Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future

There’s a gospel choir on the record I’m releasing this month. Consider this podcast episode the release party. Sixteen voices, brass underneath, a room you can hear the size of. It comes in about two-thirds of the way through a song called “F**k That Family,” which is about the people who chose you back — the ones who aren’t blood and set a place for you anyway.
That choir doesn’t exist.
I typed a description of what I wanted at my kitchen table in Barcelona at four in the morning, and waited about ninety seconds.
I’ve spent years on the other side of the glass, producing music videos for working regional acts. I know what a record costs at that level. A sixteen-piece choir with a horn section is a five-figure day before anyone has mixed anything. No regional act in Europe can afford it. Not one.
I didn’t hire anything.
This week’s episode is about what happens next. And I should say at the top what I say at the top of the episode: I’m not a neutral party in this. Normally on this show I’m at some distance from what I’m covering — somebody built a thing, somebody sold a thing, somebody got displaced, and I go find out what happened and why it matters. Not this time. This time I’m the one who did it.
I’m putting myself on trial here.
What I made
Eight songs. About forty hours. It’s called Suburb City, by 50 Minute Hour.
It’s a concept album — one narrator, multiple voices, one town, eight chapters. It’s heavy on Gen-X angst, anthems, and catharsis. And it is very personal to me, made with love and care — by me and the machine. That’s the contradiction.
There’s a Music Man patter parody about the therapy industry, sung by a huckster selling wounds instead of pool tables. A waltz in three-four where every argument resolves into you misremembered. An orchestral lament about three attempts to leave a marriage, each one interrupted. A gospel showstopper. A rockabilly strut about resigning from the position of designated family failure. Glam rock. Pop punk. And a rock opera anthem set in a tower where everyone who ever damaged you lives on a different floor, and you’re the one paying the heating bill.
Every word is mine. Every arrangement decision is mine. I knew exactly what I wanted each song to do and I iterated until it did it.
And every single performance on that record was generated. All of it. There is not one human being on it besides me, and I don’t sing.
It was made with love, passion, and commitment — and it would not exist otherwise. No budget, no band, no time. I’ve wanted to write music since I was fifteen, which is also the year I won a national poetry prize for a parody of Shakespeare. Act Two, Scene Seven of As You Like It. The one about all the world being a stage.
What it replaced
Here’s the part I haven’t heard anyone in my position say out loud.
That record replaced a session drummer.
It replaced a bass player. A guitarist. A horn section. A sixteen-member gospel choir. A tracking engineer. A mix engineer. A mastering engineer.
Nine or ten paid jobs. Forty hours. Zero pounds, euros, or dollars.
I want to be precise about the verb, because it matters. I didn’t evaluate those people and decide I could do without them. I didn’t audition anyone and find them wanting.
I couldn’t. I skipped them, because skipping them was available.
That’s the real story of the last three years, and almost nobody is telling it straight — least of all people like me.
The wrong question
In November of last year, Deezer and Ipsos ran the biggest study anyone’s run on this. Nine thousand people, eight countries. They played them music and asked whether it was made by a human or a machine.
Ninety-seven percent got it wrong.
That number has been in every article about this for eight months. It’s in open letters. It’s in policy submissions. It gets cited by the people worried about all this as proof of a crisis, and by the people building these tools as proof of arrival.
Both sides love it, which should be your first clue that something’s off.
Because here’s what that study actually measured: detection. Can you tell?
And I’d ask you — when have you ever chosen music that way?
Think about the last song you loved. Did you love it because you correctly identified the production chain? Did you put it on and think, ah yes, session players, analogue desk, human hands? Or was there autotune on it? Pitch correction? Stem separation? AI plug-ins in Logic or Pro Tools or Ableton that plenty of musicians use and nobody discloses?
The questions people actually ask are much older and much simpler. Did you like it. Was it any good. Did whoever made this work hard at it.
Nobody has tested any of those. Not once.
Every blind test that’s been run compares different songs, by different writers, and asks people to spot the machine. Which leaves the biggest variable in music — the writing — completely loose. If a listener prefers the human track, was that the performance? Or did they just prefer the song?
Eight months of argument, thousands of pages of policy, platform bans, lawsuits. And the entire evidentiary basis is a study that answered a question nobody asks.
