Liberation Now! (August 2026) from Meerkat Press
Ask yourself: when everything and everyone around you has sold out to consumer society and is being held captive under the spell of the Subliminal Empire, is there any way out?
That is the main question of Liberation Now!, Seb Doubinsky’s newest (and possibly last?) installment of the City States novels. For readers familiar with Doubinsky’s series of intertwined stories, you will be gently reminded of the settings and characters that appeared before. The various City States, including New Samarqand, Viborg City, New Babylon and the rest all make their appearance, but none of those places are center stage any more. In one way or another, they have all succumbed to the creeping malaise of the Subliminal Empire. Every culture has become a commodity, and every individual too. What the machine doesn’t already know about our personal lives is vanishing small, and the dogs of Artificial Intelligence have been unleashed to fill in the blanks.
In Liberation Now! the action has left the halls of power and drifted down to a small seaside town, Blue City, where vacationers would have once gone to get away from it all. Now, poisoned by industrial runoff, the surf is a toxic green stew and the village of Blue City is a disadvantaged hiding spot at the periphery of the urban - rural divide.
The characters are all hiding out, escaping from various troubles. President Akiko Sanchez has escaped from her secret service handlers and re-invented herself as a dancer. The rich kid, Carla, has quit her job and bought a farm, determined to set up a new alternative community called ‘Sunny Ranch’. And the esteemed sociologist, Gabrielle, has been hounded out of her university for having gone against the use of Artificial Intelligence.
Doubinksy’s characteristic writing style presents these characters (and their lovers) with a tapestry of short dialogs and vignettes. Personal moments and embraces form into a rhythm of alternating points of view that reveal more tenderness and humor than they do conflict.
Although the theme of Liberation Now! is resistance and rebellion, the mood is calm and satisfied like a summer in Spain. There is always an existential threat in the air, to be sure. There’s an alien Subliminal Empire that is slowly advancing their 89% control over the world; but even there, concealed behind their Black Shield, the alien bureaucrats are more reticent than they are menacing. The danger they represent, like their Empire itself, is more subliminal than physical. It is a danger we all face: to have lost our agency in a constant flow of commerce, to have lost our freedom in the seeming comfort of an artificial environment where we can no longer distinguish signal from noise.
Fortunately for the cause of freedom there is an antidote to our brainwashed selves, a reality-bending drug that breaks the shackles on our minds and reveals the gray goons who want to bust into our dreams and put us down. Synth. The same drug that has been passing from hand to hand through all the City States novels. In Liberation Now! the drug Synth is the catalyst that brings us all together, it gives us a paintbrush and a canvas to paint our own worlds on top of the construct that society has prescribed for us to inhabit. With Synth we can turn on an altered reality or turn it off, according to our own tastes. So it is Synth that knocked President Akiko Sanchez out of her rut, it is Synth that revealed another way forward for Professor Gabrielle, and Synth that inspired Carla to start up Sunny Ranch and a free University.
Thanks to Synth, each of these characters finds the strength to resist the imposed reality, a theme that harks back to earlier books in the City States series, like The Babylonian Trilogy, Song of Synth, and The Invisible. In each story Synth has a role, whether it is confounding, compromising, or melting down the controllers. Synth reminds me of Philip K. Dick’s “ubik” or the infamous red pill that enables us to see – to finally see – the Matrix within which we are imprisoned.
But there are those who live in a permanent Synth reality, who can turn on or off the altered states at will without any need for chemical stimulation. One of these is Vita: “a tall blonde with piercing black eyes and a hard face, all dressed in black with heavy motorcycle boots.” Vita is a recurring protagonist in the City States series, perhaps the only one who can traverse the mindscapes and the storylines from one book to another. Amidst the scenery of the City States painted in poems, Vita is the transitive verb who knows how to throw a punch.
Vita seems to have innate super powers as a native of the alien Planet X. When she appeared at the end of the novel, The Invisible, Vita’s tattoos reminded me of Gwynplaine MacIntyre’s Woman Between the Worlds, whose body was completely transparent until her shape was slowly revealed by a series of full body tattoos. But Vita is not actually a supernatural being, she has a cloak of invisibility that she stole from a laboratory in Viborg City and hyperkinetic gun. She’s a secret agent, an expert in martial arts, and she rides around in each city on a big motorcycle dressed in black.
When I think of Vita as a warm-bodied human being, not a refugee from Planet X, she reminds me of the character Rebecca Nul, the leather clad star of the film La Motocyclette [Girl on a Motorcycle, 1968]. In the French film Rebecca Nul was portrayed by Marianne Faithful, riding around on a big Harley Davidson with her blonde hair blowing in the wind.
Indeed, the motivation of Rebecca Nul in the original novel by André Pieyre de Mandiargues is a perfect match for what motivates the characters in Liberation Now!
“It felt like the ignition had been switched on inside of her too, that life had returned as if emerging from a long hibernation, that her heart had regained its normal rhythm and blood was coursing once more through her arteries and veins, just as it had in the girl she once was, open to every possibility, whether for good or ill.”
This sense of waking up, of coming back to consciousness, and realizing that resistance is our only option, percolates slowly through the pages of Liberation Now!
It’s a stark contrast from the way Vita felt in the preceding City States novel, The Sum of All Things, where: “She walked, still invisible, in a city she felt she had doomed.”
In this final (possibly final) City States novel, the tables must be turned on the Subliminal Empire. All of the characters who drifted to the Blue City find a renewed sense of purpose. There’s only one way to liberate ourselves from the current mental slavery and that is to unleash our own consciousness. We must use our minds to overwhelm the simulated reality being fed to us by the algorithms of malevolent agencies.
Liberation Now! is an easy read, a poetic drumbeat of pearls cast upon the swine. Read it and enjoy a taste of Synth. Read it to enhance your guerilla warfare tactics with some parties, some dance, some relaxation. Let’s just settle down to breakfast and have avocado toast. Let’s toss out the guns and go for the butter.
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