I have a new story out in Neon & Smoke! “But with a Whisper” is a 1,000-word sci-fi tale about the futuristic fog of war, about manipulation, about individuality… It’s written in pentameter, because the world needs more pentameter.
The opening line (“She glitters as she falls amid the stars”) came to me in a dream, and the rest followed.
Enjoy!
Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Children of Strife” is the latest novel in his “Children of Time” series, and it’s delightfully weird.
Fair warning: this is not a standalone novel, and it’d make for an extremely confusing entry point for new readers. This novel combines every single sentient species (well, almost) featured in previous books, as well as a surprise appearance of a species that had been just barely mentioned much earlier.
Unlike the previous books, which mostly took place in one timeline, “Children of Strife” takes place in three different (but overlapping!) timelines. I especially liked a Machiavellian new character who will hopefully star in her own prequel. The way the timelines overlapped in alternating chapters reminded me a lot of the first season of Westworld, which was filled with delicious misdirections and surprises.
It’s hard to describe the premise of the book without spoiling it… Let’s just say it deals not so much with any one particular species, but with big questions of identity and consent and immortality and being very very careful what you wish for, because you might just get it.
A lot of the themes in the book make fun of billionaires and particularly the self-absorbed idiots that were glorified in Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.” There’s also lots of interesting commentary on AIs, on being able to choose your own identity, and a lot of other hot topics. I must also add that the book has quite a few genuine LOL moments – not something you see often in hard sci-fi! I got a review copy, so I’m honour-bound not to quote anything in it (things may change before the publication day), but take my word for it – it’s pretty funny.
If you enjoyed Inception or Red Dwarf or Matrix or any of the previous novels in the series, you’ll love this one – and that’s all I’ll say, eh. I give this novel a solid five stars.
Kudos and thanks to NetGalley for providing an ARC of the novel in exchange for an unbiased review!
Release date: March 17, 2026
Preorder it over here.
I have a new short story out in Foofaraw!
“The Weapons of World War IV” is my satirical intepretation of Einstein’s famous quote – because war is absurd by definition, and because it should be satirized, always and by all means
I hope you enjoy this 600-word flash story.
(Just now, a friendo informed me that Ray Bradbury’s 1952 story “A Piece of Wood” deals with the same premise. I’ve just read it over here, and it’s excellent. Also, good thing ideas can’t be copyrighted, eh?)
Week 3: this week was special. I’ve decided to tackle magical realism and specifically the sub-1,000-word flash format. Each word had a purpose. The end result is a 996-word tale of Shintoism, and small gods, and belief as an act of self-care – not as a way to show off.
Week 3.1. “Rights, Wrongs, Lefts” – a 100-word drabble written on a very long walk through Tokyo’s chilly streets. That one wasn’t even part of the plan – it just happened, eh. And then, ironically, it became my first 2026 to be published. Life can be funny like that.
Week 4: got a bit carried away! I once had a particularly terrible boss when I was a warehouse grunt. Those memories have stayed with me, even over a decade later. I finally felt confident enough to turn them into a story, but it kept growing and growing…
Anyway, now I have a 8,592-word hard sci-fi novelette and a new mini-quest: trying to find a market that would buy something this long. My previous longest story was 5,300 words long.
Good times. Good times…
Week 5: decided to finally write down a pretty dark story (inspired by true events!) that’d been bouncing in my braincicle for quite a while. The end result is a 2,580-word sci-fi noir story. Quite an underappreciated subgenre, that. In a way, it’s a complete opposite of solarpunk. You know, you absolutely know that there won’t be a happy ending… And in my opinion, that adds a certain beautiful element of fatalism.
With luck, I’ll finally be able to break into The Dark or The Deadlands with this tale!
I have a new story out today in Black Cat Weekly #230 – huzzah!
“To Rue, To Revel, To Revert” is… dark. Not going to sugarcoat it. In a world of holograms and brain chips, true justice means rewriting the soul. Any tyrant’s talents can be repurposed to serve our society, but not the way you’d imagine…
This story is about who you think it is, yes, but also every other tyrant like him. I hope you enjoy it.
2026 has been good to me thus far. I’m very very proud to announce a new published sci-fi short story. “To Dream of Better Worlds” poses a simple question: what if prophetic dreams are more than just dreams?
This story was a great way for me to combine some of my passions: sci-fi, strange history, and things that are undeniable but (thus far) unexplainable. For the record, every quote in that story was genuine – there was no misleading editing, eh.
I hope you enjoy the story! And afterwards, please feel free to check out the rest of the stories at Horrific Scribblings.
Here you go: https://horrificscribblings.com/to-dream-of-better-worlds/
My newest published story (the first of many this year!) is in the winter 2026 issue of The Colored Lens.
It’s part of my growing opus of time travel-related works (all of which are interlinked), and I had lots of fun adding my own spin to some of those old tropes.
