Nerd for Hire

Submitting work to journals and presses can be frustrating for a variety of reasons, but for those of us who write longer fiction, just finding places willing to consider stories can be a challenge. Many journals max out at around the 5,000 mark for prose, while many presses aren’t interested in stand-alone manuscripts smaller than around 40,000 words. That leaves a pretty big gap where stories fall into a kind of publishing limbo.

Star Trek consistently takes a human-centric approach to science fiction. There are a multitude of species and worlds but the focus stays with Starfleet and its predominantly human-crewed ships. More unusual compared to other sci-fi universes, artificial intelligence is almost non-existent. In the Star Trek timeline, the first android wasn’t created until 2330, hundreds of years after technology like the transporter and warp drive. Compare that to, say, Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, where robots are common in the 21st century, but space travel is still limited to the immediate solar system.

Haruki Murakami 400 pages Kodansha International (1985)

Read this if you like: Unicorns, cross-genre experiments, simulated worlds

Tl;dr summary: Part surreal fantasy, part sci-fi detective story, all wonderfully bizarre—and masterfully constructed.

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I think my favorite thing about season 1 of Netflix’s Jessica Jones was the villain Kilgrave. And yes, partially that’s because he’s played by David Tennant (oh Doctor my Doctor), but his mind control superpower also makes him a particularly nefarious villain. Kilgrave robs his victims of their free will. When he tells you to do something—like cut your own arm off, or shoot your parents—you do it, and it doesn't matter how much you don't want to.

Another comic adaptation I'm fully obsessed with is AMC's Preacher. The titular Preacher, Jesse Custer, gains a mind control ability very similar to Kilgrave’s after being possessed by a cosmic being known as Genesis. This “Word of God” forces others to obey his commands. The details of the two abilities are different. Kilgrave’s is caused by a virus, meaning it's possible to become immune, as Jessica Jones is in the series; Jesse’s power is so far undefendable, even working on vampires and angels. Jesse can choose when to use his power, while Kilgrave’s is on all the time; Kilgrave's commands expire, while Jesse’s seem permanent. Functionally, though, the two abilities are the same: They speak, you obey.

Sherrie Flick 207 pages Autumn House Press (2016)

Read this if you like: Writing and reading flash fiction

tl;dr summary: Collection of short (and short-short) literary stories showing the everyday lives of a variety of characters.

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Vernor Vinge 774 pages TOR Books (1999)

Read this if you like: Hard sci-fi, world building, the Foundation series

tl;dr summary: Long-view space opera with deep political undertones that presents a unique viewpoint on both technology and time.

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Though I saw The Princess Bride for the first time when I was a kid, I only got around to reading the book in the last few years. The film is one of the rare movies from my childhood that stands up to repeated viewings on the basis of more than just nostalgia; I was curious how the experience of reading the book would compare.

The Princess Bride is a magical, wonderfully quirky novel, and the movie adaptation stays very true to the text in terms of plot, character, and tone. The differences between the two are subtle, but each version has its own unique strengths.

In the first half of this review, I looked at the physical content of Frank Herbert's created universe in Dune, but that is really only half the story. The politics and religion of both Arrakis and the rest of the Imperium are the ultimate driving force of the narrative, serving as both setting and plot.

The first Dune book spends more time exploring the Fremen than it does the Landsraad and the Imperium. The Fremen are more unique to Dune and therefore both more interesting and in need of more introduction. Herbert starts with them knowing the reader will take longer to understand them and doesn't drop too many details on the Imperium in the first book, saving that discovery for later installments in the series.

Dune is one of those books it’s effectively useless to review in a traditional sense. It doesn’t really matter to anyone if I like the book or not. It’s a classic, and it’s canon, and close to required reading for anyone who wants to write science fiction. I did my most recent re-read of Dune in this spirit—enjoying the story, sure, but trying to look beyond the story and see the underpinnings of Frank Herbert’s world and the way that he created it.

Because there's a lot to look at with this world, I've split the post into two parts. This first post will look at the physical aspects of the invented world of Dune, while the next will explore the culture.

I’ve traveled a lot in the past, but mostly under the usual vacation format: taking time off work and dedicating all my time to exploring a new place. Early in my freelancing career I took a working road trip, a multi-stop ramble from Pittsburgh to LA and back in a mix of Greyhound busses and a friend’s converted van, and I quickly learned what lots of folks reading this probably already know: traveling is hard work. On that first trip I’d only had a part-time workload, with fewer clients and longer deadlines than I have currently, and it had still been tricky to squeeze it all in between getting from place to place—and actually enjoying myself once we got there. The trip was fun but exhausting, and I came back completely spent and with a pile of work to catch up on.

For my most recent attempt at a the much-touted digital nomad life, I decided to take a different approach: slow traveling. I booked my entire one-month stay in Mérida, Mexico, kept my full client load, and set out to test whether it was really possible to enjoy traveling while I worked, or if this was all just some big scheme orchestrated by travel agents and Instagram influencers.