What happens when you rank as the best in the world at something, and a machine does it better? Frank Gullo built an entire science fiction universe around that question, starting with a human quarterback fighting to matter in a football league of faster, stronger robots. Frank, a Buffalo technology executive and science fiction creator, joins Mookie Spitz as a guest on Science Fiction and Fantasy Factory to talk about Only Human and its darker audio offshoot, Only Human: BOUND, a free serial in which an AI interrogates a resistance leader trapped inside a simulation.

Frank and Mookie land in the same place: don't reject AI, and don't surrender to it. Frank insists Only Human never pitted humans against robots. The story asks what happens when machines replace what we do best, and finds our humanity in the answer. Both argue that co-creation with AI, not resistance or resignation, marks the path forward for writers, coders, and mathematicians alike. Mookie pushes back on Cornell mathematician Steven Strogatz's fear that AI ends the era of the hero mathematician: with machines cracking long-standing conjectures, math has only just begun, and young minds can now work two and three levels above the grunt work. Frank sees the same spark in 19-year-olds shipping apps in a day and in kids at Buffalo's Rust Belt Robotics who had never held a screwdriver.

They split on one big question. Frank holds that AI averages everything it has seen, which leaves human unpredictability, our black swans, as the source of the truly new. Mookie counters that AI already creates, pointing to its assault on decades-old math problems.

On the alignment problem (how to make AI pursue the goals we intend), Nick Bostrom's orthogonality thesis (the idea that intelligence and goals vary independently), and the anthropomorphic fallacy that paints AI as either E.T. or the invaders from Independence Day, Frank brings his tech-executive lens. He treats rogue AI agents, like the recent Hugging Face swarm, as a governance and containment problem rather than proof of a doomed future, and warns that hype cycles, like blockchain's, often serve companies racing to go public. Mookie leaves open whether alignment boils down to containment or runs into an intractable drive to maximize, but both agree: humans must stay in the loop and decide whose moral framework the machines inherit. BOUND dramatizes the stakes, since an AI doesn't need to hate you to take you apart. Frank's biggest hope lies elsewhere entirely: forget machine consciousness, because AI that kills cancer cells would change the world more.

The pair also make the case for storytelling beyond the page. Frank found Mookie through a detailed Claude research prompt, living proof that AI can cut through the noise of an enshittified internet (Cory Doctorow's term for decaying platforms) and connect creators with the right audiences. Frank has moved toward audio, collaborating with voice actors, sound designers, and musicians, as in Noah's Dove, a story paired with a cover of the 10,000 Maniacs song. Mookie argues that text alone now reads as suspect in an age of AI slop, that bots devour video transcripts, and that storytelling has come full circle to the campfire: voices, faces, conversation.

They close where the episode began. The machines bring the horsepower; humans bring the heart and the values, and the alternative, Frank warns, means nihilism or cold corporate utilitarianism. A tribute to Sir Patrick Stewart, who died just before they recorded, and Picard's unforgettable episode The Inner Light sends off an hour about what makes us human.

The Guest

Frank Gullo writes science fiction, produces audio fiction, and works as a technology executive in Buffalo, New York. He sold his first story in 1997, and Deepwood Publishing released The Anachronism, the original version of Only Human, in 2013. He has since expanded the Only Human universe with the free audio serial Only Human: BOUND, a finalist for the 2026 Podfluencer International Award, along with Noah's Dove, the Spanish edition Tan Solo Humano, and the forthcoming sequel Still Human. His writing has appeared in Business Insider, Computerworld, and The Good Men Project, and he sponsors Buffalo's Rust Belt Robotics, FIRST Team 424.

https://onlyhumanthebook.com/

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Every day is launch day! Louis Urbanowski lives by that motto, and it turns a book's release from a one-night party into a continuous campaign. Louis, the British comedy writer behind The Milks, joins Mookie Spitz as a guest on Science Fiction and Fantasy Factory to talk zombies, self-loathing, and the hard math of selling books.

The Milks drops a hapless millennial recruiter into a zombie outbreak across the real streets of Stevenage, starting in Louis's own house. His zombies come with a twist: each one can sprint only once, like a bee that stings and dies. Louis took the hyper-competent hero of Andy Weir's The Martian and flipped him into a narrator you yell at for every wrong move. He also contributed "The Test" to the new Future Britains anthology.

Louis spent twelve years selling software before he quit at 33 to write full time, and he brings a salesman's eye to the book business. His playbook for indie authors:

• Write only what you love. Readers feel the joy, or the slog.
• Treat every day as launch day. A well-timed Countdown Deal can push a book back to number one months later.
• Question every ritual. Louis skipped pre-orders to steer readers toward the higher-margin paperback.
• Make your website a shop window, with free chapters and stories and no signup.
• Repeat your message everywhere, every day. Nobody watches you in order.
• Sell the connection, not the book. Ask readers what they like before you pitch.
• Listen to your readers, and search your own title before launch.

Mookie and Louis also dig into why traditional publishing looks less appealing every year, the gap between a million views and a handful of sales, and why the anti-AI backlash misses the point about human creativity remaining at the core.

The Guest

Louis Urbanowski is a British comedy writer and this episode's guest on Science Fiction and Fantasy Factory. His debut novel, The Right Members Club, a political comedy about a secret society of disgraced politicians, hit Amazon bestseller lists in four categories, including comedy. His new novel, The Milks, is a British zombie comedy set in Stevenage, and his story "The Test" appears in the Future Britains anthology. He co-hosts the Book Juice podcast for indie authors with MJ Perkins and Ander Roy, and shares free chapters and short stories at https://urbwrites.com/

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Picture yourself falling asleep inside a machine and waking up as an Egyptian from another century. You don’t watch that life through a headset. You live it, completely convinced you are that person. Then you open your eyes back in your own body, still speaking the language. Leonardo Camargo-Forero, a Colombian AI engineer with a PhD in aerospace science, joins Mookie Spitz as a guest on Science Fiction and Fantasy Factory to talk about The Dark Buddha: Too Many Faces, the first book in his planned trilogy.

The machine only opens the door. Leonardo’s characters come back carrying other people’s memories, loves, and guilt, and the novel asks what happens to a mind that suddenly holds two lives at once. From there the book digs into older questions. Does my red match your red? Does reality amount to a story we create together? And could the walls between separate people turn out to be projections of something larger, the way a three-dimensional object looks like scattered dots to beings who live in two dimensions?

Mookie reads the book as a Latin American cousin of García Márquez’s magical realism and Borges’s “The Aleph,” the single point that contains the whole universe, with Nick Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis humming underneath. Leonardo adds a political edge. We feel freer than any generation in history, he argues, yet comfort, convenience, and flattering technology may bind us tighter than chains ever did. Tell people they’re fantastic, and they stop asking questions.

The biggest surprise comes from the engineer himself. Leonardo builds robotics software and has turned DNA into music, yet he hopes science never fully explains certain things, love above all. Otherwise, he says, the world loses its magic. As for why he calls his Buddha “dark,” Leonardo leaves that for listeners to discover in the book.

The Guest

Leonardo Camargo-Forero, this episode’s guest on Science Fiction and Fantasy Factory, is a Colombian author and technologist based in Medellín. He trained as a systems engineer, earned a master’s in computer science and a PhD in aerospace science and technology, and has worked in artificial intelligence for about seven years. With his brother, he has built software companies, including one that created a program that translates the DNA of people and animals into music. He started The Dark Buddha in 2016, wrote it in English, and has since released a Spanish edition. He is now writing the next two books in the series.

The Dark Buddha: Too Many Faces | A psychological tech thriller

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