How the story began
Settlement 2107 began as a cyberpunk vision of Puerto Rico in the future. Halfway through law school, J. A. Feliciano began building its world, drawing inspiration from real political events and government practices around the globe.
The story took shape during his three-month bar-exam study period, when creative writing became a way to unwind and clear his head, and that world found its way into a story about a contestant caught inside a televised death game.
Media that shaped the book
J. A. Feliciano draws from these works in different ways: for the future's texture, the force of its systems, and the stories people tell to justify power.
R. Talsorian Games’ Cyberpunk tabletop books
They provided a street-level framework for imagining a dark future through its technology, its megacorporations, and the people trying to survive between them.
CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077
Night City makes power, body modification, style, and survival part of the lived environment. The game feels inhabited and personal. J. A. Feliciano strives to portray those same feelings.
Dark Horse’s Cyberpunk comics and graphic novels
Stories from Trauma Team to Where’s Johnny move beyond one mercenary, following emergency crews, journalists, and others caught in Night City’s corporate power struggles.
Frank Herbert’s Dune series
Dune brings ecology, resources, religion, and political power into one web. Its scale inspired J. A. Feliciano to make institutions and their rules reach into culture and daily survival. The mundane and the mystical.
Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl series
Dinniman makes LitRPG progression, lethal spectacle, and dark humor run together while keeping the characters’ human stakes and emotions in view. That energy informs the game-show pressure and rule-driven progression in J. A. Feliciano’s book. The Dungeon Crawler Carl series became the catalyst that pushed J. A. Feliciano to start writing [SETTLEMENT 2107].
HBO’s The Wire
The Wire makes institutions—from policing and government to schools and the press—part of the cast. J. A. Feliciano draws on that attention to how policy, incentives, and power shape the choices of people living inside or along those systems.
Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers and Arrowhead Game Studios’ Helldivers 2
These works inspired the political satire in [SETTLEMENT 2107]. They show how social commentary can work through the spectacle itself.
Where law enters the world
J. A. Feliciano’s legal studies helped shape a fictional framework that draws on real Puerto Rican law. The Settlement’s rules give debt, ownership, authority, and survival concrete consequences for the people forced to live under them.
The Hollowed, the game’s contestants, are people the government has stripped of all their rights. They’re left with whatever’s stipulated in their onboarding contract for the death game.
That same legal structure also meets the LitRPG system. Rules govern access, status, progression, and what a person can do next. They are not just flavor around the action; they help decide who holds power, who pays for it, and what choices remain.
When a system becomes personal
Cyberpunk lets J. A. Feliciano examine power built into technology and institutions. Horror brings that power close to the body, the heart, and the mind. Political satire looks at the spectacle—and at the people and institutions that made it profitable.
They join in the same question: what happens when a person’s debt, consciousness, body, and future become things corporations can legally own?
“The Settlement thanks you for your debt.”