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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Picture this: Washington goes broke, auctions off the Capitol and the Grand Canyon, and walks away. No taxes, no cops, no courts. On this 74th episode of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Factory, Mookie asks Jeff Jefferies, author of Carter's World: 2084, the obvious question about the America he dreamed up: utopia or dystopia? Jeff says he'd happily live there, and he thinks life would be "okay."

Not awesome. Not paradise. Just okay. Most political novels promise heaven if their side wins, their detractors calling it hell, the outcome lost in the ideology. Jeff offers a world about as fair and unfair as ours, minus the government, which makes the risk of throwing it all away worthwhile. His modest expectations set a sincere tone for everything that follows.

Jeff picks up where Ayn Rand left off. Her 1957 free-market epic, Atlas Shrugged, ends with America collapsing while her genius millionaire industrialists hide out in a Colorado valley. Jeff wanted to know what happened to everybody else. So he drops Carter, an ordinary eighteen-year-old, into the aftermath. In Carter's world, insurance companies write the law, uniformed agents collect restitution with fists and worse, and charity stands in for the safety net. Orwell gave us too much government. Jeff gives us none and lets the chips fall.

And they fall hard: sex, violence, scams, and sudden death ricochet through Carter's world, and Jeff doesn't hold back. Mookie, a self-described "libertarian light," sank his teeth into this book and came out a fan and a skeptic in equal measure. He loves Jeff's honesty while pushing back at his optimisim: if insurers make the law, enforce it, and judge it, haven't we just rebuilt the state under a new logo? Jeff swings back with reputation, the freedom to pick your own judge, and capitalism lifting all boats.

Then comes the twist: libertarians hate his libertarian novel. Their sacred non-aggression principle, Jeff says, has nothing to offer once somebody throws the first punch. His novel starts with that punch, and ends with the Yoda of the novel thinking the world might finally be alright. Mookie calls that refusal to sugarcoat human nature the story's secret weapon, which makes it more honest and realistic than Rand, and more fun to read. And stick around for Mookie's closing dare: write a sequel that changes a skeptic's mind.

The Guest

Jeff Jefferies wrote Carter's World: 2084, his first work of speculative fiction. He grew up in Bourbonnais, Illinois, and lives in the Chicago suburbs. His background in real estate and law shapes the novel, which imagines America three decades after the federal government dissolves. He is now writing a sequel.

The Novel

https://cartersworld2084.com/

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Mindy Indy sprinkled actual dirt on a watercolor to make Mars look like Mars. Then she gave it a pink sky, because she can. That's her whole AER HEAD philosophy: every page hand-made and crammed to the margins, because the creativity and the creation is most of the fun.

On the 73rd episode of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Factory, host Mookie catches the Brooklyn comics creator fresh off New York Comic Con, where she worked the floor in a beanie with a QR-code sandwich board strapped to it. Her comic follows Aereo "Aer" Zephyr, a teen surfer and lifeguard in futuristic New San Diego who dreams the future, spots a planet-killing solar flare, and drags his gang off Earth. Issue two is surfers in space. Issue three sends the surfers to Mars. Add telepathy, migraines, a plant-growing twin, a wind-bending twin, a Jetsons-meets-anime world, a dad whose coffee machine goes nuts, and an Archie-style love triangle, and you get fifty pages per issue of pure zing.

Mindy opens the vault on ten years of doing it the hard way: a sketchbook lost four sketchbooks ago, digital inks in Clip Studio, hand-painted watercolor backgrounds, and a Kickstarter to pay for a letterer, a colorist, and a trade paperback of issues one through three. Publishers once shrugged at her anime-flavored portfolio. Now they sniff around, which proves her theory: do your own thing, and your people find you.

Mookie brings his Horton Hears a Who theory of being an artist: climb the tallest building in Whoville, grab the megaphone, and yell "We are here." Mindy lives it. She sketches on the subway, posts to Instagram above ground, and wears the QR-code hat to the cons. Along the way, she plots a superpowered memoir about New York, admits she can't casually do laundry during Comic Con week, and vows to finish the series before she dies.

Join her Kickstarter while it's still hot!

