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Anaxagology for May 2025
In this issue: "Post post-apocalypse"—plus a WIP excerpt, recent publication announcements, story notes, and this month's reading log.
David Anaxagoras
May 27, 2025
Just a quick reminder: My novel The Tower is now available wherever audiobooks are sold. It’d make a perfect listen for those summer road-trips. Here’s one of my favorite reviews from an Amazon listener: “It's spooky, it's funny, it's heart-warming, it's creepy, it's thrilling, it's scary, and it's so much fun!” I’m so grateful for the positive response so far. Seeing The Tower find its way into listeners’ ears has been such a ride, and I love hearing your thoughts. If you’re in the mood for a mix of chills, mystery, and heart, give it a listen. And if you’ve already picked it up—thank you! I’d love to know what you think—your feedback means a lot.
Also, if you are a professional reviewer or a voting member of the SFWA, HWA, or other awards body, I have review copies of The Tower available. You can reply directly to this email if you’re reading in your inbox, or drop me a note at [email protected]
Post post-apocalypse
I’ve been thinking about apocalypses a lot lately. No reason, aside from <gestures broadly>. As an old Gen-Xer, I’m no stranger to the post-apocalyptic wastelands. It’s part of my DNA. The Road Warrior touched off an aesthetic conflagration that consumed everything from music videos to manga and comics to network television and right back to movies again. These days it’s mostly a zombie-flavored apocalypse you see. In my day, it was nuclear war and radioactive mutants. YAMV (Your Apocalypse May Vary). Depends on the prevailing collective cultural fears and threats.
What’s the appeal of the post-apocalypse? Well, aside from giving a shape to our fear, and thus allowing us to grapple with it in a more concrete form—which is slightly more therapeutic than living under a vague cloud of nightmarish anxiety and stomach-gnawing apprehension—it represents a kind of freedom. The worst has happened and we have survived. Now, there are no rules. It’s permission to indulge fantasies of violence and domination—which usually take the form of a lone, angry white dude on loan from spaghetti westerns and 70s revenge films killing a lot of zombies/radioactive mutants/infected/aliens/robots or whatever stand-in for not one of us is handy.
As I said, I grew up with apocalypses in popular media and I’ve indulged this fantasy plenty. If only civilization would collapse I could finally be free and the world would be mine. No school, no parents, no job, no stress. Well, aside from the things that want to eat you—but, you know, you gotta have something to shoot/chain saw/smash with a big spikey ball on a chain to prove you’re king of the radioactive scrap heap. Oh dear, the neighborhood bully turned into a mutant! Better do him a solid and put him out of his misery.
My latest WIP is a novelette set in post-apocalyptic times though it didn’t start out that way. I had the image of a boy behind a workbench in a grimy repair shop fixing someone’s robot. The world grew around that. I grabbed on to the theme of repairing is caring and started thinking a lot about what kind of world this kid was living in. I write a lot about boys because they are inherently facing the choice of what kind of man they are going to become. It’s rich ground for storytelling and also important in life.
Most of us aren’t living in a post-apocalypse but we already have plenty of men eager to don their warrior garb, join ICE, and march off to round up brown “invaders”. If we have to have an apocalypse, at least we can start to imagine a better one. Or one that’s a bit more original.
My post-apocalyptic future isn’t about violence and domination. The answers aren’t about who can be the strongest, biggest, baddest. That’s what gets you an apocalypse in the first place. It’s about repair, connection and reshaping the bonds of community. Repairing is caring.
Here’s a sneak peek at my post-apocalypse WIP. This is still an early draft, so please excuse the rough edges. In this snippet, we catch up with Ladd, a fiercely guarded and independent boy scavenging an underground parking garage, as he tries to ditch an annoying pre-Collapse butler/nanny-bot he has inadvertently reactivated:
“Just stay out of my way, Bits.”
I shoved past him. Hopped across a pile of concrete slabs, moving fast. I could outpace a rusty old pre-Collapse robot. I ducked under a beam and squeezed through a narrow space—wasn’t really watching where I was going. Just trying to put space between me and Bits.
