Mordor is a dystopia. This is not a metaphorical claim. The land of shadow in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings has all the structural characteristics that literary scholars use to define dystopian fiction: a centralized authoritarian power that exercises...
Television is a serial medium by nature, inclination, and commercial logic. The audience that returns each week to discover what happens next to characters they have come to know across seasons and years is the audience that drives advertising revenue, subscription...
Rod Serling understood something about the short-form speculative story that almost no one else in the history of American television has understood with comparable clarity — and the three revivals of The Twilight Zone that have appeared since his original series...
The TARDIS dematerialized for the first time on November 23, 1963 — the day after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, a scheduling coincidence that meant the first episode of Doctor Who was nearly buried under the weight of the world’s grief before anyone...
Genre labels exist to help readers find what they are looking for and writers understand what tradition they are working in. They also exist, apparently, to cause arguments. The terms science fiction, dystopian fiction, and speculative fiction are used interchangeably...
There is a specific kind of vertigo that afflicts readers of dystopian fiction in periods of political instability — the sensation of reading a passage from Orwell or Atwood or Huxley and feeling not the distance of speculation but the proximity of description. The...
Let us be honest about what The Hunger Games is. It is a novel in which children are selected by lottery, transported to a government-controlled arena, and required to murder one another on live television until one child remains alive. The entertainment of the ruling...
Rebellion is the most seductive structure in dystopian fiction and the one most frequently handled badly. Done badly, rebellion is a plot convenience — a narrative gear that the story shifts into when the worldbuilding needs resolution and the protagonist has learned...
Darkness without witness is just darkness. A story set in a broken world where nothing is at stake — where nothing precious persists, where no one carries anything worth protecting into the wreckage — is not a dystopian story. It is an inventory of ruin. Competently...
The question arrives with suspicion already tucked inside it. Can a story be both dystopian and hopeful? The implication is that these two things are oil and salt water — that darkness diluted is darkness betrayed, that hope smuggled into a collapsed world is a kind...
There is a moment in every great dystopian story where the dread stops being political and becomes something older — something that lives below the floorboards of argument and architecture and ideology. It becomes fear. The kind that doesn’t reason,...
On the silently solitary grain of sand, the slow science of the stubborn, and the single dissenting voice that breaks every system ever built to silence it Not Pressing Play Shortly after midnight on September 26, 1983, in a bunker sixty kilometers south of...
The softly seductive promise of safety, the silent psychology of surrender, and the frightening five fictional worlds that show how paradise becomes a prison The devil, the old stories assure us, arrives in fire and brimstone, stinking of sulfur, trailing a...
Defining Hope in the Literature of Collapse On the distance between a trajectory and a fate, and the stubborn light that survives the darkest futures fiction dares to imagine There is a question that settles over every reader who has ever closed a...
Dystopian Fiction and You There is a particular kind of reading that happens not for pleasure or escape or the civilized leisure of the well-appointed afternoon, but out of something closer to necessity. The necessity of the person who needs to understand the room...
Dystopian Futures Defined The word dystopia arrives with such frequency now, in such a variety of contexts, applied with such promiscuous urgency to so many situations of so many different magnitudes, that it risks becoming the kind of word that explains nothing...
Can Dystopian Fiction Cross a Red Line? The question arrives at three in the morning, when the draft is open and the scene is waiting and the writer’s hand hovers over the page with the particular suspended uncertainty of a person standing at the edge of something...
The Dystopian Question We’re Afraid to Ask The question arrives with the bad manners of a guest who says the thing everyone in the room is thinking. It sits there at the table, underdressed and unapologetic, while the other guests look at their plates. Is social media...
Why Dystopian Love Matters More Than Anything Else Every dystopia, at its deepest structural level, is a love story in mourning. Not a love story interrupted, or a love story defeated, but a love story that insists — in the face of every system designed to make...