The books on the shelf
I’ve watched this happen before. Several times.
I started using Photoshop at version one, in 1989, before it had layers. Then PageMaker, QuarkXPress, Freehand, Illustrator, InDesign. I watched nonlinear editing arrive and empty out the flatbed rooms — rooms full of people who cut film with their hands, and then those rooms were storage.
I watched desktop publishing kill typesetting. I used Linotronic typesetters, wax, and brayers in print shops when I was fifteen, doing paste-ups for my high school paper at the Landrum News Leader in Landrum, South Carolina. An entire skilled trade, with apprenticeships and specialists and decades of accumulated knowledge, gone in about ten years.
Nobody voted on that. Nobody consulted the typesetters.
But here’s the part of that history I’ve never heard anyone bring into this argument.
The design annuals.
If you worked in a corporate graphics department any time between about 1975 and 2005, you know exactly what I mean. Every January the department ordered the books. Communication Arts. Print. The Type Directors Club annual. The AIGA annuals. Beautiful, hardbound, ninety dollars a pop, full of the year’s award-winning work.
Nobody bought them to be inspired.
You bought them so that when a client needed a quarterly newsletter by Thursday, your in-house designer could open to page eighty-four, find the layout that won a gold medal in Chicago, and rebuild it with the client’s logo on it.
That was the job. That was how in-house design got made, at scale, across an entire industry, for thirty years. The award-winning designers knew. Everybody knew. The annuals kept selling.
So let’s call it what it was: a training corpus with a spine and a dust jacket and a purchase order attached. And we called it professional development, and nobody in forty years called it theft.
Now — here’s where the analogy breaks, and I don’t skip past it in the episode, because if I did the whole thing would be a cheap shot.
Scale and consent.
The annuals were a transaction. Somebody got paid. The designers submitted their work knowing what the book was and what it was for. Ninety dollars changed hands and everybody understood the arrangement.
What happened with these models is neither of those things. Nobody submitted. Nobody was paid. The scale isn’t a bookshelf — it’s most of recorded human output.
That difference is real and it’s the strongest argument the other side has. I’m not waving it away.
What Bowie saw
In June of 2002, David Bowie told the New York Times that music was about to become like running water, or electricity. A utility. That copyright would no longer exist in ten years, and the only unique situation left would be showing up and playing it in a room. You’d better be prepared, he said, for doing a lot of touring.
That’s four years before Spotify was founded.
Everybody treated it as the eccentric talking.
He was mostly right, and very early. Copyright didn’t die — he got that part wrong, and I’ll own it on his behalf. But the utility, and the touring, and the collapse of the recording as the thing you sell: all of that happened.
And he’d already acted on it. In 1997 he raised fifty-five million dollars against his own future royalties — twenty-five albums, two hundred and eighty-seven songs, everything before 1990. Took the money up front. Used it to buy back his masters from his former manager.
Napster launched two years later. By 2004, Moody’s had cut the rating to one notch above junk.
He wasn’t predicting AI. He was predicting something more useful: that the recording was never going to be the valuable part.
The room was.
The part nobody’s campaigning about
Almost all of the public argument about AI and music is about voices. That’s not an accident — vocals are the part a non-musician can point at, and there’s a real emotional charge to a synthetic person singing to you about their feelings.
But the work that’s actually disappearing is quieter and further down.
It’s the second guitarist who came up with the part that made the chorus work. It’s the drummer who played it four times and the fourth one was the one. It’s the engineer who’s been mixing for twenty years and knows, without thinking about it, that the second chorus needs the snare pulled back four milliseconds or the whole thing sits wrong.
None of that is legible to a listener. All of it is why records sound like records.
There’s no open letter about the person who knew which room to book.
So here’s what I want to do about it
The album is licensed Creative Commons, attribution only. All eight songs. Free.
Any musician, any band, any producer who wants to take one of these songs and rebuild it with human beings — players, singers, tracking, mixing, mastering, the whole chain — it’s yours.
The words are mine and the structure is mine. Everything else is negotiable. Change the melody. Change the tempo. Change the genre entirely. Turn the waltz into a dirge. Turn the gospel number into a punk song. I’m not precious about anything except the words, and honestly I’ll argue about those if you make a good case.
Credit me as the writer and it’s yours. Record it, release it, sell it, play it live. I’m not asking permission back.
