LORE & CONTEXT
Eight stories share something with Trotillions: extraordinary worlds, unlikely relationships, memorable characters, and societies adapting to change. Yet Trotillions takes a different road. After the White Heat, humanity is no longer the only intelligent species. New cultures compete through trade, status, territory, and negotiation. Life goes on — and it can be surprisingly funny.
These comparisons highlight what readers may enjoy, without giving away the novels’ major turns.
Film · 2015 · George Miller
Shared appeal: vivid post-apocalyptic aesthetics, distinct factions, and the desert as a character.
Trotillions offers more everyday social life and negotiated power alongside the spectacle. Its roads connect communities with different rules, not just rival convoys.
If you loved the worldbuilding of Mad Max and wanted to explore how people live between the action scenes.
Novel · 2006 · Cormac McCarthy
Shared appeal: a journey through a changed world and the emotional importance of companionship.
Where The Road is deliberately spare and bleak, Trotillions is busy with trade, customs, wit, and societies creating new routines.
If you appreciate intimate journeys but want a more populated and unexpectedly welcoming world.
Novel · 2012 · Hugh Howey
Shared appeal: systems of control, the price of information, and the slow discovery of how society works.
Trotillions opens those systems onto highways and settlements, where every faction has its own rules and incentives.
If you enjoy stories about institutions and the people who navigate them.
Game / Series · 2013 / 2023 · Naughty Dog / HBO
Shared appeal: character-driven storytelling, trust, companionship, and difficult personal choices.
Trotillions pairs its emotional center with a new multi-species society — and a large, fiercely independent cat who refuses to behave like a conventional pet.
If you value memorable relationships as much as the dangers around them.
Novel / Series · 2014 / 2021 · Emily St. John Mandel
Shared appeal: culture, everyday humanity, and the ways people rebuild meaning after catastrophe.
Trotillions leans further into new institutions, interspecies politics, warm absurdity, and the small practicalities of living together.
If you like post-apocalyptic fiction that finds room for ordinary life.
Novel · 2006 · Max Brooks
Shared appeal: social change, institutions, and the larger consequences of a world-altering event.
Rather than an oral history of collapse, Trotillions lets readers travel within the systems that now govern water, roads, and trade.
If world-level consequences interest you, but you also want a continuing cast and a road story.
Graphic Novel · 2012 · Brian K. Vaughan & Fiona Staples
Shared appeal: visually distinctive cultures, unusual relationships, sharp dialogue, and a world bigger than any one character.
Trotillions offers a grounded weird-western setting rather than space opera, but shares the pleasure of discovering how very different communities coexist.
If you enjoy imaginative societies and character-focused speculative fiction.
Novel Series · 1996–present · George R.R. Martin
Shared appeal: rival power centers, protocols, reputation, negotiations, and competing ambitions.
In Trotillions, old-world kingdoms give way to routes, trade courts, settlements, and animal-bonded domains. Reputation can be more useful than an army.
If you enjoy faction politics without needing a continent-spanning royal war.
The apocalypse changed who could think, build, trade, and rule. Wolves hold the roads. Lions turn etiquette into power. Merchants connect communities through resources and obligations. Humans are no longer the only voices at the table.
And somewhere on those roads travels Brand, a courier with a talent for reading complicated situations, alongside Rascal — an enormous cat who has never asked permission to have an opinion.
This is a post-apocalyptic world with danger, humor, memorable characters, and more life than you might expect.
Readers who enjoy the worldbuilding of Mad Max, the relationships of The Last of Us, the social imagination of Station Eleven, or the politics of A Song of Ice and Fire may find familiar pleasures here. Trotillions tells its own story in a post-apocalyptic weird-western setting.
Both. The books mix dry and dark humor with meaningful choices, shifting allegiances, unusual societies, and warm moments between characters.
Yes. The completed main trilogy consists of The Dead Lands Chronicles (Book 1), Blind Spot (Book 2), and Zero Operation (Book 3).
No. Danger exists, and some situations are harsh, but much of the world is shaped by trade, etiquette, control of resources, negotiation, and relationships rather than nonstop fighting.
Start with Trotillions: The Dead Lands Chronicles, the first book of the completed main trilogy.
READY TO EXPLORE?
Start with The Dead Lands Chronicles — Book 1 of the completed Trotillions trilogy.