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These books are the future. I loved them and really hope Daniel Suarez writes more set in this awesomely utopian/dystopian thriller tech world. Damn, they resonated with my world view and my ideas of human tubes and human plus so much. All kinds of s...

I’ve been told I sometimes write in a flashbang style. This has manifested itself in several kinds of feedback- - I can’t read for more than 10 minutes at a time. It’s exhausting. - Some of the sequences left me really feeling the pain the main char...

The White Root mine is old, so old that only the faintest outlines of its bones remain. Squint hard and you might see fragments of its ribcage scattered over the hillside, parts of a cracked skull just visible through the topsoil. Once it must have b...

I really wanted to like this book. Ever since Michael Marshall Smith wrote his sci-fi trilogy of One of Us, Spares, and Only Forwards, I thought he`d be one of my favorite authors. My first novel (as yet unpublished ) was influenced by his breezy f...

Last week I talked about character motivation- filling in the gaps between what characters want and why. It`s a fundamental part of story architecture- that the good guy wants something and will fight to get it. But probably more important than what...

During Japan`s real estate Bubble in the 1980`s, theme parks were the investment to make. They couldn`t fail. Sink millions into expensive construction, land, and man-power, and ride the surging economy to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. A...

Takahashi Minekichi was a rural Japanese strawberry farmer with a vision. For 21 years he carved the beginnings of a grand hotel into the solid rock wall of a cliff face on his land, digging out the contours only he could see. He did it all alone, us...

What has the DM`s screen got to do with writing? Well- I`m still working on my Dawn* books. I`ve sent them out to agents and got a lot of no`s in reply, with zero personal correspondence. So I`m trying to make them better. Here`s some of the feedback...

The old curiosity shop in Takadanobaba has been a mystery to me for a long time. I first spotted it passively years ago, before I lived near here, most likely on a trip to the Blue Parrot second-hand book store. It’s built in red-brick, or at least t...

Kcymaerxthaere (née Kymaerica, pronounced `ky-MAR-ex-theere`) is an alternate world. It exists over and above our own in a system of 29 `gwomes`, only 4 of which are actually Kymaerica (an early name for the world). It was discovered by Geographer-At...

Out of Ruins needs your input! This site is constantly evolving- as anyone who`s been reading for a while knows. It began as a blog about Japan, entitled Big Red Dot, after the big red dot in the middle of the Japanese flag. It then moved through inc...

It turns out they knew about Global Warming back in 1989. They knew about the problems of pollution, the reliance of any one country on any one fuel source, and to boot they knew about religious terrorism. Howard Weinstein wrote ‘Power Hungry‘ with a...

Jeju island at the southern tip of South Korea is (apparently) famous for three things- wind, rocks, and beautiful women. I didn’t see many of the latter, but can attest to both of the former, plus a fourth- haikyo resort hotels. Without really going...

Even the seasoned haikyoist is wary of haikyo phones- they are one of the myriad unseen dangers of haikyo. Alongside other well-known hazards such as poisonous mushrooms (don`t eat them!), yakuza packing hand-guns (don`t antagonize them!), and saprop...

In the Texas desert near the little town of Marfa, on a stretch of Highway known as the loneliest road in America, sits the Prada store that got left behind. No attendants bustle behind its chic white counters, though it`s fully stocked with veblen b...

If you`re into haikyo, you`ll probably already know about Haikyo Deflation Spiral. If you don`t, let me introduce you. It`s one of the top sites on the web for Japanese ruins. Compared to all the other Japan ruins sites (twodogs, ruins-site, etc..) i...

And so we come to the first of the Peter David books. Peter David is something of a legend in Trek fandom; for his prolific output and incredibly entertaining render of the Trek universe and crews. His book `Imzadi` about the origins of the Riker-Tro...

We set up the machine guns in the barn, weighing their tripod legs down with heavy chunks of firewood. When the men were shepherded in they saw the black gun muzzles and began to panic, shouting out warnings to their fellows in back. We answered with...

The avout Mexicoate writer Caso Andrade (25th century CE) may refer to Carhenge in a passage from his Bibliotheca historica. Citing the 24th-century CE historian Hecataeus of New Europa and “certain others”, Andrade says that in “a land beyond the Di...

It was a hectic morning for us. We shipped out of Muynak three hours before the dawn, and a sharp Uzbeki wind swept us far over the Aral. First mate Alisher worked the rigging, Nursultan primed the nets, and I set us on a course to drift towards the...

One day a giant went to play in the Namibian desert. He made a toytown village out of bits of things he found lying around; the husks of scorpion shells, desiccated bones, sand-sifted diamonds, and brightly colored plaster. He lined up his toytown ho...

Before you stands a gate. It rears 7 meters high and the fence it bifurcates stretches on for as far as the eye can see. Its walls glisten and seem to move with a life of their own. Across their endless expanses giant figures burrow, retreating behin...

The sky is black with ash-fall. People are standing in the streets, looking up into the fog. They hold out their hands, and little mounds of grainy black stone gather. Down the clay-walled guinnels of the town you hear the cathedral bells ringing a d...

Survivors by Jean Lorran really took me by surprise. It is a surprisingly good book, and a refreshing new take on both Data and Tasha Yar. Did anybody else know Data had ‘flirtation routines’ that made him more popular with the ladies than even Riker...