Chuck Wendig: Terribleminds

Heracles was raised to revere his Auntie Hera, Goddess of Family. As he grows up to become the strongest man in the world, he spreads word of her glory and raises a family of his own. Then an Olympian God strikes, driving him mad and destroying his family. Shattered, Heracles embarks on a series of labors, confronting the greatest minds and monsters in the world to find which Olympian is responsible. The only god he still trusts is Auntie Hera.

There’s one problem: Hera is the one responsible, and she’ll do anything to hide the truth. She’s always detested Heracles, the illegitimate child of her husband Zeus. As Goddess of Family, Heracles is a living insult to her entire being. She only realized what she’s set in motion once it was too late, and now Heracles discovering the truth would destroy them both. She must keep him from solving the mystery. Desperate, she stalls by sending him off to face impossible monsters, but each time he winds up adding another creature to a newfound family. A family that could wage war against the entire heavens.

Yes, this is a story where Heracles tries to befriend every bloodthirsty monster in the world.

The legend of Heracles was one of the first things my parents read to me, and I definitely pretended to be him as I ran shirtless around my backyard. As I grew up, I wondered about all the gaps in those stories, like why Heracles wasn’t more haunted by his actions, and where the heck Hera went after starting everything. Writing this book was about finding a beating heart in the mythology. I learned a lot, including…

MY FAVORITE GREEK HISTORIAN WAS A FRAUD

Ever since college, I’ve loved this little green book called The Library by Apollodorus, translated by the famous James George Frazer. The Library is a concise collection of Greek myths, often telling an entire myth in a couple of pages. It’s so plain, never pausing to dwell on the magnitude of what’s happening. The old generation of gods has been wiped out? Next. A huge war comes to a bloody conclusion? Next.

But “Apollodorus” was a popular name in ancient Greece, and sometimes Romans would write under that name when they wanted to sound authentic. The “Apollodorus” who wrote The Library was an impersonator, living centuries after the time of the actual Greek Apollodorus, and long after the time of Homer and Sophocles. Historians often call him “Pseudo-Apollodorus.” He was trying to garner fame by collecting the great Greek stories in a single space—a library, of sorts—while also mixing some Roman values into them. Such cultural prickles wound up influencing my book in ways I won’t spoil.

HERACLES HAD A TWIN BROTHER (WHO WASN’T A DEMIGOD)

Heracles’s story is weird from his very conception. One day Zeus spied an attractive queen named Alcmene. Being the absolute worst, Zeus decided to woo her by shapeshifting to look like her husband, Amphitryon. That night, Alcmene conceived the demigod Heracles, Zeus’s new favorite son. You’d think the story would end there, with everyone mad at Zeus. But no.

It turns out that Alcmene and Amphitryon were super into it. They hopped into bed and, in defiance of medical science, conceived a second child immediately. This child was Iphicles, totally mortal, no superpowers whatsoever. Iphicles and Heracles coexisted as wombmates, and then Iphicles immediately cut in line to be born first.

If you think this is weird, imagine being Hera: both Zeus’s wife *and* Goddess of Fertility, meaning her phone was blowing up all night.

EVERYBODY YADDA-YADDAS THE GIANT BULL

One of the issues with Heracles retellings is that after a few labors, the audience gets tired of him punching yet another giant animal. It starts with an invincible lion and then moves to a many-headed hydra. After that, do you really care that he’s fighting a really big boar?

So many versions turn the middle labors into a montage. He chases a deer, he fights a bull, who cares, what else is on? For a story that is essentially about twelve amazing feats, storytellers clearly find some more amazing than others. It actually gets funny, looking out for which labors an author skips over.

If you know my writing, you know I love monsters. My answer in all these cases was to explore the personality of the creatures. What is life like for a boar on an otherwise desolate and abandoned mountain? Which other hunters have come after it before? By treating the creatures as characters, many of the middle labors became my favorites. Having a Heracles who collected the animals in a found family rather than fighting them allowed so much more meaning to pour out.

HERACLES’S WIFE DOESN’T HAVE TO DIE

Among the many retellings, Megara often lives! My novel pivoted the moment I realized this. The classic story is that Heracles is driven mad by the Furies, and in his madness he slays his wife and children. He destroys the very family life that Hera is supposed to enshrine and protect. Everything he loved is gone.

But as I read more historians and versions of the Heracles myth, his wife Megara kept popping up. One time, she saw him off on his labors and wished him luck. Then at the end of Heracles’s labors, she appeared and married Heracles’s nephew. There was even an anonymous poem about Megara commiserating with Heracles’s mother over how their family was destroyed.

She was very busy for a dead person.

Megara’s fate changed wildly depending on who was telling it. Realizing that I wasn’t mythologically obligated to fridge Megara changed how I breathed. The entire book pivoted. While grief over loss is important to Wearing The Lion, this change allowed both parents to process the grief in different ways. I got to dig into the clash of their attempts to help each other,  how they succeeded, and how they failed. The entire arc of the book changed with Megara’s influence.

