Letter of Introduction

Compression Nation is a standalone queer/trans literary systems novel of approximately 100,000 words and the first volume of the completed six-volume cycle Wondrous Travels.

Lin enters Compression Nation to recover her wife, Nisha, from a regime that promises relief through reduction. The system can locate Nisha, classify her, and process her — but it cannot recognize their marriage except as an obsolete relational format. As Lin learns the nation’s language for care, grief, and personhood, every accepted term makes Nisha easier to file and harder to recover.

The cycle’s public atlas is provided for orientation only. The submitted novel is designed to stand on its own.