• Platform Decay

    If you look up interiority in a writer’s dictionary, it should feature a picture of Murderbot. Martha Wells’ eight-volume Murderbot Diaries novella series is as successful as it is because of her mastery of bringing the reader inside the organic and non-organic tissues of the titular rogue Sec Unit. Her deadpan delivery of Sec Unit’s thought processes as it deals with each entry’s life-threatening challenge (or its equally fraught encounters…

  • Young Woman in Hat

    Copyright E.W. Parris 2021 Procreate

  • Say What, now?

    I am oldish. I know, right? I don’t know how that happened either. I mean, it sneaks up on you. Slowly, age takes things away . Like drinking and staying out late. At some point, your body punishes you too much and you decline invitations to dance the night away in careless alcoholic blurs. Your metabolism slows down, and you have to give up your daily fix of sugary sodas…

  • A Spider-Man’s Spider-Man

    With the biggest opening-weekend box office in history, the latest Marvel outing ought to erase the conventional wisdom that their audience suffers from superhero fatigue. And really, what are we measuring with opening-weekend box office? The power of positive reviews? The strength of the marketing strategies? The raw dollars pumped into advertising? The charisma of the actors on their press junkets? There appears to be a very fuzzy causal connection…

  • Man with Beard II

    Copyright E.W. Parris 2025 Digital portrait, color. Procreate

  • Service Model

    As I listened to Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Service Model, I was struck by two things: how the story captured a post-apocalyptic world in a manner that felt like a Terry Gilliam film, and how brilliant Tchaikovsky’s narration was. I was gobsmacked by both. Briefly, Service Model covers the plight of a robot valet seeking answers in some indeterminate future when the world has collapsed gradually and then all at once. As…

SCIENCE FICTION – DOUBLE FEATURE

Reality is weird. The science that reflects our understanding of reality is weird. The very mission of science fiction is to reflect that weirdness in ways that fill the reader with wonder. Science fiction writers aren’t here to repeat comfortable tropes. We’re here to make the reader confront the unabashed nuttiness of reality and their place in it.

E.W. Doc Parris

Author, Artist, Developer