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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Robert Biehn first dreamed up The First Stone at fifteen. Twenty years and eight rewrites later, he's finally launching a novel that's also building a world readers can step into and claim as their own.

On the 70th episode of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory, host Mookie Spitz, an official Grafter Corps member according to Biehn's faction quiz, talks with the author before his debut lands. The First Stone, book one of the Exousia Chronicles, arrives in early January 2027. The YA dystopian fantasy follows siblings Cass and Evelon through a world that runs on law, metal, magic, and power. Cass wants to protect his sister. Evelon refuses to stay his little sister. That tension comes from Biehn's own childhood, when he felt responsible for protecting his older sisters, and his story asks who you are when your powers, titles, money, and relationships disappear.

Biehn's launch plan starts from one rule: serve the reader. He treats fans as citizens of the world, not customers, and he has built the machinery to prove it: a faction quiz that sorts readers by moral choices instead of favorite foods, a puzzle game with faction leaderboards, a Discord chat, a weekly lore newsletter, dual-sided Cass and Evelon cards with trackable QR codes, and a new quiz that matches readers by the moments they loved in books like Mistborn. He also has one conversation at a time with his growing fan base and community, from Facebook videos to a grocery bagger with a dragon tattoo, and he plans live book experiences with character voices, an original song, and games.

Biehn calls himself a hybrid author, and explains why. He passed on offers from bigger publishers, wary of notes that change characters to chase a demographic, and chose Storyteller Media for the freedom to run these experiments. The publisher adds Macmillan distribution, industry know-how, deadlines, and a stamp of approval, and its sister company, Curiosity Entertainment, could fast-track the books toward film and TV.

The Guest

Robert Biehn is a hybrid author and the creator of the Exousia Chronicles, whose first book, The First Stone, is a YA dystopian fantasy launching in early January 2027 from Storyteller Media with Macmillan distribution. A sales and marketing veteran who once hosted the tech podcast Digital Dilemmas, he spent twenty years developing the series and rewrote the manuscript with Michael Braff, the editor behind Red Rising. He pairs that traditional backing with indie-style direct marketing: a moral-choice faction quiz, a puzzle game, a Discord community, a weekly newsletter, and live book experiences. He and his wife are narrating the audiobook together.

Visit exousia.world and get your pre-launch copy. or visit Amazon.

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Space is infinite. The menu is not. Sebastian Howarth joins Mookie in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Factory from Johannesburg, South Africa, to break down The Synthetic Hunger, his debut novel built on a premise that should've occurred to a hundred sci-fi writers before him and somehow never did: every war in human history eventually comes down to food, so what happens when one company controls the only food left? Howarth hands humanity's entire interstellar diet to the Panterran Nutritional Authority and a single gray, flavorless gel everyone just calls the gel, or slop, or something worse.

Starship captain Lorian Vance and his ragtag crew start noticing the math doesn't add up: whole populations are eating twice as much and somehow wasting away. That one broken equation cracks open a conspiracy that welds food control to an AI alignment nightmare, and Howarth keeps both mysteries circling each other without ever tipping his hand.

Mookie and Sebastian get into the blood and guts of actually writing the thing, pantsing a series instead of outlining it to death, and Sebastian lands an argument Mookie says he's never heard in sixty-five author interviews: sci-fi writers tend to build an idea and then staple cardboard characters to it, while fantasy writers in general build the people first and let the world grow around them. That's the trick Sebastian adopted for his own Firefly-style crew, and it shows.

Then the conversation gets wonderfully weird. Sebastian's job automating systems for a health company turned him into a label-reading maniac who overhauled his own diet, and that obsession poured straight into the gel on the page. He's also quietly running the entire publishing supply chain himself: printing and warehousing South African orders out of his own garage, routing everything else through IngramSpark, and marketing the book with the same scrappy instincts he picked up fronting his alt-rock band for the past eight years. He kept the rock star and the novelist deliberately separate, two different doors into his world, and his own fans are already busting down the wall between them anyway.

Eight books in his series, and he's hungry to complete it. Book two is already underway, and there's a spinoff lurking in a completely different flavor once the main series gets some mileage on it. The desire for great sci-fi is insatiable, so try some Synthetic Hunger for far more than a Happy Meal...

The Guest

Sebastian Howarth was born in Springs, South Africa in 1992. He spent his early years on the warm beaches of the north coast of KwaZulu-Natal, before travelling and adventuring in his teens and early twenties. Having dropped out of school, he got a headstart in the world of work. Unable to take orders from anyone, he started and ran various businesses successfully, enabling him to pursue various other interests and allowing him to be creative in whatever ways he pleased. The Synthetic Hunger popped into his head in 2025 and he began writing it almost immediately. He has been working on the PanTerran Saga ever since, and is currently writing the second book in the series.

https://sebastianhowarth.com/

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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/

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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.

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Vinx the Mercenary Minx is a prequel spinoff of Mookie's flagship series, Jonnie Fazoolie and the Transfinite Reality Engine, and it answers a question the main story never stops to ask: how did Jonnie's tantalizing, savage love interest claw her way up to become the second most powerful being inside the all-powerful agency? Mookie got the idea for the whole project from conversations with LitRPG and military science fiction authors he'd had on the podcast, which sparked the thought that one of his own characters could carry that kind of story.

Vinx has been sitting near the bottom of his priority list lately, buried under a full plate that includes a nonfiction book on the Sri Lankan Civil War, the Jonnie Fazoolie sequel, and an interactive audiobook, so reading Chapter Two here is Mookie's way of reigniting his own interest in the project. He uses the rest of the episode to rant his way through the same forces pulling at his attention everywhere else: the gender and generational conflict running underneath both of his novels, and where AI is taking indie authors hunting for readers who'd actually love their work. The through line for all of it is simple. Mookie loves throwing content out into the world, rants and readings alike, whether or not anyone's there to catch it.

Here's Chapter 1

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