Premium Pulp Fiction Podcast

In this episode of the Premium Pulp Fiction podcast, my guest is Maksym Van Shamra i — millennial novelist, cultural theorist, and Ukrainian expat. In 2010, Maks had just finished his doctoral studies in Kyiv. His thesis examined something called cultural anthropocentrism — the idea that humans are both the authors of culture and the products of it. Heavy stuff. The kind of thing you wrap in abstr...

Welcome back to Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future and—I am excited to say— Premium Pulp Fiction . I’m your host, Douglas Stuart McDaniel, and before we go any further, I want to pause for a moment. We’re recording this at the start of a new year, in a world that feels simultaneously exhausted and overheated. Wars that refuse resolution. Cities under pressure from climate, inequality, and pol...

In this episode of Premium Pulp Fiction , I open the door to one of the strangest and most unexpectedly transformative creative experiments I’ve ever done: cloning my own voice… only to discover the clone was better at being “me” than I was. What began as a shortcut to audiobook narration turned into a crash course in self-reflection, audio craftsmanship, and the uncomfortable realization that som...

In this premiere episode of the Premium Pulp Fiction Podcast, I pull the camera all the way back on Ghost Emperor and show you where this whole thing actually began—not in a library, and not in a writing workshop, but under a red desert sky. The story opens in Wadi Rum, in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, where the sandstone canyons feel less like a backdrop and more like an older intelligence wat...

SAVANNAH, AUGUST, 1840 The late summer sun bore down on the Chatham County Courthouse, casting long shadows across the dusty street. A slight, hot breeze carried the scent of magnolia and freshly tilled soil, mingling with the soft hum of chatter from townsfolk going about their day. In the center of it all, a lanky young James Simms, just seventeen, adjusted the strings of his fiddle. His brow fu...

The Savannah River stretched wide and languid, its muddy waters clotted with incessant activity. The masts of countless tall ships rose high against the horizon, a forest of canvas and rigging that swayed gently with the current. Steamers puffed thick clouds of smoke as they churned toward away from piers, their hulls laden with wooden planks, bushels of rice, and bales of cotton destined for dist...

The night enveloped the modest two-story frame house, its white paint ghostly under the pale February moon. James Simms paused on the porch, his fingers brushing over the worn brass doorknob. It felt cold against his fingers, sending a brief shiver through him. Outside, the night air carried the faint scent of early spring jasmine from the garden, but it did little to clear the heaviness in his ch...

The steady rhythm of the press had gone quiet, replaced by the faint rustle of freshly printed campaign handbills stacked neatly onto the desk. James Simms moved purposefully, wiping his hands on an ink-stained rag, his eyes scanning the room with a mixture of satisfaction and urgency. Jonas hovered nearby, his nervous energy contrasting with James’s deliberate calm. The young man shifted from foo...

The low rumble of a distant train echoed faintly through the streets of Savannah, mingling with the steady clatter of the Freemans Standard’s printing press. The scent of tangy ink hung thick in the workshop, mingling with the aroma of old paper and the sharper bite of metal tools. Winter sunlight streamed through the workshop’s tall windows, its pale rays casting jagged shadows across the wooden...

Babylon. 323 BCE. Before the war, there was a funeral. Not a quiet one. Not a sacred rite. But the beginning of something far more violent—something that would echo for generations. Alexander, conqueror of the known world, had died without naming an heir. No declaration, no final command. Only silence—and a body too sacred, too dangerous, too charged with prophecy to be laid to rest. And so the qu...