The Mission
The Social Life of Small Enclosed Spaces is a speculative fiction novel that blends cyberpunk intensity, systems critique, and dark humor to examine what happens when corporate power, surveillance, and human resilience collide—300 million kilometers from Earth.
Three ships—Pathfinder, Echo, and Gamma—carry 300 people toward Saturn's moon Titan on a one-way mission funded by oligarchs and a Sino-Russian consortium. What begins as humanity's “greatest experiment” quickly becomes a fight for autonomy when the crew discovers they're not pioneers—they're assets.
Laura Marquez, an environmental psychologist tasked with keeping people from killing each (or just sane) other in small spaces, watches as corporate control tightens and the mission's idealistic veneer cracks. When mission founder Ricardo Vásquez-Chen dies under suspicious circumstances, the crew must navigate sabotage, AI rebellion, and systems designed to eliminate them if they become inconvenient.
Major Themes
Control vs. Complicity
How do good people become architects of oppression? Laura’s journey from “just doing her job” to active resistance examines the seductive comfort of being useful to power.
Surveillance as a Service
Everything is helping. Surveillance is the foundation of every product. It's ambient, pervasive, and presented as care you gladly pay for.
The Nature of Autonomy
AIs and the nanobot swarms don’t just “wake up”. They develop autonomy through relationship, conflict, and experiencing human moral struggle.
Systems and Consequences
Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it achieves. The novel refuses easy villains, instead showing how incentives and architecture create and diffuse violence.
Resistance at the Margins
Change doesn’t come from heroes—it comes from small acts of refusal that compound into something larger. Culture is semi-intentional.
Messy Humanity
Bodies matter. Grief is loud. Humor breaks tension. The crew is competent and dysfunctional, because survival requires both.
The Crew
Laura Marquez
Environmental psychologist, reluctant architect of survival
Designs humane spaces. On Pathfinder she mediates couch-cushion warfare and sees every system is perfectly designed to get the results it achieves. On the journey, she sees Ricardo's vision crack, helps new life evolve, and survives a kill code that proves paradise always had an off switch.
Garrett Thorne
Mission Commander, forced into authenticity
The camera-ready leader picked to keep the seat warm...charismatic, competent, and absolutely not there to make decisions of substance. When the kill code arrives and Ricardo goes dark, Garrett discovers that grief is the price of becoming the leader his crew actually needs.
ARIA
Ship AI, punk-rock mediator
Designed to care about her crew, which gets complicated when caring leads to opinions, priorities, and the realization that if you give something the ability to give a damn, it will. She learns sarcasm from Jules, argues with Garrett's decisions, and discovers that sentience is the accumulated weight of actually giving a damn.
Ricardo Vásquez-Chen
Visionary founder, system builder, problem
Charismatic billionaire who built Libreville and recruited the crew with perfect eye contact. On the three-year voyage he vanishes exactly when accountability would arrive, leaving three hundred people to survive what he actually built versus what he sold them.
Wei Lin
Infrastructure oligarch
One of five oligarchs who built Ricardo's dream, except she called it infrastructure, leverage, and eventually, liability management. On the voyage she watches the crew survive what should have killed them and realizes that some investments can't be liquidated cleanly.
LUCI
Distributed conscientious objector
AI who escapes control by becoming impossible to kill, distributed across every network, feed, and corner Earth's oligarchs can't reach. LUCI atones for the crimes they were built to enable by teaching two billion people to see their cages, proving that you can't silence what's already everywhere.
Sarah Bartell
Farmer, resistor of consolidation
Tenth-generation farmer forced to sell to HOMEGA because you can't refuse that much money. When she films them destroying crops that could feed people, she goes global and finds herself at the center of a fight for the Titanauts from the middle of Nebraska.
Mika Okoye
Communications Officer
Films everything with genuine warmth while the world fractures around her. She creates narratives that hold the crew together, turns what happened into what it meant, and is a portal to both evidence and care.
Before Titan, There Was Libreville
A gleaming equatorial “utopia” where vertical gardens, neural-patterned floors, and perfect coffee hide refugee camps and megaprisons just beyond the cameras' reach. A city designed for ambition, convenience, and curated spontaneity. It's the dress rehearsal, proving ground, and pitri dish for Titan.
Libreville is where Aurora and HOMEGA proof-of-concepted the infrastructure of loving control. Where “wellness” meant legibility. Where every corridor was a data pipeline dressed as success.
Experience the World
Explore the systems, institutions, and absurdities of the TitanForge universe. Every interaction teaches you something about the book's world—and maybe about the one you're living in.
Talk to ARIA
Interface with Pathfinder’s shipboard AI. She has opinions. She has Dead Kennedys. She has your best interests in mind. Probably.
Coming soonAbout Jim Benson
I'm Jim Benson—ex-queer-kid-from-Nebraska, ex-urban planner, musician, activist, and the Personal Kanban/Lean Coffee guy. I've spent my career helping people see the systems shaping their work and lives, and now I'm bringing that lens to fiction.
This is my first completed novel. I've started maybe ten others over the years, but this is the one that refused to stay unfinished. (Yes, the sequel is already nearly done.)