This story is about the ethics of changing – or not changing – the timeline on a grand scale. It’s about the secret origin of Valkyries. It’s about cold calculations compiled into a cruel-seeming codex. It’s about the third and final chances…
The opening line: “When you’re a time traveler, every hour is a happy hour.”
Enjoy, eh.
Such a small world.
The bus that took me from New York to West Reading, PA had two other filmmakers: Vanessa and Kathleen, the co-creators of the wonderful “Five Flights.” We chatted a bit before boarding the bus and then shared an Uber to Marriott’s. (Reading Film Festival provided two free nights to every filmmaker, woot!)
Our names were on the VIP guest list, so the check-in took literally seconds. The organizers gave me a bag of festival swag, two filmmaker badges (alas, I had no companion… but that meant double the drink tickets!), and an XXL-sized T-shirt due to the L-size mix-up. If I ever get a gf who likes wearing oversized shirts as pajamas, this will work great, eh.
After stashing my loot in my posh suite, I joined the first of the three separate filmmaker happy hours that night. In between, there was a 2-hour film block, but I can’t recall what was in it for the life of me.
And so it went the entire weekend: fun films all day long, all the beer and wine we could possibly ask for, and delicious food. By my guesstimate, there were about 40 visiting filmmakers (the local ones didn’t get the free hotel suites), and many new friendships were forged.
I showed off my very first film, “Please Don’t Send Help,” to quite a lot of applause and a fun Q&A with the audience and the event’s host. Along the way, I talked about my technique (making films solely with public domain footage) and trash-talked AI (which was really too easy).
The film block just before mine was “Animation and AI.” Three real animated films, three that were AI garbage. The sole filmmaker from that block who attended the event gave a brave, passionate speech: he’d spent months of his life creating and perfecting his short film, and it was slotted with that slop… The audience gave him one helluva ovation. One audience member actually asked the host to clarify which of the six films were AI slop.
That was a recurring theme throughout the weekend. Lately, AI cultists have been either bribing film festivals to accept their slop or downright spamming their submissions with infinite pieces of AI-generated videos. Each film festival that surrenders and accepts AI adds a bit more legitimacy to those dishonourable thieves. We’ve recently lost Telluride…
As far as I can tell, the Reading fest has added that section for the very first time. (This was their 11th annual festival.) I don’t think they’d anticipated the amount of backlash and anti-AI sentiment they would get. I told the festival’s runner that it would’ve been great if all AI-made (or AI-assisted) films had had a little mark next to them in the program. (It doesn’t have to be a scarlet letter, but that’d be nice.) I’m curious to see if that will happen…
Along the way, during my 55-hour stay in that town, I took very quick trips to see an old firewatch tower, the pagoda built by an eccentric German, and a small but sturdy castle where we had our very last (and small) afterparty on Sunday.
I also took an early-morning walk through downtown: they have so many beautiful murals, so much random street art… There must be something in the water!
I didn’t win any awards (and honestly, wasn’t even expecting to), but on that Sunday morning, I found out that I won the second place in the “Best Comedy SciFi Short Film” category at Brooklyn SciFi Film Festival. My first-ever film festival win – I’m honoured beyond words, and will ride that high for a very long time. (Also, now I get to add “award-winning” to my artist bio – huzzah!)
That Sunday night, after all the goodbyes, and promises to visit one another, and cake, and beer, I stood at the same bus station I’d arrived at, awaiting the bus to Philadelphia for my red-eye flight to Colorado. While waiting there, I realized two things: the “made in Reading” part of the festival was rather enticing, and the area right around the dark bus stop was quite picturesque… That resulted in me jogging around the block (backpacks and all) and filming just about everything on my Android phone. Got about 3-4 minutes of footage out of it: I’ll see if I can transform that into a short urban fantasy film. (For added difficulty, it’d have to be edited entirely on my phone: my computers are in storage in Quebec.)
The bus ride to Philly went well, but I can’t say the same about my bizarre experience with the city’s transit system at 11pm… After the second train suffered an identity crisis mid-ride and dropped me off in a weird-looking neighbourhood, I finally called a taxi. The driver was over-the-top apologetic for the way his city welcomed me. Good guy. Tipped him well.
And then… A night – and not even that – spent at the airport. People – and I use the term loosely – who thought it was fine to play loud videos on their phones at 1:20am as we all waited for the ticket counters to open. A 5am Frontier flight to Denver by way of Orlando, as well as a reminder why I rarely fly Frontier. My backpack cost me $70 since it was a carry-on item. The woman next to me in line was moving, so she had five gigantic (and bright-pink) pieces of luggage. They charged her $900 to check all of that in. She almost started crying… But ultimately accepted their terms.
Such a strange little world.
And meanwhile, a plane was waiting to fly me far away, to the Colorado mountains…
Grigory Lukin.com 