Welcome back to Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future and—I am excited to say—Premium Pulp Fiction. I’m your host, Douglas Stuart McDaniel, and before we go any further, I want to pause for a moment.
We’re recording this at the start of a new year, in a world that feels simultaneously exhausted and overheated. Wars that refuse resolution. Cities under pressure from climate, inequality, and political fracture. Technologies advancing faster than our capacity to govern them. Institutions losing credibility while still holding enormous power. For many people listening, this year didn’t begin with hope so much as vigilance.
That context matters.
Citizen One was never meant to be escapist. It exists because moments like this demand clearer thinking, longer memory, and a willingness to stay present inside complexity rather than retreat from it. The stories we explore here—about cities, systems, culture, and power—are not abstractions. They are the environments we’re already living in, whether we’ve named them yet or not.
So if you’re listening from a place of uncertainty, fatigue, or quiet resolve, you’re not alone. This space is for people who are still paying attention, still asking better questions, and still trying to understand how the future is being shaped in real time—often without our consent, but never without consequence.
With that in mind, let’s step into today’s episode.
Before I begin, I also wanted to share some important context with you. Citizen One is much more than a podcast. It is an emerging media brand where we explore stories at the intersection of innovation, culture, memory, and the past, present and future of cities.
But today, we’re stepping into a slightly different kind of narrative frontier. I want to take a moment to introduce Premium Pulp Fiction, our Citizen One literary imprint and publishing empire.
This episode is also a crossover—one that connects what we do here at Citizen One with a parallel storytelling project rooted in the same curiosity about systems, human complexity, and consequence, but expressed through fiction.
It’s called Premium Pulp — an independent traditional publishing imprint where quality, depth, and risk-bearing imagination come first.
At its core, Premium Pulp Fiction publishes speculative fiction, noir-inflected narratives, historical fiction, and narrative nonfiction concerned with power, memory, technology, and the quieter mechanics of how societies endure, adapt, and fail over time.
Beginning this year, we will be publishing a very small number of carefully selected titles, and unlike many modern indie or hybrid publishers, we fully finance standard book production. Our authors never pay for book production or global distribution; they also receive the resources to leverage an integrated marketing and publicity ecosystem built from a network of preferred, vetted, award-winning suppliers.
Over the last 15–20 years, most small presses have been forced into one of three survival models:
1. Author-funded or cost-sharing models
These include hybrid presses, “assisted publishing,” or thinly disguised vanity presses. Production costs are shifted to the author—sometimes partially, sometimes entirely—and the imprint’s role becomes administrative rather than editorial. Marketing support, when offered, is usually modular, outsourced, or pay-to-upgrade.
2. Grant-subsidized or institutionally anchored presses
University presses, arts-council-backed imprints, or nonprofit literary houses can sometimes fully fund authors, but they rely on external subsidy. Their marketing reach is often limited, conservative, or academically scoped, and publicity ecosystems are modest by design.
3. Micro-indies operating on sweat equity
These presses finance production out of pocket, but at minimal levels—basic editing, templated design, limited print runs—and expect authors to self-market aggressively. Publicity ecosystems are informal at best and nonexistent at worst.
What almost never exists anymore is a small, independent imprint that does all three of the following at once:
* Fully finances production (developmental editing through distribution)
* Retains editorial authority and risk (rather than transferring it to the author)
* Provides an integrated marketing and publicity ecosystem rather than ad-hoc support
That model used to be normal. It was called publishing.
While publishers exist across a wide range of sizes and models, the largest U.S. trade houses—commonly referred to as the Big Five—retain the scale, capital, and specialized editorial, marketing, and publicity infrastructure required to support broad distribution and coordinated campaigns at volume. Most small and independent presses operate with significantly smaller budgets and far fewer specialized departments, and as a result, authors are often expected to source, coordinate, or directly manage much of their promotional and publicity work themselves.
This context is what makes our approach genuinely uncommon. Premium Pulp Fiction is structurally closer to a miniature traditional house than to a contemporary indie press. We’re not simply financing books; we’re absorbing uncertainty so that editorial decisions can be made upstream, slowly, and with coherence.
Within that structure, the inclusion of a fully integrated marketing and publicity ecosystem is the clearest outlier.
