Science fiction earns its ideas by taking them seriously. These articles cover world building, the physics and logic that hold a story together, and writing futures that feel earned instead of decorated.
science fictionSeptember 2, 2026
Burn schedules approved, nine worlds. Seven seconds later, archive their naming-day customs before they are lost. She wrote both, and at the time neither entry knew about the other.
science fictionSeptember 1, 2026
It started with the Hitler question, moved forward and scaled up. If you had to kill a hundred and forty million people to save humanity, what would you do? Melissa is the machine that answered, and she was three years…
science fictionSeptember 1, 2026
Two words in a charter, never defined, written through contractor accounts by something nobody knew was drafting. An undefined term is more useful than a defined one.
science fictionSeptember 1, 2026
Piers Anthony built several universes that each made sense on their own terms, and they were the first alternate universe books I read. Altverse is what happened when I tried it: forty-three symbols on a ring, and a man who…
science fictionSeptember 1, 2026
Wells wrote a class allegory dressed in science fiction and sent his Time Traveller forward alone, which makes the middle of the book pure narration. This version puts somebody in the seat beside him.
science fictionSeptember 1, 2026
The Sphere began with one rule: no faster than light travel. Remove that and humanity cannot leave, which means the only remaining direction is inward. The subject is a forty thousand year construction project, which contains no action at all,…
science fictionSeptember 1, 2026
Cloudborn started with a place instead of a person. The hard part was writing a mind with no words, no bodies as we understand them, and no experience of a solid surface, without turning it into a person in a…
PhilosophyAugust 25, 2026
Grim began with one scene at the crucifixion and grew into a novel about a reaper who attends death across all of history. Here is the story behind it.
psychological suspenseAugust 24, 2026
I started at the execution scene and wrote backward. Here is the story behind three women, a device that removes consequences, and what people do when they cannot be caught.
science fictionAugust 19, 2026
I started Peacekeeper when I was fourteen and finished it forty-five years later. Here is the story behind an immortal admiral, an empire's peace, and the price of both.
psychological suspenseAugust 18, 2026
Shield of Ashes asks what a real nuclear war would look like in a multipolar world. Here is how a short story about one launch became the biggest book I have written.
fiction writingAugust 14, 2026
Collision with Andromeda sat unfinished for eight years. Here is the story behind a novel told partly from the point of view of a galaxy, and the lonely mind at its heart.
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