The Disco at the End of the World

Your Disco Needs You

Coming June 2026 from Titan Books. Acquired by managing editor George Sandison

The Day the Earth Stood Still meets the director’s cut of Studio 54. A queer liberation meets alien first-contact story, set within the discos of an alternate 1970s Los Angeles.

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In 1977 - a world in which America launched its space program shortly after WWII - Mitch Ward followed Flynn, the lost love of his youth, into the US Space Guard. Now, he’s stuck on a backwater moon base with his only friend, Gloria, watching every shuttle in the hope Flynn will be on it.

After an inexplicable encounter with a strange, euphoric being, Mitch and Gloria find themselves dishonorably discharged, and stuck in a USA rapidly sliding into fascism with no plans and no future. There’s nothing for it but to move to Los Angeles to chase their dreams, and find their people in the discos of the city.

But when Flynn crashes back into their lives, claiming to be the host for an emissary of a utopian civilization approaching Earth, he offers Mitch the power to protect himself and friends across the queer community, so they never have to live in the shadows or face oppression again.

With the world on the brink of cataclysm, and Mitch and his friends being squeezed out of every space, it’s down to this community of disco-loving outcasts to stand up for what is beautiful and right.

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The world of DISCO

This 1977 is not our 1977.

In the world of DISCO, America launched its space program in the shadow of World War II and never quite let go of the jingoism of the time. The nation established a military base, called Fort Founding Fathers, on the moon—and now America stretches from “sea to shining sea and from star to blazing star.”

Back on Earth, Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1976, largely running on the success of how he rebuilt Los Angeles after a major earthquake into a “City of Angeles on a Hill.” In LA, movie studios run swathes of the city like mini dukedoms. The city, and now the whole country, operates based on rigid cultural, censorship, and “decency” codes that once defined the Golden Age of Hollywood. Mayflower Studios, famous for its God’s Guardsmen film series about the United States Space Guard, is a essentially a propaganda arm of the government. Mayflower has a long history creating beautiful works of artifice about the American story. And just who belongs here.

Beyond LA’s glittering surface, a different city thrives after dark. Queer discos. Smuggled music, art, and birth control. Secret Underground Railroad-like rings that whisk undocumented folks away from persecution in LA to safety beyond. Part protest, part party.

In a world built on spectacle and control, the revolution will be disco-ized.