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Simulation
Hardcover
ISBN13: 9781944527068
Publisher: Natural Press
Published: Mar 9 2026
Pages: 152
Weight: 0.88
Height: 0.56 Width: 5.83 Depth: 8.27
Language: English
Ian Bloom wrote Simulation at age 25, stationed in the dream-state of Los Angeles, post-Atlanta film haze-ripping golf carts across Universal Studios, smoking in trailers, collecting commissary rituals and movie-star smiles like shrapnel. A war poet in paradise.
Simulation is a war movie inside a war movie inside the war: identity, fame, trauma, and resurrection run through a projector loop where a veteran becomes a stuntman, then a movie star, then a national myth - then something stranger. In the lineage of Network, The Manchurian Candidate, and 8 1/2, the story dissects the simulation of American power with a grin, a blade, and a camera rolling.
From the wreckage of Iraq to the backlots of Hollywood, Bloom's alter ego Cal Vallens rises - and comes apart - in a story where every line might be ADR, and every gesture might be a cue. Manufactured consent. Tabloid crucifixions. Existential showbiz. A metaphysical epic that plays like Catch-22 by way of Kubrick, then Tarantino, filtered through a soldier's haunted conscience.
Written in the high style of lived hallucination, Simulation is a transmission from inside the machine.
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