About the Book

To fight the gods—you must first become a slave.

Our universe is dead. All that’s left are memories. But the powers indigenous to the new world are fighting back.

Alexander, a handsome immigrant fleeing trouble in his poor native land, doesn’t even have a claim to his own name in the magic-rich city of Norio, where they call him Aleixo. But his name may be the least of what the sorcerers of Norio take from him, when a seemingly random invitation to cater-waiter at a party of the wealthy and famous sweeps Aleixo up into a maelstrom of imperial politics and a millennia-long war between humans and gods. The empire of Norio rules the world because of its monopoly on magical high-tech devices called dream-slaves—and now the head of imperial intelligence has proof that Aleixo isn’t human at all, but a dream-slave assassin, smuggled into Norio by the empire’s enemies.

Rescued by a cabal of sorcerers from a foiled attempt to kill him by a renegade sorcerer, Salvador, and his mysterious other-human ally Ydris, Aleixo finds his identity and humanity stripped from him in harrowing psychedelic adventures that transform his memories and bind him to a history of conflict, activating fabulous abilities he never dreamed he had. The world Aleixo lives in isn’t what he’s always believed it was: the forces that rule his destiny are not just economic class, race, gender, sexuality, body, nationality—they are much more sinister, and much more powerful. The greatest powers have secretly colonized his planet, and made its history strangely similar to our own. Aleixo discovers he may be the last line of defense against the dystopian present and future of Earth. He leads the struggle for emancipation as he grapples with who and what he is: is he human, or just a dream?

About the Author

Darieck Scott is a professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Scott is the author of Keeping It Unreal: Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics (NYU Press, 2022), which won the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Studies and was also a Finalist for the 2023 Locus Award for Nonfiction, as well as for the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize. His previous book, Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (NYU Press 2010), was awarded the 2011 Alan Bray Memorial Prize for Queer Studies by the Modern Language Association. Scott is also the author of the novels Hex: A Novel of Love Spells (Da Capo, 2007) and Traitor to the Race (Dutton, 1995), and the editor of Best Black Gay Erotica (Cleis, 2004). His fiction has appeared in the anthologies Freedom in This Village (Carroll & Graf, 2005), Black Like Us (Cleis, 2002), Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers (Harper Perennial, 2000), Shade: An Anthology of Fiction by Gay Men of Afridan Descent (Harper Perennial, 1996), and Ancestral House: The Black Short Story in The Americas and Europe (1995), as well as in the erotica collections Flesh and the Word 4 (Plume, 1997) and Inside Him: New Gay Erotica (Running Press, 2006). He has published essays in Callaloo, GLQ, The Americas Review, and American Literary History, and is co-editor with Ramzi Fawaz of the American Literature special issue “Queer About Comics,” winner of the 2018 Best Special Issue from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.

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