Demotopia: An exploration of democracy and artificial intelligence

A political science fiction from Hong Kong's Sung Ming Chow, lecturer and activist, recently relocated to Vancouver, Canada; Musqueam.

At the University of Brilliant Bastards in V-Port, students arrive from everywhere—and belong nowhere.
Some cannot return home. None can find a place for themselves where their academic escape ticket has landed them.
The sprawling, distinctive immigrant neighbourhoods of V-Port appear like a time capsule, spilling architecture and society through the 20th century. But Subin, Engle, Dehao, Kongyu and Balala don’t see themselves in the relocated communities that originated from their own mother lands.
They throw themselves into political theory: lectures, readings, late-night debates, and even virtual dialogues with sages from ancient worlds.
In these new lands, they find something unexpected: nurture, relation, and responsibility. They are willing to believe there is a place for them, a promise, here.
As old certainties fall away, a fragile question emerges. If a system of democracy could truly work here—among migrants, exiles, and the internally displaced Indigenous—might it work anywhere?
Can artificial intelligence help?

Set in a city suspended between memories and possibilities, Demotopia is today’s story of human becoming—one which insists that, even amid disorientation and loss, even in exile, life will find its way.

About the Author:
Dr. Sung Ming Chow specializes in sociology and social history. A university lecturer and activist in Hong Kong, he has recently relocated to Vancouver, Canada.
Dr. Chow is a member of the Vancouver Hong Kong Forum Society and also the founding member of C^Mind, a think-and-do tank devoted to cross-cultural collaborations.
Their work includes the Chinese translation of “Lexeywa ~ I pass the torch to you,” by Beatrice Elaine Silver. It is the first Indigenous memoir of Indian Residential School to be translated into Chinese.

Demotopia is his Sung Ming's full-length novel, and first original publication in English.

Other titles from Sung Ming Chow:

Catastrophe and Reconstruction: Human Future under the Impact of ChatGPT (2023)
Dystopia: from Smart Revolution to Post-human Future (2022)
The Coming of Post-employment Society (2018)
Note: These three books, published in Chinese, form the “Smart Revolution Trilogy.” They argue that it is not technology, but power and resource distribution which are the keys to the future of human civilization.

Buying Brings Changes (2012)
Sharing Cities (2014)
Open Cooperativism (2017)
The Genealogy of Hong Kong in Cinema (2023)

Praise for Demotopia:
“Undoubtedly, the themes are among my favourite subjects: artificial intelligence, evolution, humanity’s sense of belonging, diaspora, and our own experiences and feelings—along with academia and theory.
Yet the author is not seeking affirmation or intellectual comfort. Rather, through the form of a novel that accommodates
diverse characters, and through an ordinary yet far-from-simple structure of dialogue, he invites us to search together for answers to the questions of our time:
Who are we?
Who will we become?
What might we still become?

This is an ambitious and profoundly serious novel.”

- Tsang Sui-ming
Philosophy practitioner,
Hong Kong diaspora

Electromagnetic Print 2026
Vancouver, Musqueam
ISBN 978-1-0674077-0-4
Fiction, Political Science
516 pages, soft cover