NAMES MEAN THINGS? WHAT A CONCEPT!

Heracles wasn’t born with that name. He was “Alcides,” named after an ancestor of the mortal family. There are several explanations for why he took up his new name, but it always means the same thing: “Glory of Hera.” It carried a bitter irony, given how much Hera hated him.

This scheme of new names with serious meanings runs through Ancient Greece. Take Diomedes as an example. Meaning “Cunning of the Gods,” it was a powerful name, suggesting a brilliant tactician. That’s why everybody wanted to be Diomedes. Heracles tangled with a Diomedes who owned man-eating horses. A while later, another Diomedes popped up alongside Odysseus and Achilles in the Trojan War. Yet another Diomedes tried to conquer Hindu-Kush around 95 BCE.

They all wanted the cool name. Every kid on the playground wants to be Spider-Man.

This practice was so common that Heracles wasn’t even the only “Heracles.” Other people sought to suck up to Hera for luck.

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About John Wiswell:  John Wiswell is a disabled writer who lives where New York keeps all its trees. He won the 2021 Nebula Award for Short Fiction for his story, “Open House on Haunted Hill,” and the 2022 Locus Award for Best Novelette for “That Story Isn’t The Story.” He has also been a finalist for the Hugo Award, British Fantasy Award, and World Fantasy Award. He is the author of Someone You Can Build a Nest In, a Nebula award winner and Year’s Best pick by NPR and The Washington Post, and Wearing the Lion. He can be found making too many puns and discussing craft on his Substack, johnwiswell.substack.com.

Wearing the Lion: Bookshop.org | Libro.fm | B&N | Amazon

The year is 10151. For the last ten thousand years, Nick Hindman—a microbiologist and member of the prestigious research team the Centauri Project—slept in a state of cryogenic suspension as a quantum-powered system originally designed for interstellar travel propelled him forward through the millennia, a test subject for an emergency project to secure the survival of the human species by colonizing not the stars, but a deep future Earth. His protocol? 1) Survive. 2) Find if there are any other humans left alive. 3) Hope against hope for the arrival of a second test subject, a female.

Featuring a plausible mechanism for one-way time travel, a voyage across the post-apocalyptic seas, and lovers separated by ten thousand years, The Afterlife Project is a meditation on the future of humanity and the natural world we have unbalanced, the true meaning of deep time, and the possibility of hope in the darkness.

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Dark fiction is good for you.

One of the things fiction does better than any other art form is to allow us to vividly experience the world through a consciousness not our own, imagining alternative lives and alternative futures—sometimes very dark ones—from the relative safety of our favorite reading nook.

Dark fiction isn’t for everyone, but if you like it—if you’re drawn to the writing of Stephen King, for example, or Shirley Jackson or Margaret Atwood or our own Chuck Wendig—then it’s possible that you’re the kind of reader for whom the horrific offers a particular kind of reading pleasure.

Because let’s face it: there’s power in darkness. It’s an essential source of narrative drive for one thing—what keeps the pages turning—and it’s also a healthy response to personal stress and the ongoing shit-show of current events.

Putting ourselves in the position of fictional characters as they confront tense and difficult challenges, then processing those experiences and the emotions they evoke into wisdom or at least working theories about life, is a cathartic, healthy, uniquely human practice. “We need to play out our fears within the safe confines of the imaginary,” wrote Ian McEwan, “as a form of hopeful exorcism.”

Life on this planet is going to be okay in the long run. But humanity? Well . . .

if there’s one piece of wisdom I’ve taken away from researching and writing The Afterlife Project, it’s that we’re not facing the end of the amazing, ever-evolving panoply of life on Earth. Far from it. Rather, we are—or should be—facing the end of the illusion that the human species is not part of nature. That we haven’t from our very emergence as a species been embedded in the ebb and flow, the stew and ferment, of this complex and beautiful 4.5 billion year-old planet. The widespread adoption of this way of thinking would be a timely and necessary paradigm shift. Because it’s still not too late to save ourselves.

One-way time travel into the deep future isn’t all that far-fetched.

Part of the inspiration for The Afterlife Project was a conversation I had with an eminent astrophysicist in Tierra del Fuego (it’s a long story) who was kind enough to give me his opinion on the plausibility of one-way time travel into the deep future. Using quantum physics and a series of complex mathematical equations scribbled on napkins, he was able to theorize a mechanism based on existing or easily foreseeable technology to send a test subject 10,000 years into the future.

There are good reasons we should want to explore this option—for example to facilitate the kind of interstellar travel that would us to colonize the nearest viable exoplanet, or, as in the case of the team of scientists in The Afterlife Project, to colonize a deep future Earth after the current iteration of humanity has done its worst.

Time’s a river, not an arrow

Time doesn’t actually exist in the way we perceive it. It’s not an arrow, it’s a river. This is mathematically proven.

