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/
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If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/01/ecosexuality/#nyc-ast
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-auf-deutsche-drm-freie
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@pluralistic@mamot.fr
Thanks for sharing about Simplicity, it sounds interesting. I’m on the hold list for my library.