Antisense Screenplays

The Antisense Universe is a storyworld focused on climate action and civilisational redesign. In it, I am setting a wide variety of screenplays, novels, novellas, stories, graphic stories, and eventually games and augmented reality experiences. The main narrative through line is to be embodied in twenty four animated feature screenplays. Eight are written, and four are in process.

The reason I am choosing animation for this project is that the screenplays will share characters and locations. This would lead to enormous scheduling problems if the projects were live-action, but they will actually save money for animation, since we can reuse location and character designs. The story spans the globe and runs over at least eight centuries, so there’s plenty of scope for drama.

The people of the Antisense Universe struggle to save our human world from the systemic flaws that are destroying it. In the first phase of the story, climate scientists and refugees will gather in Climate Town, a new kind of ‘refugee camp’ that is also a model of green living. Built from rocky soil and trash by people who have lost everything, Climate Town exemplifies cheap tech that can revolutionise how we live in cities, and has the potential to be a beacon of hope for the world.

Things get complicated when the wife of a senior corporate official leaves her husband and takes shelter in Climate Town with her seven year old daughter. Her husband accuses Climate Town of kidnapping children, but before he can take action the pandemic intervenes, and he is reduced to trolling them on social media.

Over the next two decades, Climate Town acts as a refuge for people fleeing persecution of all kinds from every corner of the globe. Meanwhile, the corporations increase their stranglehold on the world until, in 2048, they engineer total ecological collapse. The heirs of the masters want to rule the ruins, but they are quickly embroiled in warfare between the various camps.

While the corporate dukes and earls are busy destroying each other, the workers are silently escaping into the wilderness. They join the movement of Zigsa, a fifteen year old escapee from Tibet who invents Antisense, a new ethical system based on happiness, sharing and love. Eventually the corporate dudebros shoot each other down with the help of their robot armies (and a passing comet), and it is finally safe for the Survivors to emerge and re green the Earth.

This process is not without dangers (and heroism) and they have to do this while facing the challenges of growing their system of Antisense to accommodate a maturing society. By 2680, things are looking good. The toxic waste left by the old world has almost entirely been cleaned up, there are forests and settlements all over the world, twelve orbital stations and a settlement on the Moon.

Then one day a child is born wrong. She falls out of the safety net of nurture and protection, the first in seven centuries to do so. The work of rehabilitating her stretches the resources of her well wishers, and the entire world, and forces the followers of Antisense to re-examine themselves and make some long overdue changes to their developing utopia.

I am looking for an animation production house, preferably based in India or Asia, to help me make these movies.

Puzzle One

This is the PDF of the first Puzzle of the Karma Sutra. It contains the Rootkit Test, which Survivors have to pass in order to be welcomed into Antisense. There are sixteen statements to which you have to answer ‘true’ or false. If you get more than ten right, you pass the test! But as we’re not living in the Antisense Universe as yet, the answers are free to read in the document. If you were a slag or chick in hanyo town, you’d have to pass the test to read the Puzzle.

The Rootkit Test isn’t exactly the core principles of Antisense, but it’s close enough for beginners. The Antisense Code is given at the end of the Puzzle.

Welcome to Antisense

This site is dedicated to the background work I am doing to create the Antisense Universe, a storyworld about redesigning human civilisation. In this world I am setting a number of short stories, novels, graphic shorts and novels, a feature film called Ants on a Leaf and a one-hour format TV screenplay called Antisense.

Works published so far:

Arisudan, novella, appeared in Mithila Review 15,

‘Arfabad’, short story, in Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures, edited by Sarena Ullibarri et al. Albuquerque, NM: World Weaver Press, 2021.

‘Replacement’, short story, in Avatar: Indian Science Fiction, ed Tarun Saint and Francisco Verso, Future Fictions 2020.

‘A Night with the Joking Clown’, short story, The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction. Ed. Tarun Saint (Gurugram, India: Hachette India, 2019.

‘How Zigsa Found Her Way’, graphic short story, in Longform: An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, ed Sarbajit Sen et al., New Delhi: Harp Collins India, 2018.

The TV series is planned for seven seasons. They are:

(1) Climate Town. This describes how Climate Town, a UN-mandated township for climate refugees, is set up in the fictional South East Asian country of Melayu. It is run by a group of climate scientists, some of whom are also climate refugees, and it pioneers ways to change our cities to make them solve the climate emergency, not aggravate it. We are also introduced to some of the corporations whose machinations form the Big Bad of the series. It ends with a global crisis precipitated by Pradip Shankar, a doctor who is meddling with gene therapies. Newborn boys begin to die.

(2) Bitch Wars. Battle lines are drawn in Season 2, and the corporations band together to destroy not just climate town but all the people who are resisting their rule. They engineer a climate crisis which breaks modern civilisation and leaves them in charge. But a generation of girls growing up without brothers is determined to stop them. One thousand boys, the sons of the richest men in the world, are being groomed to be the sole heirs of the planet.

(3) Survivarium. Season 3 tells the story of how the resistance to their rule develops, the Survivors escape and invent the system of karma to organise their work and fix wrongs. They forsake the ideas of law and money and build the first survivarium, an underground refuge filled with the ten treasures: people, plants, animals, soil, air, water, light, love, karma and knowledge.

(4) Karma. Season 4 shows the new civilisation developing in secret, and we follow the lives of the first generation of kids to grow up in the survivariums. Meanwhile the endgame is on in hanyo town: the Robot Wars have started. 

(5) Floriana. Season 5 describes how the rule of the hanyos ends, the machines get back their identities and the Survivors re-emerge to heal the Earth.

(6) Tira’s Gift. Season 6 is set five hundred years after the end of the hanyos and tells the story of Tira, an erratic genius who may have broken the world. 

(7) Lightbearers Season 7 is the final book of the series, and describes how the FLorian ci;livations reintroduces men and terraforms Venus.

The founder of the first survivarium is Zigsa, who escapes from a death sentence and takes refuge in the Flaming Mountains. When the Survivors have created their world and begun living in it, they decide they must do something to help those still trapped under the rule of the hanyos. They begin sending out agents called rootkittens who carry Puzzle One of the Karma Sutra, which is a manual for building a survivarium. The rest of the Puzzles are embedded deep in the servers of the corporations. They are hidden in little jigsaw puzzles, spot-the-difference and other games the corporate servers send to their labourers to keep their minds out of trouble. But the Puzzles of the Survivors are a blueprint for escape. 

The TV series pilot can be viewed on Coverfly 

The Antisense wiki on this site describes the Antisense Universe, its history, systems, concepts and personalities.