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Premium Pulp Fiction Podcast

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by Doug McDaniel

10 episodes

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Podcast Overview

Premium Pulp Fiction is where epic storytelling and worldbuilding collide. Host Douglas Stuart McDaniel takes you inside the creation of his historical, gothic, and futuristic sagas—from desert-born sparks and forgotten wars to character engines, story ecologies, and the craft behind narrative architecture. This is fiction as excavation: how worlds are built, why they matter, and what they reveal about us now. <a href="https://premiumpulp.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast">premiumpulp.substack.com</a>

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9/16/2025

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Recent Episodes

February 12, 2026

Premium Pulp Fiction S1:E4 Ukrainian Philosophy and Poetry Put on a Spacesuit

In this episode of the Premium Pulp Fiction podcast, my guest is <a target="_blank" href="http://www.mvanshamrai.com">Maksym Van Shamra</a>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 abstract philosophical language until nobody understands it anymore.Then he attended a lecture on the role of poetry in forming personality. At the end, confused by the jargon, he asked the speaker to explain it simply.She smiled and said: “Poetry helps the heart think when the brain is tired.”That sentence cracked something open. Maks realized his ideas about humanity, memory, power, and meaning didn’t want to stay inside academic language anymore. They wanted characters. Danger. Conflict. Emotion.“2010 became the moment,” Maks told me on this week’s podcast, “when my philosophy quietly put on a spacesuit and stepped into fiction.”A Book That Lived Several LivesScions of the Last Hope began in Ukraine under a different title — The Last Crew — written first in Russian, the everyday language of southern Ukraine at the time. By 2011, Maks had moved to Spain, diving deeper into art and culture, meeting the love of his life, learning Spanish at the government language school in Vigo. The manuscript paused at chapter seven. He was absorbing rather than creating.Then came 2022.When the sirens sounded in Kyiv, Maks was working on chapter eleven. Something opened inside him. The book wasn’t just philosophical anymore — it became deeply emotional. He finished the manuscript in Ukrainian, then translated the entire novel into Spanish himself. Not with Google Translate. With dictionaries, with his Spanish family, with random guys at the calisthenics park who could tell him how young people actually spoke.“It was quite a challenge,” he said. “Asking people, asking my family, my friends — which was quite a nice journey.”He wanted to publish first in Ukraine, his home. But Ukrainian publishers had been hit by missiles. The infrastructure was gone. So Spain became the path forward. The Spanish edition, Vástagos de la Última Esperanza, was released in 2025 by Caligrama, an imprint of Penguin Random House.And now Premium Pulp Fiction has acquired the English-language rights.What Survives When a Story Crosses BordersOne of the things I pushed Maks on during our conversation was voice. How do you carry an Eastern European literary sensibility — with its space for silence, moral tension, slow philosophical moments — into English, a language that often rewards acceleration?His answer was precise: “I didn’t want to sound very Spanish or German or whatever. I wanted to sound Ukrainian. Eastern European.”That’s not about being different for its own sake. It’s about protecting the philosophical heart of the book. Scions of the Last Hope isn’t just a space adventure with explosions and heroes. It explores what Maks calls “biopolitical science fiction” — questions about power over human life itself. Who is allowed to live? Whose memory is preserved? Which version of humanity gets a future?These questions need space. They need reflection, not just fast action.“If I remove that deeper, quieter layer,” he said, “the story would lose part of its meaning.”The Seed of the NovelWhen I asked Maks what the book is really about, he offered two questions that haunt the entire narrative:Can you build a new future without carrying the ghosts of the past?When systems of power and survival define humanity, what remains of the human?His answer to the second: Choice. Fragile, constrained, often punished — but not entirely erasable.That’s the seed. Set in 2136, after planetary cataclysm has plunged humanity into collapse, the story follows scientists racing to understand a distant exoplanet that might become humanity’s new home — while navigating corporate intrigue, government conspiracies, and a mystery encoded in a single prehistoric word.It’s dystopian science fiction, yes. But it’s also a reflection on identity, memory, and what it means to remain human when technology and power structures are trying to decide that for you.Eastern European RootsMaks cites Stanisław Lem, the Strugatsky Brothers, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke as influences — but also Ukrainian writer Volodymyr Arenev and Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski (yes, The Witcher). And films: Star Wars, Alien, Prometheus.What unites them? “Humanity facing the big questions,” he said. “I’m always looking for the philosophical point in every single book or movie. Even if there is no philosophical point.”He grew up in a household in Mykolaiv where his father — a professor of physics and mathematics — also played guitar, piano, and accordion, and wrote poetry that he never published. His mother taught primary school. His grandmother taught math and geometry for decades. That combination of science, art, and education runs through everything Maks writes.What It Means to Become a PPF AuthorAt Premium Pulp Fiction, we don’t acquire books because they’re easy. We acquire them because they’re worth the work.Maks didn’t just hand over a manuscript. He entered into a rigorous editorial process — one that asks hard questions about language, identity, rhythm, and what survives translation. We’ve had uncomfortable conversations about pacing. We’ve killed darlings while protecting voice. We’ve worked through what he calls “digestion” — the slow process of adapting tone, idiom, and emotional nuance for a new audience without losing the story’s soul.“It’s like being an actor in the same film, but with a different director,” he said. “The story is the same, the scenes are the same, the characters are the same. But you have to pause, think, process.”That’s what real editing looks like.A Message to Young Ukrainian WritersI asked Maks what he would say to young Ukrainian writers and thinkers during these dark times — with his home city of Mykolaiv under near-constant bombardment, with blackouts lasting 22 hours a day, with even his webmaster in Kyiv apologizing for missed deadlines because there’s no electricity.His answer:“We have to keep being human. Think about imagination, which is very important to create things. Preserve the culture, the identity. Because we are facing challenging times — someone wants to erase our identity. Even when we can speak their language, it doesn’t mean we have to erase our own culture and our own language. It’s a beautiful language.”Then he paused.“Just don’t let imagination slip away from your mind. Keep it inside. Try to develop something interesting, something new, something unknown to the rest of the world.”As his father would say: More poetry.The DedicationAt the end of our conversation, Maks read the dedication of Scions of the Last Hope — first in Ukrainian, then in English. It’s a dedication to his country and his people facing dark times.I won’t reproduce it here. You’ll have to read the book.But I will say this: the imagery, the pain, the journey of Maks, his family, and his people — it’s all there on the page. This isn’t a book that happened in spite of history. It’s a book that happened because of it.The Spanish edition, Vástagos de la Última Esperanza, is available now on Amazon and everywhere books are sold. The English edition from Premium Pulp Fiction is coming later this year.Stay tuned for more updates — and listen to the full conversation on the Premium Pulp Fiction Podcast.Douglas Stuart McDaniel is the founder of Premium Pulp Fiction and host of the Premium Pulp Fiction Podcast. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://premiumpulp.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2">premiumpulp.substack.com/subscribe</a>

