The Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory

Hosted by writer and ranter Mookie Spitz, the SFFF is where science fiction & fantasy creators, fans, and technologists transform imagination into reality. Each episode explores how writers, filmmakers, and world-builders bring their universes to life, with personal stories about turning wild ideas into finished projects that connect, inspire, and thrill. From indie authors to visionary engineers, Mookie uncovers the creative engines powering the future of sci-fi & fantasy storytelling!

The Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory is a fiction podcast hosted by Mookie Spitz, with 66 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Mookie Spitz hosts The Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory, a fiction show with 66 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  Episode #68

  Blake Anderson's The Great Awakening Sounds the Alarm with a Cautionary Tale

  Sep 29, 202653 minS2

  Blake Anderson joins Mookie in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Factory to talk about The Great Awakening , his debut novel built around an amazing premise: every person on Earth shares the exact same near-death-style dream overnight, wakes up transformed, and watches the world's tribalism dissolve into universal empathy. Blake traces the idea back to a debate he watched between Ben Shapiro and Alex O'Connor about religion and open-mindedness. As an atheist, he started asking himself what kind of message would actually convince him God was real, and he landed on the premise driving the whole book, a single unmistakable dream reaching every person on the planet at once. Mookie and Blake dig into how fast that utopia curdles once security, control, and a group of "Unawakened" holdouts enter the picture, and why that fictional bargain, suffering traded for a manufactured paradise, mirrors real anxieties about AI right now. Both trace the same pattern through the internet, mobile phones, social media, and now AI: each wave arrives promising connection and enlightenment, and each one ends up cutting the opposite way once it takes hold. The conversation also covers Blake's own road to writing it. After thirty years at Microsoft across Xbox, Azure, and Office, he retired, started a life and wellness coaching practice, and only found the story once he forced himself to actually stop and rest for the first time in decades. He and Mookie compare notes on using AI as a brainstorming partner without letting it anywhere near the actual prose, a line both writers insist on holding. Blake also shared his best practices on how he's getting his book seen as an indie author, including running a Goodreads giveaway to build reviews before pushing paid promotion, prioritizing podcasts whose audience is into speculative fiction, and using compelling marketing tools to gain attention with hopes for an adaptation. Meanwhile, he's got a sequel in mind, with the first two acts mapped out and the third still waiting to arrive the same way the original idea did. For an engaging and thought-provoking read and a fresh take on the often tainted core of "positivity," Mookie recommends the novel. The Guest Blake Anderson writes at the intersection of consciousness, transformation, and speculative fiction. His work explores what happens when identity dissolves, belief systems shift, and individuals are invited into deeper awareness. Beyond fiction, Blake is also a transformational coach, helping individuals navigate personal awakenings, life transitions, and purpose-driven growth. His coaching work mirrors the core themes of The Great Awakening—clarity, inner alignment, and conscious evolution. Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, he earned a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Washington and spent thirty years in the tech industry, including more than two decades at Microsoft across Office, Bing, Xbox, and Azure teams. He's also the founder of Honu Perspective, a life and wellness coaching practice. The Great Awakening won the Literary Titan Book Award. https://blakeandersonauthor.com/ Want to be on the show? Have feedback? Send Mookie a text! Support the show