The water in the river of time does flow downstream, but if you were to trace the river back upstream a few miles you would find the same water flowing between the same banks—so in a certain sense all the moments that have ever passed are still unfolding.

Because of the way it feels for us to live in our aging bodies, it’s almost impossible for us to to accept this truth intuitively, but rest assured: it’s one of the fundamental precepts of physics.

Forget about the market. You really do have to write what’s in your heart.

I know you’ve heard this before, but you really need to listen. I know novelists who haven’t listened, and it never ends well.

I mean it’s okay to think about the market before you start, and you’ll need to think about it eventually if you want to pitch and sell it, but don’t focus on the market when you’re writing!

I wrote a weird, dark novel. I didn’t set out to make it that way, it just happened. It turned out to be one of those books that felt like it was being dictated from on high, though, and when a story feels like that—when it starts to tell itself like this one did, you just ride the wave and hope for the best. As a well-known Mexican novelist and filmmaker recently reminded me, you’re writing for your own particular “species.” You just have to trust that there are other members of that species out there, and that they will find your book.

Learn about the market, of course; study it and understand your genres. But if you try to write purely for the market, the muse will turn her back.

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Tim Weed is the author of three books of fiction. His work has won or been shortlisted for the Eric Hoffer Book Award, the Writer’s Digest Annual Fiction Awards, the Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction, the Fish International Short Story Award, the New Rivers Many Voices Project, and many others. Co-founder of the Cuba Writers Program, Tim is on the core faculty of the Newport MFA at Salve Regina University. His new novel, The Afterlife Project, was a finalist for the Prism Prize in Climate Literature and Uncharted magazine’s Novel Excerpt Award.

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The Afterlife Project: Bookshop.org | B&N | Amazon | Audible | Podium

Elsa has felt awkward and out of her depth for as long as she can remember. In a world where one’s Animal Affinity is a sign of maturity and worth, Elsa’s inability to demonstrate hers has become more than a disappointing nuisance; it’s a narrowing path.

Obscured behind the curtain of society’s disdain, she has no confidence that she’ll ever conquer her Plainness. Frustrated by her failure to fit into their picture-perfect life, Elsa’s family grows more intolerant of her by the week. Her boss, a seven-foot-tall rage demon, is one clawed step away from setting loose his temper and firing her––or worse.

And on top of all that, her cat wants to eat her. Things could be better. But that’s not the direction they’re heading.

A violent gang of wolves prowls the streets of Elsa’s neighborhood, harassing Plain Ones. With the pack’s presence becoming stronger and its threat more real, Elsa’s life is rapidly plummeting from lackluster to perilous.

Her only bright spots are her cousin and a co-worker who seem to know her better than she knows herself. But even though they can see through to what society won’t, will that be enough to protect Elsa from making a drastic choice? In her desperation to shed her Plainness, how far will she go to evolve?

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When I first sat down to write Elsa’s story, I wrote one sentence: “Elsa’s family has become meaner than usual, her job is awful, and she has a nagging suspicion her cat wants to eat her.” Then I wrote a page. The next day, I wrote another. At that time, I had no idea where the story would go, but I knew it would be fantastical. As that first draft emerged, I recognized Elsa’s challenging situation in life wasn’t of her own making, and her struggle to find agency would be at the heart of everything. That was a relatable story. It wasn’t necessarily an easy one.

Sometimes you have to write hard things.

Maybe I’m a romantic, but I like stories whose characters end up okay, especially when they deserve to. In my much younger years, I was sometimes accused of “pulling my punches” as a writer. But literature is about conflict and characters making awful choices and sometimes terrible things happening. As writers, it’s important not to shy away from that when the story calls for it.

While finishing an earlier draft of A Narrowing Path, I received news that a friend from college had died, accidentally and quite tragically, on vacation with her family. Thinking through the news and manner of her death subconsciously overlapped into my revisions. The main character, Elsa, makes tough choices when it looks like she doesn’t have enough options to make good ones. I don’t usually write fiction based on the real events in my life, but the way I wrote that part of Elsa’s story was absolutely influenced––and improved––by the way I was processing my grief.

Never underestimate the importance of close cousin relationships.

I have almost two dozen first cousins. I grew up with my extended family all around me, all the time. It was great! Growing up, I was not a naturally popular child and could count the number of classmates I was friends with on the fingers of one hand. While other kids at school had sleepovers and played softball together on the weekends, I could depend on Sunday afternoons at my grandparents’ house with all the aunts and uncles and cousins. We kids were mostly left to our own devices, and I made a practice of observing interpersonal dynamics from a young age, a skill that later would help me tremendously as a writer.

If I was unpopular at school for not being sporty and living too far inside my imagination, when I began writing short stories, things got worse. The first time I read one of those manuscripts, about an epic battle between angels and demons, to my class in fourth grade, the response I got was muted at best and othering at worst. It was clear I needed to keep that nonsense to myself and just read Louisa May Alcott like the other girls. Shout-out to my cousin Paige who handed me her brick-shaped mass market copy of Little Women on the first day of summer that year, a book I devoured so ardently that reading it at the start of every summer became a tradition.

