Elysium Accumbens is part space opera, part murder mystery, part love letter to role- playing games, and part philosophical treatise on the nature and utility of pleasure. The novel follows a spaceship on a forty-two-year mission to colonize another solar system. Its crew are fourteen disembodied brains in tanks, wired together to live in a virtual reality bound only by their imagination. Amidst an unravelling mystery and heated arguments over how they will build a civilization from scratch, the characters contemplate what it means to build a meaningful and productive life when one can instantly realize any desire or whim with almost no consequences.