Mark Bruno

Mark Bruno writes cyberpunk and progression fiction: stories about ordinary people handed a terrible situation, a worse class, and no reasonable way out of either.


He wrote tabletop roleplaying supplements before he wrote novels, which is where he picked up the conviction that a game system should hold up when readers do the math. He still builds the system before he builds the story, on the theory that numbers which don’t survive a calculator won’t survive a comment section.


Smile, You’re On! is the first book in the series of the same name, set in Zenith City: a vertical megasprawl where the apocalypse is appointment viewing, the audience is complicit, and the ratings are load-bearing. He’s currently writing the second, and Deck isn’t having a better time.