Read the Full United States of 2096 Series — 16 Posts What 2096 Could Look Like If We Don’t Act Now Why I Chose 2096 for My Dystopian Science Fiction Series How Close Are We Really to the World of 2096? Building a Believable 2096 Dystopia The Warnings Hidden...
Read the Full United States of 2096 Series — 16 Posts What 2096 Could Look Like If We Don’t Act Now Why I Chose 2096 for My Dystopian Science Fiction Series How Close Are We Really to the World of 2096? Building a Believable 2096 Dystopia The Warnings Hidden...
Read the Full United States of 2096 Series — 16 Posts What 2096 Could Look Like If We Don’t Act Now Why I Chose 2096 for My Dystopian Science Fiction Series How Close Are We Really to the World of 2096? Building a Believable 2096 Dystopia The Warnings Hidden...
Read the Full United States of 2096 Series — 16 Posts What 2096 Could Look Like If We Don’t Act Now Why I Chose 2096 for My Dystopian Science Fiction Series How Close Are We Really to the World of 2096? Building a Believable 2096 Dystopia The Warnings Hidden...
Read the Full United States of 2096 Series — 16 Posts What 2096 Could Look Like If We Don’t Act Now Why I Chose 2096 for My Dystopian Science Fiction Series How Close Are We Really to the World of 2096? Building a Believable 2096 Dystopia The Warnings Hidden...
Read the Full United States of 2096 Series — 16 Posts What 2096 Could Look Like If We Don’t Act Now Why I Chose 2096 for My Dystopian Science Fiction Series How Close Are We Really to the World of 2096? Building a Believable 2096 Dystopia The Warnings Hidden...
Read the Full United States of 2096 Series — 16 Posts What 2096 Could Look Like If We Don’t Act Now Why I Chose 2096 for My Dystopian Science Fiction Series How Close Are We Really to the World of 2096? Building a Believable 2096 Dystopia The Warnings Hidden...
Read the Full United States of 2096 Series — 16 Posts What 2096 Could Look Like If We Don’t Act Now Why I Chose 2096 for My Dystopian Science Fiction Series How Close Are We Really to the World of 2096? Building a Believable 2096 Dystopia The Warnings Hidden...
Read the Full United States of 2096 Series — 16 Posts What 2096 Could Look Like If We Don’t Act Now Why I Chose 2096 for My Dystopian Science Fiction Series How Close Are We Really to the World of 2096? Building a Believable 2096 Dystopia The Warnings Hidden...
Read the Full United States of 2096 Series — 16 Posts What 2096 Could Look Like If We Don’t Act Now Why I Chose 2096 for My Dystopian Science Fiction Series How Close Are We Really to the World of 2096? Building a Believable 2096 Dystopia The Warnings Hidden...
Read the Full United States of 2096 Series — 16 Posts What 2096 Could Look Like If We Don’t Act Now Why I Chose 2096 for My Dystopian Science Fiction Series How Close Are We Really to the World of 2096? Building a Believable 2096 Dystopia The Warnings Hidden...
Read the Full United States of 2096 Series — 16 Posts What 2096 Could Look Like If We Don’t Act Now Why I Chose 2096 for My Dystopian Science Fiction Series How Close Are We Really to the World of 2096? Building a Believable 2096 Dystopia The Warnings Hidden...
Read the Full United States of 2096 Series — 16 Posts What 2096 Could Look Like If We Don’t Act Now Why I Chose 2096 for My Dystopian Science Fiction Series How Close Are We Really to the World of 2096? Building a Believable 2096 Dystopia The Warnings Hidden...
Read the Full United States of 2096 Series — 16 Posts What 2096 Could Look Like If We Don’t Act Now Why I Chose 2096 for My Dystopian Science Fiction Series How Close Are We Really to the World of 2096? Building a Believable 2096 Dystopia The Warnings Hidden...
Read the Full United States of 2096 Series — 16 Posts What 2096 Could Look Like If We Don’t Act Now Why I Chose 2096 for My Dystopian Science Fiction Series How Close Are We Really to the World of 2096? Building a Believable 2096 Dystopia The Warnings Hidden...
