The Brotherhood

Read my short story "The Brotherhood" at Altered Reality Magazine, an e-zine devoted to speculative fiction.

Brotherhood is about a guy that loses his girlfriend and power to his apartment. He goes on a quest for Wi-Fi with his roommate, Double Sam so they can play Death Kingdom. He finds something different that he sets out for.

Sometimes, I drop little Steely Dan easter eggs into my stories like the name Double Sam from a song on Can't Buy a Thrill--"Please make mine a double, Sam." I know I'm not supposed to reveal my own easter egg but this one has no hope of ever being found otherwise. I would have named the arcade they enter A Gentleman Loser, but William Gibson already used that one in a short story. I guess I shouldn't worry about borrowing something that someone else borrowed?

For more of my fiction, check out the following:

Atomic Rocat
Tower Defender
Sherman: A Novel

Star Wars Holiday Special 1978

The Star Wars Special sucks, but it was created in the ethos of the Star Wars franchise.

This movie is terrible, nearly unwatchable even. I admit that I used YouTube's preview feature to jump ahead to the scenes with a star, and by star, I don't mean to include Jefferson Starship. Carrie Fisher once called the Star Wars special "a punishment from God." The score is played poorly and its association with this film cheapens otherwise great music. Chewbacca's family scenes are rage inducing--the Wookie kid is inexplicably playing with an X-Wing toy. Mark Hamill's makeup makes him look like a Ken doll. And the height of the conflict is Han Solo's combat with a lone stormtrooper.

To All Your Scattered Bodies Go - Philip Jose Farmer

In some cases, eternal life sounds like a bad deal. To All Your Scattered Bodies Go is one such place. There, death is a momentary affliction, followed by adulthood reincarnation. 

White Noise - Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo's White Noise isn't commonly thought of as sci-fi, but I maintain that not only does it fit in the genre, it's one of the more important science fictions. Two elements of the book merit closer attention: the Airborne Toxic Event and the influence of pop culture on identity.

Cold Storage - David Koepp

David Koepp is a proven screenwriting talent--he worked on the screenplay for Jurassic Park, for example. His 2019 novel, Cold Storage, returns to the Crichton canon, this time mining from Andromeda Strain. Foremost, the book operates as cli-fi, dealing with anxieties of changes to our ecosystem as a result of carbon emissions and other human activity, but it also deals with anxieties of nuclear proliferation and the diversifying of America.