Vancouver, Musqueam
DEMOTOPIA
An exploration of democracy and artificial intelligence
A forthcoming political science fiction by Sung Ming Chow.
At the University of Brilliant Bastards in V-Port, students arrive from everywhere—and belong nowhere.
Some cannot return home. None can quite find a place where their academic tickets have landed them. Around them stretch the immigrant neighbourhoods, a sprawling time capsule of architecture and society through the 20th century. Yet Subin, Engel, Dehao, Kongyu, and Balala do not recognize themselves in the communities shaped by their motherlands, nor in the promises of the new one.
They throw themselves into political theory: lectures, readings, late-night debates, and even VR dialogues with sages from ancient worlds.
They are pursuing a system of democracy that works for everyone: a Demotopia. If they can devise a system to work here – it could work anywhere.
Can artificial intelligence help?
Now available in print and e-book
Tsang Sui-ming Philosopher, author, blogger, HK diaspora
"This is an ambitious and profoundly serious novel.”
Home to an Empty House
Stories
A collection of short stories by Kerry Coast
There is a deep churning within identity, where the devices of humanity are polished. One of the grindstones is the place we live and call home.
Eleven stories explore our collective human condition, using the license provided by fable and legend. Characters from imagined pasts, possible futures, and real life each spin their own story until we recognize ourselves in the blurred, familiar patterns.
"Little Blue Riding Hood" is a girl who can only find herself when she's running away, and she never really gets there.
In "Ghosts of St. Mary's," the child is only saved from Indian Residential School after she's passed to the spirit world.
"The General" is still fighting a war he lost a long time ago.
In "Passport," seven people stranded abroad realize that picture identification is only one way to get through borders.
"Coyote's Last Strategy" is a battle so long-suffered that his people seem to lose everything - and, yet, nothing at all.
"Magred and the Fire Flowers" tells the story of our collective struggle in one small mountain village.
The "War Chief" switches sides to win.
We consider what lets people live together in "Tattoo."
A very intimate, overdue conversation takes place in "The Camera."
We see what the world wants with women in, "The Mill."
"Fish Rock Boy" reminds us what it is to be people of this land.
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About the Author
Kerry Coast is a journalist, dramatist, and active writer.
She currently publishes Archive Quarterly with Electromagnetic Print, and was the founding editor of The St’át’imc Runner and The BC Treaty Negotiating Times newspapers, co-founder and writer for the Úcwalmicw Players theatre company; and author.
Her first book, The Colonial Present, was published in 2013 by Clarity Press. Other titles include Speeches from the Crowd, 2018; The Picture of Intent, 2021; and her latest is her first novel - The Feeding Habits of Roses, 2026.
Coast’s current projects include "Roadblock" – an encyclopedic documentary of Indigenous roadblocks in British Columbia.