Elsa’s family is complicated. Some of them treat her badly because of how she’s disappointed their expectations of what her life should be. But she has one cousin, completely disconnected from the morass of her parents and sister, who represents a safe, if somewhat dispassionate, haven for her. Cousin relationships are important to me, and they find their way into my writing a lot.

I write slowly; it takes time to layer all the “literary” stuff in.

When my husband and I bought our first home, we moved from an 800-square-foot apartment to a 2,600-square-foot house in the suburbs. We were able to furnish most of that house with the stuff we’d previously crammed into four rooms in the artsy part of town. One friend who helped us move in commented, “It’s like all your furniture has room to exhale.”

A Narrowing Path is a more expanded story than its original form, Finis. When I signed with my new publisher to turn the Animal Affinities books into an integrated trilogy, Elsa’s story gained room to exhale, too.

My first drafts come slowly. Some would call me a pantser or discovery writer; while writing this way feels more artistic, it takes longer. But I’ve made peace with it, because as I go through each draft, revising individual sections as my critique group tackles them before pressing forward with the next, meaningful features––character development, metaphor, themes––weave themselves into the plot. The prose improves. Storylines find their intersections, the foreshadowing becomes more subtle, the subtext blooms. Everything deepens. This is all to the good.

I love working with a small, capable press.

I’ve worked with multiple editors and publishers over the course of my career. Working with a really competent small/indie press has been amazing. In a publishing landscape that could be fairly called bleak and/or disappointing on any given day, it’s been a relief to know the people I’m working with not only prioritize and champion my books but also share my values about the industry. GenAI won’t be part of our process: the artists and designers are human and fairly paid, the editing has been done by humans, and this publisher isn’t going to feed my manuscript into an LLM without my knowledge, consent, or compensation. I always know what’s going on with my project. The transparency is profound; I feel lucky.

It’s necessary to make art during hard times.

By now we’re all intimately familiar with dystopian nightmare. Making art during times of existential dread/threat is tough, but necessary. Maybe literature helps us escape. Maybe it helps us process, maybe it inspires us. Maybe we just need more good stuff in the world to counteract the wretched.

When I was thirteen, one of those close cousins of mine, who was twelve, died suddenly from an illness. It took me decades to process that shock. He turned up in my writing over and over again: the primary way I was handling grief, even if I didn’t recognize it yet.

Things can be hard. My cousin is dead. My friend from college drowned in front of her ten-year-old. My friends are under attack from the government because they aren’t cishet white guys. The planet has a fever and someone is firing the scientists. That doesn’t mean writing is dead. That doesn’t mean I can’t respond to all of it with my art, and thereby help other people respond to all of it, too. And that inspires me to make more of it, to figure all this human condition stuff out.

Because I’m pretty sure that to survive this mess, I’ll need to.

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Angélique Jamail is an award-winning Lebanese-American author whose poetry, essays, and short fiction have appeared in dozens of journals and anthologies and been featured on the radio. The first time she read one of her short stories to an audience was fourth grade; the reaction to it was a character-building experience. Her other books include the poetry collection The Sharp Edges of Water, and she’s the creator of the zine Sonic Chihuahua. She serves on the Board of Directors for Mutabilis Press and is the Director of Creative Writing at The Kinkaid School. She resides in the Houston area with her family and their cats; she has otherwise lived inside her imagination pretty much her whole life.

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Angélique Jamail: Website

A Narrowing Path: Blue Willow | Bookshop.org | B&N | Amazon

“The Fermi is the fastest ship, and the deadliest weapon in the universe. We only need it to be one of those things.”

In this sequel to Fermi’s Progress, the Fermi continues its voyage across the galaxy, its faster-than-light engine vaporising every planet it encounters, forces unknown steering it towards inhabited worlds.

But now there is hope of a way out. An ancient, lost alien device that might negate the deadly side effects of the Alcubierre drive. As they voyage through dangers including a war-torn forest moon, a vampiric dinner party, and the terrors of their own imagination, will the Fermi’s crew find that escape?

Or will they be forced to confront the destruction that lies in Fermi’s Wake?

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1. Everything is made up

The spaceship Fermi is a worldbuilding engine (despite looking a lot like the precise opposite of that). It was designed so I could introduce new planets quickly and show you their weirdest and most alien bits. If you have questions about those planets like “But how would that economy function long-term?” or “Is there even enough biomass in that ecosystem to support a predator of that size?”, I definitely have the answers to those questions. Except oh, the planet just exploded, I guess now we’ll never know.

But I still put a lot of thought into how each planet works, trying to avoid the baked-in assumptions of a (Western, 21^st century) human society. Some things, like gender, are easy to blow apart and rebuild differently. But other times, you will start picking apart systems of measurement to try and find an alien alternative for a single line of dialogue, and discover once again that every unit we have can ultimately be traced back to an estimate of the length of a Mesopotamian farmer’s forearm.

