Many people who are incarcerated suffer from addiction, mental health crises, or poverty.

Prison, as it currently exists, totally stops our ability to respond meaningfully or with compassion to incarcerated individuals specifically. We have these big social ills that we acknowledge, at least on some level. The new maestro of dystopian lit has arrived. In doing so, he doesn’t reinvent the genre novel so much as make it his own. Across ballad-like chapters, which move with the speed and emotional care of anime fight scenes, Adjei-Brenyah weaves a sprawling sci-fi world of blood and profit, but one not entirely scrubbed of hope. In the book, convicts who remain alive are granted freedom, and Thurwar is next in line. It’s sponcon for the carceral state, the most depraved form of influencerdom we may soon encounter, where inmates are recycled into reality TV stars. The story revolves around two inmates/lovers-Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker-who are part of Criminal Action Penal Entertainment (CAPE), a supermax corporation that broadcasts a survive-or-die, gladiator-style prison tournament called BattleGround. His latest, the novel Chain-Gang All-Stars, is an extension of everything Adjei-Brenyah does persuasively: juggle love with death, satire with pain, the impossible with the possible. This story is part of WIRED30, our special 30th anniversary series. What his stories are, at their most fundamentally satisfying, is exceedingly honest about the human condition. The stories are sweeping, acrobatic, and brim with danger. His themes cartwheel with intensity, from the venom of consumerism to the unbelievably bizarre ways racism shows up in speculative realms. “Zimmer Land” was about an amusement park where gun-happy white patrons shoot Black people for fun, while “Lark Street” dealt with the fantastical aftermath of abortion.

In his 2018 story collection Friday Black, Adjei-Brenyah didn’t purely write about imminent dystopias, he anchored them with moral stakes. And because he is a builder of worlds dark and twistedly terrifying, I am curious if he sees his work as hopeful-or is the future really that bleak? “Even just me being a Knicks fan means I’m a hopeful person,” he says. A canny conductor of the macabre, Adjei-Brenyah writes profoundly about dystopia. When I reach author Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah on the first Monday in May, on the eve of his debut novel’s publication, he explains, in so many words, that being a lifelong New York Knicks fan has taught him what it means to have absolute faith in a losing enterprise.

Nana kwame adjei brenyah friday black