“Cash Crash Jubilee is a fun, smart read, a great way to start a trilogy of novels.”
—Amazing Stories

“Eli K. P. William is a genius,  a unique, powerful voice that truly understands Japan.”
—Robert J. Sawyer, Hugo, Nebula, and three-time Seiun Award-winning author of End of an Era

It has been ten years since the release of my first novel, Cash Crash Jubilee, and more than two years since The Jubilee Cycle concluded with release of the final book, A Diamond Dream. Writing this trilogy, a single continuous story told in three books, was the largest undertaking of my life so far. A decade after I debuted as a novelist, I’m now finally ready to reflect on how I went about it. This is the story of my most ambitious story, a portrait of one author’s messy meandering creative process.[1]

Conceptual Genesis

I began work on what would become The Jubilee Cycle in 2003 when I was 18 years old. This was during my gap year, when I travelled and did part-time work as a film extra between high school and university.

I took the seed for the core concept of the entire trilogy—actions as intellectual properties owned by corporations that charge licensing fees—from a then newly released documentary called The Corporation. This classic of anti-neoliberal cinema chronicles the rise of multinational corporations into the early 21^st century.

One section toward the end covers what is now known as the Cochabamba Water War, a conflict that unfolded in Cochabamba, one of Bolivia’s largest cities, at the turn of the millennium. Bolivia had fallen into a financial crisis and, as so often happened, the World Bank agreed to bail the country out only under certain conditions, one of which was the privatization of water infrastructure.

The American multinational, Betchel, took advantage by obtaining ownership of water in Cochabamba. And as the incident is presented in The Corporation, this wasn’t just some particular water treatment plant or plumbing system. The company was entitled to *all* water in the precincts of the city, and began to charge citizens what was in some cases a quarter of their income just to drink it. Even collecting rain or going to the river with a pail technically required payment.

The law that had enabled this institutionalized extortion was ultimately overturned after the people rose up in dissent. But learning about the Cochabamba Water War nevertheless made a big impact on me at the age of 18. Because, if water, the most basic necessity of life, can be turned into private property, and not just tap water or bottled water but every single drop of it, and you have to pay someone for each sip you take, then what are the limits on ownership? Is air fair game? Or pieces of sidewalk? Sunlight?

Such questions led me to imagine a world in which literally every molecule is owned and traded by different companies. But I soon realized that in this scenario, there would have to be some mechanism by which the powers that be extract rent for use of such properties.

From there, I conceived the idea of defining private property in terms of actions. It wouldn’t be the air as such that was owned but the act of breathing it, not food but the action of eating it, and so on.

False Starts

The future presented is believable… highly readable, entertaining… This is a page-turner that is more of a mystery than science fiction. Readers will want to know what ‘Jubilee’ really means just as much as Amon. Just remember to get some sleep and avoid being ‘discreditable’.” 
—Yomiuri Shimbun (on book one Cash Crash Jubilee)

“William reverses the outsider perspective of cyberpunk in this intricate tale of a digitally claustrophobic future.”
—Publishers Weekly

In the months before entering university, I made my first attempt at turning this idea into a story. From what I can remember of the manuscript, it took place after an awful environmental collapse. Everyone wore some kind of stylish spacesuit-like outfit to protect them from the pollution, and it was this that kept track of everyone’s actions.

The obsessively-frugal character that would eventually become my protagonist Amon Kenzaki was then named Harold, after my maternal grandfather. Don’t ask me why. I was 18.

Harold commuted to work by swinging through the city on a wire because it was cheaper than paying fees to walk on the sidewalk. When I watched Terry Gilliam’s 1985 film Brazil several years later, I would realize that this greatly resembles the mode of locomotion used by one of the characters.

Although I had never been to Japan or even east Asia, I decided to set the novel in Tokyo. I must have been influenced by the images of futuristic Asian cities that I had absorbed since early adolescence, in such films as Akira and Blade Runner, and in novels like Neuromancer.

