Welcome back to the Season Two premiere of Citizen One, Exploring Our Urban Future. I'm your host, Douglas Stuart McDaniel, currently back on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. This season, I'm changing up the rhythm and structure of Citizen One a bit. Each episode will include, as always, a deep exploration of urbanism and the past, present, and future of cities, followed by a segment on narrative architecture, a way of framing stories, speculative futures, and imagination around visual storytelling and worldbuilding, one of my favorite topics.

A Quick Book Update

But first, an update about the book. Due to seismic shifts in the global smart city arena, I regret to inform you that my book, Citizen One, will not be published this fall, but for a very good reason. I freely admit that this feels a bit like when Bill Gates released The Road Ahead in 1995, and he barely mentioned the internet. He had to quickly rewrite a year later to keep up with a fast-moving new reality.

However, I'd rather pause a book than miss or gloss over an important shift everyone will be talking about for some time to come about the future of cities. In particular, I'm setting off to do some sorely needed research on AI models that read satellite and geospatial sensor data that inform the resilience of cities. And I'm also working on a deeper focus on people-centered governance over gadget-centered innovation. And that brings me to resilience — not just in manuscripts, but in the everyday fabric of our cities.

Waffle House Urbanism

The FEMA Index says it best: if your Waffle House is still open, you’ll survive the storm. If it’s shuttered, it’s already too late. That grim little measure says everything about the American built environment — disposable, fragile, engineered for throughput and profit rather than for people. Waffle House has perhaps become one of the last civic institutions standing — a 24-hour diner doubling as lighthouse, while the rest of the built environment collapses into gas stations, payday lenders, and drive-throughs.

Resilience isn’t just an urban design principle. It’s also a narrative one — how we remember, imagine, and refuse to accept sameness as destiny. There are places that prove otherwise — districts where walkability, memory, and human scale still matter. Savannah’s street grid, Portland’s Pearl District, San Francisco’s Mission. They remind us resilience can be designed into the bones of a city rather than outsourced to a 24-hour diner.

Introducing Premium Pulp Fiction

So I am super excited about this second segment on world building storytelling, we're going back a few millennia for a really good reason. This is about worldbuilding, storytelling, and the launch of Premium Pulp Fiction, beginning with my upcoming historical epic novel, Ashes of Empire: Ghost Emperor, coming in early 2026.

So let's dive in.

Every city is a story, even ancient Babylon, how it was built, how it worked. What gods were worshiped there. And so as a story, a city is not a metaphor, it's a fact. Cities are imagined before they are built. From the carved thresholds of Petra to the pylons of Luxor, the places we inherit were designed not only to shelter people, but to embody power, belief, and survival.

That act of imagining, of turning ideas into places is now what we call world building. And it isn't just ancient. It's the foundation of what I've been working on with my friend and collaborator, Olivier Pron, one of the great concept artists and visual storytellers of our time. Over the summer, as you may have seen in a prior episode, Olivier and I set up camp in the Dordogne in Southwest France for about two weeks, deep in the Le Périgord Noir, a landscape already steeped in its own layers of history, caves, cave paintings, and memory.

There we continued developing an AI powered design and storytelling workflow that we're pretty excited about, where we're blending concept art, narrative, and digital tools into something that lets us move seamlessly between page, screen, and sound. It's part cinema, part architecture, and part literature.

Because part of what we've done here is developed a platform where it's easy to imagine not just the future of cities, but also their past and present. You want to reimagine a coastal community in Mississippi, or you want to reimagine what Babylon looked like in the third century BCE? That's what we can quickly mock up, prototype and explore from a worldbuilding perspective. And so that process has become the seed for something larger. This new literary line I'm calling Premium Pulp Fiction.

These are going to be stories that span genres, historical, speculative futurism, noir, science fiction, but all grounded in the same philosophy of pulp fiction with depth, narrative with muscle, fiction that is as cinematic on the page as it is in your imagination. So when I talk about worldbuilding here, I'm talking about more than ruins or futuristic skylines. I'm talking about storytelling practice, a way of imagining that moves across media, across centuries, and across these genres.

And of course, cities are one of our oldest forms of world building, yes, but so are stories. And now with these tools, we can begin to stitch together. And now with these tools, we can begin to stitch them together in new ways that feel both ancient and radically new.

So without further ado, what follows is a short three and a half minute book trailer that introduces this first work of fiction that I'm going to be releasing in early 2026. It's a novel born from my obsession with the ruins of ancient cities, empires, and the human cost of ambition. The title is Ashes of Empire, Ghost Emperor, and it begins in Babylon in 323 BCE, where the body of Alexander the Great lies unburied, already rotting, already unraveling the order of the known world.

Why It Matters

Ghost Emperor isn’t just antiquity on fire — it’s a mirror. Alexander’s corpse, contested and dragged across hostile lands, becomes a commentary on today’s fractured empires, the redrawings of borders in blood, and the slow violence of decline. In that sense, it belongs in the same universe as Citizen One — a world asking how we build, govern, and endure when the center no longer holds.

Ghost Emperor will go to press in early 2026 under Premium Pulp Fiction, my new literary imprint. Alongside it, I'll be rolling out other titles already in the pipeline. Here on Substack first as audiobooks, ebooks, and Premium Pulp paperbacks. You'll be able to subscribe monthly or annually for exclusive access to every forthcoming release. Think of CitizenOne.World and Premium Pulp Fiction as more than a book of the month club. It's an invitation into the writer's room, into the world-building experience, and gaining a seat at the table as this new literary line starts to take shape in real time.

Ghost Emperor will be the first volume in a projected five novel saga. And it reimagines the succession wars of the Diadochi after the death of Alexander the Great not as a footnote to conquest, but as a descent into political horror and mythic grief.

This is epic saga-scaled history, rich in blood, betrayal, and the slow collapse of a civilization that mistook ambition for divinity, like Game of Thrones, but without the dragons and greater historical intrigue and betrayal. It’s a prestige historical epic set in the brutal aftermath of Alexander’s death, where commanders become warlords, widows become assassins, and embalmers whisper prophecy over a corpse too heavy to move and too sacred to burn. And what truth emerges? The body is the crown. And whoever buries the king inherits the myth.

A Heartfelt Thank You

So thank you for listening to the unorthodox Season Two premiere of Citizen One, Exploring Our Urban Future. This is the structure I'll return to every week, like a small book with an introduction, a world building or storytelling framework, and always an exploration of urbanism and the future of cities. Together, I hope to form a new multiverse of Citizen One, nonfiction, fiction, speculation, and lived reality woven into one unfolding conversation. And I have to say, this means so much to me. To finally be back here with you, opening a new season, building on years of work, and sharing stories that stretch from Petra in Jordan to the Gulf Coast, from Alexander's empire to the future of AI in our cities.

I don't take your time or your attention lightly. Even through the hardest stretches, your encouragement has kept this project alive. And so Season Two opens here — on I-10 asphalt, with the Waffle House light burning against the storm, and in Babylon, where Alexander’s body still waits to be buried. These are the stories of resilience we inherit, and the ones we choose to write.

Season Two will be bolder, more personal, and more unflinching in exploring what it means to build, to imagine, and to endure.

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