Mindy Indy sprinkled actual dirt on a watercolor to make Mars look like Mars. Then she gave it a pink sky, because she can. That's her whole AER HEAD philosophy: every page hand-made and crammed to the margins, because the creativity and the creation is most of the fun.

On the 73rd episode of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Factory, host Mookie catches the Brooklyn comics creator fresh off New York Comic Con, where she worked the floor in a beanie with a QR-code sandwich board strapped to it. Her comic follows Aereo "Aer" Zephyr, a teen surfer and lifeguard in futuristic New San Diego who dreams the future, spots a planet-killing solar flare, and drags his gang off Earth. Issue two is surfers in space. Issue three sends the surfers to Mars. Add telepathy, migraines, a plant-growing twin, a wind-bending twin, a Jetsons-meets-anime world, a dad whose coffee machine goes nuts, and an Archie-style love triangle, and you get fifty pages per issue of pure zing.

Mindy opens the vault on ten years of doing it the hard way: a sketchbook lost four sketchbooks ago, digital inks in Clip Studio, hand-painted watercolor backgrounds, and a Kickstarter to pay for a letterer, a colorist, and a trade paperback of issues one through three. Publishers once shrugged at her anime-flavored portfolio. Now they sniff around, which proves her theory: do your own thing, and your people find you.

Mookie brings his Horton Hears a Who theory of being an artist: climb the tallest building in Whoville, grab the megaphone, and yell "We are here." Mindy lives it. She sketches on the subway, posts to Instagram above ground, and wears the QR-code hat to the cons. Along the way, she plots a superpowered memoir about New York, admits she can't casually do laundry during Comic Con week, and vows to finish the series before she dies.

Join her Kickstarter while it's still hot!

The Guest

Mindy Indy is an independent comic writer and illustrator based in Brooklyn, New York, and the creator of Aer Head, a sci-fi comedy series about a teen surfer and lifeguard who sees the future in his dreams. A Michigan native and former graphic designer, she now freelances, teaches art, designs for nonprofits, and has illustrated five children's books. Her work has hung in Atlantic Gallery in Manhattan and Honey Badger Motel Art Gallery in Brooklyn. She draws AER HEAD by hand, inks digitally in Clip Studio, paints her backgrounds in watercolor, and funds each issue through Kickstarter.

Contribute to her Kickstarter.

Visit her website.

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Brits and Yanks speak the same language, yet their speculative fiction often dreads very different futures. Martin Grace, curator and contributor of Future Britains, joins Mookie on the Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory to dig into an anthology of 22 near-future stories by British writers, and what those stories reveal about a country wrestling with its own identity in 2026 and beyond.

Future Britains started as a contest between Martin and his father, fellow sci-fi writer Nick Grace: who could hit 3,000 words first? Martin won. His story, "Implanted," turns his hometown of Portsmouth into an island prison for dissidents in a Britain that bans human art and hands every song, painting, and book to state-controlled AI implants. On the train home from his day job as an AI specialist, he posted a note on Substack asking whether other British writers wanted to imagine the future of their own hometowns. Within 24 hours, two dozen said yes. Then came the panic: he knew nothing about publishing a book.

Nine months and significant hair loss later, the book launches October 23. Martin walks through how strangers became a collective: three-writer beta teams named after sci-fi greats, editor Evelyn volunteering to proofread and copyedit 80,000 words, and a firm rule that every story unfold this century, close enough that readers think, "That could happen to my kid." The stories sorted themselves into a concept-album arc of political unrest, human identity, machine life, civil war, and the end, closing on a vivid fable.

Then the conversation crosses the Atlantic. Mookie, the son of Hungarian emigres who grew up in a house that didn't speak English, reads Britain's fears against America's. Yanks dread plutocracy and runaway corporations. Brits aim their punk energy at politicians, the surveillance state, and AI as an instrument of government. Martin explains why Britain's closest answer to Elon Musk makes vacuum cleaners, and why his country still struggles to reckon with an empire whose slave-trade money built its stately homes and whose collapse sent his own family fleeing Uganda under Idi Amin.

Martin flips the question: what makes American sci-fi so American? Mookie's answer: spectacle. Dungeon Crawler Carl's gory intergalactic game show, Brandon Sanderson's $41 million Kickstarter, and SpaceX Starship launches that wreck their own launch pad. The two compare the Fresh Prince of Bel Air with Fawlty Towers and the two versions of The Office, and land on the core contrast: American fiction goes big and aspirational, British fiction goes small and intimate, down to a newspaper and a few extra rations at the local Tesco.

They close on ideas for a franchise already in motion, with Future Germania perhaps next and Canadian writers knocking. Plus Mookie's own work in progress: the sequel to Jonnie Fazoolie and the Transfinite Reality Engine and an interactive audiobook that casts the listener as the main character.

The Guest
Martin Grace is a speculative fiction author and musician whose stories are inspired by his interests in space exploration, technology, and our beautiful blue planet. Martin serialised his debut climate fiction novel, The Moon Talker, and its spin-off, Lunis-One, on Substack, and is the publisher and curator of the Future Britains anthology.

Pre-order Future Britains (paperback and ebook) on Amazon.

Special edition hardback with extra artwork: https://solstories.co.uk

Martin Grace on Substack: https://martingracewrites.substack.com

Sol Stories on Substack: https://solstories.substack.com

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Patrick Abbott takes St. Paul’s advice to "test everything" seriously, whether the subject is a scheming flapper vampire, an alien civilization’s faith or a 1946 ghost rocket over Scandinavia. Patrick returns to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Factory after his first visit, when he and Mookie dug into his novels Fallen and Risen. This time the two Substack buddies explore how a writer holds faith and skepticism in the same hand, and why a little absurdity keeps us sane enough to take the serious things seriously.

The conversation opens in Savannah, where Patrick's Paranormal Detective Agency serves as his annual Halloween release valve. He traces Debra, Max and Fred back to his attorney father, the video game Grim Fandango, Flannery O'Connor's "Christ-haunted" South, and the Oz Museum in Wamego, Kansas. From there, Patrick explains why he takes UFO and ghost claims seriously enough to demand evidence. His grandfather's unexplained cattle mutilation made it personal, and an intelligence-community method taught him to weigh probability against confidence. He and Mookie take on a media landscape where institutions have collapsed and confirmation bias has rushed in to fill the vacuum.

Then come the big questions: Pope Leo's take on AI, and why Patrick refuses to let a machine write his stories. Autonomous drones and the future of warfare. The Fallen saga, now growing into a four-book series, and the deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan that shaped its hero. Patrick tells the overlooked story of America getting it right: the Potawatomi and Pawnee alliances, Vice President Charles Curtis, and tea with tribal elders that accomplished what force couldn't. The episode closes on the Fermi paradox, possible traces of life on Mars, the 1946 ghost rockets over Scandinavia, Black Elk, and whether aliens might worship the same God we do.

Grab Savannah Paranormal Detective Agency 1 and 2 on Amazon. Book 3 posts a new chapter every Wednesday this October at patrickabbott.net, with the finale landing on Halloween.

The Guest

Patrick Abbott writes speculative fiction and investigative nonfiction with a Catholic heart and an analyst's eye. His Fallen series (Fallen, Risen, Dormition, and the upcoming Assumption) is a psychological military sci-fi saga about first contact. It draws on his deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan and his work with people living with combat-related PTSD. His comic paranormal series, The Savannah Paranormal Detective Agency, returns every October as his Halloween gift to readers. On Substack, he digs into UFO history, religion and culture with an evidence-first approach.

Find him at patrickabbott.net.

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