Then both versions go up. Same page, same player, level-matched, unlabeled.
And listeners answer one question. Not can you tell.
Which one would you play again?
That’s it. That’s the whole idea. And the reason it’s worth doing is that it controls for the thing every previous test left wide open — same words, same songs, same writer. The only variable that changes is who, or what, performed it.
Whatever difference shows up is the value of human musicianship, measured. Not asserted in an open letter. Measured.
And whatever comes back, I publish. If the human version is better, that goes up. If it isn’t, that goes up too.
Why I actually care
There’s a song on this record about a woman who died. She was my wife for a long time, and then she wasn’t, and then eighteen months after I finally got out, the phone rang.
There’s another song with a spoken passage in the middle of it. It’s a sentence somebody said to me across a kitchen table, more or less word for word, and I put it in because it was true and because I’d never been able to explain it to anyone otherwise.
The machine sings both of those beautifully. Pitch is perfect. Phrasing is right. Every note where it should be.
It doesn’t mean it.
And I honestly don’t know whether that’s a real thing I’m hearing, or whether it’s sentiment — whether I just know what’s underneath those songs and I’m supplying the weight myself.
Nobody knows. That’s the whole point. Nobody has checked.
Bowie said the room was the thing. I don’t have a room.
The songs are yours — Creative Commons, attribution only.
I’d like to hear somebody mean it.
🎧 Listen to the full episode above.
🎵 The album is here: www.citizenone.world/suburbcity
Citizen One — Exploring Our Urban Future.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit multiversethinking.substack.com

Friends,
I want to tell you what we just pulled off, because most of you have watched me build toward it for a while and I think it finally matters.
Premium Pulp Fiction, my indie traditional publishing startup within the Citizen One World ecosystem, just brought our first Ukrainian novel into English. The new novel is Scions of the Last Hope by M. Van Shamrai, launching August 1. You can pre-order the book today at www.scionsofthelasthope.com
.
Maks wrote it in the Eastern European literary SF tradition: think Glukhovsky as the near comparison, the Strugatskys and Lem as the ceiling. This is not Anglo-American genre fiction wearing a translation. It’s the real thing, and Kirkus saw it. Their Indie review called it “a vividly imagined multi-dimensional intergalactic romp of a space novel” — and then delivered the line I can’t stop grinning about: “(Van) Shamrai’s characters are a lot more grounded than the menagerie of spacefaring malcontents George Lucas populated the Mos Eisley cantina with.”
More grounded than George Lucas. For an indie debut in translation, that’s the review you hope for and rarely get.
But the review isn’t really the point I want to make to this group. You know how challenging the book world can be. What I want you to see is the next-gen machine I am building within it.
Start with the book itself, because this is where most presses cut corners and where I refuse to compromise. Every PPF author gets the full editorial chain, fully funded: developmental edits, line edits, copyediting, and proofreading, then layout and interior design and original cover design. And here’s what I think is genuinely unique — I’m in it with them while they’re still drafting. Writing coaching and AI-assisted research through the draft and the rewrite, not just cleanup after the manuscript lands on my desk. I’m a creative partner from the blank page forward.
Then the apparatus around the finished book, all of it at no cost to the author: trailers cut in-house. A companion wiki — a full Field Guide wiki companion web site with 150+ illustrated glossary entries, character pages, the works. A training program for launch and ongoing Instagram and TikTok carousel campaigns, nearly a hundred custom slides on a locked visual spec. A blurb operation reaching leading authors in the field. Trade review submissions. Award pathways. A PR and marketing ecosystem a debut novelist could never assemble alone and most small presses simply don’t support.
I built this the hard way — on my own books first. Ghost Emperor was the canary in the coal mine, the first live test of the systems. The Southern civic noir trilogy (Bloodwater, Defiance, and The Dark Water Gospel) stress-tested the rest. I chose to make the mistakes on my own titles, including overpaying for obsolete book marketing programs, so I wouldn’t make them on someone else’s. My AI-powered publishing, PR, marketing and back-end royalty reporting systems are finally in place, proven, and running.
That’s the model: IP-first, adaptation-second, full funding, never charging an author for production or distribution, and staying in it for the long haul with à la carte marketing systems rather than one launch week window. A real alternative to both the Big Five and the pay-to-play hybrids.