But the structure was less stable here. When I climbed over another tangle of debris, I felt something shift.
I had no time to react.
Something heavy—a concrete pillar, or worse—hit my shoulder, knocking me sideways. I was seconds from becoming a permanent part of the architecture. But before I could be squashed to jelly, a hand yanked me clear.
Two lamplights blinked at me in the dark.
Bits shoved me against a wall and leaned in, bracing me. He put his hand gently on top of my head and pressed my face into his chest.
“I advise the young master to close his eyes against the dust.”
I did as he said.
I heard the rumble and crunch as the building folded. Smaller bits—gravel, dirt, dust—made a soft shushing sound as it all settled into the gaps. My heart was in my throat, vibrating like a loose cooling fan.
When it was over, Bits stepped back. His eyes blinked brilliant blue. A soft scan-light washed over me.
“There. I see the young master is entirely unharmed. How gratifying.”
He produced a tiny lint brush from his coat pocket and started brushing my shoulders in slow careful strokes. Pretty sure it was leaving more cruft than it removed.
I pushed his hand away.
“Stop that.”
“As you wish, young sir. I—”
“Endeavor to satisfy, yes. I’ve heard.”
Bits stood completely still for a moment. Then—
“Shall we proceed, then, to the exit?”
I looked around—or tried to. Wherever I had left the cracklights, they were now buried. Maybe I wouldn’t ditch Bits just yet.
“You can see in the dark?”
“I am equipped both with infra-red sensors—” his eyes flashed red, “—and ultra-sonic echolocation.”
His “ears” popped out and emitted a faint high-pitched whine. I just hoped we didn’t attract razor bats.
“If the young master would care to follow me—”
The young master would.
Just this once.
Out now
I had two flash fiction stories published in May. The first is “The Everlasting Wound of Polyphemus.” After centuries of isolation, a blinded Polyphemus struggles to heal in a world that only remembers him as a monster—until an unexpected friendship teaches him to truly see again.
"The last time I looked at anything with this eye, all I saw were men who hated me."
In The Odyssey, we see the Cyclops Polyphemus as a terrifying, man-eating monster. He traps Odysseus and his crew in his cave and proceeds to devour them one by one. He was not a gracious host—it’s just terrible manners to eat your guests.
Polyphemus turned up a couple hundred years later in The Cyclops by Euripides, still a one-eyed giant, but he now bumbling and oafish, full of self-pity. An object of derision. I thought it was pretty shabby treatment, even if he did occasionally consume a dinner guest or two.
I was fascinated in this shift of the portrayal of Polyphemus and felt he deserved a more sympathetic examination. I cast him a lonely figure, out-of-place in the modern world. His wounded eye and his refusal to remove his bandages spoke to his unprocessed trauma. Fortunately for him, Gale from the Department of Mythical Beings isn’t ready to give up on him just yet.
You can check out a review of “The Everlasting Wound of Polyphemus” in Myna Chang’s Flash Roundup for May 2025. “I’m in love with the idea of a Department of Mythical Beings!…Anaxagoras succeeds on several layers in this alluring piece.”
The story is free to read right now in Factor Four Magazine.
Also available this month is “The Last Time I Went on a Prowl with Farrell Jenkins.” On the last night before he disappears, enigmatic Farrell Jenkins—a boy possibly raised by cats—takes reluctant Autumn on one final, magical prowl through the strange spaces between growing up and letting go.
“It’s not a proper prowl unless you leave by the window,” Farrell said. “No good prowl ever started out the front door.”
You can read “Farrell” in the April 2025 (Version One) issue of Worlds of Possibility. I’ll have more story notes on “Farrell” next time.
If you enjoyed these (or any of my stories) please share them on social media, drop me a note on Bluesky or Instagram, or comment on my website. Members of the SFWA, you can add to or upvote these stories on the Nebula Reading List.
Short fiction reading log (mostly post-apocalypse flavored)
I’m keeping a reading log of both vintage and contemporary speculative short fiction. I thought I’d share some select stories here. I’ll note where I read them, if you’re interested. Pro tip: You can look up a speculative short story in the ISFDb and get a list of magazines, anthologies and collections in which it is featured.