January 16, 2026

Premium Pulp Fiction S1 E3: A Citizen One Literary Imprint

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 political fracture. Technologies advancing faster than our capacity to govern them. Institutions losing credibility while still holding enormous power. For many people listening, this year didn’t begin with hope so much as vigilance.That context matters.Citizen One was never meant to be escapist. It exists because moments like this demand clearer thinking, longer memory, and a willingness to stay present inside complexity rather than retreat from it. The stories we explore here—about cities, systems, culture, and power—are not abstractions. They are the environments we’re already living in, whether we’ve named them yet or not.So if you’re listening from a place of uncertainty, fatigue, or quiet resolve, you’re not alone. This space is for people who are still paying attention, still asking better questions, and still trying to understand how the future is being shaped in real time—often without our consent, but never without consequence.With that in mind, let’s step into today’s episode.Before I begin, I also wanted to share some important context with you. Citizen One is much more than a podcast. It is an emerging media brand where we explore stories at the intersection of innovation, culture, memory, and the past, present and future of cities.But today, we’re stepping into a slightly different kind of narrative frontier. I want to take a moment to introduce Premium Pulp Fiction, our Citizen One literary imprint and publishing empire.This episode is also a crossover—one that connects what we do here at Citizen One with a parallel storytelling project rooted in the same curiosity about systems, human complexity, and consequence, but expressed through fiction.It’s called Premium Pulp — an independent traditional publishing imprint where quality, depth, and risk-bearing imagination come first.At its core, Premium Pulp Fiction publishes speculative fiction, noir-inflected narratives, historical fiction, and narrative nonfiction concerned with power, memory, technology, and the quieter mechanics of how societies endure, adapt, and fail over time.Beginning this year, we will be publishing a very small number of carefully selected titles, and unlike many modern indie or hybrid publishers, we fully finance standard book production. Our authors never pay for book production or global distribution; they also receive the resources to leverage an integrated marketing and publicity ecosystem built from a network of preferred, vetted, award-winning suppliers.Over the last 15–20 years, most small presses have been forced into one of three survival models:1. Author-funded or cost-sharing modelsThese include hybrid presses, “assisted publishing,” or thinly disguised vanity presses. Production costs are shifted to the author—sometimes partially, sometimes entirely—and the imprint’s role becomes administrative rather than editorial. Marketing support, when offered, is usually modular, outsourced, or pay-to-upgrade.2. Grant-subsidized or institutionally anchored pressesUniversity presses, arts-council-backed imprints, or nonprofit literary houses can sometimes fully fund authors, but they rely on external subsidy. Their marketing reach is often limited, conservative, or academically scoped, and publicity ecosystems are modest by design.3. Micro-indies operating on sweat equityThese presses finance production out of pocket, but at minimal levels—basic editing, templated design, limited print runs—and expect authors to self-market aggressively. Publicity ecosystems are informal at best and nonexistent at worst.What almost never exists anymore is a small, independent imprint that does all three of the following at once:* Fully finances production (developmental editing through distribution)* Retains editorial authority and risk (rather than transferring it to the author)* Provides an integrated marketing and publicity ecosystem rather than ad-hoc supportThat model used to be normal. It was called publishing.While publishers exist across a wide range of sizes and models, the largest U.S. trade houses—commonly referred to as the Big Five—retain the scale, capital, and specialized editorial, marketing, and publicity infrastructure required to support broad distribution and coordinated campaigns at volume. Most small and independent presses operate with significantly smaller budgets and far fewer specialized departments, and as a result, authors are often expected to source, coordinate, or directly manage much of their promotional and publicity work themselves.This context is what makes our approach genuinely uncommon. Premium Pulp Fiction is structurally closer to a miniature traditional house than to a contemporary indie press. We’re not simply financing books; we’re absorbing uncertainty so that editorial decisions can be made upstream, slowly, and with coherence.Within that structure, the inclusion of a fully integrated marketing and publicity ecosystem is the clearest outlier.Most small presses either:* hand authors a checklist, or* provide one or two vendor introductions, or* rely on goodwill and improvisationVery few embed authors into a preferred, already-vetted network of publicists, designers, media prep, trailers, and positioning support. Doing so requires long-term relationship capital, not just money.So the honest framing is this:Premium Pulp Fiction is not rare because it’s boutique. It’s rare because it