Here’s my ask. I have new authors I have yet to announce — in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. But I’m always looking for the next one. If you know an emerging writer looking for a publishing partner who will actually build the whole apparatus around their work — and be in the room from the first draft — send them my way.
Always glad to talk it through with any of you directly.
Doug


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit multiversethinking.substack.com

There are people who fear they’ll never see the world. There are others who see all of it and come home exactly as heavy as they left, counting cities the way you’d count change. And then there are people like me, who somewhere along the way felt hope finally outrun the fear — the belief that the longing you carry out of a place isn’t the cost of leaving it but the evidence that it mattered.
I went to the National Gallery of Victoria on a Sunday afternoon in June expecting a museum of empire — another British Museum, another V&A, the spoils of the world hauled home and hung where the light is good. I expected the Grand Tour paintings on the third floor. What I didn’t expect was to meet their counterargument first, on the ground floor, dressed up as a yellow pumpkin. It took me three hours and three floors to understand that’s what it was.
Reading a city by what it sells and what it buries
I got there the way I always start in a new city: a tram to the market. Melbourne’s trams are the green of a billiard table and the cream of old piano keys, and within the downtown grid they cost nothing — you step on, you step off, no tap, no fare, no questions. A man raised on American cities, where the middle class treats the bus as a sentence the poor are made to serve, stands on Swanston Street watching the free tram stack up and pull away and thinks: so it can be done. They simply chose to do it.
The Queen Victoria Market is one of the oldest arguments Melbourne has with itself, and it doesn’t advertise the fact. I didn’t know, walking the sheds, that I was walking on the dead. Seven hectares of fruit stalls and fish halls sit on top of the city’s first cemetery, closed in 1854 and paved over when Melbourne decided it wanted the land more than the memory. They moved 914 bodies out in the 1920s — give or take what the record admits to — and they did not move all of them. Sir John Monash himself called it a disgrace, and the work went ahead anyway, because the work always goes ahead. What gets paved over gets called progress, then heritage, then it gets a plaque. I’ve written that exact sentence about a dozen towns. It was restful, in a grim way, to find it waiting for me at the bottom of the world.
So I did what the living do: I poked around on top of all of it. Secondhand booksellers, a Turkish woman who sold me a coffee and a borek without looking up, butchers calling out to women they’ve sold to for thirty years. The market does both things at once, openly — the dead under the floorboards, the living haggling over flathead above them.
Then I walked several kilometers down Swanston Street, which runs through Melbourne’s memory in strata: the boom-time bluestone built to look like temples because money prefers to be worshipped indoors; Chinatown, the oldest continuous one in the country, planted square across the city’s central spine rather than tucked off to a margin; St Paul’s and the buttery clocks of Flinders Street Station; and finally the river, brown and patient and in no hurry to explain itself. A street keeps its own minutes. I read buildings the way I read court files. Rivers are the only honest archive — they take everything and keep none of it where you can reach it.
The pumpkin and the thumb
The gallery announces itself low and long, no dome, no columns — Roy Grounds built it in 1968 to look like a fortress that had made peace. Out front, amid the fountains, stands David Shrigley’s Really Good: a bronze thumbs-up the height of a house, the thumb stretched like taffy past any bone that could hold it, approval cranked so far past sincerity it curdles. It greets you the way a city greets a man who’s been gone a long time — too friendly, slightly wrong, the gesture held a beat too long. It’s the most honest thing on the lot, because it admits the performance.
Inside, dead center under the glass roof of Federation Court, stood the pumpkin. Yayoi Kusama’s Dancing Pumpkin — yellow as a caution sign, eleven splayed legs, pocked all over in her graduated black dots. Kusama has painted this same gourd for more than eighty years, since she was a girl on a seed farm in Matsumoto, and the dots are the obliteration she’s spent a lifetime fighting, the pattern that wants to scatter the self into infinity. The pumpkin is the homely anchor she sets against it, painted and repainted so it cannot float away. A woman who stayed mostly in one room her whole life, painting one thing until it filled the universe. I filed it away without yet knowing what it was the answer to.
The painting was never a souvenir. It was a credential.