"I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" by Harlan Ellison in If: Worlds of Science Fiction (Magazine) 112, March 1967. The last five humans on Earth are imprisoned and tortured by an insane supercomputer AI. Harrowing and nightmarish and more than a little cruel and sadistic. Misogynist in its treatment of the lone female character. Disturbing and effective prose and an increasingly relevant warning about AI that absolutely no one seems to be heeding.
"Mimsy Were the Borogoves" by Lewis Padgett in The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF. A future higher-dimensional being unintentionally sends a box of children’s toys back to our time, where they inadvertently train a couple of kids to think beyond our current understand of math and physics. The ideas here must have seemed bold at the time, but the dry expository writing was a struggle to get through. Succeeds mostly when focused from the kids’ perspective (the writing is more immediate and visceral) but quickly becomes an old white man’s science lecture as the parents’ take over the narrative. Full of dry scientist-types explaining, drinking, patronizing, drinking, philosophizing, drinking, repeat and re-repeat. An undeniably influential SF story but not well constructed. Loosely adapted as the movie The Last Mimzy which was terrible in it’s own right and if I recall correctly, added in a bunch of new-age claptrap.
"Steadyboi After the Apocalypse" by Merc Fenn Wolfmoor in Escape Pod #979, February 6, 2025. Steadyboi is a warbot without a war, built like a tank, and ready to give up and literally crawl into a hole and deactivate after being constantly treated as a threat by humans—despite efforts to find peaceful purpose in the post-apocalypse. This is a story about finding meaning and renewal in helping others. And it's about the necessity of trust and care in (re)building a community. Rich characterization, expertly crafted. A moving tale of holding out and holding on.
“After the Rain” by P.A. Cornell in Escape Pod #991, May 1, 2025. A young courier rides her bike around her caring and sharing post-apocalyptic community. Her village is soon confronted with a criminal in their midst. This story has a gentle, easy, pleasant vibe that makes you want to be part of this community and ride your bike through the summer rain. Lovely.
This month, I’m excited to feature a fellow writer and her fantastic free monthly newsletter. Meet P.A. Cornell (She/Her), a Nebula, World Fantasy, and Aurora-nominated speculative fiction writer, with publications in over fifty magazines and anthologies, including Lightspeed, Analog, Apex, and three "Best of the Year" anthologies. In her newsletter, you can expect updates on all her writing-related news as well as a "Story Behind the Story" feature with a look at a new story each month. Subscribers also receive occasional bonuses just because. Subscribe to P.A. Cornell’s newsletter here: https://pacornell.substack.com/
ICYMI
If you’re just joining the party, here’s a rundown of what I’ve been up to and where you can find my work.
Forthcoming: “Five Dispatches from Conflict Zone W-924/B Regarding Post-battle Deployment of A. Thanatensis” in Lightspeed.
I am the author of the middle grade mystery horror audiobook original, The Tower (Recorded Books, 2025), narrated by Christopher Gebauer. Now available wherever audiobooks are sold, or check your local library.
My most recent fiction, “The Last Time I Went on a Prowl with Farrell Jenkins,” is available in the April 2025 (Version One) issue of World of Possibilities.
Other recent fiction includes “The Everlasting Wound of Polyphemus,” “Three Birds That Came Out of Grayson Huff and a Bunch More That Fell from the Sky,“ and “Under a Star, Bright as Morning.” Visit my Bibliography for a full list of fiction and other works.
I wrote for Nickelodeon’s Glitch Techs, an animated sci-fi adventure about teens who hunt video game monsters that have broken out into the real world. I also created and co-executive produced Amazon Studio’s first live-action kids and family series, Gortimer Gibbon’s Life on Normal Street, about three kids whose life is anything but normal.
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Anaxagology is a free monthly(ish) newsletter from author and speculative fiction writer David Anaxagoras. Subscribe now! You can find more about Dave at his website, or follow him on Bluesky or Instagram.
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