Welcome to The Butterfly Koi!
Book 1 in the Syphon Continuity
Magic is here, ready to store your data and keep your cell phone charged... endlessly. But what the packaging won’t say is magic doesn’t work for everyone.
Eika Fujiwara, heiress to the Fujiwara Heavy Industries mining empire and face of Diet Breakfast Water, is determined to repair the magical damage caused by her family’s ecological misdeeds. Together with her best friend, the brilliant engineer Misora Toyama, she’s paving the way for the next generation of magitech, this time available to all.
The two will find their progress helped and hindered by a diverse crew: an American magitech engineer forced to relocate after the US bans magic; a journalist wrestling with both her temper and the tangled web of the Tokyo underworld; a charismatic Korean actor who might be working for the competition; and an acerbic and magically-limited criminal more interested in unearthing valuable information than help from idealistic Eika.
When development hits a roadblock, the pressure is on to use any tool, legal or not, to continue. What trade-offs are they willing to make for an invention that might change magic forever?
Why Subscribe?
Each Friday, you’ll receive a chapter of The Butterfly Koi. Yes, the novel is free! All of it!
In addition, paying subscribers will also receive:
An additional related essay on topics like metathinking about writing and narratives, reflection on how we came to the final version of the chapter, using lenses of sociology and educational theory to interrogate how we make sense of the world, to general rage about our modern capitalist hellscape
Links to things across the internet that have caught our eyes and recommendations for other interesting reads
Occasional comics featuring the characters
A comments section to discuss the topic of the week
The rosy glow that comes from supporting writing online
Who is ASK?
A. Sherman Karlsson is the pen name for two academic women in a trenchcoat who have been collaborators across moves abroad to Japan and South Korea, Master’s degrees in Sociology and Japan Studies, and two PhDs.
To our writing, we brought our fascination with how culture shapes thinking, our fury about the ways that modern capitalism disenfranchises individuals, and our delight in the absurdities of life, aiming to create a compulsively readable critique refracted through a fantastical lens.
Wait, is this whole novel already written?
Yes, this novel is fully written and edited, all 47 chapters.
The Butterfly Koi is book one of a five-book series. We’re sharing the first book at the rate of one chapter per week. Once we finish, we plan to take a short break to post a few side stories before continuing on to share book two.
We’d love to write even more in the Syphon Continuity given the time, including more short stories and other series set in the same universe. If you’d like to support this, consider becoming a paid subscriber.
How else can I support this project?
Consider sharing this Substack with others. The book is free, so you’re welcome to share chapters with any of your human friends, post about the project on social media—anything helps!
But also, because we live in the weirdest timeline: No rights are granted to use this work for purposes of training artificial intelligence technologies.