Upstairs, the Grand Tour. The wall text described it as a charming custom — young aristocrats off and away across Europe and other continents to learn their art and culture. The honest version: a young man of the right family sent abroad to acquire the finish a country house couldn’t supply, returning with a canvas to hang in the hall so visitors would understand, without anyone saying the words, that the boy had seen the world. And not only boys. Women made the same crossing — Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Lady Hester Stanhope, and at least 955 more that a Stanford project has only lately dug out of the registers. The men got the portraits. The women got the footnote, and then not even that.
The paintings are beautiful — Canaletto’s Venice laundered into light, Bellotto the nephew working the same flattering haze, Tiepolo’s silk-wrapped Finding of Moses in the color of money. I want to be honest about the beauty, because my argument doesn’t need them to be ugly. They are very beautiful, and they were painted to be carried home as proof. Both true at once, which is the only register I know how to think in anymore. A gallery, even a royal one, is just a courthouse with better lighting: the pictures on the wall are the minutes, and the meetings are held elsewhere.
I recognized the machinery immediately, because it’s the same machinery — only the freight has changed. They paid to see these places; I get paid to live in them. They had a slow ship and six months to plan a crossing I’d do between a Tuesday and a Wednesday with a carry-on and a Wi-Fi password. And we counted countries the same way. That’s the uncomfortable part. They were the empire. I was the help the empire moved around, billing my crossings to a client the way their footmen once billed their passage to a household. No one was ever going to paint me. I counted anyway.
The inventory the canvases don’t hang
Here’s what doesn’t make it onto a gallery wall. The 152 bus down Avenida Santa Fe in Buenos Aires, learned before the language. The Tangier medina folding in on itself. Cairo’s car horns like a second weather, and a driver named Hani who wouldn’t cheat me and after a while wouldn’t let anyone else. Venice — the real one, not Canaletto’s — drowning quietly under everyone arriving to photograph it before it goes. And four years, no joke, in a construction camp in the Saudi desert, which is the room where the finish gets made and never the room that gets painted. There’s no gilded canvas of a labor camp at the edge of the Empty Quarter, no flattering haze, no Canaletto to place each man exactly where a man should be. I can give you that picture, because few others have: the heat with actual weight, the fine red grit in the keyboard and the bedroll and the back of the throat. The Hejaz was one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever lived, and the most honest — the only stop on the whole itinerary that wasn’t selling me anything.
The Grand Tour shows you the cathedrals and the canals. The worker camps show you the quarry the cathedral came out of. One is the truth and the other is the painting, and you should know at all times which one you’re looking at.
What the pumpkin was arguing against
The grand tourists count the world to prove they mattered. The old woman in the one room repeated a single gourd until it filled the universe — not to prove she’d gone anywhere, but to keep from disappearing where she stood. One art counts; the other holds on. I’d climbed the stairs with the lord’s instinct in my chest and come back down owing her an apology.
So why do we count at all — the tourists with their commissions, me with my stamps and datelines and whatever this is? I think the count is a hedge against the suspicion that none of it stuck, that a man can cross every water there is and come home exactly as heavy as he left, with nothing in the hold but stamps. The paintings were insurance against that fear. So is the passport. So, honestly, is this.
But there’s one credential that can’t be commissioned or hung or paved over — the saudade, the longing, the evidence carried in the body and not the hold, that the going meant something, that I did not merely move. Tourists collect views; I accrued routines and then abandoned every one of them. They have Venice in a frame on a wall, behaving itself forever. I have a tideline on a stone wall and the muscle memory of a bus route in a city I’ll probably never see again.
The aristocrats, then and now, come home with a painting. I came home full of people I will miss until I die.
I will take the ache.
— Douglas Stuart McDaniel, Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit multiversethinking.substack.com

I wrote this one at 35,000 feet, in economy, on a China Eastern A350 somewhere over the darkness between Moscow and St. Petersburg on my way to Shanghai. While everyone around me slept, I was thinking about Shanghai — not the Shanghai of now, but the Shanghai of the 1930s, the one that lived mostly in the heads of people who would never go there. That Shanghai was a genre before it was a place. It was where the competent man operated, where the threat was real and exotic and geopolitical, where the woman in the hotel bar was either an asset or a liability and the wise operative knew which before he finished his drink.
