Recommended Reading: "John Shirley's Guide to Wrecking Your Career in Science Fiction"

John Shirley, who generously provided a laudatory blurb for my story collection, CRYPTOPOLIS & OTHER STORIES, published a fascinating essay on BoingBoing on the 25th of February. The piece is a captivating (and sometimes even harrowing) memoir entitled "John Shirley's Guide to Wrecking Your Career in Science Fiction." Here's a brief excerpt: 

Pointless Hostility brought me numerous enemies. Strangely enough, this comeuppance surprised me.

But then — when you come with the damage I have…and when you are then caught up in the reflowering of anarchism alongside the proto-punk culture of NYC punk rock; when you're thrashing in the scene that applauded when Lou Reed was shooting up meth on stage and handing the syringe to the audience; when your first wife gets you into mainlining cocaine; when you're working under the (sublime) influence of Baudelaire, the great surrealists, and Celine; when you're fresh from prostitution and having to carrying a knife when you went out to score dope…when you're trying hard to give up drugs and sometimes failing …When your favorite album is Iggy's Raw Power with songs like "Death Trip" and "Your Pretty Face has Gone to Hell"…

…You just don't get how to relate to mainstream folks. You have neither the sensibility nor the sensitivity.

You don't understand people from outside the demimonde. You feel like your only salvation is to swagger onto a stage and snarl into a mic (figuratively and literally) and somehow intimidate the world into submission.

It was really about defensive aggression. I was hurt and scared — so I was anger. Sometimes I kept it inside, but through my darkest stories, and Pointless Hostility, I let it out. I didn't yet grasp that people can be critiqued with discretion and respect.

Anger is an energy, sang John Lydon. My later novel, Transmaniacon, was a Fellini-influenced, wildly plotted tale of a proto-cyberpunk hero in a surreal future. He's equipped with a device, implanted over his heart, that can project his own angry energy so it infects people around him. He can use this "exciter" to waken their suppressed anger, using their sudden rage as a weapon. The key to the concept was my notion that everyone is always secretly angry. Not quite true, in real life, but having to work on suppressing my own rage, I assumed it was there in everyone. And after all — riots aren't so hard to start. Nor are wars, really. Look at the angry savagery of history...

To read Shirley's entire article, click HERE.

I also recommend checking out Shirley's most recent short story, "The Corporate Soul," which you can find in the Summer 2025 issue of THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION... 

CRYPTONECROLOGY: Dan Simmons, R.I.P. (1948-2026)

On February 21, 2026, in Longmont, Colorado, Dan Simmons passed away. Simmons was the author of CARRION COMFORT (1989), HYPERION (1989), PRAYERS TO BROKEN STONES (1990), LOVEDEATH (1993), THE TERROR (2007), DROOD (2009), THE ABOMINABLE (2013), and the forthcoming OMEGA CANYON, among many other books. He also contributed the most memorable story ("The Final Pogrom") to Harlan Ellison's recently published anthology, THE LAST DANGEROUS VISIONS (2024). What follows is a brief excerpt from Sian Cain's 3-1-26 GUARDIAN obit entitled "Dan Simmons, Author of Hyperion and The Terror, Dies Aged 77":

The author was best known for Hyperion, his 1989 science fiction novel that won the prestigious Hugo award for best novel and a Locus award; Simmons later wrote three sequels.

Over his career he also won two World Fantasy awards, a dozen Locus awards, the Shirley Jackson award, and several Bram Stoker awards, while his 2007 novel The Terror, a fictionalised imagining of what happened on the doomed Franklin expedition, was adapted into an acclaimed television series in 2018.

Born in Peoria, Illinois, in 1948, Simmons grew up in Illinois and Indiana. He worked as an elementary school teacher for 18 years, in Missouri, New York and Colorado, where he was once finalist for Colorado Teacher of the Year.

“Every day after lunch, Dan told his students a daily installment of an epic tale that started on the first day of school,” his obituary reads. “As they listened, the students would color illustrations that he’d drawn for them. When the story finally came to an end on the last day of school, many recall being reduced to tears. This story would go on to become Dan’s Hyperion Cantos.”

