Brave New World

“Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what it can do to you.”

Brave New World began as a roleplaying game I designed back in 1999. It features a dystopian setting in which you play superpowered rebels working to take back America after all superpowered people are ordered to either work for the government or go to jail. This all starts when the entire city of Chicago is destroyed in 1976, and the entire nation has been under martial law ever since.

I created Brave New World more than two years before 9/11, but the themes it raised then about the competing values of safety versus liberty seem prescient now. There’s a lot of intriguing ground to cover there, and it’s only gotten more fertile over the past 12 years.

To top it off, I’ve been working with an independent film house, Reactor 88 Studios, to get a Brave New World feature film off the ground. We have an awesome proof-of-concept piece we shot a couple years ago — which you can see below — and I’ve been itching to get back to the setting ever since. I sold the game to AEG years ago, but they’ve kindly licensed it back to me for a trilogy of novels, the first three books in my 12 for ’12 project. (Many thanks to my pal John Zinser for that!)

The first book follows the plot of the film, as led into here:

The Trilogy

To launch my 12 for ’12 plan, I decided to put up a Kickstarter drive to support a trilogy of Brave New World novels. It was a huge success, and we raised over $13,000. I’ve finished writing the books and am in the process of getting them to press.