That genre still has a name. We call it pulp fiction. Not Tarantino’s — though I’ll note, as a fellow Knoxvillian, that he and I came out of the same city, which may explain a few things about both of us and our relationship to genre and violence. When I say pulp, I mean the thing itself: the wood-pulp magazines, the writers who built narrative machinery inside them, and the machinery that is somehow still running.
A river, not a family tree
The cleanest way to understand a genre is to stop thinking of it as a family tree and start thinking of it as a river system. Multiple tributaries, shared sediment. The water at the mouth is the water of everywhere it’s been.
The globetrotting intelligence thriller — the competent man in foreign terrain, the moral-consequence action narrative — does not begin with Ian Fleming. It begins, for our purposes, with John Buchan and The 39 Steps in 1915: Richard Hannay, a mining engineer who stumbles into a plot, finds a corpse in his flat, and runs for the Scottish countryside chased by police and spies. Buchan gave the form its grammar — the chase, the capable loner, civilization under threat, the landscape as both obstacle and character. His heroes aren’t invulnerable; they’re capable, which is different, because capability admits the possibility of failure, and failure is where stakes and story live.
From Buchan the line forks. In Britain it runs through H.C. McNeile (”Sapper”) and Bulldog Drummond — Hannay with the complexity drained out and the violence cranked up, but he sold, and he set a flavor that would resurface in Fleming with better prose attached. In America it runs through the magazines, especially Adventure, and writers like Talbot Mundy, Harold Lamb, and Arthur O. Friel, who understood the world as a system of places, each with its own history and danger.
That American current is where F. Van Wyck Mason comes in, with Colonel Hugh North — a G-2 officer working a world of embassies, ballrooms, and backstreets. The North novels ran from 1930 to 1977, nearly five decades, which is not a thing formula alone can do. Mason wasn’t original in the flattering sense of that word. He was working squarely inside an established tradition and producing competent, consistent work within it. What he contributed was longevity and reliability — and that, whatever you make of the prose, is craft.
Then Fleming, where the lineage becomes famous, which is both its vindication and its distortion. Fleming read all of these men — Buchan, Sapper, Mundy, Mason, the Mr. Moto novels of John P. Marquand — and synthesized them with three things none of his predecessors had combined: a journalist’s sensory precision (Bond never simply drinks; he drinks a specific thing, prepared a specific way), the Cold War (Buchan’s grammar reloaded with nuclear anxiety, SMERSH and SPECTRE as Fu Manchu scaled up to the hydrogen bomb), and sex handled with a frankness the older tradition had coded or avoided. The components were inherited. The recombination felt new. That’s what good genre synthesis does.
Did Fleming plagiarize? Not exactly, and once — Thunderball, built on material developed with Kevin McClory and Jack Whittingham, a dispute he settled in court and that trailed the franchise for the rest of the century. The rest of his debts aren’t plagiarism. They’re genre. Everyone writing in a tradition is downstream of the tradition. The only question is what you do with the water.
The genre that runs ahead
Which brings me to Tom Clancy, because Amazon just dropped Jack Ryan: Ghost War, John Krasinski back in the role. Clancy’s contribution was technical specificity — where Fleming had luxury brands, Clancy had weapon systems and submarine propulsion and the org chart of the Soviet naval command. The detail was the proof of seriousness.
I used to buy his novels from a newsstand near the Pentagon while I worked at the Navy Annex — the American military-intelligence apparatus as protagonist, sold fifty yards from the actual apparatus, and nobody found it strange. That proximity is the whole point. In Debt of Honor (1994), Clancy put a pilot flying a 747 into the Capitol during a joint session of Congress, killing the president and most of the government and leaving Jack Ryan sworn in inside a CNN studio. Seven years later, Condoleezza Rice told Congress that no one could have imagined terrorists using aircraft as weapons. Clancy imagined it, and sold it to millions.
This is what the tradition does at its best. It runs slightly ahead of reality — not because the writers are prophets, but because they pay attention to systems: how power works, what the failure modes are, what happens when the machinery breaks down. The genre has always been systems thinking dressed as entertainment. That’s not a bug. That’s the engine.