To read Cain's entire article, click HERE. 

You can hear Dan Simmons being interviewed by his mentor, Harlan Ellison, during the 11-7-86 episode of MIKE HODEL'S HOUR 25 less than a week after he took home the World Fantasy Award for SONG OF KALI, the first debut novel to win the award. If you want to listen to the entire interview, click HERE.

THE NEW YORK TIMES and THE GUARDIAN on Trump's Iran Strike

1) From THE NEW YORK TIMES' 2-28-26 op-ed piece entitled "Trump’s Attack on Iran Is Reckless":

In his 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised voters that he would end wars, not start them. Over the past year, he has instead ordered military strikes in seven nations. His appetite for military intervention grows with the eating.

Now he has ordered a new attack against the Islamic Republic of Iran, in cooperation with Israel, and Mr. Trump said it would be much more extensive than the targeted bombing of nuclear facilities in June. Yet he started this war without explaining to the American people and the world why he was doing so. Nor has he involved Congress, which the Constitution grants the sole power to declare war. He instead posted a video at 2:30 a.m. Eastern on Saturday, shortly after bombing began, in which he said that Iran presented “imminent threats” and called for the overthrow of its government. His rationale is dubious, and making his case by video in the middle of the night is unacceptable [...].

Mr. Trump’s approach to Iran is reckless. His goals are ill-defined. He has failed to line up the international and domestic support that would be necessary to maximize the chances of a successful outcome. He has disregarded both domestic and international law for warfare [...].

Mr. Trump is [...] telling the American people and the world that he expects their blind trust. He has not earned that trust.

He instead treats allies with disdain. He lies constantly, including about the results of the June attack on Iran. He has failed to live up to his own promises for solving other crises in Ukraine, Gaza and Venezuela. He has fired senior military leaders for failing to show fealty to his political whims. When his appointees make outrageous mistakes — such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sharing advanced details of a military attack on the Houthis, an Iranian-backed group, on an unsecured group chat — Mr. Trump shields them from accountability. His administration appears to have violated international law by, among other things, disguising a military plane as a civilian plane and shooting two defenseless sailors who survived an initial attack.

To read the entire article, click HERE. 

2) From Simon Tisdall's 2-28-26 GUARDIAN op-ed piece entitled "A World on Edge as Trump Bombs Iran and Triggers War in the Middle East. There Was No Need for This":

While there are certain differences, the similarities between Donald Trump’s siege of Iran and George W Bush’s disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq are striking. Both crises fit a wider pattern of ultimately unsuccessful, costly US interventionism dating back to Vietnam – and the 1953 CIA-led Iran coup. Trump promised to avoid foreign adventures. Surprise! He lied. Anyone who believes he has radically changed the way the US engages with the world should review this sordid saga of post-1945 imperial hubris. In this, he’s no different from his predecessors.

Trump is unusual in that his self interest is so evident. Though he said today that he wants “freedom” for the Iranian people, and for Iran to be a place that’s “safe”, he’s no Woodrow Wilson, who justified plunging the US into the first world war in 1917 by saying “the world must be made safe for democracy”. (It transpired Wilson meant democracy in Europe, not in the colonial empires of Africa, the Middle East and Asia.) After attacking Venezuela in January, Trump baldly admitted he just wanted the oil. Yet in other respects, what’s happening now feels very familiar.

Like Bush, Trump manufactured a crisis, founded on falsehood, and effectively cornered himself. He is hostage to self-imposed expectations, having confounded his own false claim to have “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capabilities last year. Like Bush and his accomplice, Tony Blair, Trump deliberately inflates the threat. His unsubstantiated State of the Union claim that Tehran’s ballistic missiles could “soon” reach US territory recalls notoriously false US and UK claims about Saddam Hussein’s fabled weapons of mass destruction. Israel’s claim to have mounted “pre-emptive” strikes is misleading, too. There is zero clear evidence Iran was about to attack. On the contrary, it was desperately hoping to preserve the peace after last June’s damaging US-Israeli onslaught [...].