Detours: Philosophy and Translation

“As entertaining as the works by American-Canadian science fiction giant William Gibson.”
—Japan Times

“Cash Crash Jubilee is a roller-coaster ride of action and political speculation, all set against a vivid urban backdrop lit by total corporate domination of human life. Writing in the tradition of Dick and Gibson, Eli K. P. William leverages the details of near-future dystopian Tokyo to superb critical effect. A terrific debut!”
—Mark Kingwell, author of Concrete Reveries and The World We Want

My first efforts to storyfie the idea were a failure. Chock it up to immaturity. I remember feeling that I needed more knowledge, and that was the main reason I decided to go to university. As you can see, I had my priorities straight. I didn’t go to university to one day secure a high paying job or even for the parties. I subjected myself to years of exams and essays so I could tell an elaborate book-length lie.

But soon after enrolling, I encountered philosophy and the Japanese language and became so immersed in studying that I almost gave up on writing fiction. Though I did take two creative writing courses and wrote several articles for my school paper, the collection of scattered notes that would become Cash Crash Jubilee languished half-forgotten on my hard drive for almost 7 years. Occasionally I would come up with some new detail and write it down, but the unfinished manuscript lay more or less unchanged. It wasn’t until I moved to Tokyo amid fallout from the global financial crisis that I finally revived it.

After nearly two years piecing together a living through bottom-of-the-barrel English conversation gigs while studying the Japanese language in every spare moment, I found myself at the outset of my career as a translator, with some modicum of financial stability for the first time in my life—and even a bit of spare time for creative pursuits. I had by then accumulated several ideas that I thought might work as novels, and I wavered for a few months about which one to tackle. Ultimately, I settled on actions as intellectual properties because it seemed the most closely related to what was going on in the world then (circa 2011). I felt that I could write the other stories five, ten years later and they would still be just as relevant, but that this one was dying to speak to the zeitgeist.

I decided for the second time to set the story in Tokyo, the city I was then living. Amid that unbelievably vast metropolis, there were so many fresh experiences from which to draw inspiration that going with my initial instinct for the setting seemed only natural. But even now a decade after this novel was published and two years after the trilogy it initiated was completed, I’m not sure whether my decision to set the story in Tokyo all those years ago is what unconsciously brought me to move there, or whether moving there is what made me decide after all to set it in Tokyo.

The First Draft

“Cash Crash Jubilee is utterly fascinating, from cover to cover… a trove of insanity and wonder, all in one place.”
—BiblioSanctum

“What is truly phenomenal about Cash Crash Jubilee, and what has held my attention, is the world building…  after reading it, I’ll never take something as simple as staring up at the night sky for granted again.”
—BookRiot

“A one-way bullet train into a bizarre but chillingly plausible future. A brilliant debut!”
—Jesse Bullington, author of The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart and The Folly of the World

By the time I began to flesh out the manuscript, nearly ten years had passed since I conceived the initial idea of actions as properties, and the world had drastically changed. The internet was becoming ever more pervasive. The smartphone was beginning to seize people’s minds. I could see that these and other technologies would be a crucial component of capitalism going forward. So I added a second core idea: the ImmaNet. You can think of the ImmaNet as like a virtual world except instead of being contained inside a screen or in some alternate realm called cyberspace, it’s overlaid on the city. Walls, windows, streets, clothes, the sky, everything in sight is covered in a flux of cinematic images and information designed to sell some action or other.

With my two main ideas in hand, I began to wander around different areas of Tokyo—Ginza, Kanda, Kabukicho—and used actions as intellectual properties and the ImmaNet as conceptual filters with which to translate my present perceptions into visions of a future. I also created two new areas on reclaimed land in Tokyo bay: a luxury-condo-paradise-cum-theme-park called Wakuwaku City, and a bankdeath camp called the District of Dreams.This phase of the process was inspired by China Mieville’s masterful novel Perdido Street Station, in which the fantasy city of New Crubozon evolves through rich almost hallucinogenic descriptions into something like a character of its own.