Read the Full United States of 2096 Series — 16 Posts What 2096 Could Look Like If We Don’t Act Now Why I Chose 2096 for My Dystopian Science Fiction Series How Close Are We Really to the World of 2096? Building a Believable 2096 Dystopia The...
The Bridge Between Books and Believers Every book is a message in a bottle, sealed with the labor of years and flung into the vast and churning ocean of the contemporary attention marketplace. The bottle may be beautiful. The message may be profound. The prose...
Reclaiming the Republic: Rebooting the Democratic Party Now Preface Note: This post is a deliberate work of Democratic political strategy and analysis. After advising six campaigns as a “boldly blue” strategist however many years ago, experiences...
The Hinge Between Worlds: Parallel Universes and the Science Fiction / Speculative Fiction Author Out of Sync There is a hinge in the wall of the world, and on the other side of it, you made a different choice. Perhaps it was this morning. Perhaps it was...
Borrowed Hours, Broken Clocks: Time Travel in Speculative Fiction and Making It Work Something is always wrong with the clock. In laboratories of light-spliced possibility, in smoky London parlors where gentlemen in waistcoats argue the nature of the fourth...
How Indie Authors Escape the Geography of Silence There is a particular peculiarity to living in a place that will not look back at you. Hampton Roads is a beautiful beast — salt-sprayed and sprawling, steeped in seafaring history, humming with harbors and the heavy...
Editing Speculative Fiction for Pacing, Rhythm and Character Arcs There is a scene in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey that lasts nearly four full minutes without a single line of dialogue — only the waltz of Johann Strauss, the slow pirouette of...
Writing Software, Plotting Tools, and Collaboration Programs to Augment Creativity The Architecture of Imagination Every author begins in the same cathedral of blank space — the vast, vaulted silence before the first sentence settles into the stone. What separates the...
Speculative Fiction Authors and Collaborations The Crossroads Between Stories Every story lives alone. It breathes in its own darkness, illuminated only by the particular light the author brought to it. But there exists, in the wide and peculiar world of speculative...
Speculative Fiction Trilogies and the Challenges in Writing Them The trilogy is a cathedral. It is not three separate structures sharing a parking lot — it is one soaring, singular vision whose nave and transept and choir loft are each doing different work while all...
Five Voices, Five Worlds A Speculative Fiction Writer’s Guide to Literary Voice Every story is a secret sealed inside a sound. And the sound — the particular pitch and presence of the telling — is voice. Not theme, not plot, not the breathtaking built...
Guilds, Gatherings, and the Glowing Screen A Speculative Fiction Author’s Guide to Online Organizations, Writing Communities, and Professional Groups There is a peculiar ache that visits the speculative fiction writer at odd hours — the ache of the solitary...
Portals in the Pixel-Dark: A Guide to Virtual Conventions, Hybrid Events, and Online Summits for the Indie Speculative Fiction Author DIAMOND RATING KEY ◆◆◆ Fully Online — entirely virtual; no travel required to speak or attend ◆◆ Hybrid — Strong Online Track —...
A Definitive Guide to Podcasts That Feature, Welcome, and Champion Indie Authors as Guests Why Podcasts Are the Overlooked Engine of Author Discovery In the cathedral-quiet corners of the internet — those few rooms where the algorithms and the ad budgets...
The NaNoWriMo November Novel Machine NaNoWriMo’s Storied Spark, Its Sad Slow Stumble, and the Successors Carrying the Creative Flame Forward A Dream Drafted in Darkness: The Birth of NaNoWriMo Picture a particular, peculiarly promising evening in the summer of...
Growing Your Author Family Tree On the Creative, Intellectual, and Spiritual Value of Choosing the Literary Ancestors Who Will Shape Your Writing for a Lifetime Every writer inherits something. The question is whether the inheritance happens by accident — the slow,...
