. Van Shamrai

    Introducing the Book Trailer for Scions of the Last Hope, by M. Van Shamrai
    Jul 1 2026

    Friends,

    I want to tell you what we just pulled off, because most of you have watched me build toward it for a while and I think it finally matters.

    Premium Pulp Fiction, my indie traditional publishing startup within the Citizen One World ecosystem, just brought our first Ukrainian novel into English. The new novel is Scions of the Last Hope by M. Van Shamrai, launching August 1. You can pre-order the book today at www.scionsofthelasthope.com

    .

    Maks wrote it in the Eastern European literary SF tradition: think Glukhovsky as the near comparison, the Strugatskys and Lem as the ceiling. This is not Anglo-American genre fiction wearing a translation. It’s the real thing, and Kirkus saw it. Their Indie review called it “a vividly imagined multi-dimensional intergalactic romp of a space novel” — and then delivered the line I can’t stop grinning about: “(Van) Shamrai’s characters are a lot more grounded than the menagerie of spacefaring malcontents George Lucas populated the Mos Eisley cantina with.”

    More grounded than George Lucas. For an indie debut in translation, that’s the review you hope for and rarely get.

    But the review isn’t really the point I want to make to this group. You know how challenging the book world can be. What I want you to see is the next-gen machine I am building within it.

    Start with the book itself, because this is where most presses cut corners and where I refuse to compromise. Every PPF author gets the full editorial chain, fully funded: developmental edits, line edits, copyediting, and proofreading, then layout and interior design and original cover design. And here’s what I think is genuinely unique — I’m in it with them while they’re still drafting. Writing coaching and AI-assisted research through the draft and the rewrite, not just cleanup after the manuscript lands on my desk. I’m a creative partner from the blank page forward.

    Then the apparatus around the finished book, all of it at no cost to the author: trailers cut in-house. A companion wiki — a full Field Guide wiki companion web site with 150+ illustrated glossary entries, character pages, the works. A training program for launch and ongoing Instagram and TikTok carousel campaigns, nearly a hundred custom slides on a locked visual spec. A blurb operation reaching leading authors in the field. Trade review submissions. Award pathways. A PR and marketing ecosystem a debut novelist could never assemble alone and most small presses simply don’t support.

    I built this the hard way — on my own books first. Ghost Emperor was the canary in the coal mine, the first live test of the systems. The Southern civic noir trilogy (Bloodwater, Defiance, and The Dark Water Gospel) stress-tested the rest. I chose to make the mistakes on my own titles, including overpaying for obsolete book marketing programs, so I wouldn’t make them on someone else’s. My AI-powered publishing, PR, marketing and back-end royalty reporting systems are finally in place, proven, and running.

    That’s the model: IP-first, adaptation-second, full funding, never charging an author for production or distribution, and staying in it for the long haul with à la carte marketing systems rather than one launch week window. A real alternative to both the Big Five and the pay-to-play hybrids.

    Here’s my ask. I have new authors I have yet to announce — in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. But I’m always looking for the next one. If you know an emerging writer looking for a publishing partner who will actually build the whole apparatus around their work — and be in the room from the first draft — send them my way.

    Always glad to talk it through with any of you directly.

    Doug



    This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit multiversethinking.substack.com
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    7 mins
  • I Will Take the Ache

