Ancient Logic

My story "The Mystagogue," a tale of subterranean dread and outsider art appears in the first issue of the new Cyclopean digital magazine. I'm honored to have my work included and I can't wait to see what other stories are in the first issue. Thank you to Cyclopean Press for selecting my story! Also, I want to take a moment to mention the cover art on this issue is awesome. It reminds me a little bit of a Simon Bisley Doom Patrol cover which really strikes the right mood for cosmic horror and weird fiction.

The Expanse is the new, heavily promoted, space opera television show on the SyFy channel, part of its renewed embrace of, you know, SCIENCE FICTION. I have been talking up this show for purely selfish reasons. I like the story and I want to see it reach the end of the first book. Characters from the SyFy Channel series, "The Expanse" from the left; Julie Mao (Florence Faivre), Det. Joe Miller (Thomas Jane), Naomi Nagata (Dominique Tipper), Jim Holden (Steven Strait), Alex Kamal (Cas Anvar), Amos Burton (Wes Chatham), and  Chrisjen Avasarala ( Shoreh Aghdashloo) I saw this morning that the past few episodes have not had the audience that SyFy was looking for. That's a shame and I hope that the cold-eyes execs can hold on for a little while because a show this good is absolutely going to find an audience.  I'm going to dispense with any arguments about how you, a SFF fan, should watch this show out of some sense of obligation. The fact is, although The Expan...

This past weekend, I sat on a panel at Arisia entitled the Future of Mars. All things considered, it was a great panel, and I was happy with my contributions. I did have a few thoughts about the panel afterwards, about what the conversation might mean, and where I’d like to take my thoughts regarding Mars in the future. First a quick biographical note. The first story I ever wrote was about Mars but I have an ambivalent relationship with it. Not that Mars cares, being a planet, but I go back and forth on the whole idea of what happens next to this planet. Mars, as a topic of speculative fiction, is the setting that never quite leaves science fiction. We're always twenty years from going there. We always learn some new discouraging fact about the planet. Dust, perchlorates, and even the possibility of microbial life, all make the effort to reach Mars that much harder to realize We keep talking about Mars and  yet, year after year, we somehow fail to be on Mars. To be ...

I've been working for the past few weeks on my Castle Fortress around a Lovecraftian theme. It's reached the point where I've gotten most of the details settled so I thought I'd put it up for your enjoyment (or derision). View post on imgur.com

This past weekend, Lauren and I went to Arisia for our sixth visit to the science fiction convention. We both had an amazing time, which I’ve shared through various social medias already. Posting on Ancient Logic gives me the chance to drill down into what is so great about this convention and what I’m going to take away from it. An explanation for this follows. Scalzi on right, me on the left. (Lauren Shamitz-Crooks 2016) First off, John Scalzi, author of Old Man’s War and Red Shirts, was the guest of honor. Scalzi has refused to attend any convention that doesn’t have a strong anti-harassment policy in place and after holding Arisia up as an example of a convention that has done this right, he agreed to attend Arisia 2016.  Which created a kind of super-sized Arisia experience. There were good and bad elements to this. Although my experience in the Registration line was mild, I know friends who waited an hour+ for their badges. I haven't heard the final numbers but...