Where we’re going, we don’t need tables
When I was a kid, there was a set of shelves in our basement stacked with board games. Monopoly, Sorry!, Clue, all the old classics. I’d play with my parents, friends, whoever I could rope into sitting at a table (or on the floor) with me. I liked video...
Year 8 of my 5-10 Year Plan for Overnight Success
My expectation going into 2020 was that it would be a year dominated by an exhausting number of hindsight jokes. In hindsight, I wish it had been. For those who don’t keep track, this January marks the 8th anniversary of Firehurler’s publication and the end of...
It Used to Come in the Mail
2007... Fox was still trying to make Fantastic Four movies, the iPhone had been announced and was a year from stores, the Oklahoma City Thunder was still the Seattle Supersonics, and Netflix had just launched a new feature called Watch Now. Today, we call...
We’re Celebrating WHAT?
It's autumn in the northern hemisphere. It's a time of changing leaves, football games... and Halloween. There are plenty of holidays on the calendar, some better than others. Some are religious in origin, if not always in observation. Others are patriotic. Halloween...
History Like It Never Happened
Alternate History.It's not the sole province of dictators and totalitarian regimes. Alternate History is also a niche subgenre of science fiction that takes actual historical events and either reimagines them or takes them off the rails. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire...
The One That Almost Made It
It's time once again to sift through the flotsam of my TBW pile (To Be Written) and share why one of them has failed to climb its way out. This week's is one that I've come close to choosing several times, but ultimately it slips farther down the list. Arcanist’s...
Frumious Bandersnatch
A younger version of me had some pretty clear ideas about what the future might look like. Somewhere between the emergence of the internet and the release of the first smartphone, we arrived there. This isn't the future of warp drives and sentient robots; it's the...
Poll: Imagine it’s 2065. “I believe robots will_”
Back when I first launched my Project Transhuman series (formerly Robot Geneticists), I posed this question to my email insiders. While my series takes a less common perspective on the role robots will play in the future, there are some views that come up frequently...
This show is a giant Easter egg hunt
One show that I never expected to like was Once Upon a Time. The basic premise is that Snow White and Prince Charming's daughter ended up an orphan on Earth, grew up, and had a kid of her own before stumbling onto a tiny coastal town in Maine where fairy tale...
No Robot Uprising in 2020
Not sure what my Author Scrapheap is? I introduce the idea on the Author Scrapheap archive page. This time diving into my Author Scrapheap, we're going to examine... Idea: Robot Underground Robots lead boring daily lives, meeting in secret to plot the overthrow of...