Steven M. Moore's Blog, page 4

MECHs vs. Clones and Mutants…

I’ve written several trilogies. The “Inspector Steve Morgan” trilogy is the most recent; it’s basically a continuation of the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series, and “Revenge at Last,” a novella in the free PDF download of the same name, almost made Morgan’s trilogy into a series (and still might, depending on my energy reserves). Three other trilogies,, “The Last Humans,” “The Mary Jo Melendez Mysteries,” and “Clones and Mutants,” are quite different. One difference is that they have stro...

Another “successful” prediction?

Long ago when I began to write the first parts of Survivors of the Chaos (the first novel in the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy”), I had a premonition that fascist oligarchs like Elon Muskrat, the big Bezos bot, and the other tech fascists attending Trump’s inauguration and kissing his McD’s butt, were plotting to own the world. Later even Hollywood movies like Blade Runner, Alien, and Avatar echoed that fear of fascist capitalism I had and Putin and Xi have now popularized in the autocratic world. (...

Sometimes you win a few…

Despite the attacks from Bezos and his bots that screwed up the Amazon listings of the first two novels in the series, the post-apocalyptic novels found in “The Last Humans” trilogy don’t do badly at their job in portraying a possible and terrible future most of us who are sane wouldn’t want. In that sense, they are a warning of things to come.

Consider the worldwide contagion that wreaks havoc in the first titular novel The Last Humans  (Black Opal Books 2019). Readers won’t learn its source ye...

Friday Fiction: “Revolution!”

Revolution! A Sci-Fi Fable…

Copyright 2025, Steven M. Moore

The middle=aged man code-named Zorro, host of the meeting, tapped his wineglass to bring the group to order. “Welcome, my friends.”

He smiled at the ethnic mix of women and men seated around the old table in the game room above the old pub’s main floor. All of them were patriots who, as refugees living in Canada, had organized the American resistance.

“We will now take the final vote on whether we’re ready to end the fascist reign of th...

Kid gloves…

“I’ve no use for fascists, no matter how they’re labeled.”—Detective Rolando Castilblanco in The Collector (Carrick Publishing, 2014).

Sometimes readers send me more personal critiques of my stories, although the more public reviews can be snarky as well. Any author has to have a thick skin, of course–there are a lot of trolls out there!—but both kinds of critiques, the personal and public ones, often make me wonder if maybe I should call for someone to do a mental health intervention, maybe off...

The social-media pandemic…

It’s not just about TikTok. Sure, the Chinese are using it, one, to brainwash its users, especially America’s youth; and two, to collect data about Americans to facilitate that brainwashing and other insidious things. But I saw that early on and never signed up to use it. (I’m paranoid. I don’t believe the fascist MAGA maniacs are the only ones out to get me. Xi’s assassins might be planning their revenge against me for writing Fear the Asian Evil, although the title hides the fact that it’s abo...

“And miles to go before I sleep…”

I’m at a point in my life when it’s obvious that there are many more days in my past than those remaining in my future. In other words, I’m beyond my expiration date or shelf date and must prefer for the inevitable. Maudlin thoughts entering the new year 2025? Maybe. In my stories, human mortality is always part of the plot, though, so it’s difficult to not be morbid at times, especially when I kill off a character!

N Scott Momaday taught me to love poetry, but I could never create any of my own...

Time travel done right…

“From the moment I picked up your book until I put it down, I was convulsing with laughter. Someday I intend to read it.”—Groucho Marx

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I’m certain I’ve posted about this topic before and certainly wrote about it in the end notes of A Time-Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse (most of my novels have end notes although I expect that few readers read then). But from The Time Machine to The Time-Traveler’s Wife speculative fiction novels have played fast and loose with the contradictions of t...

Kayla Jones…

Kayla is the kick-ass young female protagonist in Origins, the first novel of the “Denisovan Trilogy.” AB Carolan hasn’t yet written the other two, but he says he’s working on them. Personally, I think Origins can stand alone as one of the best “ancient civilizations”-type sci-fi mystery and thriller novel, a wonderful, adventurous, and grand mix of fiction, sociology, and archaeology,,,but I’m biased, I suppose. [wink, wink]

Eons ago on Earth (our real Earth, not a fictional one), different gro...

Three of my favorite young female heroines…

In a previous post, I’ve considered my strong female adult characters, Esther Brookstone, Mary Jo Melendez, and Penny Castro, protagonists from three different series, but what about those strong young ladies from AB Carolan’s novels, the “ABC Sci-fi Mysteries for Young Adults” [wink, wink]. My Irish collaborator from Donegal, Ireland, designed those stories to take place in the same sci-fi universe as my “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy” (which also has a plethora of kick-ass adult heroines who predat...