Star Trek: A Piece of the Action

So this could be considered Part Three of my loose-knit series on science fiction: The Distorted Society.

This is a sci-fi convention where there is an Earth…or another planet, at least somewhat Earth-like, that has some aspect of society that is a ...

When he created the Twilight Zone, Rod Serling was motivated by the desire to tell more meaningful stories. In his writing career up to then, his work had been heavily censored.

Serling realized that by setting his stories in fantastical situations, in alternate or futuristic versions of Earth, that he ...

We've all seen the cringy dialogue. The weirdly stereotypical and awkward situations. The sheer effort of the script writer, the novelist, or the comic book writer to write someone they don't know: a woman, or a man.


Too often the problem is very stark when comparing character designs ...

Unless they are an old-timey Disney villain or similarly classic cartoon villain, nobody wants to be evil or bad starting off. Nobody's ambition is to be the villain in their own story. (note I say ‘villain’ and not ‘antagonist’)

Everyone is out to be the hero.

So why aren ...

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The nature of online communities and making connections with people you meet in them is quite different from what happens with “social media”. The connections are ...

The Prologue of Invasive Species opens up in a setting very similar to a role-playing game complete with character avatars and text boxes. It is as if the narrator is immersed in this digital land as he goes in and out of consciousness with reality. The main character goes by ...

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Cooperation Vs Competition. For decades the mantra was competition is good: it produces progress and makes things better… Well that's actually false. Competition is what you ...

Any creative person knows that the hardest thing can be to find an audience for your work. On one side of the great divide we have the creatives (the writers, artists, fashion designers, architects, musicians, dancers etc), and on the other we have the consumers. Those consumers have a voracious ...

Last weekend we discussed that strange phenomenon of independent creation, where there's more than a passing resemblance to another work but it's not a case of plagiarism. Interestingly, not long after I posted that I saw not one but two instances of independent creation being brought up (though ...

We all talk about the sheer necessity to create characters that don't appear cardboard, that are fleshed out, that generally feel like real flesh-and-blood, living, breathing people (regardless of your character's species or nature) with personalities that ring true to the audience.

There are several elements that contribute ...