Ancient Logic

Next week is Arisia 2018 and I'm on a few panels you might be interested in. In addition to my first couple of writing panels, I'll be joining in conversations about ghosts, haunted houses, and Steven King. If you find yourself at the convention, please consider stopping by! In order of occurrence with location, time, participants and brief panel description: Writing Horror, the Occult, and the Macabre  Bulfinch (3W), 8:30pm - 9:45pm Chris Philbrook (moderator) , Hillary Monahan , Tom Deady , Douglas Wynne , Morgan Crooks From the revival of Stephen King's dark fantasy series 'The Gunslinger' to long-running post-apocalyptic dramas such as 'The Walking Dead,' horror is hot ... it just lurks under different names. Come learn how to use the horror conventions to ramp up suspense, weave the supernatural into your stories, use real-life elements to prey upon your audience's fears, and how you can create your OWN dark and edgy worlds where no c...

On to movies. Overall, 2017 was a great year for speculative movies. Three above average MCU movies, a bunch of interesting reboots, and a Star Wars movie makes for a decent period to be an SFF fan. Correspondingly, I ended up seeing relatively fewer non-SFF movies this year despite there being several (Baby Driver, Wind River) that I really do want to see.  "Chasm" by Morgan Crooks (2017) Below are my picks for the movies of the year. #1: Dunkirk. No real surprise there. I felt this was basically the movie of the year in July and little transpired between then and now to change my mind. Essentially this is a war movie built around a complicated structure weaving three disparate threads into one complete narrative. I'm not someone who thinks all war-movies are anti-war simply by virtue of showing the terrible fates of young men. This movie, for example, strikes a bleak and, at times despairing tone, to bring the drama of sacrifice on the beach of Dunki...

Waiting for the opening crawl for Episode VIII, I thought about what I wanted The Last Jedi to include. What stuck in my head was I wanted to 'learn something.' I think I assumed there would be plenty of action, daring rescues, a bit of humor and amazing spectacles. (First SPOILER among many to follow - there are) But, I ask a bit more from movies like Star Wars. As foolish as this perhaps sounds, I wanted this movie to always be about something. More than Rey's parentage or the mystery of Snoke, I wanted some greater message from the experience.  Rose Zico and Finn in Canto Bight. So what did I learn? Towards the end of the movie, Rose prevents Finn from sacrificing his life (most likely in vain). Catching up with her, Finn asks her why. Rose's reply, "to save what I love," stuck with me. In ways both big and small, this movie invested a lot of energy into describing and elaborating upon that message. The heroes are never more heroic than when th...

The end of December seems like a great time to express my gratitude for all the stories I've seen published in 2017. So, in order of appearance, here a few stories you could track down and read from me. If you were considering such a rash action. Killing the First Gods . The Book of Blasphemous Words published by A Murder of Storytellers (January 2017). My contribution is a small tale of a woman living in the Upper Paleolithic clawing for survival visited by a ghost of one of her dead gods. Promontory . A Breath From the Sky published by Martian Migraine Press (August 2017). A college president nears retirement from his position and his role as an agent of alien forces. He struggles to maintain his ideals in the face of certain doom and relentless suffering. Upbeat:)  Machinery of Ghosts . The Year's Best Transhuman SF published by Gehenna and Hinnom Books (November 2017). Most of my stories this year dealt with loss and warfare in some way. This tale concerns ...

There are some albums I buy that lift me off the floor the second I hear two or three songs, and compel daily repeat listens until I exhaust every ounce of interest I ever had in them. There are other albums I feel sort of meh about initially which grow on me over time until they become something indispensable. What I'm trying to get at is there are some works of art that burn like incredibly bright fireworks only to vanish utterly and then there are works with enduring value. One side of ledger you have Offspring's "Smash" which I absolutely adored in 1994 and can safely say I've never listened to once since. On the other you have PJ Harvey's "To Bring You My Love" which I put on at least once every month. What's the difference? I think there is a certain type of art that leans hard on the spectacle, the easy and cheap emotional high requiring little deep investment of emotion for a pay off. Another type of artist is willing to sacrif...

