• EAT

    “Night of the living furries” is how a character describes their situation a little more than midway through Jesse Brown’s EAT. I laughed when I read that line and I also nodded. That’s a good description of the basic premise, though replace cute or weirdly sexualized furries with the sleek, muscle-bound, eat-your-face-off variety. Caede wakes on the pavement one cold morning surrounded by dead bodies, some look like they died…

  • The Realists of a Larger Reality

    Is there a science fiction author more akin to literature than Ursula K. Le Guin? I can’t think of any. There are others that may rise to her level. Octavia E. Butler, certainly. One day, I think N.K. Jemisin will have that luster. I struggle to think of a male writer with the same claim to science fiction as art. There are many, many science fiction writers content to write…

  • Cordwainer Smith – The Sci-Fi Master You’ve Probably Never Heard of

    When I was a teenager, my brother introduced me to a set of books by a writer with a goofy name, Cordwainer Smith. The first was a short story collection called The Instrumentality of Mankind, and the other was a novel called Norstrilia. My mind was blown. These stories, published in the 50s and 60s, were breathtaking in the wildness of their vision. They were almost psychedelic in their strange…

  • The Case for Astrology

    Rational people will tell you that Astrology is bullshit. Astrology lovers will tell you it can be a profoundly accurate way to determine character traits in people and predict how they’ll respond to upcoming events. Rational people will respond with something like, the stars that make up the astrological signs are so far away their influence on us is far fainter than a birthday candle — less electromagnetic energy and…

  • Machine Learning

    I started drawing when I was 3. Writing started later, but my earliest surviving stories were from age 6. Photography started in sophomore year in high school when my father and I built a darkroom in our basement, and my mother bought me a cheap Russian SLR. Code didn’t enter the scene until I was 25 and bought a Commodore 64. All of those are forms of expression I never…

  • Vonnegut on Writing Short Stories

    There was a time when I was a wee lad and Kurt Vonnegut was not particularly famous, when you could make a decent living selling short stories to magazines. There were lots of magazines and lots of readers. There was no internet and people doomscrolled their newspaper in one sitting at breakfast. There were only three channels on the TV and you had to get up to change between them.…

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