The Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory

The 33rd episode of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory asks the question: What happens when intelligence stops looking human? Mookie sits down with speculative fiction author Philip Cahill—longtime contributor to the annual anthology circuit and author of Noystria —to tear into one of the biggest questions in science fiction: not whether AI will get smarter, but how alien that intelligence...

The 32nd episode of The Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory features Mookie diving deep into science, religion, and philosophy with indie author Patrick Abbott. a writer pulling from real-world experience to build science fiction that resonates.  Patrick's Fallen series hurls readers into a first contact scenario where humanity is immediately outmatched technologically, strategically, and p...

Mookie welcomes Al Hagan onto the Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory floor, a writer whose complex heroes and driving prose comes from his dedication to duty and service.  Instead of MFA programs or writing circles, Al rose through the ranks of the United States Marine Corps, followed by decades in oil, intelligence-adjacent work, and real-world exposure to how systems break, and how people rea...

The 30th episode of the pod features Mookie and Howard after connecting the way many indie sci-fi writers do—through an anthology collection. Both landed stories in S.A. Gibson’s 2026 sci-fi collection, turning a cold submission into a creative collision and, now, a deep dive into how they each approach the genre. Loring’s method strips the language down, leans heavily on dialogue, and avoids over...

In this robust episode of Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory , Mookie sits down with Margret Treiber—a pissed-off, no-nonsense New Yorker by way of Long Island and Jersey, now out in the Soutwest desert but still swinging that East Coast edge like a light sabre. She’s been grinding for years, writing sharp, dark, often hilarious science fiction… and getting buried under the algorithmic avalanch...

The 28th episode of Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory features speculative fiction author Patrick LeClerc, a writer who Mookie discovers made a deliberate choice early on: skip the gatekeepers, go indie, and answer to no one but the story. Faced with the grind of chasing agents and waiting for permission, Patrick flipped the equation. Instead of pitching to publishers, he put that same energy...

What happens when first contact isn’t with aliens—but with ourselves? On this episode of The Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory , Mookie shares the floor with indie sci-fi author J. Michael Thomas for a conversation that starts with a compelling premise and spirals into something bigger: AI, authorship, and the slow erosion of what makes us human. Thomas unpacks his Substack series First Contac...

The 26th episode of The Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory has Mookie Spitz with technology entrepreneur and science-fiction writer David T. Etheredge for a wide-ranging conversation about artificial intelligence, creativity, and the future of storytelling. At a moment when much of the cultural conversation around AI is dominated by fear—job loss, creative collapse, armageddon, and even worse,...

On this 25th episode of The Science Fiction & Fantasy podcast , host Mookie Spitz sits down with C.S.E. Cooney for a lively conversation about her Saint Death series —and the living, breathing speculative-fiction community that shaped it. Cooney is a 20+-year veteran of the genre: poetry, short fiction, audio narration, conventions, small presses, writing groups, and editorial volleys. Her car...

Mookie Spitz welcomes A.C. Wise to the 24th episode of The Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory: a Canadian-born, award-winning speculative writer, and one of the most incisive critics across genre circles. Wise boldly crosses boundaries between science fiction, fantasy, and horror, and her decades-long career has explored them from both sides of the page as creator and critic.  Mookie and Alison...

What happens when the people who trained for catastrophe watch society ignore every warning sign? In the 23rd episode of The Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory , host Mookie Spitz asks that question and many others of Helen Hynson Vettori—former EMT, senior medical intelligence analyst for the Department of Homeland Security, and award-winning author of the Black Swan speculative thriller serie...

The 22nd episode of The Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory features the crew of indie science-fiction authors who gathered together at Pasadena Comic-Con 2026 to bark their books, network, and rally around their shared sci-fi passion. Together on the pod they crack open their creative process, and wrestle with the future of storytelling in the age of AI.  Welcome to their post-Con roundtable on...

In this episode of The Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory , host Mookie Spitz sits down with the prolific and acclaimed science fiction author Matthew Kressel to dissect his new novella Rainseekers , a deeply human, quietly radical novella about hope, grief, and collective endurance on a terraformed Mars. Matthew talks candidly about writing against the scifi default dystopia. Set centuries in...