In tandem with crafting the setting, I was also developing characters from my early drafts and giving them new names. The protagonist Harold became Amon Kenzaki, his feisty outspoken co-worker become Amon’s best friend Rick Ferro, their madly bureaucratic boss become Sekido-san, and the female love interest Mayuko Takamatsu. Meanwhile, I was stitching together old fragments of scenes and adding texture to events. This led to more plotting and research, after which I redeveloped the concept, went back to the plot, wrote more scenes, did more research, etc., etc. I was inching along on this circular course until one day the ending to the whole story came to me in a flash. From this epiphany, I was able to build the full narrative arc and use it as a guide to write each chapter in order.

Narrative Cell Division: A Novel Becomes a Duology, Then a Trilogy

It was at this stage that I was in for a surprise. I was writing a story that I believed at that time to be a single novel. But I began to get the sinking suspicion that it was rather long and unwieldy for just one book. Having no clue how many words a novel ought to be, I went online to search. There is, as it turns out, wide variation. A novel can range anywhere from 50,000 words (think Slaughterhouse Five) to 500,000 (think Infinite Jest) or more. Through my web search, 100,000 words eventually emerged as a sort of sweet spot in terms of appeal to publishers. But I had written less than half way through my plot outline, and the manuscript already exceeded 200,000! After a few weeks moping about whether this bloated tome would ever get published, I decided to cut it in half and make two novels.

I then focused my energies on turning the first half into a cohesive narrative, which I titled Cash Crash Jubilee. By the time I was done polishing the novel to my liking, I had been working on it (since committing after university to taking my second stab at the idea) for three and a half years. The manuscript for Cash Crash Jubilee earned me my first agent in 2014 and with her help I was able to secure a publishing contract for two books with Skyhorse Publishing, then the fastest growing publisher in the USA. My book would be released on their newly established SF&F imprint, Talos.

During the several additional months I spent finalizing Cash Crash Jubilee with my editor, I diverted my attention to book two, which I titled The Naked World.

“The sequel to Cash Crash Jubilee returns to a world pulled straight from the best episode of Black Mirror never made.”
—B&N Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog

“A worthy second novel in a trilogy, and made me eager to read the final book.”
—Amazing Stories

I knew from early on that the setting of The Naked World would be a place of extreme poverty. But I didn’t want my second novel to succumb to the cliche of the successful man who falls into a generic ghetto, an all too common trope in sci-fi since long before Bruce Sterling coined the cyberpunk mantra “lowlife, high tech”, so I worked hard to come up with a unique sort of underworld. I read up on global poverty, including the book Planet of Slums by Mike Davis. I also visited Manila as field work, staying in the Makati and Quezon City areas and going on a slum tour of Tondo, the most densely populated area on Earth at the time. This included a visit to HappyLand, a slum with particularly abject conditions even by the standards of Tondo.[2]

The fruits of my research were two new ideas to complement actions as intellectual properties and the ImmaNet: the Charity Gift Economy and a dissolving nano-material called Fleet. These I used to design the District of Dreams, the world’s largest bankdeath camp, a vast ephemeral labyrinth of slowly dissolving disposcrapers (disposable skyscrapers) packed with the bankdead hordes who must depend forever on supplies provided by the rapacious Philanthropy Syndicate. This is a vision of  future poverty, I am confident, that has never before been seen in fiction.

As I was fleshing out the plot and designing a new a cast of characters in accord with the setting, the second novel began to grow and burgeon like the first. Soon I got that sinking suspicion again.

“The defining dystopia for our time.”
—Barnes & Noble Sci Fi & Fantasy Blog

“A riveting read from cover to cover, The Naked World demonstrates Eli William as having a genuine flair for originality and imaginative, narrative driven storytelling of the first order.”
—The Midwest Book Review

“While a completely original work, characters face predicaments evocative of works by Jonathan Swift, Aldous Huxley, Philip K. Dick, George Orwell and Stephen King.”
—The Japan Times

This is when I informed my agent timidly, that I was pretty sure I was writing a trilogy. She told me that since we’d only signed a two-book deal I was screwed and would have to trim down my second novel, whatever it took. But I contacted my editor, made a pitch for the trilogy, and was able to negotiate for a third book. This I titled A Diamond Dream.