reinstates a publishing contract that the market quietly abandoned—one where the imprint assumes risk, curates taste, and provides infrastructure so authors can focus on the work itself.That isn’t nostalgia. It’s a deliberate structural choice. It’s structural dissent.That structural choice shapes our focus: books built to last—structurally sound, intellectually grounded, and resistant to fashion. That orientation is not accidental. It reflects the belief that long-term relevance and endurance require more than a launch cycle or a marketing push; they require structural coherence, editorial intention, and depth of engagement that only emerges through sustained collaboration between author and editor.Premium Pulp Fiction was founded to support work that understands genre as a working tool rather than a marketing label. We are interested in stories that know where they come from — noir that remembers its debts, historical fiction that treats the past as something lived rather than staged, speculative work that understands systems, worlds, and story ecologies before it imagines their collapse.Handled seriously, genre does more than entertain. When handled carefully — structurally, morally, and contextually — genre becomes a way into complexity rather than a shortcut around it.Our publishing approach intentionally mirrors that complexity. Premium Pulp Fiction operates as an independent traditional imprint: we fully finance book production for our authors, including editorial development, copyediting, cover design, layout and formatting, distribution setup, media kits, and book trailers. This allows editorial decisions to be made on the basis of quality and coherence rather than speed or scale.That work extends beyond production. We focus on positioning, framing, and long-term relevance, with attention to how a book will read five or ten years after publication, not just how it launches. That longer view matters because a great story, like a great city, continues to live and change after its initial debut, shaping and reshaping its readership over time.The kinds of work we seek include:* Speculative fiction grounded in political, economic, and technological reality* Dystopian narratives informed by history rather than abstraction* Noir fiction attentive to power, corruption, and moral compromise* Historical fiction concerned with memory, survival, and unfinished businessWe value narrative control, structural clarity, and voice, and we welcome humor when it emerges from intelligence rather than irony.Most importantly, we do not offer paid publishing packages. Premium Pulp is not a service press. We seek projects that benefit from close editorial engagement and long-term positioning rather than rapid release cycles.This publishing philosophy—production financed in full, editorial risk assumed by the imprint, and a limited annual catalog—creates space for seriousness rather than spectacle. It allows fiction to ask big questions rather than announce its genre category before it earns the right. It aligns with the way Citizen One interrogates systems, but through narrative intelligence rather than analytical exposition.Now, with that foundation in place, I want to introduce the first author signed under this imprint who exemplifies the kind of work Premium Pulp was created to support.Van Shamrai is a Ukrainian science-fiction novelist whose work is shaped by lived historical pressure rather than speculative distance. His fiction emerges from a close engagement with political systems, social fracture, and the long consequences of collective decisions, drawing on both contemporary Ukrainian experience and broader European intellectual traditions. Rather than treating collapse as a sudden event, his writing traces how societies erode over time—through institutional strain, moral compromise, and the accumulation of unresolved choices.His characters move through worlds governed by constraint rather than convenience, where survival is inseparable from memory, responsibility, and inherited obligation. The speculative elements in his work are never decorative; they function as extensions of real historical and civic forces, rendered through disciplined worldbuilding and a restrained, unsentimental narrative voice.We will be publishing the English-language edition of Scions of the Last Hope, scheduled for release in late spring.Scions of the Last Hope reflects those priorities. It is speculative in a way that respects political and historical gravity, attentive to systems as lived environments rather than convenient backdrops, and resolute in narrative voice and consequence. Its world is not a metaphor. It is an environment shaped by pressure, inheritance, and moral trade-offs that resist simplification.Premium Pulp Fiction is not here to rescue publishing, nor to compete with high-velocity content engines. It is here to practice a standard of editorial responsibility that treats fiction as intellectual work, moral architecture, and imaginative infrastructure — work capable of carrying complexity without surrendering it for the sake of market clarity.That is why we exist, why we work the way we work, and why the English release of Scions of the Last Hope matters—not simply as a book, but as a continuation of the narrative practices Citizen One was built to explore.Thanks for listening. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://premiumpulp.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2">premiumpulp.substack.com/subscribe</a>