The Guest

Mindy Indy is an independent comic writer and illustrator based in Brooklyn, New York, and the creator of Aer Head, a sci-fi comedy series about a teen surfer and lifeguard who sees the future in his dreams. A Michigan native and former graphic designer, she now freelances, teaches art, designs for nonprofits, and has illustrated five children's books. Her work has hung in Atlantic Gallery in Manhattan and Honey Badger Motel Art Gallery in Brooklyn. She draws AER HEAD by hand, inks digitally in Clip Studio, paints her backgrounds in watercolor, and funds each issue through Kickstarter.

Contribute to her Kickstarter.

Visit her website.

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Brits and Yanks speak the same language, yet their speculative fiction often dreads very different futures. Martin Grace, curator and contributor of Future Britains, joins Mookie on the Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory to dig into an anthology of 22 near-future stories by British writers, and what those stories reveal about a country wrestling with its own identity in 2026 and beyond.

Future Britains started as a contest between Martin and his father, fellow sci-fi writer Nick Grace: who could hit 3,000 words first? Martin won. His story, "Implanted," turns his hometown of Portsmouth into an island prison for dissidents in a Britain that bans human art and hands every song, painting, and book to state-controlled AI implants. On the train home from his day job as an AI specialist, he posted a note on Substack asking whether other British writers wanted to imagine the future of their own hometowns. Within 24 hours, two dozen said yes. Then came the panic: he knew nothing about publishing a book.

Nine months and significant hair loss later, the book launches October 23. Martin walks through how strangers became a collective: three-writer beta teams named after sci-fi greats, editor Evelyn volunteering to proofread and copyedit 80,000 words, and a firm rule that every story unfold this century, close enough that readers think, "That could happen to my kid." The stories sorted themselves into a concept-album arc of political unrest, human identity, machine life, civil war, and the end, closing on a vivid fable.

Then the conversation crosses the Atlantic. Mookie, the son of Hungarian emigres who grew up in a house that didn't speak English, reads Britain's fears against America's. Yanks dread plutocracy and runaway corporations. Brits aim their punk energy at politicians, the surveillance state, and AI as an instrument of government. Martin explains why Britain's closest answer to Elon Musk makes vacuum cleaners, and why his country still struggles to reckon with an empire whose slave-trade money built its stately homes and whose collapse sent his own family fleeing Uganda under Idi Amin.

Martin flips the question: what makes American sci-fi so American? Mookie's answer: spectacle. Dungeon Crawler Carl's gory intergalactic game show, Brandon Sanderson's $41 million Kickstarter, and SpaceX Starship launches that wreck their own launch pad. The two compare the Fresh Prince of Bel Air with Fawlty Towers and the two versions of The Office, and land on the core contrast: American fiction goes big and aspirational, British fiction goes small and intimate, down to a newspaper and a few extra rations at the local Tesco.

They close on ideas for a franchise already in motion, with Future Germania perhaps next and Canadian writers knocking. Plus Mookie's own work in progress: the sequel to Jonnie Fazoolie and the Transfinite Reality Engine and an interactive audiobook that casts the listener as the main character.

The Guest
Martin Grace is a speculative fiction author and musician whose stories are inspired by his interests in space exploration, technology, and our beautiful blue planet. Martin serialised his debut climate fiction novel, The Moon Talker, and its spin-off, Lunis-One, on Substack, and is the publisher and curator of the Future Britains anthology.

Pre-order Future Britains (paperback and ebook) on Amazon.

Special edition hardback with extra artwork: https://solstories.co.uk

Martin Grace on Substack: https://martingracewrites.substack.com

Sol Stories on Substack: https://solstories.substack.com

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Patrick Abbott takes St. Paul’s advice to "test everything" seriously, whether the subject is a scheming flapper vampire, an alien civilization’s faith or a 1946 ghost rocket over Scandinavia. Patrick returns to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Factory after his first visit, when he and Mookie dug into his novels Fallen and Risen. This time the two Substack buddies explore how a writer holds faith and skepticism in the same hand, and why a little absurdity keeps us sane enough to take the serious things seriously.

