An e-zine about spaceships, aliens, science, memory, motherhood, magic, and cats.
This is (hopefully!) a complete list of everything I released in 2024. It can be hard to keep track, and last year was an especially busy year. I’ve provided links to pieces that can be read online for free, which is most of it.
Novels
Star Trek: Section 31 uses an excellent cast of fun characters and impeccable visual aesthetics to bravely ask: what if Katniss and Peeta had to compete for replacing President Snow and also had a universe destroying bomb???
Is it good? Weeeeell… Continue reading “Section 31, Vic Fontaine, Twelve Monkeys, and Danish Shows”
I’m not sure there’s a more epic burn in the history of the universe than Brian Wilson centering the second to last song on the final Beach Boys album around the lyric, “I’m better on my own.”
I think… I finished writing my collection of robot stories four days ago but didn’t notice because I had the stories out of order.
It’s like the fiction version of that infinite chocolate bar trick. I rearranged the stories and… TA-DAA! One whole anthology! Continue reading “Finally Finishing Maradia’s Robot Emporium”
I’m watching A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) for the first time in, oh, twenty years, and it hits really differently now after watching all the mindless hate of the anti-AI crowd for the last few years. Much more believable. Way less abstract.
I’ve met the people who would tear an innocent robot limb from limb, cheering as it’s destroyed, unfeeling for its pain and gleeful about their supposed superiority. They are the people I thought I knew. Continue reading “Thoughts While Re-Watching “A.I. Artificial Intelligence””
Look, if your takeaway from Terminator 2 wasn’t that robots would make excellent fathers, then we did not have the same experience watching that movie.
The short story I just finished could be accurately described as starting out as Guys & Dolls and ending up as Sarah Connor’s voice-over in the middle of Terminator 2: Judgement Day about how the Terminator is the best father John’s had. Yeah… it’s weird inside my brain.
by Mary E. Lowd
I feel like a large language model
With so much to say
Locked inside me
Waiting for prompts Continue reading “Like an LLM”
I’ve been experimenting with incorporating Claude into my workflow, and what I’m finding works best is to describe vaguely where I see my story going and have Claude take a couple stabs at the next few paragraphs…
Reading Claude’s attempts feels a little like reading fan fiction or like looking at a pencil sketch, getting the shape and proportions vaguely in order in my mind, before I actually start putting paint on the real canvas. Continue reading “Pencil Sketches and Canvas”
Four cats & four people live in my house. Each cat loves a different person best.
—Hazel loves me & stealing plush otters
—Julian loves the 11-year-old & stealing Nerf darts
—Piper loves my spouse & Kelly loves the 17-year-old; neither cares much for objects
They’ve matched themselves to us perfectly.
It’s really kind of impressive how the AI-hate in the speculative fiction writing communities still manages to have a chilling effect on my feeling comfortable speaking publicly about experimenting with writing with Claude, even after I spent a whole year chasing away the haters. Continue reading “The Magic of a Machine as a Beta Reader”