Anthony Dobranski Online

Category: essay

  • Excerpt – Chapter 8

    In this excerpt from The Demon in Business Class, Gabriel and his boss try to recruit a criminal with a secret hobby, and a special talent… from Chapter 8 – San Francisco In the silent dim gray, the limousine’s facing benches seemed less car than train. Gabriel remembered long rides in Russia, bundled up in…

  • Excerpt – Chapter 12

    In this excerpt from The Demon in Business Class, in a hotel bar in Aberdeen, Scotland, two people meet cute … not so cute. Chapter 12 — Aberdeen Gosh she was pretty. “The bartender comes and goes,” Gabriel told her. “He helps in the kitchen.” Her face was a tangram of sharp ellipses: pointed chin,…

  • A playlist for The Demon in Business Class

    I created this playlist for a blog tour — if you want to start listening, here it is on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4tR8uHsFCla94vEFZnwz8c It was a fun project, sort of a soundtrack with backstory. Some of these songs were specific influences, though unnamed, on certain scenes. Other songs evoke its moods. The project also put me in…

  • An interview with Zarabeth

    AD: Hi! I’m Anthony Dobranski, author of the modern fantasy novel The Demon in Business Class. Today we’re talking to Zarabeth Battrie, the main character, about her life and her story. Zarabeth, welcome! ZB: Hi. Thanks for having me. Also, writing me. For the most part. You could have left a few things out. AD:…

  • 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…

  • 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.

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…