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Syntopia Episteme: A Design Odyssey
Paperback
Series: Syntopia, Book 1
Mystery & ThrillerGeneral Fiction
Publisher: Staten House
Published: Jun 15 2026
Pages: 622
Weight: 0.94
Height: 1.38 Width: 4.00 Depth: 7.00
Language: English
...but one young woman is designing a new one. Not a utopia. Not a dystopia. A syntopia. A solarpunk floating future for stateless people. A future empires cannot tolerate. When hired guns close in, she designs resistance.
Floating Eden Defies Empires.As the world is being parceled out, Ayesha, born Bajau, a stateless Southeast Asian sea dweller, loses her mother in a traumatic accident. Orphaned in Sumatra, adopted in Singapore, her Leonardesque gift for drawing leads her to study design in France.
Upon returning to her beleaguered stilt village, Ayesha commits herself to helping her community by prototyping self-sustaining floating islands from salvaged plastic and low-tech ingenuity, with the support of her former orphanage bully turned corporate lawyer, a retired U.S. Army engineer, and a gifted Bajau teenager.
Neither utopia nor dystopia, the emerging artificial archipelago is called a Syntopia: places that design together. But when her half-moon, glinting Eden draws predation, relentless pressure and intimidation from hired guns follow.
Can the Bajau keep their future afloat when land-dwellers keep dragging it under?Written by a professor of design, SYNTOPIA EPISTEME: a Design Odyssey is conceived as the first volume in a series of speculative epic, Vernian novels intended to make design theory and practices vivid, thrilling, and cinematically engaging for students.
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