For the second time, Trump has offered negotiations to Iran while obviously planning an attack. It’s now evident this week’s negotiations in Geneva were a charade. Nor is there any sign Trump and Netanyahu, having set out their maximalist objectives, will break off the attacks soon. To do so would suggest failure. Trump wants to be the president who finally avenges US humiliations during the 1979 Iranian revolution, who brings Iran back into the western fold. He also wants a “win” to impress November’s midterm voters – one that revives his poor approval ratings. 

To read the entire article, click HERE. 

BALTIMORE SUN on ICE Facilities in Maryland

From Natalie Jones' 2-23-26 BALTIMORE SUN article entitled "Maryland Battles Over ICE Facilities Raise Constitutional Question":

As local governments in Maryland clash with the Trump administration’s plans for new federal immigration facilities, the issue is reviving a long-running constitutional question: When the federal government buys or uses property, does it have to obey state and local zoning and land use laws?

Legal scholars say the short answer is complicated — and multiple disputes now unfolding across Maryland could help determine it.

At the center is a lawsuit filed Monday by Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown seeking to block the Trump administration’s plan to convert an 825,000-square-foot warehouse in Washington County into a 1,500-bed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center. The suit argues the Department of Homeland Security failed to complete required local environmental review before spending $102.4 million to purchase the Williamsport property.

Meanwhile, Baltimore County lawmakers may have passed emergency legislation banning private immigration detention facilities earlier this month, but it doesn’t stop ICE or its legal department from occupying office space in Hunt Valley.

Together, the disputes highlight a fundamental constitutional tension: the supremacy clause — which generally gives federal law priority over conflicting state law — versus traditional local authority over land use [...].

Cori Alonso-Yoder, director of the Immigration Clinic at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, said a federally owned detention center would generally be permissible so long as it does not violate constitutional rights. The Baltimore County law instead targets private actors who might host detention operations.

Federal immigration detention relies heavily on private facilities; a February 2025 analysis by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse found roughly 90% of people held by ICE were housed in privately owned or operated centers.

To read the entire article, click HERE. 

Republican QAnon Follower Omar Navarro Sentenced to Four Years in Federal Prison

From Helen Jeong's NBCLosAngeles.com report entitled "Omar Navarro, Ex-congressional Candidate, Gets 4 Years in Prison for Embezzlement":

A former candidate in previous California congressional races was sentenced to federal prison for embezzling nearly $250,000 from his political campaign and spending the money on personal expenses, including trips to Las Vegas.

Omar Navarro, who challenged Rep. Maxine Waters for California’s 43rd Congressional District from 2016 and 22, was sentenced to 48 months in federal prison after he pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud last June.

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has said after raising millions of dollars during the four election cycles, the 37-year-old defrauded his campaign committee by pocketing some of the money.

Although he knew federal law strictly prohibits the personal use of campaign funds, Navarro funneled campaign cash to himself between July 2017 and February 2021, the DOJ said.

To read Jeong's entire article, click HERE. 

For further information about Omar Navarro, check out my 12-17-23 EVERGREEN REVIEW article entitled "The Silent Civil War: The Radicalization of the Evangelical Right": 

The QAnon movement persisting without Q is exemplified not just by Newmax but also by Omar Navarro (who ran for California’s 43rd congressional district for the fourth time after having served six months in jail for stalking and harassing his ex-girlfriend, fellow Republican politician and QAnon promoter DeAnna Lorraine Tesoriero). Navarro has strategically refrained from mentioning Q since January 6. Here’s an excerpt from Davey Alba’s December 20, 2021 New York Times article entitled “‘Q’ Has Been Quiet, but QAnon Lives On”:

Mr. Navarro said he had stopped posting about QAnon to avoid being barred from the [social media] platforms.

“I’m not dumb,” Mr. Navarro said in an interview. “You have to be politically correct in today’s world to survive on social media.”

