After Daniel Weinberg and his son, Herbert, scour their local dump for five thousand smoke detectors—which collectively contain enough of the ingredient Americium-241 to build a nuclear bomb—King Daniel (a self-conferred title) declares the independence of his suburban home (“Weinbergia”) from Long Island and the rest of the United States. He’s had enough of the U.S. and its unnecessary wars and he wants to exert some control over his own destiny. Also, he’s somewhat aimless and heading toward crazy.

Our narrator, Prince Herbert, possesses the ability to read minds, including yours—he knows what the reader is thinking—and will eventually harness this power to help his father’s roster of future minions. Herbert’s a tremendous asset to the cessation cause, even if no one quite understands what he’s capable of. “There wasn’t a secret in the world I couldn’t dig out of someone’s brain,” he says. Clearly it’s not quite our world he’s talking about. (When it comes to the Americium, however, the notion isn’t entirely far-fetched: when terrorist Dhiren Barot was arrested in 2004, one of his plans involved building a bomb out of ten thousand smoke detectors.)

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—Jory John