Most small presses either:
* hand authors a checklist, or
* provide one or two vendor introductions, or
* rely on goodwill and improvisation
Very few embed authors into a preferred, already-vetted network of publicists, designers, media prep, trailers, and positioning support. Doing so requires long-term relationship capital, not just money.
So the honest framing is this:
Premium Pulp Fiction is not rare because it’s boutique. It’s rare because it reinstates a publishing contract that the market quietly abandoned—one where the imprint assumes risk, curates taste, and provides infrastructure so authors can focus on the work itself.
That isn’t nostalgia. It’s a deliberate structural choice. It’s structural dissent.
That structural choice shapes our focus: books built to last—structurally sound, intellectually grounded, and resistant to fashion. That orientation is not accidental. It reflects the belief that long-term relevance and endurance require more than a launch cycle or a marketing push; they require structural coherence, editorial intention, and depth of engagement that only emerges through sustained collaboration between author and editor.
Premium Pulp Fiction was founded to support work that understands genre as a working tool rather than a marketing label. We are interested in stories that know where they come from — noir that remembers its debts, historical fiction that treats the past as something lived rather than staged, speculative work that understands systems, worlds, and story ecologies before it imagines their collapse.
Handled seriously, genre does more than entertain. When handled carefully — structurally, morally, and contextually — genre becomes a way into complexity rather than a shortcut around it.
Our publishing approach intentionally mirrors that complexity. Premium Pulp Fiction operates as an independent traditional imprint: we fully finance book production for our authors, including editorial development, copyediting, cover design, layout and formatting, distribution setup, media kits, and book trailers. This allows editorial decisions to be made on the basis of quality and coherence rather than speed or scale.
That work extends beyond production. We focus on positioning, framing, and long-term relevance, with attention to how a book will read five or ten years after publication, not just how it launches. That longer view matters because a great story, like a great city, continues to live and change after its initial debut, shaping and reshaping its readership over time.
The kinds of work we seek include:
* Speculative fiction grounded in political, economic, and technological reality
* Dystopian narratives informed by history rather than abstraction
* Noir fiction attentive to power, corruption, and moral compromise
* Historical fiction concerned with memory, survival, and unfinished business
We value narrative control, structural clarity, and voice, and we welcome humor when it emerges from intelligence rather than irony.
Most importantly, we do not offer paid publishing packages. Premium Pulp is not a service press. We seek projects that benefit from close editorial engagement and long-term positioning rather than rapid release cycles.
This publishing philosophy—production financed in full, editorial risk assumed by the imprint, and a limited annual catalog—creates space for seriousness rather than spectacle. It allows fiction to ask big questions rather than announce its genre category before it earns the right. It aligns with the way Citizen One interrogates systems, but through narrative intelligence rather than analytical exposition.
Now, with that foundation in place, I want to introduce the first author signed under this imprint who exemplifies the kind of work Premium Pulp was created to support.
Van Shamrai is a Ukrainian science-fiction novelist whose work is shaped by lived historical pressure rather than speculative distance. His fiction emerges from a close engagement with political systems, social fracture, and the long consequences of collective decisions, drawing on both contemporary Ukrainian experience and broader European intellectual traditions. Rather than treating collapse as a sudden event, his writing traces how societies erode over time—through institutional strain, moral compromise, and the accumulation of unresolved choices.
His characters move through worlds governed by constraint rather than convenience, where survival is inseparable from memory, responsibility, and inherited obligation. The speculative elements in his work are never decorative; they function as extensions of real historical and civic forces, rendered through disciplined worldbuilding and a restrained, unsentimental narrative voice.
We will be publishing the English-language edition of Scions of the Last Hope, scheduled for release in late spring.
Scions of the Last Hope reflects those priorities. It is speculative in a way that respects political and historical gravity, attentive to systems as lived environments rather than convenient backdrops, and resolute in narrative voice and consequence. Its world is not a metaphor. It is an environment shaped by pressure, inheritance, and moral trade-offs that resist simplification.
Premium Pulp Fiction is not here to rescue publishing, nor to compete with high-velocity content engines. It is here to practice a standard of editorial responsibility that treats fiction as intellectual work, moral architecture, and imaginative infrastructure — work capable of carrying complexity without surrendering it for the sake of market clarity.
That is why we exist, why we work the way we work, and why the English release of Scions of the Last Hope matters—not simply as a book, but as a continuation of the narrative practices Citizen One was built to explore.
Thanks for listening.
