S Y N T O P I A B O O K S E R I E S
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
— R. Buckminster Fuller
E P I S T E M E
A DESIGN ODYSSEY
USD 9.95 EUR 8.50
Kindle Edition
(Amazon Exclusive)
Language: English
File size : 3.0 MB
USD 21 EUR 18
Language: English
Pages: 628
10 x 18 cm (4 x 7 in)
ISBN: 979-8-90514-026-6
Ask your local Bookstore
or pre-order from Barnes & Nobles
In a near future of rising seas and failing empires, a young woman designer builds a floating world from the ruins of the old one, confronting climate dystopia with low-tech ingenuity under the pressure of global powers.
Floating Eden Defies Empires.
As the world is being parceled out, Ayesha, born Bajau, a stateless Southeast Asian sea dweller, loses her mother in a traumatic accident. Orphaned in Sumatra, adopted in Singapore, her Leonardesque gift for drawing leads her to study design in France.
At every stage of her journey, mentors and bullies, some real and some composite, appear like stepping stones across a widening river delta, sharpening her worldview and refining her sense of what design can be at its worst, and what it should be at its best.
Upon returning to her beleaguered stilt village, Ayesha commits herself to helping her maritime community by prototyping self-sustaining floating islands from salvaged plastic and low-tech ingenuity, with the support of her former orphanage bully turned corporate lawyer, a retired U.S. Army engineer, and a gifted Bajau teenager.
Neither utopia nor dystopia, the emerging artificial archipelago is called a Syntopia: places that design together. But when her half-moon, glinting Eden draws predation, relentless pressure and intimidation from hired guns follow.
Can the Bajau keep their future afloat
when land-dwellers keep dragging it under?
Written by a professor of design, SYNTOPIA EPISTEME: a Design Odyssey is conceived as the first volume in a series of speculative epic, Vernian novels intended to make design theory and practices vivid, thrilling, and cinematically engaging for students.
SYNTOPIA is a speculative series built around a simple but radical idea: redesigning global systems far from their centers of power.
Its recurring heroes are not conquerors, detectives, or chosen ones, but designers: people who respond to ecological collapse, political coercion, and systemic failure by building autonomous, self-sufficient communities, villages, and cities in remote parts of the world. These experiments, called syntopias, are locally grounded yet connected to others, forming a loose, distributed network of places that learn, adapt, exchange, and design together beyond the old logics of extraction and domination.
Neither utopia nor dystopia, a syntopia is a living prototype: a place where new infrastructures, new social contracts, and new ways of inhabiting the Earth can be tested under real conditions. Across the series, floating archipelagos, desert settlements, forest communities, and other improbable habitats become laboratories of survival, interdependence, and moral choice.
The first volume, SYNTOPIA EPISTEME, tells the birth of that concept through the life of Ayesha, a stateless sea-nomad woman from maritime Southeast Asia. After losing her mother in a traumatic accident, being orphaned in Sumatra, adopted in Singapore, and later trained in design in France, she returns to her threatened stilt village with a dangerous idea: to help transform it into a floating archipelago built from salvage and low-tech ingenuity. What begins as an act of design becomes an act of resistance as hired guns, political intimidation, and geopolitical predation close in.
Written by a professor of design, SYNTOPIA is a series of epic speculative novels conceived as a diegetic simulator, making complex ideas and global systems vivid through characters forced to design under pressure.
For readers drawn to plausible worldbuilding, ecological futures, and complex geopolitical tension, SYNTOPIA offers a speculative vision unfolding around designers, activists, engineers, teachers, greenwashers, mercenaries, and visionaries, all caught in the struggle to decide what kind of future deserves to survive.