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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!
25 Episodes
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On this 25th episode of The Science Fiction & Fantasy podcast, host Mookie Spitz sits down with C.S.E. Cooney for a lively conversation about her Saint Death series—and the living, breathing speculative-fiction community that shaped it. Cooney is a 20+-year veteran of the genre: poetry, short fiction, audio narration, conventions, small presses, writing groups, and editorial volleys. Her career was forged inside the ecosystem that still defines serious science fiction and fantasy, and is ...
Mookie Spitz welcomes A.C. Wise to the 24th episode of The Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory: a Canadian-born, award-winning speculative writer, and one of the most incisive critics across genre circles. Wise boldly crosses boundaries between science fiction, fantasy, and horror, and her decades-long career has explored them from both sides of the page as creator and critic. Mookie and Alison chat about her work as an author of novels like Wendy, Darling and Hooked — quirky, charact...
What happens when the people who trained for catastrophe watch society ignore every warning sign? In the 23rd episode of The Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory, host Mookie Spitz asks that question and many others of Helen Hynson Vettori—former EMT, senior medical intelligence analyst for the Department of Homeland Security, and award-winning author of the Black Swan speculative thriller series. Their conversation is a bracing, no-nonsense examination of disaster, denial, and what happens ...
The 22nd episode of The Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory features the crew of indie science-fiction authors who gathered together at Pasadena Comic-Con 2026 to bark their books, network, and rally around their shared sci-fi passion. Together on the pod they crack open their creative process, and wrestle with the future of storytelling in the age of AI. Welcome to their post-Con roundtable on writing, publishing, fandom, hustle, technology, and the tough but fun reality of being a c...
In this episode of The Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory, host Mookie Spitz sits down with the prolific and acclaimed science fiction author Matthew Kressel to dissect his new novella Rainseekers, a deeply human, quietly radical novella about hope, grief, and collective endurance on a terraformed Mars. Matthew talks candidly about writing against the scifi default dystopia. Set centuries in the future, Rainseekers follows forty-six flawed, damaged, searching people trekking across Mars to...
The 20th episode of The Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory features host Mookie Spitz welcoming debut science-fiction author and AI technologist Bruno Rothgiesser onto the factory floor. The authors dissect Dark Matter—Bruno's post-apocalyptic first-contact novel that skips the AI uprising and asks the harder question: What happens after the war is already lost… and the machines come back anyway? Someone built it, and almost everyone died. Humanity has survived the AI revolution—barely. Ar...
Mookie welcomes to the Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory the acclaimed comic artist and storyteller Don Ellis Aguillo, known for his striking emotional style, energy-charged imagery, and powerful storytelling across Spawn, Superman, Aquaman, Green Lantern, indie titles, and his own beloved series Rise. What starts as a conversation about art quickly evolves into something deeper: identity, vulnerability, creative rebellion, AI's onslaught, gratitude, fearlessness, and the raw grind of doi...
Welcome to a celebration of indie writing recognition! The Outstanding Creator Awards is one of the most visible and influential platforms recognizing independent authors who deliver quality, originality, and emotional punch. These awards aren’t participation trophies—they’re competitive, professionally judged, and taken seriously in the indie community. They don’t just validate a book; they amplify it. And Ingrid Moon wasn't only nominated… she dominated. The Warrior’s Shade and The Te...
In the 17th episode of Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory, Mookie Spitz chats with Steve Gibson (S.A. Gibson), the prolific indie science-fiction author, editor-in-chief of a globally sourced science-fiction anthology, and writer whose work asks an uncomfortable question: what survives when technology doesn’t? Gibson unpacks his journey from voracious sci-fi reader to author of more than twenty books, many set in a post-collapse world where steam power, printing presses, libraries, and hum...
The 16th episode of The Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory has Mookie sitting down with Daniel P. Douglas: the shared pen name of Paul and Phil Garver, prolific multi-genre writers who are also identical twins. Together, they unpack what it means to collaborate as creative partners for decades: how two distinct sensibilities merge into a single authorial voice, how trust replaces ego, and why their process has evolved from strict turn-taking to a sharper writer–editor dynamic. The twin ang...
