The Americana Chronicles

About the Book

A president. A river. A continent that hasn't been named yet.

When Theodore Roosevelt leads a band of settlers onto an unknown continent, he does what any leader worth his salt would do — he picks a river, names a capital, and starts writing everything down.

The Americana Chronicles is an alternate history novel structured around the founding of a new nation from nothing. Every chapter is a turn. Every turn advances the clock. What begins as one man's journal slowly becomes something far larger — a chorus of voices, each telling their own version of what it means to build a home in a world that hasn't decided yet whether to welcome you or swallow you whole.

This is a story about geography and loyalty, about the distance between strategy and sentiment, about the people history remembers and the ones it quietly forgets. It is also, at times, very funny.

The Origin

Born from 24 turns of Civilization VI.

This novel began as a game of Sid Meier's Civilization VI, playing as Theodore Roosevelt on a randomly generated continent. Every chapter in the book corresponds to one turn of the game. Twenty-four turns. Twenty-four chapters. One week per turn.

The geography is real — pulled directly from the game map. The Horseshoe rainforest. The volcano to the east. The desert to the south. The mountain range. Lake Wayne. The cotton fields. All of it existed on-screen before it existed on the page.

What the game gave was a skeleton — terrain, resources, first contact, the fog of war lifting tile by tile. What the book gives back is everything a game can't: the fear of the general marching into the unknown, the restless ambition of a president writing by candlelight, and a private who can't keep his trousers on.

Civilization VI · Theodore Roosevelt
24 Turns · Continents Map · King Difficulty · Marathon Length

Roosevelt capital in Civilization VI nestled between rainforest and a volcano named Mauna Loa

Roosevelt · Civilization VI

The Written Record

Multiple voices. One chronicle.

The story unfolds through the written words, field reports, and personal records of those who lived it.

†

The President

A philosopher with a map and a mandate. He names rivers, writes laws, and carries the weight of every decision he asks others to live with.

†

The General

Profane, tactical, and loyal to his bones. He leads the first ranging party into the unknown and brings back more questions than answers.

☼

The Elder

A chief who speaks to the earth before he speaks to men. His people were here long before the settlers arrived. He watches. He waits.

†

The Envoy

A man whose diplomatic career began with an incident involving a horse, a handkerchief, and a catastrophic loss of trouser integrity.

☼

The Runner

Blood of blood. Swift as the river, reckless as the wind. She tracks what others cannot see — and answers to no one but the earth beneath her feet.

The Supreme

A masked ruler who operates beyond the third-dimensional bandwidth. His blood rages with intelligestosterone. His cells are in constant celebration.

About the Author

Dino Stanković

Kaštel Lukšić, Croatia

A journalist for ten years before turning to fiction. Never a novelist by training, never boxed in by genre — which is exactly why The Americana Chronicles reads like nothing else on the shelf.

A decade of capturing how different people talk, think, and present themselves turned into a novel with six distinct narrators and a voice on every page that sounds like it belongs to a real person — because the instinct behind it was built interviewing real people.

Volume I: The River Knew Before We Did is his debut novel.