A drum I love to bang is that good sci-fi shows us how much of what we assume to be universal (scientific, economic, moral) law is actually a convenient local assumption, but it’s still dizzying when you probe even a little bit into just how much that is true (So often it’s easier to just have your universal translator do the systems of measurement as well).

2. Sequels aren’t as much of a timesaver as you think

Fermi’s Progress was four novellas, but also very much one novel. So Fermi’s Wake really felt like my first go at writing a sequel. And writing sequels is great! You get to skip so much of the hard bit of starting a new book – establishing the characters, and the setting, and the rules of the story. Except I quickly found out you don’t really.

The beginning of a story is the beginning of a story, even if everyone in it had lives before it started (and you hope they did). You still have to do all the same jobs – you might know everyone’s name already, but you have to establish where they are now, whether that was two minutes or ten years from the last page of the previous book.

While we like to pretend characters are independent people running around inside our heads (and I do), they also exist to carry out a function, and that function is not going to be the same from story to story. So in a lot of ways, a sequel still feels like starting from scratch.

3. A bad draft can be more useful than a good one

When writing a Fermi novel, I write each novella, then go over each one in turn, then do another edit on the whole sequence before the final check and polish. Sometimes that first or second edit is easy. With the first story in Fermi’s Wake, I was rewriting the occasional sentence or paragraph as I went, occasionally tweaking the order of things for pacing, but that first draft was very similar in shape to the one you’ll buy.

The second novella, For the Trees, was completely different. Put bluntly, it sucked. It wasn’t just that it was bad – it was exactly wrong in every respect. The wrong characters were experiencing the wrong events, in the wrong places, with the wrong information, in the wrong order. People were in the midst of action that meant nothing to them, while the people who would have felt it most were sitting around waiting for plot to happen.

That first draft was so precisely wrong, it served almost as a perfect negative image of the good draft. That redraft amounted to almost a complete rewrite, and it was kind of exhilarating. The final result might be my favourite story in Fermi’s Wake – but it wouldn’t have been possible without that truly terrible first version.

4. Grim events don’t make for grim people

When I started on Fermi’s Progress, tone was a challenge. I had, intentionally, picked about the grimmest scenario you can imagine. A band of people who have lost everyone they ever cared about, and who know that everyone they ever meet is also doomed to die because of them. It’s a comedy.

It’s a comedy because I am physically incapable of Not Writing the Jokes, but I still wanted those deaths to matter, not just to be a glib punchline for each story.

But also, I’m here to write cool space adventures on alien planets. I didn’t want my characters spending their time sitting in dark rooms lost in their thousand-yard stares.

Fortunately, then the Covid-19 pandemic happened (Okay, I’m not entirely above a glib punchline). It was not the first globally bad thing to happen while writing these stories – I started writing Fermi in the twelve months before Brexit and Trump 1.0 kicked off – but it helped crystalise something for Fermi’s Wake that I think until then had only been subconsciously feeding into Fermi’s Progress.

Which is that when everything else is miserable, people don’t just stop. We make jokes. We get incredibly angry out of all proportion about things apparently unrelated to the source of the misery. We find little silly sources of happiness. And sometimes, on a really, really good day, we find ways to make things a tiny bit better.

The Fermi stories are about people trapped in and forced to maintain a machine that makes death, and Fermi’s Wake is when it really clicked for me why I relate to that so much.

5. Don’t hold back the good bits

The list of influences that went into the Fermi melting pot is a long one, and most of them are writ large in the book itself, but a big one is The Twilight Zone. I am an absolute sucker for a Rod Serling twist, that moment where you realise the two kissing faces you’ve been staring at have been a candle stick this whole time. There are definitely a few such twists scattered around Fermi’s Wake, but if you chase that high too far, you can easily trip into the “mystery box storytelling” trope, endlessly promising a good Rod Serling twist but never delivering the payoff. What makes The Twilight Zone such a presence today isn’t the twists, it’s that those twists capped off intriguing situations and characters we enjoyed spending time with.

I ended Fermi’s Progress with a few questions dangling over the Fermi and her crew, and in Fermi’s Wake you’ll get some of those answers much quicker than I think you’re expecting. If the promise of a future answer is how you keep your audience around, you’re not focusing enough on what’s happening on the page right now. And for me, the really interesting stuff is what changes once you have the answer, and what the characters do with it.

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Chris Farnell had his first novel published in 2006. Since then, he has written jokes for the TARDIS, the employee handbook for Star Trek Lower Decks’ U.S.S Cerritos, as well as chronicling the misadventures of the deadly starship, Fermi.

Adventures and supplemental material he has written can be found in the worlds of Spire: The City Must Fall, Legacy: Life Among the Ruins, and Star Trek Adventures. And between all that he writes for the likes of Den of Geek, Rock Paper Shotgun, Film Stories, and The Radio Times. He lives in Norwich.

