Finalist, The Best Thriller Book Awards on BestThrillers.com
Winner of a 2022 Independent Press Award for Science Fiction Distinguished Favorite!
In the dystopian future where the rich have turned two dimensional and gobbled up the world’s resources, leaving the enslaved poor to remain three dimensional, can a disgraced detective help his rebellious daughter save the world?
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Advance Praise for Prior Futures
A hardboiled sci-fi thriller set in a world where evolution is for sale.
As Prior Futures opens, Jeremiah Prior stands knee-deep in the turquoise waters of Antigua, staring at the wreckage of his stilted hut after another violent storm. The former New York detective is now an Authentician, a specialist in verifying rare artifacts.
Prior has fled a world divided between the three-dimensional poor known as Fringe and the ultra-wealthy two-dimensional beings called Mod. His exile is rooted in professional disgrace and personal guilt, and author Dan Kopcow quickly establishes that neither distance nor ocean will keep the past from catching up.
Disruption arrives in the form of a nano-engineered message that clears Prior’s name in an old case and urges him back to Manhattan. His return plunges him into a city warped by technological excess. In this future, wealth has become evolutionary. Those who can afford it shed their physical mass and turn Mod, hovering above the rest of humanity both socially and dimensionally. Kopcow turns inequality into anatomy, making class no longer a metaphor but a bodily condition.
Looming over the city’s power structure is Anton Ferri, the visionary architect of the nano-revolution. Ferri’s influence stretches from policy to policing to private life, and as Prior resumes his investigations, it becomes clear that Ferri’s ambitions extend far beyond technological progress. He represents the seductive logic of engineered transcendence and the moral detachment required to sustain it.
Kopcow frames the mystery not as a single crime to solve but as a structure to decode. Prior’s profession as an Authentician becomes thematically sharp in a world where art can be hidden in blood and bodies can be dissolved into programmable particles. Authenticity itself is unstable. As tensions escalate and law enforcement pressure intensifies, Prior navigates a city under constant nano-surveillance, where allegiances shift quickly and even routine encounters carry risk.
Structurally, the novel blends hardboiled detective rhythms with speculative science fiction. The technological elements remain tactile and grounded because they are filtered through Prior’s skeptical, world-weary perspective. Elsewhere, the story is about family. Prior’s strained relationship with his daughter, Molly, mirrors the broader societal fracture between resignation and resistance. Their ideological divide adds emotional charge to the investigative arc and keeps the stakes personal.
Beneath the book’s spectacle lies a central conflict between system and individual, architect and dissenter, along with a question that resonates well beyond the page. When technology promises transcendence, who decides what humanity must leave behind?
– BestThrillers.com
Prior Futures is a clever, biting work of satire. Rich with humor and horror, it transitions with ease from the silly and absurd to the powerfully allegorical.
– Fredrick Soukup, author of Bliss
Dan Kopcow builds an aesthetically pleasing world and weaves a hauntingly inclusive tale of technology and wealth gone sour, as Jeremiah Prior searches high and low for redemption and, hopefully, a way to turn his life and many others around. In a decadent future, and in the era of the Mod, Prior is an unsung hero. World shaping honed, Kopcow is clearly a science fiction writer to look out for.
– Lawrence Dagstine, author of Espionage First
An imaginative and stirring blend of hardboiled detective noir and science fiction, Prior Futures shows a dystopia where nanotechnology has taken wealth inequality to horrifying extremes. Crackling with wit, creative and richly detailed views of a frightening future, brilliant social commentary about wealth and technology, and a call for humanity, Prior Futures is an enjoyable book with a satisfying and moving conclusion.
— Matthew Arnold Stern, author of Amiga and The Remainders
Dan Kopcow’s Prior Futures is a smart, satirical thriller with a hardboiled, political edge, hilarious dialogue, and a loopy optimism all its own. With knowing nods to Flatland and The Maltese Falcon, the tale spins out in a swarm of nanos, cops, detectives, and mad scientists. As the bodies pile up, sparks fly off the page. A great ride.
– Jon Frankel, author of GAHA: Babes of the Abyss and Isle of Dogs
Prior Futures challenged my concepts of the limits and potential dangers of future technologies gone amuck without control. It ultimately gave me hope for the humans who survived an experiment in population control gone horrifyingly wrong. It encouraged and thrilled me as the humans proved they had a strong will to survive the worst circumstances as old proven technologies prevail over corrupted new ones.
– Sharon K. Middleton, author of The McCarron’s Corner series
The sci-fi paranoia of Philip K. Dick meets the hardboiled sleuthing of Raymond Chandler. Prior Futures is a fast-paced and enigmatic trip through a nightmare world lost to its own decadent affair with nanotechnology and two-dimensional beings. Atmospheric and thought-provoking, this book will have you looking over your shoulder for nanos. It won’t help, though. You can’t see them.
– David E. Sharp, author of Lost on a Page
Sam Spade meets Blade Runner in this mind-bending story of a dystopian world where two-dimensional beings rule. Dan Kopcow has created a cynical detective, worthy of Raymond Chandler, who shuffles, floats, and warps among a cast of eccentric characters in search of his own Maltese Falcon—a blood-borne art treasure that may hold the clue to survival for both the powerless and the powerful. Fast-paced and provocative, Prior Futures does not disappoint.
– Steven Mayfield, award winning author of Treasure of the Blue Whale and the forthcoming Delphic Oracle U.S.A.
An ambitious take on a classic, set in a quirky, upsetting reality, Prior Futures is a delightfully imaginative take on the classic noir detective. Exploring what we are willing to risk for family, for integrity, for identity, it ponders the age old question – what makes us human? Creative, full of twists and turns, it takes the best of the detective genre and puts a fantastical cyberpunk spin on it. Hold on to your hat. This is one wild ride!
– Alice Kaltman, author of Dawg Towne
What does it mean to be human in a world where nanotechnology separates the rich and poor, the Mod and the Fringe, into two or three dimensions?
Set in the near terrifying future, where extreme weather patterns have become the norm and nanotechnology has reached terrifying heights, Prior Futures places crime noir into a chilling dystopian landscape where class has become dimensional, and the human ‘Fringe’ subject to the whims of the ‘Mod’. Prior Futures asks what would you sacrifice for immortality? For redemption? For family?
– Alicia Gilmore, author of Path to the Night Sea