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  Episode #67

  Dungeon Crawler Mookie: How Indie Authors Become Publishing Sensations

  Sep 24, 202648 minS2

  Mookie flies solo on the Science Fiction and Fantasy Factory podcast to unpack why Matt Dinniman's Dungeon Crawler Carl has become the decade's breakout indie sensation, and why the rise looks almost identical to one that happened ten years earlier with Andy Weir's The Martian. Both writers built an audience from nothing on a serialized platform, both let readers shape the story as it grew, and both books ended up capturing the mood of the exact moment they were written in: Weir's post-Obama optimism and faith in institutions against Dinniman's post-pandemic dread and distrust of the systems running the show. Mookie breaks down the LitRPG genre for anyone unfamiliar with it (video game stats and leveling systems woven straight into the prose) and walks through Dungeon Crawler Carl's premise: an alien syndicate flattens the surface of Earth, drops a few million survivors into a deadly multi-level dungeon, and broadcasts the carnage across the galaxy as entertainment. He digs into what Carl and his ex-girlfriend's newly sentient, thoroughly obnoxious cat Princess Donut represent, and why Dinniman's satire of media, influencer culture, and institutional rot lands so hard right now. What both authors did to break out: Built a real community first (Weir's mailing list, Dinniman's Royal Road serialization and Patreon) before ever chasing a traditional deal Took reader feedback seriously enough to let it influence the story itself Expanded across formats once the core audience existed, from Jeff Hayes' audiobook narration to Ridley Scott's Martian adaptation and Dungeon Crawler Carl's own NBC Universal miniseries Mookie also name-checks prior podcast guests Mallory and Matthew Kent for their own takes on the LitRPG scene, and Recontour Press's push to get young readers, boys especially, back into books. Then he ties it all back to his running argument that art erupts from its era rather than from any single genius, and he bets Dungeon Crawler Carl won't be the last indie phenomenon to break out this way. If Weir's decade proved hope sells and Dinniman's decade proves dread sells just as hard, the real lesson for indie writers is to stop trying to write a genre and start reading the room. Want to be on the show? Have feedback? Send Mookie a text! Support the show

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  Episode #65

  Gus James' The Xeno Files: Alien Sex, Bad Decisions, and a Damn Good Time

  Sep 11, 20261h 25mS2

  Gus James, author of The Xeno File and The Terra File, joins Mookie on the Science Fiction and Fantasy Factory podcast to talk about his evolving trilogy. Gus is an Oregon attorney by day, spending his hours fighting insurance companies, and a first-time novelist who wrote his debut purely to make himself laugh. When an early reader sent him detailed notes on proper three-act structure and where certain beats were supposed to land, he read every note and ignored almost all of them on purpose, reasoning that his story should be his, so screw the rules dictating how it's built. That instinct runs through everything else the two discuss: leaning on dialogue over exposition, skipping the show-don't-tell orthodoxy whenever it's in the way, and letting a down-on-his-luck lawyer narrator named Jim Braxton just talk his way through a plot that starts with him discovering, mid-threesome, that one of the women involved is an alien. From there Mookie and Gus trace his literary influences back to Christopher Moore and Jason Pargin, share the enduring appeal of an ordinary, unqualified guy thrown into extraordinary circumstances, and swap theories on why alien abduction stories dominated pop culture for decades and then vanished (Gus's answer: they didn't stop, aliens just got better at it; Mookie's answer: the South Park pilot with Eric Cartman getting an anal probe made these stories impossible to take seriously anymore). They dig into the current, ongoing drought of good storytelling in film and television, why legacy franchises keep alienating longtime fans by moralizing, and why LitRPG and lighter, funnier genre fiction might be exactly what's needed to pull disengaged young male readers back into books. Gus then shares his blunt, funny take on why marketing his own book has been harder than writing it, his inventive guerrilla marketing (alien-probe punch cards left at bus stops and restaurant tables, an upcoming booth at a UFO festival, homemade merch from a sewing hobby he picked up during COVID), and Mookie's optimistic reframe of AI scraping content for training data isn't a threat to indie authors, and instead is free, constant exposure to interested audiences. The Guest Gus James writes absurd, fast-paced stories about aliens, bad decisions, and people who probably should’ve stayed home. His debut novel, The Xeno File, is a chaotic road trip wrapped in a conspiracy to save the planet. He lives in Oregon and insists most of the bad decisions in his books are fictional. Get his books, sign up for his newsletter, and find out more on his website: https://goosedown.square.site/ Want to be on the show? Have feedback? Send Mookie a text! Support the show

