Mattie Lubchansky’s ‘Simplicity’
A tale of walled cities, omnisexual communes, and Cthulhoid horrors.
Hey, German-speakers! Through a very weird set of circumstances, I ended up owning the rights to the German audiobook of my bestselling 2022 cryptocurrency heist technothriller Red Team Blues and now I’m selling DRM-free audio and ebooks, along with the paperback (all in German and English) on a Kickstarter that runs until August 11.
Cartoonist Mattie Lubchansky has a new, horny, weird, amazing science fiction graphic novel called Simplicity and it drops today:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/739012/simplicity-by-mattie-lubchansky/
Simplicity is set in the not-so-distant future, in which the US has dissolved and its major centers have been refashioned as “Administrative and Security Territories” — a fancy way of saying “walled corporate autocracies.” Lucius Pasternak is an anthropology grad student in the NYC AST, a trans-man getting by as best as he can, minimizing how much he sells out, which is not enough to make his bosses treat him with respect, but is more than his friends can stomach.
Pasternak’s fortunes improve when he gets a big, juicy assignment: to embed with a Catskills community of weirdo sex-hippies who supply the most coveted organic produce in the NYC AST. They’ve been cloistered in an old summer camp since the 1970s, and when civilization collapsed, it barely touched them. Pasternak’s mission is to chronicle the community and its strange ways for a billionaire’s vanity-project museum of New York State.
The meat of the action is set in Simplicity, the Catskills home of the Spiritual Association of Peers, where Pasternak struggles to gain the support and trust of the community, working their gardens by day and, eventually, attending their orgy/free-for-all nightly rituals, where the community members work out their tension and aggression through a mix of wild sex and punch-ups.
But no matter how diligently Pasternak tries to fit in, he still finds himself at the community’s margins, unable to win over their trust. Then, just as he starts to make some progress, members of the community start going missing, turning up horribly mutilated. The horror of this is compounded by the erotic, nightmarish visions that have haunted Pasternak since his arrival in Simplicity, of a many-tentacled, many-mawed, many-vulvaed monster.
Pasternak’s bosses abruptly recall him to the NYC AST, and that’s when he learns the true nature of his mission to Simplicity, and the story moves into a thrilling, action-packed final act with an extremely satisfying conclusion.
This is such a tight little tale, speedily told in that way of the best graphic novels, which cram so much expressivity and atmosphere into the visual storytelling. It’s got shades of Ellis’s Transmetropolitan and Matt Bors’s Justice Warriors:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/22/libras-assemble/#the-uz
This is post-cyberpunk, ecosexual revolutionary storytelling at its finest. I know Lubchansky mostly from her absolutely amazing podcast, No Gods, No Mayors (co-hosted with Trashfuture’s November Kelly and Riley Quinn), where she is incredibly charming, funny, and incisive:
https://www.patreon.com/nogodsnomayors
If you’d asked me to imagine what kind of science fiction graphic novel she would turn out, I probably wouldn’t have guessed this one — but now that I’ve read it, I’m not surprised at all that it came from her.
Support me this summer in the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop! This summer, I’m writing The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to AI, a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux that explains how to be an effective AI critic.
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