The conversation opens in Savannah, where Patrick's Paranormal Detective Agency serves as his annual Halloween release valve. He traces Debra, Max and Fred back to his attorney father, the video game Grim Fandango, Flannery O'Connor's "Christ-haunted" South, and the Oz Museum in Wamego, Kansas. From there, Patrick explains why he takes UFO and ghost claims seriously enough to demand evidence. His grandfather's unexplained cattle mutilation made it personal, and an intelligence-community method taught him to weigh probability against confidence. He and Mookie take on a media landscape where institutions have collapsed and confirmation bias has rushed in to fill the vacuum.

Then come the big questions: Pope Leo's take on AI, and why Patrick refuses to let a machine write his stories. Autonomous drones and the future of warfare. The Fallen saga, now growing into a four-book series, and the deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan that shaped its hero. Patrick tells the overlooked story of America getting it right: the Potawatomi and Pawnee alliances, Vice President Charles Curtis, and tea with tribal elders that accomplished what force couldn't. The episode closes on the Fermi paradox, possible traces of life on Mars, the 1946 ghost rockets over Scandinavia, Black Elk, and whether aliens might worship the same God we do.

Grab Savannah Paranormal Detective Agency 1 and 2 on Amazon. Book 3 posts a new chapter every Wednesday this October at patrickabbott.net, with the finale landing on Halloween.

The Guest

Patrick Abbott writes speculative fiction and investigative nonfiction with a Catholic heart and an analyst's eye. His Fallen series (Fallen, Risen, Dormition, and the upcoming Assumption) is a psychological military sci-fi saga about first contact. It draws on his deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan and his work with people living with combat-related PTSD. His comic paranormal series, The Savannah Paranormal Detective Agency, returns every October as his Halloween gift to readers. On Substack, he digs into UFO history, religion and culture with an evidence-first approach.

Find him at patrickabbott.net.

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Robert Biehn first dreamed up The First Stone at fifteen. Twenty years and eight rewrites later, he's finally launching a novel that's also building a world readers can step into and claim as their own.

On the 70th episode of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory, host Mookie Spitz, an official Grafter Corps member according to Biehn's faction quiz, talks with the author before his debut lands. The First Stone, book one of the Exousia Chronicles, arrives in early January 2027. The YA dystopian fantasy follows siblings Cass and Evelon through a world that runs on law, metal, magic, and power. Cass wants to protect his sister. Evelon refuses to stay his little sister. That tension comes from Biehn's own childhood, when he felt responsible for protecting his older sisters, and his story asks who you are when your powers, titles, money, and relationships disappear.

Biehn's launch plan starts from one rule: serve the reader. He treats fans as citizens of the world, not customers, and he has built the machinery to prove it: a faction quiz that sorts readers by moral choices instead of favorite foods, a puzzle game with faction leaderboards, a Discord chat, a weekly lore newsletter, dual-sided Cass and Evelon cards with trackable QR codes, and a new quiz that matches readers by the moments they loved in books like Mistborn. He also has one conversation at a time with his growing fan base and community, from Facebook videos to a grocery bagger with a dragon tattoo, and he plans live book experiences with character voices, an original song, and games.

Biehn calls himself a hybrid author, and explains why. He passed on offers from bigger publishers, wary of notes that change characters to chase a demographic, and chose Storyteller Media for the freedom to run these experiments. The publisher adds Macmillan distribution, industry know-how, deadlines, and a stamp of approval, and its sister company, Curiosity Entertainment, could fast-track the books toward film and TV.

The Guest

Robert Biehn is a hybrid author and the creator of the Exousia Chronicles, whose first book, The First Stone, is a YA dystopian fantasy launching in early January 2027 from Storyteller Media with Macmillan distribution. A sales and marketing veteran who once hosted the tech podcast Digital Dilemmas, he spent twenty years developing the series and rewrote the manuscript with Michael Braff, the editor behind Red Rising. He pairs that traditional backing with indie-style direct marketing: a moral-choice faction quiz, a puzzle game, a Discord community, a weekly newsletter, and live book experiences. He and his wife are narrating the audiobook together.

Visit exousia.world and get your pre-launch copy. or visit Amazon.

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