The 20th episode of The Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory features host Mookie Spitz welcoming debut science-fiction author and AI technologist Bruno Rothgiesser onto the factory floor. The authors dissect Dark Matter —Bruno's post-apocalyptic first-contact novel that skips the AI uprising and asks the harder question: What happens after the war is already lost… and the machines come back...

Mookie welcomes to the Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory the acclaimed comic artist and storyteller Don Ellis Aguillo, known for his striking emotional style, energy-charged imagery, and powerful storytelling across Spawn , Superman , Aquaman , Green Lantern , indie titles, and his own beloved series Rise . What starts as a conversation about art quickly evolves into something deeper: identity...

Welcome to a celebration of indie writing recognition!  The Outstanding Creator Awards is one of the most visible and influential platforms recognizing independent authors who deliver quality, originality, and emotional punch. These awards aren’t participation trophies—they’re competitive, professionally judged, and taken seriously in the indie community. They don’t just validate a book; they ampl...

In the 17th episode of Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory , Mookie Spitz chats with Steve Gibson (S.A. Gibson), the prolific indie science-fiction author, editor-in-chief of a globally sourced science-fiction anthology, and writer whose work asks an uncomfortable question: what survives when technology doesn’t? Gibson unpacks his journey from voracious sci-fi reader to author of more than twent...

The 16th episode of The Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory has Mookie sitting down with Daniel P. Douglas: the shared pen name of Paul and Phil Garver, prolific multi-genre writers who are also identical twins. Together, they unpack what it means to collaborate as creative partners for decades: how two distinct sensibilities merge into a single authorial voice, how trust replaces ego, and why t...

Out on the Science Fiction & Fantasy Factor floor is Cornish poet and performer Bert Biscoe, who voices two sections from Jonnie Fazoolie and the Transfinite Reality Engine audiobook as a teaser reel.   The first reading shares the infinitale of Kreo Bonsai, a sardonic, alien spider scientist who has built the Jar—the ultimate simulation machine that instantiates every possible universe, one P...

What happens when two Gen-X science-fiction lifers turn on the mic, set themselves loose, and argue about everything ? You get the 14th episode of SFFF. Host Mookie Spitz welcomes longtime friend and fellow sci-fi heretic Lee Kantz for a sprawling, sharp-tongued, no-sacred-cows conversation that tears through Star Trek, Star Wars, Spielberg, Nolan, AI, wokeness, anti-wokeness, bad writing, great i...

J.Z. Pitts doesn’t posture, pretend, or pose behind “author brand” theatrics. He comes on the Factory floor to pod with Mookie Spitz, where they tell the truth about what it costs to write, to fail, to get back up, and to self-publish when the world is drowning in content and nobody’s handing out golden tickets. In this episode, Pitts walks us through Virtual Rebel, his YA sci-fi novel about a tee...

The twelfth episode of the SFFF features Mookie chatting up the genre with Princeton astrophysics grad student turned tech consultant Ed Powell, where they immediately launch into hard science, bad science, and unraveling state of a genre that used to dream big and think smart.  Ed walks in with his PhD, his plasma-physics past, and his lifelong obsession with Clarke and Asimov. He remembers buyin...

This episode of the SFFF drops you straight onto the factory floor with Robert Reif, the Zoomer indie author who somehow writes like a pulp-era wanderer inebriated on optimism. His debut novel, Frontier One , feels like Tarzan meets Sally Ride, wrapped in that old-school, high-adventure energy that so much of science fiction abandoned when it got moody, preachy, and self-righteous.  Robert riffs a...

Mookie gets chatty with speculative-fiction author Lou Iovino about the long, uneven road to becoming a working writer. Lou shares how his creative life started in comics through co-authoring a ten-issue graphic novel on his commute to Manhattan, hiring artists out of pocket, and learning the discipline of concise storytelling and crisp dialogue. That foundation carried Lou into screenwriting and...

Mookie is thrilled to chat with Blake and Sherry Shimshock, the husband-and-wife team behind the Chronicles of Derek Fade: a fast-paced sci-fi adventure series that fuses James Bond swagger, Star Wars style, and Firefly heart.  Their partnership echoes the creative chemistry of The Expanse ’s Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck: Blake provides the action, imagination, and cinematic energy of a screenwrit...