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.