Thankfully the story didn’t keep dividing like cells. This would be the final book.

Journey From the Land of Banklife to the Land of Bankdeath and Back

Once it was clear that I was writing a trilogy that told a single continuous story, I began to seek inspiration from other such trilogies. I decided to re-read the Lord of the Rings, my favourite book as a child, for the first time in some 25 years.[3]

Here is the trilogy plot structure I eventually settled on in a single sentence:

Set in a dystopian future Tokyo where all actions incur licensing fees, The Jubilee Cycle follows Liquidator Amon Kenzaki on his journey from banklife to the land of bankdeath and back, and finally to his reckoning with the action-transaction market he once served.

Book one, Cash Crash Jubilee, covers Amon’s origin in the land of banklife, book two, The Naked World, his sojourn in the land of bankdeath, and the final book, A Diamond Dream, his bank resurrection.

The Pandemic: Delays, Delays, and More Delays

Most of the final book, A Diamond Dream, was finished in rough before book two. My roundabout writing process involved drafting book three before book two because I needed to know how the climax would function. But completing the final book, as I wrote in the acknowledgements, took much longer than it should have. This was partly due to the challenge of tying together all the many threads—conceptual, narrative, and emotional—of a story of this scale and complexity. Finessing the climax took many rewrites. But it was also due to a variety of factors beyond my control.

I submitted A Diamond Dream in summer of 2019. Before my editor had a chance to review the manuscript, the pandemic hit. What followed was a seemingly endless series of delays with the publisher, delays due to supply chains, and even delays with the printers! In short, A Diamond Dream was that species of sad neglected publication known as a covid book, sucked into the maelstrom of a global crisis, sometimes never to emerge.

For several years after I submitted the manuscript for A Diamond Dream, I had no idea when it might come out and doubted that it ever would. This was one of the most deflating and agonizing periods of my entire life. I’ll leave the details for some future date when I’m mentally prepared to write about it.

My only salve for these numerous setbacks was the relief I felt when A Diamond Dream was finally released in 2023. After all those years, The Jubilee Cycle was complete at last! I had taken an idea from my youth and realized it the fullest degree possible, overcoming every obstacle that stood in the way of its publication and finally producing an ending for all the readers who were waiting. 

The Present After My Future

I’m currently at a transitional point in my career. When I wrote The Jubilee Cycle, I was expecting to write novels and only novels for the rest of my life. But since my agent quit agenting to work for an app several years ago, I have been without representation and have yet to find a home for my fourth novel (set in two alternate world Torontos).

Now I find myself juggling multiple projects of different kinds. I’ve just finished translating a book of literary essays called the Traveling Tree for an imprint of Hachette. I have contracted to edit an anthology of classic Japanese sci-fi for MIT Press and am in the process of selecting the stories. I’m doing ongoing research in preparation to write a proposal for a non-fiction book on the history of Japanese science fiction. I am also writing increasingly in the Japanese language. I help write scenarios as a consultant for a major Tokyo-based video game company and have just written my first work of fiction in Japanese, a short story called Photo Bomber (フォトボマー）that appeared in an anthology put out by by Japan’s largest and oldest sci-fi publisher.

I am grateful  for the variety of creative work I have found myself doing. Still—and I hope this doesn’t sound too masochistic —what I want more than anything is to write another trilogy of the same scale as The Jubilee Cycle. Because after everything I’ve been through and learned, I think my next trilogy will be even better.

Wish me luck.

Purchase The Jubilee Cycle in paper, ebook, and audiobook

Book One: Cash Crash Jubilee
Book Two: The Naked World
Final Book: A Diamond Dream