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  Episode #64

  A.G. Meier's Champions Awakening: Interstellar War, Settled One Duel at a Time

  Sep 8, 202657 minS2

  A.G. Meier joins Mookie on the 64th episode of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Factory to talk about Champions Awakening , his debut novel and the first book in the True Power saga. Adam's been telling stories his whole life, long before he ever sat down to write one. As a kid, he was the one at the family cottage every summer who'd get a dozen cousins gathered around a campfire and make up scary stories on the spot, purely from instinct, reading the crowd as he went. That same impulse carried straight into adulthood, where, behind the wheel for hours at a stretch, he'd build entire scenes in his head, characters, conflicts, whole worlds, working out how to get from one dramatic beat to the next just to keep himself entertained on the road. He calls it always being "in Storyland," and he means it literally: once he builds a character enough in his own mind, that character becomes real to him, with a voice, a personality, and a will of their own on the page. A separation, raising three kids largely on his own, and eventually meeting a partner who gave him the time and encouragement to actually sit down and write finally turned decades of daydreaming into a finished manuscript. Once he started, he wrote for four hours a day, every day, for three straight months, discovering along the way that he's a committed "pantser," someone who knows roughly where a scene needs to land but has no idea how he'll get there until he's actually writing it. The novel imagines a great interstellar war resolved through single combat, each planet birthing its own champion to fight on its behalf rather than risk mutual annihilation, and Adam walks through the specific, almost logistical daydream that sparked the idea in the first place. He and Mookie dig into how personal the book still is despite being pure invention, his own dog appears as a beloved character, his father inspired another, and how a good soundtrack playing in his head while he drives can build an entire scene before a single word gets written. Their conversation is about the particular kind of person who can't stop imagining entire worlds and at long last found a way to get them out of his head and onto the page. The Guest A.G. Meier is a Master Electrician from Hamilton, Ontario, and the author of Champions Awakening , Book 1 of The True Power Saga, published under his own imprint, Gold Crown Empire. He grew up spending summers at his family's cottage in Northern Ontario, where he first started telling stories around the campfire for his cousins. More books in the Gold Crown Empire universe are already underway. Visit his website: https://www.goldcrownempire.com Get Champions Awakening: https://www.amazon.ca/Champions-Awakening-G-Meier/dp/B0HD696TDK Want to be on the show? Have feedback? Send Mookie a text! Support the show

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  Episode #63

  Dennison Smith's The Westward Hours: Nightmare of a Sacrificial America

  Sep 1, 20261h 15mS2

  Dennison Smith joins Mookie in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Factory to talk about The Westward Hours , a genre-blending literary dystopia landing in the US and Canada on September 8th. The premise starts from something genuinely real: in the 1970s, corporations quietly floated the idea in Congress of declaring the strip-mined Four Corners region a formal "sacrifice area," officially exempt from cleanup or accountability. It never made it to a vote. In Dennison's near-future America, that idea won by default: everything west of a single line in Kansas becomes exactly that, a sacrifice area, plundered for resources once corporate power fills the vacuum left by a government that climate catastrophe finally broke. Dennison and Mookie dig into what makes dystopian fiction actually work, tracing a line from Orwell's 1984 through Brave New World to the genre's current moment, where writers increasingly find themselves less warning about a possible future and more describing one already arriving. Dennison's own approach sets her apart from the genre's usual playbook. She's a committed "pantser," writing from character and sentence rather than outline, and describes how a minor supporting character seized control of an earlier novel entirely, and how two of Westward Hours' most magnetic, morally ambiguous characters emerged the same uninvited way. The novel took her a full decade to write, and she's candid about how history itself caught up with her mid-draft, what felt speculative when she started reads uncomfortably close to current events now. The conversation goes somewhere unexpected too: two and a half years Dennison spent living in the New Mexico desert after finishing the manuscript, learning to weave with a Navajo community, and how Native American conceptions of time, where the past isn't fixed but recurring, directly shaped both the novel's title and its structure. They range across Nabokov, Pynchon, and Norman Lear's famous miscalculation with Archie Bunker, land on a shared, sharp point about how modern media distorts our sense of scale and catastrophe, and, by accident, discover they grew up as neighbors in Chicago's suburbs decades ago. The Guest Dennison Smith is author of The Westward Hours and two previous novels, The Eye of the Day and Scavenger , as well as a collection of poetry, Fermata . She holds both an MA in Creative Writing and a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from University of East Anglia in the UK. She was founder and creative director of The Baldwin Gallery and Curatorial Team (London, England), curating dialogue between arts, cultures and nature and specializing in representing contemporary fine art by indigenous North American artists, whose lands stand at the front-line of Climate Change. She is also an interdisciplinary theatre artist and fiber artist. American and Canadian, faced with the recent sea change in US politics, she now makes her home in Alentejo, Portugal. More from Dennison Smith: https://www.dennisonsmith.com Get The Westward Hours: https://www.amazon.com/Westward-Hours-Dennison-Smith/dp/1739521167 Want to be on the show? Have feedback? Send Mookie a text! Support the show

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