The illustrator’s argument
I keep coming back to my great uncle, John Alan Maxwell, one of the significant commercial illustrators of the mid-20th century. He illustrated Steinbeck, Ferber, Huxley, Conan Doyle, Costain, Yerby, Forester — and Van Wyck Mason. He even appears, as himself, inside The Bucharest Ballerina Murders. He illustrated the first edition of Anthony Adverse, the book that knocked Gone with the Wind off the bestseller list; N.C. Wyeth got the second.
And he moved between all of it without apparently drawing a distinction or giving much of a damn. Steinbeck on one commission, Mason on the next. The pulp/literary divide was enforced not by quality but by venue and price point — hardcover with a dust jacket and a review in the Times was literature; cheap paper was pulp; the same story by the same writer could cross that line depending on where it landed. My great uncle’s forty-year career is one long argument that the distinction was always a distribution question, never an aesthetic one. The craft was the craft.
What “Premium Pulp Fiction” means
I named the imprint deliberately. It’s a provocation and a position: we take the pulp tradition seriously as a tradition. We treat genre as a working tool, not a marketing category. We know where the form comes from, and we publish work that knows it too — noir that remembers its debts, historical fiction that treats the past as lived rather than staged, speculative work that understands systems before it imagines their collapse.
The catalog reflects it. The Southern Civic Noir trilogy — Defiance, The Darkwater Gospel, Bloodwater — knows its debts to noir, to the Southern Gothic, to the grammar of civic corruption that runs from Faulkner through Ellroy. Ghost Emperor, set in Babylon in 323 BCE, treats ancient politics as a system rather than costume drama. And Maksym Van Shamrai’s Science of the Last Hope comes out of the Eastern European science-fiction tradition, displacement literature, philosophical anthropology. It knows where it comes from. That’s the criterion.
Genre fiction was always collaborative in ways literary fiction prefers not to admit — writers, illustrators, and editors working together at speed, each contributing to something none could finish alone, the collaboration carried in the DNA even when one name lands on the cover. That’s the tradition I’m publishing inside, and the lineage I want to carry forward.
Now I’m going to finish this coffee and get on a plane to Melbourne — another city with a story it tells about itself — and think about what gets built when people decide the stories worth telling are the ones that know where they come from.
If you’ve got a manuscript that knows its debts, send it our way. And join the Substack — there’s more coming.
— Douglas Stuart McDaniel, Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit multiversethinking.substack.com

Two blocks from where I live in El Raval, there’s an archaeological excavation underway. I pass it often enough now that it’s become part of my daily geography — a fenced rectangle of disturbed ground, archaeologists at work, construction paused but not stalled.
This started as a straightforward public-space upgrade. The Jardins del Doctor Fleming and Plaça de la Gardunya are being renovated — new paving, lighting, benches, a play area. Functional improvements. El Raval needs public space that works, and it needs it without apology.
What makes the site interesting isn’t the renovation. It’s the predictability of what emerged once the pavement came up.
Barcelona expects archaeology. It plans for it. The ground here is a record, and every infrastructure project knows it may have to read a few pages before proceeding.
At Fleming, those pages belong to the hospital city. Burials associated with the Hospital de la Santa Creu, dating to the 17th and 18th centuries — the cemetery known as El Corralet. By July 2025, archaeologists had documented eighteen burial units containing twenty-five individuals: men, women, and children. The older burials were simple — bodies placed without coffins, the unclaimed poor. The later ones showed a certain dignity: wooden coffins, rosaries and medals still present, arms folded properly. Someone had cared enough, even for the abandoned.
These were the ones whose relationship to the city was transactional and final — and whose remains now slow the installation of playground equipment, because Barcelona has decided they are worth documenting before the children arrive.
A Ship Beneath the Fish Market
Ten minutes’ walk from Fleming, at the foot of La Rambla, the Drassanes Reials — the Royal Shipyards, now the Maritime Museum — stands as one of the great medieval industrial buildings in Europe. Sixteen Gothic stone naves, each sixty metres long, built to produce warships for the Crown of Aragon at scale. At its peak in 1423, twelve galleys could be built simultaneously inside those halls. The Drassanes wasn’t a monument to craftsmanship. It was a factory.
In April 2025, three kilometres up the coast, construction crews excavating for a new biomedical research complex broke through into a medieval shipwreck. They named it Ciutadella I. Ten metres long, built of thirty curved wooden ribs and at least seven hull planks, mid-15th century. A merchant vessel, most likely — sunk in a storm when that section of the city was still open water.
