Featured Post
New piece in Adventitious magazine
Everyone should subscribe to this excellent spec-fic quarterly edited by Scott Beggs. Very proud to have a short piece in it.
Genre Exercises
I write speculative fiction, cultural criticism, humor, and journalism, with a particular interest in retrofuturism, video games, fandom, and forgotten corners of pop culture history. My work has been published by Wired, Rolling Stone, Slate, McSweeney’s, Adventitious, The Daily Tomorrow, Alta Journal, Flash Fiction Online, and Nature: Futures. I also publish the newsletter Pop Cultural Precursors.
My story was serialized by The Daily Tomorrow. Their synopsis: "a deathbed codicil, a savage sport, a mechanical replacement, and further complications? Join us for a healthful outing in Chris Baker’s marvellous 'A Duty of Care.' Happy hunting!"Subscribers can read an afterword about the story's making. https://dailytomorrow.substack.com/p/a-duty-of-care-full-story
If you could rewind time and erase your mistakes, would you use that power responisbly? Or would you be undone by undos? Read my piece in Futures: Science Fiction in Nature, and subscribe for more sci-fi flash fiction.I wish more science mags still published speculative fiction. We didn't know how good we had it with Omni back in the day...
As the legendary Berkeley effects house closes its doors, revisit the workshop where the handmade past of Star Wars and RoboCop collided with the digital future of Jurassic Park. Read my deep dive profile of special f/x wizard Phil Tippett and his magnum opus—a return to handmade stop-motion animation after decades of trailblazing work in CG animation.
Read my dystopian sci-fi horror about End Times Reply Guys. "I don’t enjoy playing the role of That Annoying Internet Guy who reflexively replies with hectoring know-it-all comments like 'Why are you surprised?' or 'How is this news?' But people force me..." Read it here
Sorry, Villeneuve and David Lynch. This version wins even though it never made it past pre-production... Read about it in my newsletter.
NEW NEWSLETTER: In 1985, an ambitious game simulated the ruinous long-term effects of a conservative political agenda on a Midwestern city. It now feels less like dystopian sci-fi and more like current events. Read it here.
Here are some fiction and non-fiction pieces I forgot to post about... LATEST POP CULTURAL PRECURSORS NEWSLETTER: Before there was Battle Bots or Real Steel or Pacific Rim or even Robot Jox, there was the Critter Crunch. Read the epic story of the world’s first robot death match at the 1989 Denver MileHiCon. I’m trying out a different format for this post—an online version of an 8-page zine. Read it here. History article presented as an 8-pg zine FLASH PIECE: I have a story in Flash Fiction...
I examined a tragic real-life event in Texas history through the lens of Mexican ghost ballads, dark fantasy pulp, EC horror comics, Swinging Sixties steampunk, spaghetti Westerns, sci-fi manga, & a psychedelic Jodorowsky fever dream. Flash piece in the anthology Twisted Trails: Tales of the Weird Wild West. Buy it here and read my story: “Specters of the Crash: A Cross-Media Survey of Paranormal Narratives Surrounding the Crush Collision of 1896 (Journal of the Texas Folklore Society, Vol....
In 1987, Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game added vital details to the sci-fi universe that are still used today.The impact is still felt in movies, games, novels, and streaming series. I updated and retrofitted an article I wrote for Rolling Stone a while back and posted it on my newsletter. Read it here.