Strange and Beautiful Book Club

Do you have problems? Good. Michael Malbon doesn’t, and he hates it. His supernatural synesthesia confuses smell with normative information, so Mike always knows what to do to produce the best outcome despite not even knowing what the best outcome is.

But success is a paradise, and a paradise which one cannot leave is a prison. So when Mike finds himself mysteriously thrust into a war-ravaged far future, occupying the body of a hapless highschool girl with no knowledge or understanding of the world around him, he does what he always does— turns lemons into lemonade.

Mike flees from the utopia of his causal nose into the dystopia of the world around him. He adopts the identity of his new body in perverse defiance of the mystery it poses. He enlists in the future-military to pilot a giant mech against the bug-monsters and the killer robots. He befriends the friends of the highschooler whose life he usurped, and uses them as the brick and mortar of a fate which he architects unknowingly. He’s unhinged. He’s sociopathic. But can he find a reason not to be when dystopia and utopia are one and the same?