The world is going to end. Most people can go about their day to day without thinking about it too much, covering up concerns of an eventual apocalypse with grocery lists, carpools, training your Snorlax—the minutiae of daily life. But for people who professionally think about the future, planning smart cities and advising on drone warfare, there’s no escape from depression about impending self-destruction.

In his latest work, Normal, writer Warren Ellis offers up a "techno-thriller" set at Normal Head, a refuge within an experimental Oregon forest where futurists go to recover from "abyss gaze." Ellis is no stranger to cultural critique through entertainment: he’s the legendary writer behind Transmetropolitan, the scathing commentary on gonzo journalism in a dystopian city. But Normal doesn’t read like a work set in an unknown future: Its characters, struggling to reconcile their study of how the human race is selfishly pushing the earth towards annihilation with daily life, feel familiar—and, to Ellis, who came up with the story while giving talks at futurist conferences, they are.

FSG Originals

"It became very apparent quite quickly that a lot of the people who work in futurism suffer from depression," he says. He first noticed it while talking to environmental forecasters, trying to save the world from climate change, and political strategists, working to predict the collapses of different nations. "A lot of those people end up sitting down with a bottle of Prozac and going to sleep, because it’s miserable work that leads you to consider the worst-case scenario for everything,” Ellis says.

In Normal, Ellis develops those two careers into different camps at the institution: foresight strategists, civil futurists who plan smart cities and try to offset the effects of climate change; and strategic forecasters, who help strategize drone warfare for corporate entities. When one patient disappears from the secure premises, leaving a pile of bugs in his wake, new patient Adam Dearden must bring together the two groups of futurists to investigate the mystery and fight against a common enemy.

But the story also deals with more common symptoms of tech addiction: Adam describes feeling tired as going into airplane mode, or people coming into focus as turning up a contrast control. At Normal Head, a remote forest with no digital access, futurists aren’t just detoxing from their jobs—they’re recovering from the dystopia of their over-reliance on technology.

Digital First

While Normal will come out as a print novella in November, Ellis wrote the book as four separate works, which FSG Originals will release over the next month. For FSG Originals, which published Lian Hearn’s Tale of Shikanoko tetralogy and Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy in quick print installments, digital serialization is the next step in binge-friendly reading.

In Normal, futurists aren’t just detoxing from their jobs—they’re recovering from the dystopia of their over-reliance on technology.

And Ellis is no stranger to experimenting with form: in 2011, he wrote SVK, a graphic novel that comes with a credit card-sized UV torch to reveal the portions of the story printed with UV-sensitive ink. He sees automatic serialized delivery as the great promise of digital books: readers can pre-order all four installments of Normal as Kindle Singles today, and automatically receive a new chapter, around 50 pages each, on their devices each Tuesday for the next three weeks.

"You buy the project, and then once a week, you get shown a new episode," says Ellis. FSG Originals hopes this will encourage a sense of momentum and reader investment, aided by a Twitter conversation and a virtual book club: Each week, Ellis will discuss the chapter and reader questions along with another author (Robin Sloan, author of Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore, will join for the first segment).

Readers who wait for the single print edition in November will encounter the same story, but Ellis believes some of the message will be lost without the serialized delivery—especially because the story revolves around digital addicts in recovery. In one early scene, an orderly explains to the protagonist that there’s no access to TV or games; to check a print book out of the library, he’ll first need permission from a physician. By engaging on a digital device, readers are relying on the very technologies that prompted the characters’ mental breakdowns—a juxtaposition that Ellis intended.

"Those two things"—the form and the content—"struck sparks off each other," he says. "I like to think that someone might be reading the digital serialization, and actually realize that the characters would never be able to read it like that."