In 2012, I founded the web-based community Manic Expression, borrowing the name from my book series. In our heyday, we banded together for big site-wide projects—movies, documentaries, and a series of audio dramas we called Podcast Plays.
I wrote and produced three original Podcast Plays, all of which I later adapted into the Manic Expression: A Collection universe. Today we’re looking at the third: Futility: A Manic Expression Story, an existential drama set aboard a spaceship. I’ve always felt this story would have fit perfectly as a Twilight Zone episode—using a sci-fi premise to explore isolation, memory, and loss.
What Futility is about: Tapio has spent ten years locked in a sterile metallic cell aboard an alien vessel. His only companion is a dispassionate AI voice that offers logic but no comfort. He knows that when the ship reaches its destination, he will become the subject of cruel experiments. His only escape is into memories of the wife he loved and the child he never got to meet—but even the past is turning toxic, slowly driving him mad with loneliness.
The long, strange road to this release: The three Podcast Plays I adapted can be thought of as the “Matti Mali trilogy.” Matti was one of the first Expressionists to join the community. He was such a gifted actor that I not only cast him in every play I wrote, but I also started writing Finnish characters specifically for him. That decision created a through-line connecting Futility to the other two Podcast Play adaptations, Vows and Another Time.
Futility is stark and bleak, written in the aftermath of my breakup with my children’s mother. Looking back, it’s striking that the exact number of years Tapio spends in that alien cell matches the length of that relationship. I didn’t intend that at the time, but I suppose it makes sense. I wasn’t just mourning the loss—I was also processing the feeling of having been trapped.
Ultimately, Futility is about the fruitless act of begging for salvation. The cold AI voice can be read as a stand-in for God: dispassionate and unmoved by suffering. Tapio mourns what he lost while dreading what’s coming. If that isn’t a metaphor for life, I don’t know what is.
Grab your copy today!
I’d love to hear your thoughts. Do you think aliens are real—and would ever want to meet on?
Things get steamy with next week’s story, so stay tuned.
James Daniel Walsh
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