The Reading Bud

Welcome to the TRB Lounge. Today, we are featuring Jae Darcy for their latest release, Extropia.

Book: Extropia
Author: Jae Darcy
Publication Date: 1 May 2026
Publisher: Pomegranate Seed Press
Pages: 416
Genre: Young-Adult, Dystopia, Science-Fiction
Available Formats: Kindle ebook, trade paperback
For Readers who Enjoyed: Feed by M.T. Anderson, Warcross by Marie Lu, Uglies by Scott Westerfeld, Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness
Fun Fact: Bache Parker started life in online writing forums, years before this book existed — long before The Matrix came out. He was getting thrown out of school and making a spectacular mess of himself in other stories, and I found him so compelling that I eventually had to ask where someone like him ends up.

About the Book

In 2164, reality is something you can buy. The wealthy live online in a gleaming virtual world wired directly into their bodies from birth. Those left outside keep the lights on in an abandoned world.

Bache Parker is eighteen, exiled, and forgotten. His bioware was destroyed in a hack gone wrong, and now he spends his days tending the comatose bodies of people living the life he lost. When a blind girl from a neo-Luddite community asks him to help deliver a virus that will bring the Inside crashing down, he should walk away.

He doesn’t.

Ayven Reynolds has never seen the Inside. She’ hasn’t seen anything at all, until Bache wires her in, and the world her people call an abomination gives her back her sight. Now the virus is live, the stakes are real, and everything both of them thought they believed is suddenly negotiable.

Extropia is a YA cyberpunk novel about power, identity, and what it costs to see the world clearly — even when you’ve been blind your whole life.

You can find Extropia here
Amazon

About The Author

Jae Darcy

Jae Darcy is the author of Extropia. She is a content writer and marketer who lives in the starry hills of Western Massachusetts. She first dreamt up Bache, Ayven and their world in 1996, when she entered her first online RPG chatroom, and has been astonished to watch this reality get closer and closer every year since.    You can sign up to get updates about their writing here.

She can be contacted at jaedarcy@proton.me.

You can find author Lysaght here:
Website | Instagram

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