Out on the Science Fiction & Fantasy Factor floor is Cornish poet and performer Bert Biscoe, who voices two sections from Jonnie Fazoolie and the Transfinite Reality Engine audiobook as a teaser reel. The first reading shares the infinitale of Kreo Bonsai, a sardonic, alien spider scientist who has built the Jar—the ultimate simulation machine that instantiates every possible universe, one Planck-second at a time. As Kreo marvels over how his Jar works, we hear how he also endures ...
What happens when two Gen-X science-fiction lifers turn on the mic, set themselves loose, and argue about everything? You get the 14th episode of SFFF. Host Mookie Spitz welcomes longtime friend and fellow sci-fi heretic Lee Kantz for a sprawling, sharp-tongued, no-sacred-cows conversation that tears through Star Trek, Star Wars, Spielberg, Nolan, AI, wokeness, anti-wokeness, bad writing, great ideas, worse dialogue, and the slow death of subtlety in modern science fiction A rant sampling: “S...
J.Z. Pitts doesn’t posture, pretend, or pose behind “author brand” theatrics. He comes on the Factory floor to pod with Mookie Spitz, where they tell the truth about what it costs to write, to fail, to get back up, and to self-publish when the world is drowning in content and nobody’s handing out golden tickets. In this episode, Pitts walks us through Virtual Rebel, his YA sci-fi novel about a teenage girl fighting through a virtual-reality dystopia: equal parts Ready Player One, coming-of-ag...
The twelfth episode of the SFFF features Mookie chatting up the genre with Princeton astrophysics grad student turned tech consultant Ed Powell, where they immediately launch into hard science, bad science, and unraveling state of a genre that used to dream big and think smart. Ed walks in with his PhD, his plasma-physics past, and his lifelong obsession with Clarke and Asimov. He remembers buying The Sands of Mars on the Jersey shore; Mookie counters with his own gateway drug, Asimov’s...
This episode of the SFFF drops you straight onto the factory floor with Robert Reif, the Zoomer indie author who somehow writes like a pulp-era wanderer inebriated on optimism. His debut novel, Frontier One, feels like Tarzan meets Sally Ride, wrapped in that old-school, high-adventure energy that so much of science fiction abandoned when it got moody, preachy, and self-righteous. Robert riffs about Charlie, the jungle-raised flat-world himbo who treats the sky like a ceiling; Talina, t...
Mookie gets chatty with speculative-fiction author Lou Iovino about the long, uneven road to becoming a working writer. Lou shares how his creative life started in comics through co-authoring a ten-issue graphic novel on his commute to Manhattan, hiring artists out of pocket, and learning the discipline of concise storytelling and crisp dialogue. That foundation carried Lou into screenwriting and eventually novels. He explains why he didn’t chase traditional publishing at first, how Hugh Howe...
Mookie is thrilled to chat with Blake and Sherry Shimshock, the husband-and-wife team behind the Chronicles of Derek Fade: a fast-paced sci-fi adventure series that fuses James Bond swagger, Star Wars style, and Firefly heart. Their partnership echoes the creative chemistry of The Expanse’s Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck: Blake provides the action, imagination, and cinematic energy of a screenwriter, while Sherry crafts the emotional core, depth, and prose that make the characters human. ...
The engines of creativity are humming, the publishing lights are flickering, and an electrifying story just streamed off the line. On this launch-day episode of The Science Fiction Factory, host Mookie Spitz welcomes indie author Nathan J. Pearce, whose debut cyberpunk thriller Faith Faraday and the Cyber Samurai hits screens and shelves today! Set in 2076 Tokyo, the book follows Faith Faraday, a daemon hunter chasing rogue AIs that masquerade as digital ghosts. Think Men in Black for machine...
The seventh episode of The Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory explores how speculative fiction actually gets made — the grind, the vision, and the madness behind the worlds we can’t stop dreaming about. Hosted by writer, ranter, and raconteur Mookie Spitz, he sits down with Matthew Carauddo, creator of the Diamond Dragons saga — a richly illustrated six-book fantasy series blending martial arts, mysticism, and philosophy. But Matthew isn’t just an author: he’s a stunt performer, fenc...
What do you get when a dopamine-deficient bald guy, a stack of manuscript pages, and an accidental reader with a doctorate walk into a podcast? You get this wild, heartfelt, and honest episode of The Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory—where Mookie Spitz, podcaster, ranter, and writer talks about the creation of his latest science fiction novel: Jonnie Fazoolie and the Transfinite Reality Engine. In a full-circle moment of gratitude and literary soul-searching, Mookie hands the mic to...
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