Gehenna and Hinnom's "Year's Best Transhuman SF" anthology is now available ! This awesome collection happens to include my story "Machinery of Ghosts" which has a bit of an involved back-story. Here are a few notes on its inspirations as a story and its development over the years.  Hugo Station by Morgan Crooks (2012) I wrote this story more than a decade ago while working as a night shift guard in downtown Boston. Twice every night I had to leave my desk in the front lobby, take an elevator to the top floor, and walk all the way back down to that lobby. To make sure guards completed their rounds, each floor had two sensor stations that I had to check into with a black metal wand. For the most part, I didn't mind this part of the job. The upper floors provided a nice view of the city and it was interesting checking up on the various companies in the building. I did, however, mind the fifth floor. The fifth floor was in the process of bein...

Gehenna and Hinnom's "Year's Best Transhuman SF" anthology is now available! This awesome collection just so happens to include my story "Machinery of Ghosts," a story set on an abandoned space station years after a traumatic, system-wide nanological war. Long after peace has been declared, a different sort of war endures within the station, one threatening to claim the station and everyone inside of it. Purchase "Year's Best Transhuman SF" paperback Purchase "Year's Best Transhuman SF" e-book I am so grateful to C.P. Dunphey and the entire team at Gehenna and Hinnom for choosing my story for this collection. Seeing it along side such excellent authors as Julie Novakova, Jeremy Szal, and Sheldon Woodbury is an amazing honor.  Read Gehenna and Hinnom's press release I will release story notes for "Machinery of Ghosts" in the next few days, so stay tuned!

Arisia 2018 Panels have been announced and it looks like I'm going to be on a bunch in 2018. Go me! Arisia, if you don't know, is a small fan-run, fan-centered annual SFF convention in Boston. I've had incredible experiences in the past taking part in panels on literature, media, gaming, and science.  Two of the panels, "Writing Horror, the Occult, and the Macabre" and "Emotional Impact — How to Make Readers Care," are the first writing panels I've been invited to. I'm not claiming mastery in either but with a few stories under my belt I hope I have a few useful things to share. I'm also on the "2017: The Year in Stephen King" panel which was my reach goal for the year. I count myself as an enormous fan of King's oeuvre and this has certainly been a banner year for the author from Bangor. From television series based on his work (Delores Claiborne and The Mist) to a pair of movies (one reportedly terrible and on...

"So, what is Cosmic Weird?" said Lance Newblood of the Rocket Legionnaires, twisting the control yoke of his YD-3000 combat vehicle to the left. "Is it something new or simply nostalgia?" Twin neon spirals of anti-ship rockets blazed past, close enough he could have spit on them. If he dared, that is, open his cockpit to the cold embrace of vacuum. "Cosmic Weird is science fiction, a sub-genre within Space Opera," replied Commander Athena Madison over the staticy commline. Encased in her famous crimson survival mesh, she weaved without effort between the combat droids of the Tethyan Hierarchy, the control fields of her suit interacting with separate Eisentein frames to propell her forward, backward, and sideways with shocking ease. Very little of this suit made sense to Lance or any other reputable scientist, but it worked. In a universe filled with implacable and deadly foes like the Hierarchy, the government could be forgiven for overlooking a few a...

Gehenna and Hinnom has released the cover and table of contents for their " Transhuman SF " anthology which just so happens to include my story "Machinery of Ghosts." Could you check out this cover for a second? Total sci fi awesomeness! The presale for the digital version goes out Nov. 15th and both book and e-book will be available for purchase Nov. 30th.  Awesome cover to Year's Best Transhuman SF 2017 Anthology In any case, my story is about a long is a SF thriller set in a decaying space station in the grip of a nano-technological cold war. Thank you again to C.P. Dunphey for giving this story the perfect home! Expect a few more words about the story once pre-orders are available as this story has a bit of a back story attached to it. November promises to be a busy month as I also have a flash piece appearing in Collateral Journal, an online magazine devoted to exploring the consequences of war outside of battlegrounds. My story, "The Ferry...