He added: “I’m running a campaign for Congress. So I need to focus on issues that matter more, like the economy or business other than” focusing on QAnon.³⁰

Of course, to be more truthful Navarro should have said, "So I need to focus on issues that matter more, like the economy or business or illegally siphoning off campaign funds to myself through my own mother." Navarro's mother, by the way, also pled guilty to embezzlement. Returning to the article...

In a June 27, 2021 Business Insider article entitled “A Trump-loving Insurrectionist and a Convicted Stalker Are Among 36 QAnon Supporters Running for Congress in 2022,” Joshua Zitser and Sophia Ankel write that Navarro still “believes in ‘some things’ that ‘Q’ says, including the human trafficking trope.”³¹ It’s both distressing and amusing that Navarro talks as if the problem of human trafficking was something no human being had ever acknowledged until Q popped up on 4chan. Q’s followers don’t seem to understand (or don’t wish to understand) that the critics of QAnon aren’t saying that human trafficking doesn’t exist. They’re saying that QAnon’s distorted, politically weaponized fantasies about human trafficking do far more harm than good, particularly when they begin to crowd out genuine information about how human trafficking can actually be combated in the real world as opposed to the ineffectual theorizing that occurs among most “digital soldiers” (a phrase first coined by General Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser) in the online LARPing world of QAnon.

Back to Omar:

“I do believe that there’s human trafficking going on right now. I do believe that Hollywood has participated in some of this with pedophilia and it’s something obviously we can’t ignore,” [Navarro] said.

Navarro, who has gone viral multiple times on Twitter for his far-right and homophobic views, has previously pushed the debunked Pizzagate theory [from which QAnon is a direct outgrowth]. He told Insider: “I feel like there are certain things going on. There’s something shady in that pizza shop” [i.e., Comet Ping Pong in Washington, D.C.].

The Californian also defended using the popular QAnon slogan WWG1WGA (“Where we go one, we go all”) in a tweet posted on October 3, 2020, saying he ended up deleting it because he didn’t want Twitter to ban him.

“I always have to worry about my free speech and what I say on Twitter,” he said.³²

As we can see from the above comments, the social media ban on QAnon content did not prevent people like Navarro from believing in political disinformation; it simply encouraged them to find better and more efficient ways to hide their beliefs while still spreading (and acting on) that disinformation. It made identifying those responsible for spreading the disinformation a thousand times more difficult. Rather than stopping bad ideas, censorship inevitably serves as both a shield and an amplifier for those ideas.

It's interesting to note that, according to THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, Trump confidant Roger Stone served as Navarro's campaign advisor back in 2017, the same year QAnon got its start on 4chan.

If you'd like to read the entirety of "The Silent Civil War," then click HERE. 

IT'S TWIN PEAKS DAY ONCE AGAIN!

 Since it's Twin Peaks Day once again, I'd like to take this opportunity to suggest that if you're a Twin Peaks fan, you might very well enjoy the wonderfully strange tales in my collection, CRYPTOPOLIS & OTHER STORIES... 

PRAISE FOR CRYPTOPOLIS & OTHER STORIES: 

"The stories in Cryptopolis feel like the bloody, star-filled lovechildren of Burroughs and Delany, with each tale ostensibly one part of a greater whole; abstract limbs and organs tethered together by strained flesh. Cryptopolis will take readers on a hallucinogenic journey through worlds fractured by time and place—slipping through liminal dimensions with seamless abandon to unveil unsettling illusions and heartbreaking realities—and totally worth the trip."

--Philip Fracassi, author of Boys in the Valley

 

"If you're tired of the same wines and you're curious about the vintage only just whispered about, have a deep draught of Robert Guffey's Cryptopolis. You don't have to descend with Fortunato to the deepest cellars to find this bottle of Amontillado. Here it is! If Poe collaborated with Robert Anton Wilson...if Borges had a lovechild with Lovecraft, which was subsequently adopted by Kafka...you might get Cryptopolis. I think too that Clark Ashton Smith would admire this collection. Written with the obsessive precision of a mysterious staircase descending into the abyss, Cryptopolis will take you to strange epiphanies..."  

