In Travis Jeppesen's Settlers Landing, a wholly fantastic yet nightmarishly real excavation of the Trumpian malaise, Mrdok is a self-made billionaire who has everything he wants and needs, and quite often, too much of it. What he does not yet have is his own private island. So when he discovers Sagosia, a former pirate colony in the lost Pseudotropical region known as the Brown Sea, he takes it over the only way he knows how-roughly, and under the guise of "philanthropy." But merely possessing his own slice of offshore land isn't enough; together with his algorithmically selected band of .01% elites, he elects to declare sovereignty and launch his very own country. It will be the deal of the century. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, a lot, it turns out-especially when you throw in an infinite-release opioid manufactured by North Koreans, a CIA-funded civil war being fought by veterans afflicted with untreated PTSD, a poet laureate suffering from aphasia, and a dog that speaks in rhyme-to name just a few of the tributaries in this relentlessly inventive narrative, a brutal and pyrotechnic satire of a very awkward Zeitgeist that mercilessly fracks the dreams of colonial conquest haunting our history, literature, and consciousness.