At some point in between catching up with The Orville, I paused to watch the new Star Trek television series. It occurred to me that while I enjoyed both series, it's fair to say they are simply two branches of the same tree. Namely the great and spreading arbor that is the Star Trek universe. It interested me that although The Orville is clearly meant as a shameless homage (rip-off?) of Star Trek, its use of certain classically Trekian tropes like the legal struggle over personhood and what it means to be human struck a more immediate and familiar tone than anything I've seen in Discovery so far. And yet, I wouldn't say I enjoy The Orville more than Discovery, in fact far from it. Orville is a decent amount of fun, but Discovery feels like the genuine and sincere look at what made Star Trek Star Trek that Enterprise always wanted to be.  We live in an age of facsimiles. Facsimile food. Facsimile presidents. Facsimile art. In part, this isn't new. No matter h...

Having recently finished the last book in Liu Cixin's instant classic "The Remembrance of Earth's Past" series, Death's End, I can only report a feeling of total amazement and awe. There is so much about this novel that blew my mind, that offered different and better ways of viewing the universe. This novel did what I wish more novels would, serve up a new universe entire, evoking beauty and horror, nobility and disgust, in a timeless monument to unfettered speculation.  Obviously, in discussing the events of the last of a trilogy books, spoilers are to be expected. I am, however, going to try to avoid discussing much beyond the first 100 pages of the third novel. I read the translation of this novel, as ushered into being by the amazing talent of Ken Liu. Ken has written of a certain prickliness when it comes to translating work. He makes an effort not to anglicize the source material, not smudging away the occasional difficulties in bringing Cixin...

I am thrilled to share the news my story, "Promontory," will appear in an upcoming anthology of unusual possession stories published by the incredible Martian Migraine Press. The anthology, "A Breath from the Sky,"puts together a classic H.P. Lovecraft tale and twenty other atypical stories of possession. Judging from the cover and the list of impressive authors, I'm anticipating pure awesomeness. "Promontory" is a possession story and one of my more overtly horror tales, so I'm overjoyed that it found a host, er, home here. I am sharing the Table of Contents below, as well as a link to the announcement on the Martian Migraine website to provide a sense of what this collection will be about. The cover is amazing, the other authors selected for the collection are amazing, and I have to say, having a story appear alongside a classic tale like HP's "Colour Out of Space," feels pretty darn amazing. I hope to provide more information about...

As part of my preparations for this weekend's Arisia, I've looked back over the idea of truly alien aliens. Tomorrow, I will be joining a panel concerned with this very same topic. Aliens are an abiding obsession in science fiction and appear in many of the classics of speculative literature generally. In fact, if a space opera doesn't contain some reference to aliens or unknown life-forms, it's considered a notable deviation (so called Mundane Science Fiction movement and Firefly both come to mind). There's a deeply-rooted expectation that science fiction will at some point address aliens. Why? I don't have any easy answers for this question. The topic itself is more unwieldy than it might appear. When we talk about aliens, are we just talking about the traditional space opera with human astronauts encountering strange cultures on distant planets? Are we also adding in first-contact stories, cosmic horror, and fantasy literature that includes references to ...

Now that we are a bit closer to the kick-off for Arisia 2017, I thought I'd firm up the times and locations for panels that I'm participating in. Arisia is an annual science fiction and fantasy convention, held in Boston in the Westin Hotel drawing bit more than 4,000 fans each every year. This will be my seventh year at the convention and the fifth on panels. So, yeah, I really like the community that turns out for this thing and it's pretty much the high point of each winter. I like how welcoming and supportive the community at Arisia is. No matter what your interest, there is a track where like-minded individuals can gather, discuss, and participate in that fandom. There are certainly larger conventions that offer that sort of "big tent" ethos, but few that have the cozier, more casual feel of Arisia. So, anyway, if you are interested in hearing me talk about literature and media from the past year, I'm attending the following panels (Descriptions and...