December 9, 2025

AI Clones and the Art of Creative Replication

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 sometimes the machine version of you can teach the human version a thing or two.I walk through how I trained a two-hour dataset in ElevenLabs to build a frighteningly accurate vocal double—cleaner breaths, steadier cadence, none of the Appalachian ghosts in my vowels—and how hearing that polished version forced me to step up my own delivery. The clone didn’t replace me. It coached me.From there, I bring you into the creative bunker I share with Aiden, my AI assistant who can shift from literary analyst to emotional support algorithm to forensic audio engineer in the space of a sentence. Together we dissect the entire audiobook workflow: Riverside’s eerily flattering AI enhancement, the brutal physics of ACX compliance, and Adobe Audition’s labyrinth of menus that appear and disappear like an M.C. Escher fever dream.This episode is equal parts craft, chaos, and confession: how I built the mastering chain that finally satisfied ACX; how Python, loudness analysis, and a little Negroni magic helped me find the voice the book deserved; and how the technology meant to “clone me” ultimately made me more present, more intentional, and more connected to the words I wrote.If you’ve ever wondered whether AI can be a creative partner instead of a threat, or how audiobook narration works behind the curtain, or what happens when a novelist stares into a machine-made mirror long enough to hear something true—this one goes deep.Welcome to the lab.Welcome to the mess.Welcome to Premium Pulp Fiction. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://premiumpulp.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2">premiumpulp.substack.com/subscribe</a>

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What is Premium Pulp Fiction Podcast?: Premium Pulp Fiction is where epic storytelling and worldbuilding collide. Host Douglas Stuart McDaniel takes you inside the creation of his historical, gothic, and futuristic sagas—from desert-born sparks and forgotten wars to character engines, story ecologies, and the craft behind narrative architecture.

This is fiction as excavation: how worlds are built, why they matter, and what they reveal about us now. <a href="https://premiumpulp.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast">premiumpulp.substack.com</a>
How often does this podcast release new episodes?: This podcast updates daily.
Where can I listen to this podcast?: This podcast is available on 4 platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. You can also use the RSS feed directly.
Does this podcast accept guests?: Yes, this podcast regularly features guests.

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