I’m into some heavy research right now, trying to make some headway on a story of mine that ties together the lives of HG Wells, Moura Budberg, RH Bruce Lockhart, Constance Coolidge, Gorky, Stalin, a Malayan woman of the time named only Amai (Lockhart’s first “wife” if common-law marriage had applied to “natives” in the Empire), and many more figures, locked together with questions central to the later work of Wells, SF and nonfictional futurism alike. (It’s a story I considered attempting at Clarion West, before going, but which I realized, after I’d arrived, I would have to research a …

Something I’ve been thinking about is that moment in certain Philip K. Dick novels (for me, UBIK and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said come to mind first for some reason) where reality just suddenly shifts, turns itself inside out, and you–the dear and much-blessed reader–follow along, feeling the “Woah!” and maybe some of the “Huh?” but not so much that you feel disoriented beyond the effect of, say, a few glasses of wine. Now, a lot of SF does this from page one, I know, and a lot of stories don’t necessarily involve any second-stage WTF?–though I think the …