Arrival.
Emma washes ashore and is taken in. The kindness is too complete.
Ø · the island of the unknown
Arctic Utopia
The real darkness in the Arctic is human.
The book
A utopia with a body count.
An island that is on no map. Seven people who share everything. One rule they keep when the sun goes out.
When Emma, a Danish zoologist searching for her missing husband, is thrown ashore on a nameless coal island between Greenland and Svalbard, its six inhabitants welcome her into a society with no money, no rulers and no kitchens. She has three days, until the polar night begins, to find work that only she can do. What she does not know is what the island does with strangers in December.
Arctic Utopia is a cold, exact story about a community that has survived by consuming the outsider, and about the warming sea that is coming to collect the debt.
Not the weather. Not the myth. The welcome.
Named Utopia after the old name was crossed out.
Why now
The Arctic is the front line.
It is warming nearly four times faster than the rest of the planet. Readers want climate stories that are felt, not explained. No sea ice means no seals. No seals means hunger. The horror grows out of the water.
The North is reckoning with its past.
In Denmark and Greenland, colonial history, relocation and extraction are now a public conversation. The book takes that history personally: coal that left clean, and a name invented to lure people across the water.
The appetite is already there.
Midsommar, The Terror and Smilla’s Sense of Snow showed the audience for isolated places and cold, patient dread. Arctic Utopia keeps the dread in the kindness.
What makes it different
- A perfect share that needs an outsider. Seven people, seven appetites. Each resident is human before they are monstrous. Emma is a white Danish zoologist. Some of the islanders are Greenlandic. The welcome does not sort them.
- Folklore, woven in. Inuit stories — Sedna and the tupilak — sit beside Grýla and the Yule Cat, and beside the Norse who named Greenland to lure settlers. A marketing trick the island repeats.
- Climate as a character. The sea keeps every name it was given, and takes them back one by one. The thaw is not background. It is the debt.
- Genre
- Literary horror, climate fiction, Arctic gothic
- Length
- About 20,000 words, four chapters
- Setting
- A fictional coal island between Greenland and Svalbard, 23 October to 21 December
- Tone
- Cold, precise, allegorical. The horror comes from calm.
- For readers of
- Smilla’s Sense of Snow, The Terror, Annihilation, Nordic noir
- Formats
- Print, ebook, audiobook, translation editions
The four chapters
Desire.
She finds her place by becoming what each of them craves. One table. No kitchen. Everything shared.
Truth.
In the polar dark she learns what happened to her husband. Someone has to go down, and comb. Sedna’s story, not a costume.
Ruination.
A storm, a rising sea, and a community that will not leave. The sea comes to collect what the coal had borrowed.
In the log, under Remarks, the second mate wrote: No land observed.
Audience
Adult readers of 25 to 55 who read literary horror, Nordic crime and climate fiction, along with book clubs and festival audiences drawn to politically alert fiction. Strong crossover for the Nordic, UK and international translation markets.
The author
Yu Ma is a writer and filmmaker trained in film and media studies at the University of Copenhagen. Arctic Utopia grew from conversations with friends who lived in Greenland, and from years of reading on the Arctic, its colonial history and its changing climate.
Opportunities
- Rights. World English, and translation editions in Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Chinese and others.
- Audiobook. An immersive sound world of wind, ice, aurora and silence.
- Screen. A contained, single-location story designed for a four-part limited series, with Nordic co-production potential.
- Partnerships. Climate institutes, polar research bodies and cultural festivals.
Seeking
A publishing partner, and development support for the audiobook and screen package.
For publication rights and copyright authorisation.
i@yumayu.comØ · the island of the unknown