Askari Productions is a creative media house developing exceptional properties in Los Angeles. Everything we’ve released is below for your enjoyment.
A Cancellation
A novel by Cairo Smith
244 pages / Published by New Ritual Press / Releasing May 30, 2026
Having fun?
A longtime vlogger’s comedy career implodes in a train wreck of bad decisions over one grueling summer.
Amanda Bannington should be thriving. She's made millions online, has a legion of supporters, and does what she loves every day. But there's a dark and clawing hole in her heart, and it isn't just her inappropriate texts to underage fans, or her lack of respect for her putz fiancé, or her boundary-crossing use of her gay best friend and assistant.
It's 2023, a year of cancellations, and the altar of fame in the San Fernando Valley is ready for its next sacrificial victim.
Burn Zone
A novella by Cairo Smith
123 pages / Published by Askari / Released January 3, 2026
America has lost a great war. Now it's out with the old and in with the new.
In gloom, former White House staffer Carter Clemens prepares to be judged by a shadowy military tribunal for his wartime actions. His next few words, and the words of his co-conspirators, could mean the difference between freedom and a trip to face the firing squad.
Burn Zone is an explosive closed-court ensemble tribunal thriller rendered in striking modernist fragmentary style.
Who of the accused is guilty, who is innocent, and will it matter to the vindictive Coalition?
Current Affairs
A novel by Cairo Smith
326 pages / Published by Askari / Released December 6, 2025
The city, love, and other traps.
From author Cairo Smith comes a tender, sincere society novel for the 21st century, surging with a modernist romantic spirit and all the heartaches of youth.
Calvin Munn is a good man. He left his Iowa hometown to chase Manhattan dreams, dead-set on art school and an advertising career. Now, he stands on a Honolulu veranda, on the precipice of thirty and feeling like a kid all over again. Madeline Payne, his childhood friend, his muse, waits just feet away and yet beyond reach. How did he screw it all up this bad?
A decade earlier, Calvin meets Madeline just once, as a high school senior. From there, he sets off for New York, entwining himself in a complicated marriage with an Egyptian-American socialite who is hiding her double life from her father, Calvin’s boss.
Career turns, rich friends, and new heartaches all compound. Madeline, married to a rising country star, haunts Calvin as their lives thread together and apart again and again.
It may take a shock to finally end the pattern.
Red Team
A short film by Cairo Smith
16 minutes / Distributed by Askari / Released November 6, 2025
A tech thriller.
An AI startup sales executive must confront a ruthless enemy when members of his software team start to die under strange circumstances. Red Team is a short tech thriller that takes the art of the plausible to an unsettling extreme in an exploration of startup culture, web agent misalignment, and the ways it could all go awry.
Scenebux
A novel by Cairo Smith
192 pages / Published by New Ritual Press / Released September 6, 2025
A rapid-fire tech-weird picaresque.
Scenebux paints a searing and wry portrait of the mid-2020s, an era careening at high speed toward an uncertain future.
Ben Etxina is a software engineer who can't bear to look at a screen. When he crosses a shady German motorcycle club in downtown San Francisco, he ends up thrown into a mess of underground parties and venture funds rumored to connect to a certain neoreactionary billionaire. A mysterious Pacific island, Vietnamese Catholic femme fatale, and anti-AI terrorist sect all spell deeper trouble for the jet-setting sensitive young man.
Calinitia Dreaming
A novel by Cairo Smith
493 pages / Published by Askari / Released March 15, 2025
A noir plunge into a city of high-rises, beaches, and dark ritual.
A girl goes missing from a club uptown. The cops don’t care, and the cathedral won’t lift a finger—but it just might be the start of the end of the world. Tracing dark magic, military washout Adon Halicar follows his old friend’s trail through the mansions and alleys of gleaming mid-century Calinitia. The sun bakes the asphalt, the sea shines blue, and a conspiracy simmers in the city’s bloodstained shadows.
Calinitia Dreaming is a neo-noir fantasy adventure novel. From swimming to street racing, the temperate Calinitian Provision has something for everyone. You just need to look past the broken politics, ethnic strife, and increasingly overbearing mandates from the state church. Beneath the balmy exterior, something bad is ready to crack, and one guy with a beat-up muscle car might be all it takes to blow the whole thing open.
Quarterlives
A short story collection by Cairo Smith
178 pages / Published by Askari / Released November 20, 2024
We are on the farthest edge of the centuries.
Quarterlives is the second fiction collection from filmmaker and writer Cairo Smith. Its pages burn with the longing of young people building their lives in the maw of an uncertain century. Eight short stories are included, spanning a range from the terrifying to the passionate—and often mixing both.
Find love, fight a civil war, and grapple with the ghosts of past. This edition includes a foreword by author Matthew Pegas, co-creator of New Ritual Press and author of Dragon Day and The Black Album.
This collection contains the stories Hunters, Network States, Spirit of '87, Locked In, Zach Dinesen's Ghost, From the Branch, and Portrait of Camille Oken.
Komodo
A novel by Cairo Smith
633 pages / Published by Askari / Released June 15, 2024
Two hundred planets in her iron grasp.
Basra Camden will stop at nothing. In the outskirts of a stagnating solar republic, the twenty-nine-year-old customs enforcer is adrift between cultures and worlds. When she's blacklisted after a raid gone wrong, she doubles down to build her own private peacekeeping force.
Rising from the outer territories, Basra claws her way to glory, transforming herself and the public sphere like a supernova. As her mythic cult of personality takes hold, war lurks in the shadows of the crumbling democratic order, setting the stage for cascading collapse that holds billions of lives in the balance.
Komodo combines sci-fi action and intrigue with sweeping, relentless personal and interstellar conflict. It's a saga of enterprise, of empire, and will to power exerted across the heavens.
No Return
A short story collection by Cairo Smith
154 pages / Published by Askari / Released June 15, 2024
A cabin awaits outside time. A plane descends into darkness. An execution is ordered. There is no return.
No Return is a collection of six science fiction and slipstream stories. Ranging from yearning to macabre, they span a decade of futurist imagination, written from 2013 to 2023.
"Presence," a prescient exploration of AI web agents, first ran in VICE's Terraform in 2013. Otherworldly romance "The Palisade" appeared online in 2021. All other stories in the collection are previously unpublished, available now for the first time in digital and print.
Screwdriver
A feature film by Cairo Smith
94 minutes / Distributed by Buffalo 8 / Released November 10, 2023
A neo-gothic psychological thriller.
An eerie slow-burn psychological thriller in the vein of Queen of Earth, Dogtooth, and Rosemary's Baby. Blindsided by divorce, a young woman seeks refuge in the home of an old high school friend and his wife. As their hospitality gives way to surreal manipulation, she falls into a delirious tailspin, grappling with her health and her sanity.
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Cairo Smith
FOUNDER AND CEO
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Chandler Berke
PRODUCTION COORDINATOR
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Claire Guimary
PRODUCER