Chris Farnell: Website | Bluesky

Fermi’s Wake: Landing Page | Season Pass | Amazon

When it first appeared on American television sets in 1993, “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers” was like nothing else on TV. The brainchild of Israeli-American music producer Haim Saban, the show stitched together segments from the Japanese children’s program Super Sentai with newly recorded live-action footage, and its unexpected popularity quickly cemented the Fox Kids Network’s reputation as a pop-culture powerhouse. Garish, heartfelt, utterly strange, and bursting with irrepressible energy, the show was a dramatic departure from the animated fare that dominated kids TV at the time, and came closer than any program before—or since—to being a “live-action cartoon.”

Three decades later, the Power Rangers are global icons and a billion-dollar business. In “Morphenomenal,” journalist and lifelong fan Joshua Moore delivers a deeply researched narrative history of Power Rangers—from its inception to today—and details milestone moments for the brand and show, as well as offering fresh looks at its thriving toy line and an adult fandom that can’t get enough of those “teenagers with attitude.” Drawing on original interviews, new research, and the kinds of insights that only a true devotee can bring, this is a bold and boisterous account of one of the most unusual and beloved franchises in pop-culture history.

REDISCOVERY IS UNDERVALUED

To say that Morphenomenal was written amid a tumultuous period for the Power Rangers franchise isn’t particularly illuminating, because unrest is the brand’s fuel.

Fans have fretted about Power Rangers’ cancellation since at least the late 90s, but their fears were finally realized when, last year, current brand-owner Hasbro ceased production of the show in New Zealand (where it’d been made for 20 years) and auctioned off decades of screen-used costumes and props. Understandably, a lot of fans — conditioned for 30 years to expect a new season of the show to arrive in front of their eyeballs (and oodles of accompanying toys to invade their bookshelves) — were distraught when that didn’t happen in 2024.

I was disappointed, but more for the people down under whose livelihoods were impacted than about the show’s “demise.” There are almost 1,000 episodes of Power Rangers to enjoy; if another was never made — and there’s zero chance of that being the case, because capitalism — the world it put into the world is so much more imaginative and inspirational than 99 percent of TV shows that have ever existed.

Through the course of writing, I intently re-watched about two-thirds of those episodes, an experience that affirmed some of my prior feelings about certain seasons (Time Force remains my all-time favorite), opened my mind to others (my 23-year-old self would be aghast at his 34-year-old self’s newfound admiration for Megaforce), and forced me to engage with the show on the deepest level I ever have. It allowed me to notice things I hadn’t before — like an incredible directorial decision in the final episode of season three, “Hogday Afternoon, Part II” that subtly calls back to the series premiere. (Read my book if you wanna know what that is!) I’m still seeing and feeling different things about the show every time I watch, and I have Morphenomenal to thank for that.

I’ve loved Power Rangers since before I was potty-trained, but I’m not sure I really appreciated it before embarking on this adventure. Certainly not in the way I do now. Even if the book were a complete flop, it somehow made me fall further in love with a show I’ve loved my whole life. I hope it can invigorate others, too.

A LOT CAN HAPPEN IN TWO YEARS … AND 45 MINUTES

July 2021: The idea for Morphenomenal originates in summer 2021 while reading Claire McNear’s Answers in the Form of Questions on a Florida beach.

December 2021: I begin pitching my proposal, developed through the aid of instructive podcasts and other materials put forth by New York Times bestseller Jennifer K. Armstrong (Seinfeldia) and Kimberly Potts (How We All Became the Brady Bunch). If you ever want to write a non-fiction book, I highly encourage you to, at a minimum, listen to their now defunct podcast #Authoring.

February 2022: My wife, Stephanie, and I get married. I wore Power Rangers socks and her garter had Power Rangers helmets on it.

June 2022: I make the scariest decision I’ve ever made in my life: I leave an awesome career of 13 years for another, in part, to support development of a book that might never come to fruition.

November 2022: Stephanie is pregnant after a few months of trying. (Fuck yea!) Our son, Jason, is born in August 2023, a day after his mother’s birthday. Based on the math, he was conceived around my birthday. What a legend!

February 27, 2023: I’m sucking down Coke in a local McDonald’s, determined to fire off one last round of pitches to agents before throwing in the towel for a year or two – our kid comes first. I send an email to a man named Mark Falkin at 3:12 p.m. His response arrived 45 minutes later. He becomes my agent.

May 18, 2023: Publishers Marketplace announces that Applause Books will publish Morphenomenal in spring 2025.

I don’t think my journey to publication is unique except in the ways that all journeys to publication are unique. Every book, regardless of genre, is different in its content but also in the life happenings that accompany us as we’re writing. No matter how many other books I write, none will ever come with another Jason. This contribution to the literary world was forged in its own cocktail of panic attacks, mid-diaper change piss missiles, and stinky milk hands. And that recipe is gone forever.

