If You Loved These,
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Shared DNA

• ◆A world where new societies have built rituals, aesthetics, and hierarchies from the wreckage
• ◆Factions defined by visual identity — you know who rules by what they wear
• ◆Action as spectacle that reveals character and culture simultaneously
• ◆The desert as both setting and character

Where Trotillions Goes Further

Fury Road is pure kinetic poetry — minimal dialogue, maximum motion. Trotillions adds what Fury Road deliberately strips away: political complexity, faction negotiation, dark irony, and a protagonist who navigates through wit rather than speed. Where Immortan Joe is a symbol, Schwartz is a philosophy. And where Fury Road gives you the Doof Warrior, Trotillions gives you a three-meter llama-mutant rating zombie demolition on aesthetics. Eight out of ten.

Shared DNA

• ◆A man and his companion navigating a collapsed world
• ◆The apocalypse as a moral landscape, not just a physical one
• ◆The question of what it means to remain human when humanity's rules no longer apply
• ◆Violence that matters — never gratuitous, always consequential

Where Trotillions Goes Further

The Road is ash and silence. It earns every comma. But its world is empty by design — the monsters are human, the threat is entropy. Trotillions fills the silence with noise: five factions, political intrigue, a functioning economy of debt and water, and a protagonist who makes choices not because there's nothing left but because there's too much to navigate. The emotional core is the same — a man and his companion, and what he refuses to sacrifice — but the world is baroque where McCarthy's is bare.

Shared DNA

• ◆A protagonist who begins as a functional cog in a broken system
• ◆A world governed by rules that only the reader gradually understands
• ◆Power structures that maintain themselves through information control
• ◆An indie-to-franchise trajectory that proved the model

Where Trotillions Goes Further

Wool is vertical — one silo, one mystery, one direction. Trotillions is horizontal — five territories, five power models, five aesthetics colliding across open desert. Where Wool asks "what is the truth of this world," Trotillions asks "whose version of truth survives the next negotiation." Both are about systems of control. One is claustrophobic. The other is a map you want to trace with your finger.

Shared DNA

• ◆A man whose defining characteristic is the companion he refuses to sacrifice
• ◆A world that has built new societies, economies, and power structures from collapse
• ◆A protagonist who starts as a function — a transporter, a courier — and becomes a fault line
• ◆Emotional beats that land harder because the world around them is indifferent

Where Trotillions Goes Further

The Last of Us ends with Joel making a choice that breaks the rational calculus of survival. Trotillions begins there. Brand refuses the deal — the logical, profitable, survival-maximizing deal — in the first book. That's the premise, not the finale. And unlike Joel's companion, Brand's cat has been quietly running a negotiation with the dead for two years while Brand thought he was translating boredom. The emotional architecture is similar. The reveal is different in kind.

Shared DNA

• ◆A post-collapse world where art, ritual, and culture immediately reassert themselves
• ◆Factions and groups defined by what they chose to preserve from the old world
• ◆The understanding that human beings build meaning before they build walls
• ◆Dark moments balanced by genuine warmth and strange humor

Where Trotillions Goes Further

Station Eleven is elegiac — it mourns the old world while finding beauty in the new one. Trotillions is not elegiac. It has moved past mourning into something more interesting: a world that has decided the old human order was overrated, and built something weirder and more honest in its place. The lion-bonded aristocracy in baroque wigs patrolling a ruined gas station is not a tragedy. It's a consequence. And it's funnier than anything in Station Eleven, which is not a criticism of either book.

Shared DNA

• ◆A systemic view of zombie apocalypse — not one survivor's journey but a world's response
• ◆Political and economic structures rebuilt around the new reality
• ◆Dark humor as a survival mechanism within the narrative
• ◆The sense that humanity is simultaneously its own worst enemy and its own best tool

Where Trotillions Goes Further

World War Z documents. Trotillions inhabits. Brooks gives you the history of a collapse; StViga drops you into its operating economy. In Trotillions, the question isn't "how did civilization fall" but "what is the price of water and who controls it, and what happens when someone finds two hundred aquifer nodes instead of seventeen." The geopolitics is real. It just involves a lama-mutant and a pouch of lemonade.

Shared DNA

• ◆Multiple warring factions, each visually distinct, each internally coherent
• ◆Dark humor woven into high-stakes political situations
• ◆A central relationship that the entire universe tries to destroy
• ◆World-building that reveals itself through consequence, not exposition

Where Trotillions Goes Further

Saga is space opera with family at its center. Trotillions is weird western with a cat at its center — which turns out to mean the same thing. Both works understand that factions are most interesting when they are comprehensible from the inside: the lion-bonded aristocracy isn't evil, it's just operating according to a logic that treats human beings as a renewable resource. Saga readers will recognize the texture. The Trotillions graphic novel is already in development, and the visual language is there.

Shared DNA

• ◆Multiple factions with internally consistent worldviews, none purely heroic or villainous
• ◆A protagonist who becomes a political node — essential to multiple sides simultaneously
• ◆Power expressed through aesthetics: banners, colors, rituals, and symbols of dominance
• ◆The understanding that the most dangerous people are those who believe they are right

Where Trotillions Goes Further

Westeros has seven kingdoms. The Dead Lands has five factions — and the scale is deliberate. Trotillions is ASoIaF compressed into desert, stripped of romantic chivalry, and replaced with a functioning economy of water and explosives. Where Martin's world moves at glacial political pace, Trotillions moves like a courier — fast, dangerous, and navigating by who owes whom what. The White Court is the Lannisters if the Lannisters were literal lions and didn't pretend to be human. Which, on reflection, is an improvement.