The ship is five metres below current ground level because Barcelona’s coastline moved. After the city built its first artificial docks in 1439, the old sandbar shifted, the sea receded, and the city grew forward over its own port. The ship became sediment. The sediment became a fish market. The fish market became a construction site.
What surrounds it makes it extraordinary: that single excavation contains the remains of 18th-century Bourbon fortifications, the 19th-century fish market, a Civil War air-raid shelter built in 1938, and the 15th-century vessel beneath it all. Five centuries of Barcelona, stacked in one pit.
The Drassanes built ships for kings. Ciutadella I carried cargo — the freight that actually made the city’s economy run. The museum holds the reproduction of the famous flagship. The ground beneath a future parking structure held the workhorse.
A Battle That Remade the West
In 218 BCE, Rome fought its first battle on Iberian soil — at an Iberian town called Kissa, in what is now Catalonia. The Roman general Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio defeated the Carthaginian commander Hanno, captured Hannibal’s abandoned baggage, and established the foothold that would eventually become the Roman province of Hispania. Some historians consider it one of the decisive engagements of the ancient Mediterranean world.
For two thousand years, no one knew exactly where Kissa was.
In 2025, a team from the University of Barcelona confirmed it: Valls, in the Camp de Tarragona, at the Vilar archaeological site. The evidence is unambiguous — Punic coins concentrated in a destruction layer, lead ballista projectiles inside burned houses, a stratigraphic sequence consistent with violent demolition in the fall of 218 BCE. The geography confirms it too: Valls controls the coastal pass toward the interior of Catalonia. Roman troops marching south toward what is now Tarragona would have had to go through here.
The city wasn’t abandoned immediately. People kept living in the rubble for another decade or two before finally leaving — still trying to make a life in a place that had become a footnote in someone else’s war.
Workers Who Built Their Own Survival
In December 2025, construction teams preparing the ground for the new La Sagrera high-speed rail station broke into something not on any map: a Civil War air-raid shelter, built around 1937, absent from the 1938 census of public shelters and from every official record of Barcelona’s wartime civil defense network.
Which means it was private. And given the location — directly beneath the former La Sagrera freight station, which the CNT, the anarcho-syndicalist railway workers union, had collectivized in 1936 — it means the workers built it themselves. For themselves. Without asking permission.
The structure is unlike any other shelter found in the city. While most of Barcelona’s 1,322 documented wartime shelters were tunnels carved into hillsides or adapted basements, this one was excavated in the open air and built as a poured concrete bunker before being buried under fill. The roof slab is two metres thick, calculated to withstand 100-kilogram bombs. The freight station had already been bombed twice in 1937. The workers knew exactly what was coming.
Inside: two main galleries, four large rooms, four latrines, a probable infirmary, and graffiti marking the CNT and the FAI — the Iberian Anarchist Federation. Some of the dates on the walls run as late as 1954. Fifteen years after the war. Six years into Franco’s dictatorship. Someone was still using this space, or still marking it, or perhaps sheltering in it again for different reasons, in a different kind of fear.
The high-speed railway to Madrid will eventually run over the exact spot where those workers hid.
What the Pattern Means
Taken together — the hospital cemetery, the medieval ship, the Iberian battle site, the anarchist bunker — what emerges is not a collection of curiosities. It’s a pattern.
What strikes me about each of these sites is how little drama surrounds any of them. Archaeologists work. Sites are documented. Remains are treated properly. Timelines adjust and then resume. No spectacle. No false choice between memory and progress.
This is not Barcelona discovering its past. It’s Barcelona managing it well.
When the Jardins del Doctor Fleming reopen, children will play there. Neighbors will sit. The space will feel calmer and safer. None of that is undermined by what lay beneath it. Barcelona understands that improvement doesn’t require amnesia — that public space can be both functional and deep.
Two blocks from my apartment, that pattern is playing out again. And in Valls, and in the Ciutadella, and under the future AVE platforms of La Sagrera, it’s playing out too.
Quietly. Competently. Without self-congratulation.
The ground spoke. The city listened just long enough. Then it continued — better informed.
Citizen One is a podcast and Substack about the future of cities. Subscribe at citizenone.substack.com. Next week: Part 3 of the Barcelona series.


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