 

--John Shirley, author of The Feverish Stars

 

"Once upon a time, weird and speculative fiction had an underground full of stories that were not written as calling cards or as film treatments or as extended internet memes. Guffey's tales resist genre gentrification; they move into your mind to turn it into a punk house squat!" 

--Nick Mamatas, author of Move Under Ground and The Second Shooter

 

"Cryptopolis, a collection of interconnected and cleverly interwoven short stories, is simply beautiful, while at the same time exceedingly surreal."

--Christine Morgan, author of Spermjackers from Hell and Nympho Shark Fuck Frenzy  

 

 "In Cryptopolis & Other Stories, Guffey's free-ranging intellect meshes wonderfully with his command of the language."

 

--John Oakes, author of The Fast

 

"Guffey brings together 25 horror shorts that swing wildly between terrifying mindtrips and gritty realism. Throughout, Guffey’s blunt prose lends a sense of normalcy to the fantastic as his cast of losers from all walks of life face the cruelties of their existence—sexual violence, drugs, war, parenthood, and poverty [...]. Though not for the faint of heart, this bizarre and over-the-top collection is sure to thrill devotees of weird fiction."

--Publishers Weekly   

"Cryptopolis may end up being a gateway drug into Robert Guffey’s work. I don’t use that term spuriously. So many of Guffey’s stories in Cryptopolis have a hard-bitten edge and gritty feel to them that I could see him crafting a metatext about an author whose books are physically addictive. Across the collection’s twenty-five stories and vignettes, Guffey displays a range of interests and foci with such depth and heart that I wouldn’t be surprised if he became one of my favorite modern writers [...].

"Affect, the experience of emotional response, seems to be at issue in every one of Guffey’s offerings. From the opening eponymous story (which is the only outright Lovecraftian story in the collection), with its resonances of love as a torturous paralytic, to the last, 'Esthra, Shadows, Glass, Silence,' a parable of alternate lives and lost possibilities, the emotional response drawn from the reader appears to be the crux of every piece. These stories are engines designed to make the reader feel."

--Géza A. G. Reilly, Dead Reckonings

 "If you want a walk on the wild side, and I mean WILD, Robert Guffey’s fiction delivers that and more. It’s as if you’re lying in the grass in a park on a calm summer afternoon, you look up, and a creature you can’t even describe is looking at you. He starts talking in an even voice. But his words are chopping reality to pieces, and when he puts the pieces back together again, and you see the new picture, you feel a need to call the police. But then you realize you’re in a new place where the last people you want to talk to are the cops. What do you do now? You’re on your own. You better have strong resources. Very strong." 

 --Jon Rappoport, author of The Secret Behind Secret Societies

THE GUARDIAN on Austin Martin

From Ed Pilkington's 2-23-26 GUARDIAN article entitled "New Details Emerge About Armed Man Shot and Killed at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago": 

The 21-year-old man who was shot and killed after having entered Donald Trump’s Florida resort on Sunday – while carrying a shotgun – came from a North Carolina family of the president’s supporters and had reportedly become increasingly fixated on the so-called Jeffrey Epstein files.

The focus of the FBI’s investigation into the intrusion attributed to Austin Tucker Martin is tightening on his movements and motives. Martin was confronted by Secret Service agents and a local sheriff’s deputy inside the secure perimeter of Mar-a-Lago and killed after he had raised a shotgun into the shooting position at about 1.30am on Sunday, law enforcement said [...].

The illustrator came from Cameron, North Carolina, where his relatives described him as quiet and generally opposed to guns. Martin’s cousin told the Associated Press that the family was staunchly pro-Trump.

“We are big Trump supporters, all of us,” Braeden Fields said. “Everybody.” He added, though, that Marin tended not to talk about politics.

Fields said Martin would regularly send a portion of his monthly paycheck to charity – and he had difficulty fathoming what authorities say his cousin had done on Sunday.

Martin’s family appear to have become alarmed by his disappearance over the weekend, posting on Facebook that he was missing. A missing person’s report was entered into a national database after the Moore county sheriff’s office in North Carolina received a report from a relative early on Sunday morning...

To read the entire article, click HERE.