Embrace your current chaos. You might miss it.

BOOKS ARE BABIES

They both need to be fed. Neither is capable of walking on their own. You’ll want to reach for a bottle of Woodford Reserve after a long day with either. There’s no ideal way to raise them. And you’ll never know how much time you really have until they’re in your life.

Jason’s existence made it incrediblydifficult to focus on writing for a while. See, I was so worried about pitching the book to agents and then, once connecting with Mark, pitching it to publishers, that I didn’t actually spend a whole lot of time writing the damn thing until putting digital ink to my contract. At the time the project was publicly announced, about 10,000 words of the actual book-to-be — the prologue and first chapter housed within the proposal, and the start of a second chapter — existed in the 80,000-word narrative history I promised to deliver by April 1, 2024.

The final manuscript is closer to 90,000, and a substantial portion — about 60,000 words — was written over the course of three months, November 2023-January 2024. It was impossible not to spend every waking moment with Jason in the early-going; I might have written 1,000 words in his first couple months of life despite taking a month of leave from my day job. Guilt persisted amid the final flurry, but the threat of a breached contract is a good motivator. Good thing I’m used to deadlines!

EVERY PERSON SHOULD HAVE TO WORK AT A NEWSPAPER

Since 2009, I have been employed, in some form, by the Lexington Herald-Leader, the paper of record in Lexington, Ky., the state’s second-largest city. I started as a part-time news assistant, eventually became a full-time news assistant, then a full-time sports reporter, then left the paper for a job in marketing but stayed on as an “on-call” reporter.

Morphenomenal wouldn’t exist without the Herald-Leader. I didn’t study journalism in college but learned everything I needed to know within the walls at 100 Midland Avenue. How to edit something when you’ve only got space for about 300 words and the story from the Associated Press wire has 894. How to distinguish between bullshit and horseshit when a coach says in a survey that they’ve got the best player in their region. How to accidentally piss off a college offensive coordinator who’s now the head coach of the Jacksonville Jaguars. Newsrooms teach you so much more about yourself and the world around you, whether you ever actually want to work as a reporter. The best years of my working life were in a small-but-mighty one.

I’m not gonna overly belabor this point, but real journalism is the most vital organ to a functioning society, and I believe that its increasingly vestigial status in the 21^st century is what’s gotten us to the point where a sitting U.S. president can *insert whatever unknown batshit thing he’s done or said on the day this publishes* without repercussions.

If more people spent time with the newspapers and organizations dedicated to covering the people and places in their own community, instead of getting misled by a meme shared by a wannabe-actor-turned-grifter, well … y’know.

I SHOULD READ MORE (AND LESS)

A lot of writers say they read a lot. I am not a lot of writers.

I’m legitimately embarrassed to admit that I’ve read maybe 10 traditional books, cover-to-cover, in the last four years. (Including, yes, those mentioned above.) The last non-comic book work of fiction I remember completing was Tom King’s A Once Crowded Sky circa 2013, and even thatis experimental with its use of comic-book imagery and inserts. This is by no means a knock on comics – they were the reason I first picked up a newspaper! – but my brain would benefit from more colorless sustenance.

I am a lot of writers if “reading” is opened to the likes of newsletters, bite-sized and long-read pieces of journalism and observant and/or funny threads on Bluesky. I’d wager that I read 10,000 words a day, easy, and that’s probably underplaying it. But even when a thread posits the question, “Who would win in a fight, Goku or Mewtwo?” or an article breaks down the NBA MVP race, sirens call out from every pixel. “Take a hit of the good stuff,” they scream, waving toward the stockpile of doom that’s just a scroll away.

There’s only so much will-power a man can generate. But even one evening where a screen gets swapped out for a library book is one less evening spent stewing in a digital mud puddle. I might still get mad, but at least there will be more intention behind it.

JOSHUA MOORE is a freelance writer, marketer and on-air talent based out of Lexington, Ky. He loves and lives with his wife Stephanie, their son Jason, and two clingy cats, Maple and Steamboat. Morphenomenal: How the Power Rangers Conquered the World is his first work of non-fiction. He has self-published two books of poetry, No Fries and Dark Peace.

Morphenomenal: Bookshop.org | Barnes & Noble | Amazon

Joshua Moore: Website | Power Rangers Newsletter | Bluesky

Yesterday, the Chicago Sun-Times (and then also the Philly Inquirer) published an issue of their newspaper that included an insert about fun summer things, and in that was a list of fifteen great summer reads, blah blah blah. Harmless enough, until of course you realize that ten of those fucking books don’t fucking exist because the writer (“writer”), Marco Buscaglia, used generative AI to generate the list of books. (He also seems to have used it in the rest of the insert, as well.) It literally includes books by real authors that do not exist. It also bungles descriptions of existing books. And then? This went unvetted into the world, unexamined, untouched, unworried, unbothered. Someone straight up closed their eyes, hummed a song, and slammed a happy finger down on the YES PUT THIS OUT INTO THE WORLD IMMEDIATELY button.