    I Will Take the Ache
    Jun 23 2026
    There are people who fear they’ll never see the world. There are others who see all of it and come home exactly as heavy as they left, counting cities the way you’d count change. And then there are people like me, who somewhere along the way felt hope finally outrun the fear — the belief that the longing you carry out of a place isn’t the cost of leaving it but the evidence that it mattered.I went to the National Gallery of Victoria on a Sunday afternoon in June expecting a museum of empire — another British Museum, another V&A, the spoils of the world hauled home and hung where the light is good. I expected the Grand Tour paintings on the third floor. What I didn’t expect was to meet their counterargument first, on the ground floor, dressed up as a yellow pumpkin. It took me three hours and three floors to understand that’s what it was.Reading a city by what it sells and what it buriesI got there the way I always start in a new city: a tram to the market. Melbourne’s trams are the green of a billiard table and the cream of old piano keys, and within the downtown grid they cost nothing — you step on, you step off, no tap, no fare, no questions. A man raised on American cities, where the middle class treats the bus as a sentence the poor are made to serve, stands on Swanston Street watching the free tram stack up and pull away and thinks: so it can be done. They simply chose to do it.The Queen Victoria Market is one of the oldest arguments Melbourne has with itself, and it doesn’t advertise the fact. I didn’t know, walking the sheds, that I was walking on the dead. Seven hectares of fruit stalls and fish halls sit on top of the city’s first cemetery, closed in 1854 and paved over when Melbourne decided it wanted the land more than the memory. They moved 914 bodies out in the 1920s — give or take what the record admits to — and they did not move all of them. Sir John Monash himself called it a disgrace, and the work went ahead anyway, because the work always goes ahead. What gets paved over gets called progress, then heritage, then it gets a plaque. I’ve written that exact sentence about a dozen towns. It was restful, in a grim way, to find it waiting for me at the bottom of the world.So I did what the living do: I poked around on top of all of it. Secondhand booksellers, a Turkish woman who sold me a coffee and a borek without looking up, butchers calling out to women they’ve sold to for thirty years. The market does both things at once, openly — the dead under the floorboards, the living haggling over flathead above them.Then I walked several kilometers down Swanston Street, which runs through Melbourne’s memory in strata: the boom-time bluestone built to look like temples because money prefers to be worshipped indoors; Chinatown, the oldest continuous one in the country, planted square across the city’s central spine rather than tucked off to a margin; St Paul’s and the buttery clocks of Flinders Street Station; and finally the river, brown and patient and in no hurry to explain itself. A street keeps its own minutes. I read buildings the way I read court files. Rivers are the only honest archive — they take everything and keep none of it where you can reach it.The pumpkin and the thumbThe gallery announces itself low and long, no dome, no columns — Roy Grounds built it in 1968 to look like a fortress that had made peace. Out front, amid the fountains, stands David Shrigley’s Really Good: a bronze thumbs-up the height of a house, the thumb stretched like taffy past any bone that could hold it, approval cranked so far past sincerity it curdles. It greets you the way a city greets a man who’s been gone a long time — too friendly, slightly wrong, the gesture held a beat too long. It’s the most honest thing on the lot, because it admits the performance.Inside, dead center under the glass roof of Federation Court, stood the pumpkin. Yayoi Kusama’s Dancing Pumpkin — yellow as a caution sign, eleven splayed legs, pocked all over in her graduated black dots. Kusama has painted this same gourd for more than eighty years, since she was a girl on a seed farm in Matsumoto, and the dots are the obliteration she’s spent a lifetime fighting, the pattern that wants to scatter the self into infinity. The pumpkin is the homely anchor she sets against it, painted and repainted so it cannot float away. A woman who stayed mostly in one room her whole life, painting one thing until it filled the universe. I filed it away without yet knowing what it was the answer to.The painting was never a souvenir. It was a credential.Upstairs, the Grand Tour. The wall text described it as a charming custom — young aristocrats off and away across Europe and other continents to learn their art and culture. The honest version: a young man of the right family sent abroad to acquire the finish a country house couldn’t supply, returning with a canvas to hang in the hall so visitors...
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    29 mins
  • Tom Clancy Imagined 9/11 in 1994