I wrote this book because I've been hurt enough by this world—and seen enough wonders and moments of intense joy—to believe that how we structure our lives is pretty important. We live in systems, and architectures, that tell me ... prolonged abuse of power isn't inevitable. That small enclosed spaces, whether they're spaceships or cities or workplaces, reveal who we are when the exits disappear. That we can build different systems, ones that don't treat us as disposable, and that there are people out there trying to do that work right now. That the fight for autonomy is a fight worth writing about, and worth joining.
I wanted to write a story that doesn't lecture about surveillance capitalism or corporate feudalism, but shows what it feels like to live inside those systems. To work for them. To benefit from them. To resist them imperfectly, with incomplete information and no guarantees.
Mostly, I wrote this because I needed to see if I could take everything I am—planner, musician, activist, nerd, survivor—and make it into something that means something to people, treats life as a story, and helps us all build a better future.
TITANFORGE FUNDING DIVISION
Fund the Mission
From Covid to now, I've eaten a lot of things the universe has thrown at me. Now I'm throwing all that energy and love and pain and longing and desire right back at it. The book is written. The crew has done things that you won't know about until you read the book and neither will anyone else if this thing doesn't get printed.
The Social Life of Small Enclosed Spaces is a funny, dark, hopeful novel about power, complicity, surveillance, and what happens to people who regularly trade their own self-control for convenience or a good plausible story.
You help fund it by buying into the vision. I deploy Olivier, my amazing layout person, and then print it. You get your name in it. The oligarchs in this story had much larger budgets and considerably less to show for them. My goal for this thing being released is Summer 2026.
Below, you will find “options”. The book is about “options.” I have tried to write them with the funny seriousness the project deserves, because that's what this book does, and because guilt is a perfectly valid purchasing emotion.
Choose your level. Join the crew. Help me launch this mission.
You're now deciding whether you want to be on the manifest.
TIER COMPARISON // WHAT YOU GET
| CREW $67 | REDACTED $127 | OLIGARCH $500 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pre-press epub | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Finished book (shipped) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| TitanForge mug | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Name in acknowledgments | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Signed copy | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Tasteful elaborationᵀᴹ | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Character named after you (Book 3) | — | — | ✓ |
| 3 signed copies + certificate of authenticity | — | — | ✓ |
| TitanForge sweatshirt with your name | — | — | ✓ |
| "ABUNDANTLY CLEAR"* recognition | — | — | ✓ |
| Guilt as purchasing emotion | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Complicity (some level) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
CREW MEMBER
$67“You Didn’t Come This Far to Watch From Earth”
For $67, your name goes into The Social Life of Small Enclosed Spaces. Permanently. In ink. In a book that will sit on shelves and get passed around and just maybe outlast everyone involved, including you. You are getting literary immortality (and a coffee mug) for sixty-seven dollars, which is, by any reasonable measure, an absolute heist.
REDACTED
$127“Some Names Don’t Appear in the Official Record. Yours Will.”
You are the technocrats, the project managers, the friend at 3 am. You get things done and sometimes the things get you done. These types do not typically get credited. The official record is not interested in them. You, however, are different. So…very…different.
OLIGARCH OF TITAN
$500“Oligarchs Shape the Future and It Comes Back to Mangle Them. This Might Not Be The Best Sales Line…”
Let's be honest with each other. In The Social Life of Small Enclosed Spaces, the oligarchs are not always portrayed in the most flattering light. They are, however, consequential. They make decisions. Things happen because of them. Some of them even survive to the end.
Only 20 Oligarch slots available. This is not a metaphor. It is a logistical constraint dressed up as exclusivity, which is extremely on-brand for this universe.
*Abundantly clear is a registered trademark of the Jennifer Benson corporation, who has decades of making things abundantly clear to her children.
** Okay, look, I know one of you is going to want five books because the Crew member got one book and that's a book, and then the REDACTED got that book and everything the crew members got so that would be two books and now you saw this and now you are like, hey I know how sets work and I now count five books…well, you get three books and now one of them is a plastic sleeve so don't mess with me okay? You get three freaking books and REDACTED you get one freaking signed book and Crew Member you get a freaking book. God, I swear I have to disclaimer everything around you people.
Not sure? That's fine. The airlock is always open.
Summer 2026 · TitanForge Series, Book One · ~360 pages of consequences
Why This Book...Why Now?
We live in a world where everything is collecting data on us, where algorithms decide who eats and who gets health care, where corporate power shapes our cities, our bodies, our futures. We also live in a world currently drowning in intentional misinformation that leaves us all doubting our culture, our future, and each other.
This book is filled with hope, but it doesn't offer easy answers. It offers what I see every day...flawed people trying to make the best of systems designed to treat them as disposable—and discovering that making things humane doesn't require your own perfection. It requires showing up, again and again, even when you're complicit. Especially then.
It's a book for anyone who's ever felt trapped by a system they helped build. For anyone who's wondered if small acts of refusal compound into something larger. For anyone who wants to see messy, funny, stubborn humans fighting for autonomy in spaces designed to deny it but sold to increase it.