The problems with this are so myriad, I do not think my blog has the bandwidth to publish them. I could rage-shriek terabytes of just angry ululations about how generative AI is a rash that pops up in places you don’t want it, which is to say, literally everywhere. A rash is underselling it. It’s a cancer, bloating into full on metastasis as its tendrils push through our entire information system like the shoots, roots and runners of an invasive plant out to crush everything under a mat of bedstraw and bindweed.

I’ll focus on two things.

First, this just continues to absolutely damage (and ultimately destroy) the fidelity of our information systems. We are fast approaching the point where the boundaries of fiction and truth have dissolved utterly, plunging us into a river of garbage puked up by billionaire computers and their mindless lazy-fuck users. Anything is true. Everything is false. We’re cooked.

Second, the push for AI is by billionaires and tech-bro “break everything and disrupt the world back into the stone ages” villains but it is one seized upon and urged forth by carriers like the writer (“””writer”””) of that article, Marco Buscaglia. That guy was like, “Ennh, I don’t really want to do all this work,” and so he took his brain out of his head, shoved the machine into his empty skull, and gave it a hard poke, telling it to DO SOMETHING. Generative AI is the tool of the lazy and the unimaginative, the slugabed bullshit artist, the idea-fetishist, the disinterested and callous, the ignorant eyes-forced-shut soft-boy dimwits, the people who simply don’t care enough to make the journey and care only to teleport to the destination, the people for whom work and effort and knowledge is all just an impediment to result, result, result. People who want to build a building but don’t want to ever understand how architecture works. People who want to take their driving tests in a Waymo. People who want cheat codes for everything in life. People who are definitely going to try to marry a fuck-bot someday*.

Here’s the trick, though —

These people are, unsurprisingly, rubes.

Because they misunderstand the fundamental problem with generative AI, particularly when it comes to using it for informational services —

AI doesn’t know anything.

I’ll say that again, a bunch more times, because you need to get that:

AI doesn’t know anything.

AI doesn’t know anything.

AI doesn’t know anything.

AI doesn’t know anything.

AI DOESN’T KNOW ANYTHING.

AI isn’t smart. It does not have ideas. It is not sentient. It does not think. It is, almost literally, a super-fancy lorum ipsum generator. It is you giving it the parameters of a block of text, and saying, “Fill this space with the shape of the thing I’m asking about.” It will conjure not an answer, but an answer-shaped thing. That is all it does, all it can do, and all it will be able to do. Sometimes, the answer-shaped thing will contain fragments of Actual Answer. Sometimes it’ll even get it pretty close to right on. A lot of times? It’ll pollute the answer-shape with lots of made-up answer-shaped shit. Because it doesn’t know. It literally doesn’t vet the information. It cannot think its way through the information. It has no brain. It has no soul. It has no wit, no awareness, no wisdom, no knowledge. It has, at best, the cumulative wit and awareness and wisdom and knowledge of whatever it has eaten — which is to say, whatever was stolen for it by the billionaire tech-bro shitheads, stuff stolen and then crammed into its wood chipper mouth. Then it whirs and chews and chips it all into a meaty slurry, then horks up partially-digested chunks of that wit/awareness/wisdom/knowledge into the shape you want. But all the material has been smashburgered together. It is now just ground meat.

Uncooked ground meat.

It is bad at the job they are telling you it does. Further, this bad job it does comes at quite the high cost: it ruins, as noted, our information fidelity; it is based on material not offered to it but stolen for it from actual human beings who did not consent to having their life’s work ripped out of their hands and casually tossed into the wood chipper; it is destroying the environment, guzzling water, eating power.

Generative AI is a consumer. It eats and eats and eats. And all it can do with that is either throw it back up, or shit it out. And neither its shit nor its barf are nutritious.

Stop using it.

Not for art. Not for words. Not for information. Not for learning, for writing papers, for grading papers, for composing articles, for reading and parsing articles, for farming ideas, for executing ideas, for photos or drawing or videos or shitty stupid AI slop memes.

It lies because it doesn’t know not to.

It plagiarizes because that’s the only way it can do what it is tasked.

It kills the world because everybody is demanding we use it and they’re cramming it in every digital orifice across the internet and across our devices.

Just say no to generative AI.

And definitely, definitely don’t have it write a goddamn article for you, and definitely definitely DEFINITELY do not publish that fucking article.

WTF JFC FFS.

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* I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to judge you for marrying your fuck-bot, I feel like that’s kinkshaming, and neither you nor your fuck-bot deserve that. Unless of course your fuck-bot is built using generative AI, in which case, it goes in the volcano, sorry.

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Anyway, buy my book or I perish in the abyss. No AI was used in writing the book, because art and story is by people, for people, and I am people. Also I’m not a lazy fucking rube.