    Tom Clancy Imagined 9/11 in 1994
    Jun 15 2026
    I wrote this one at 35,000 feet, in economy, on a China Eastern A350 somewhere over the darkness between Moscow and St. Petersburg on my way to Shanghai. While everyone around me slept, I was thinking about Shanghai — not the Shanghai of now, but the Shanghai of the 1930s, the one that lived mostly in the heads of people who would never go there. That Shanghai was a genre before it was a place. It was where the competent man operated, where the threat was real and exotic and geopolitical, where the woman in the hotel bar was either an asset or a liability and the wise operative knew which before he finished his drink.That genre still has a name. We call it pulp fiction. Not Tarantino’s — though I’ll note, as a fellow Knoxvillian, that he and I came out of the same city, which may explain a few things about both of us and our relationship to genre and violence. When I say pulp, I mean the thing itself: the wood-pulp magazines, the writers who built narrative machinery inside them, and the machinery that is somehow still running.A river, not a family treeThe cleanest way to understand a genre is to stop thinking of it as a family tree and start thinking of it as a river system. Multiple tributaries, shared sediment. The water at the mouth is the water of everywhere it’s been.The globetrotting intelligence thriller — the competent man in foreign terrain, the moral-consequence action narrative — does not begin with Ian Fleming. It begins, for our purposes, with John Buchan and The 39 Steps in 1915: Richard Hannay, a mining engineer who stumbles into a plot, finds a corpse in his flat, and runs for the Scottish countryside chased by police and spies. Buchan gave the form its grammar — the chase, the capable loner, civilization under threat, the landscape as both obstacle and character. His heroes aren’t invulnerable; they’re capable, which is different, because capability admits the possibility of failure, and failure is where stakes and story live.From Buchan the line forks. In Britain it runs through H.C. McNeile (”Sapper”) and Bulldog Drummond — Hannay with the complexity drained out and the violence cranked up, but he sold, and he set a flavor that would resurface in Fleming with better prose attached. In America it runs through the magazines, especially Adventure, and writers like Talbot Mundy, Harold Lamb, and Arthur O. Friel, who understood the world as a system of places, each with its own history and danger.That American current is where F. Van Wyck Mason comes in, with Colonel Hugh North — a G-2 officer working a world of embassies, ballrooms, and backstreets. The North novels ran from 1930 to 1977, nearly five decades, which is not a thing formula alone can do. Mason wasn’t original in the flattering sense of that word. He was working squarely inside an established tradition and producing competent, consistent work within it. What he contributed was longevity and reliability — and that, whatever you make of the prose, is craft.Then Fleming, where the lineage becomes famous, which is both its vindication and its distortion. Fleming read all of these men — Buchan, Sapper, Mundy, Mason, the Mr. Moto novels of John P. Marquand — and synthesized them with three things none of his predecessors had combined: a journalist’s sensory precision (Bond never simply drinks; he drinks a specific thing, prepared a specific way), the Cold War (Buchan’s grammar reloaded with nuclear anxiety, SMERSH and SPECTRE as Fu Manchu scaled up to the hydrogen bomb), and sex handled with a frankness the older tradition had coded or avoided. The components were inherited. The recombination felt new. That’s what good genre synthesis does.Did Fleming plagiarize? Not exactly, and once — Thunderball, built on material developed with Kevin McClory and Jack Whittingham, a dispute he settled in court and that trailed the franchise for the rest of the century. The rest of his debts aren’t plagiarism. They’re genre. Everyone writing in a tradition is downstream of the tradition. The only question is what you do with the water.The genre that runs aheadWhich brings me to Tom Clancy, because Amazon just dropped Jack Ryan: Ghost War, John Krasinski back in the role. Clancy’s contribution was technical specificity — where Fleming had luxury brands, Clancy had weapon systems and submarine propulsion and the org chart of the Soviet naval command. The detail was the proof of seriousness.I used to buy his novels from a newsstand near the Pentagon while I worked at the Navy Annex — the American military-intelligence apparatus as protagonist, sold fifty yards from the actual apparatus, and nobody found it strange. That proximity is the whole point. In Debt of Honor (1994), Clancy put a pilot flying a 747 into the Capitol during a joint session of Congress, killing the president and most of the government and leaving Jack Ryan sworn in inside a CNN studio. Seven years later, Condoleezza Rice ...
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    24 mins
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