Author: Anthony Dobranski
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The bad news is, I was right
I’m finishing my second novel, but in the last few months I’ve spent some time with my first, The Demon in Business Class, as it enters a new medium. The amazing voice actor Laura Petersen has recorded the audiobook — early spring release! don’t worry, I’ll be posting about it. I’ve been pitching in doing…
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I grieve for my beloved Hong Kong
It has bad air. I was still a smoker when I worked there, and I joked it was protective. It’s impossibly expensive, though plenty of people live there cheaply. It’s a culture clash, crash, and fusion — Chinese and Anglo, old and new, rich and poor, metropolitan and tropical, high-pressure and laid-back. It’s fast, so…
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On being good at sales
I am a fierce fan of my stuff. It’s not for everyone, but it’s for more than might initially see themselves buying it.
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The safe bummer of legal marijuana
In the small clear-plastic cube on the counter were two shelves of smoking accessories. On the top shelf, clear glass pipes printed with silhouette men and women having sex; on the bottom shelf, blister packages of metal pipe and grinder combos, in Jamaican flag colors, with a Bob-Marley-ish face in the grinder. The gear was…
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Science-fiction is neither cyberpunk nor broken
In his new Slate essay, Lee Konstantinou opines that Something is Broken in Our Science Fiction. He isn’t really talking about science-fiction, so much as its subgenre of cyberpunk, which certainly still influences science-fiction subgenre naming, from steampunk to hopepunk. I’m not sure that cyberpunk has more influence than that these days – but let’s…
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First look at Business Class Tarot!
COMING FALL 2018 Are you a business person, entrepreneur, or maker? Do you work where product meets brand? Where data and money become one? BUSINESS CLASS TAROT™ See the Present — Change the Future Tarot cards have centuries of wisdom about human nature and power dynamics, hidden behind obscure symbols and outdated worldviews. BUSINESS CLASS…
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Thoughts on Eden while mowing my lawn
In the book of Genesis, Adam and Eve eat from the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil on the serpent’s advice, “know their nakedness,” and are thrown from the garden to a life of toil and want – the original sin that in Christianity, Christ died to forgive. This sin of the apple is…
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Book Review – Under the Skin by Michel Faber
My vacation book on my family trip to New Orleans was Michel Faber’s elegant, familiar, horrifying novel Under the Skin. I’ve owned the book a long while, and knew very roughly what it was about. I had no idea what a perfect foil it would be for my trip – an escape from my escape, yet…
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Recovering technophiliac
I use a MacBook Air 2012, second version of the Air line and model for all that follow. It’s a perfect size for serious work, with a screen that usefully shows a half-dozen apps in a single desktop space. It’s substantial yet light, easily portable, fine in a lap or a desk. It has local…
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Destroying Budapest
My science-fiction work-in-progress is set in a single city, and I needed to see it to imagine living in it. Welcome to Pest! Only walk on gray parts…. Budapest was a proxy in the One-Day War between Greater Russia and Umoja East Africa. Buda is now the White Lake, a boiling toxic waste of microscopic…