One day last September, a curious email arrived in Chris Hables Gray’s inbox. An author and self-described anarchist, feminist, and revolutionary, Gray fits right into Santa Cruz, Calif., where he lives. He’s written extensively about genetic engineering and the inevitable rise of cyborgs, attending protests in between for causes such as Black Lives Matter.While Gray had taken some consulting gigs over the years, he’d never received an offer like this one. The first shock was the money: significantly more than he’d earned from all but one of his books. The second was the task: researching the aesthetics of seminal works of science fiction such as Blade Runner. The biggest surprise, however, was the ultimate client: Mohammed bin Salman, the 36-year-old crown prince of Saudi Arabia.

Prince Mohammed is hoping for a nationwide population boom that he says will be necessary to make Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest crude exporter, an economic powerhouse. “That’s the main purpose of building Neom,” he said. “To raise the capacity of Saudi Arabia, get more citizens and more people in Saudi Arabia. And since we are doing it from nothing, why should we copy normal cities?”