Simplicity

The future is hauntingly familiar and hilariously horrific in the ambitious latest from Lubchansky (Boys Weekend). In the year 2081, anthropology student Lucius Pasternak is hired by the Museum of the Former State of New York to leave his high-tech walled city and study Simplicity, a hippie commune that’s survived in the woods since the 1970s. “We’re mighty kind here,” he’s told not long after arriving. “That doesn’t mean we’re just nice.” Lucius interviews commune members, works on their farm, and observes the Mutual Rite, a nightly orgy of sex and violence in which they release their collective id. Inevitably, he becomes part of the community, and Simplicity’s countercultural rejection of gender assumptions is refreshing to him as a trans man. But mystical visions of nature gods, monster sightings in the woods, and a string of bloody deaths suggest that Simplicity may not be so simple after all. Lubchansky’s bright, cartoony art lends lightness and humor to the story’s heavier elements and gives the moments of fantasy a psychedelic touch. The book is almost too many things at once—science fiction, folk horror, political satire, call to revolution—but Lubchansky spins the disparate elements into an audacious story about 20th-century utopian dreams meeting 21st-century cynicism. It’s a sharp addition to the canon of socially relevant science fiction. Agent: Kate McKean, Howard Morhaim Literary. (July)