I have to admit it took a little while to get into the new Star Wars movie. The beginning felt weird to me: both in terms of the scattered, start/stop nature of the set-up and also, being honest, the lack of the title crawl. I know it's a small thing but details matter. Without the crawl, some part of the task of determining what is going on and how it fits in with everything else falls to the viewer. Perhaps that's the point here. Without the frame of mythology and a redemption arc, how does the conflict of Star Wars look to the people who actually fought it?  Gareth Edwards, the director of the new movie, makes some wise decisions early on, despite the muddle: Jyn's story of lost parents and abandonment is classic storytelling in the epic mode - certainly something Star Wars fans have come to expect from the franchise. Overall, though, none of that really mattered. The ending for this movie is tremendous, perfectly setting up Episode 4, giving a sense of the sa...

My new story, "The Yuru-chara of Hector, NY," is now available in the current issue of the Electric Spec magazine. I'm very proud that this story is getting published at Electic Spec for the simple reason I've been reading the magazine for years, dreaming of the day I might get a story published there. Well, it's finally happened. The story of "Yuru-chara" is pretty simple: a young girl wakes up to discover that her old virtual friend, a seven-foot-tall yellow monster named Tama Bell, has come to life. While navigating through waves of other virtual creatures released through a world-wide hack, the young heroine tries to come to grips with her responsibility to her forgotten friend and the losses inherent to growing up. I hope that you enjoy my story and that you give the other stories a try. They're awesome! Thank you for your continued support.

As mentioned last week, I do have a bit of happy news to share. I am excited to announce that my story, "The Yuru-chara of Hector, NY," will appear in the next issue of the Electric Spec Magazine at the end of the month. I am tremendously excited about this for a few reasons: Electric Spec is simply awesome. I've been reading this magazine for awhile and never been disappointed by a single story. To have one of my stories selected is beyond humbling. I can only give an earnest thank you to Lesley L. Smith for choosing the story. I love this story dearly. It has one of my favorite protagonists and shows in the clearest way I've managed where I'd like to go with my fiction.  Electric Spec also gave me the chance to reflect on this story and its meaning in a guest blog which I am sharing below. Without being spoilery, this blog expresses some of what resonates about "The Yuru-chara of Hector, NY," with me.  Guest Blog at Electric Spec At the moment, ...

Yesterday, after three years of development, hype and disappointment chasing every footstep along the way, the video game No Man's Sky was released. Looming Planet by Morgan Crooks (2016 - taken from No Man's Sky) I first encountered this game while researching a short story based - in small part - on procedural generation. I was flabbergasted when I saw the trailer, imagining the possibilities of a universe entirely created by the application of complex algorithms - every planet, every mountain and valley, every plant and animal. If the trailer released at that point hadn't been so convincing and frankly awe-inspiring, I'm not sure I would have credited its existence. Now over a year later, I have it in my hands. Is this a good game? That's a tough question. If your idea of a game is something like Call of Duty, Madden Football or Dark Souls, than this isn't going to be a game for you. There are threats and a story that sort of pushes the player forward fr...

Setting aside hype and concerns, I think my basic reaction to the new Star Trek movie, Star Trek Beyond was, oh so that's what a decent Star Trek episode would be like as a movie. Your reaction to the new movie will probably depend a great deal on whether or not you can make your peace with Star Trek as a summer sci-fi thriller. When the first trailer for Beyond dropped earlier this year, I told friends that this was exactly what I thought a trailer for a movie directed by the guy from the Fast and Furious franchise would look like. I was not excited. Having watched the movie, I would say pretty much the same thing but add that's not necessarily a bad thing. Justin Lin has a rep for focusing on ensemble character interactions and kinetic action sequences. That's what you get in this movie. Beyond is strongest when the superb cast is together in various combinations, talking, arguing, and working to solve their problems. It gets a little muddled as the scale of act...