The event is at Urmston Library (UK) on the 6th of June 2026. You can reserve a free seat (advisable) using the link below.

I will primarily be talking about how science fiction is becoming more mainstream, the connections I see between Sci-Fi and Comedy (and why I cannot listen to marketing types who tell me to just ‘pick a lane’). I will also be talking about my newish book THE COSMONAUT WHO DIED TWICE which has actually been out for a year now, I just turned all my ads off so I could save money for comedy stuff, so you may not have heard about it.

Lots of weird plates spinning.

TCWDT features a cosmonaut called Galina Agafonov who ventures into deep space to initiate first contact with an alien pyramid in the outer solar system. Meanwhile, in another time, an alien frog called Duran is selling human fossils on the dark markets between planets, and trying to avoid being turned into a sentient museum exhibit by an ancient species of collectors.

It’s an odd book, and it has links to EARTHLOOP and WHO BUILT THE HUMANS hidden away for older fans to explore. If you’re new, it’s just a fun story you can read in a day.

Check out the single review it has online.

All my stuff

I share it today because that book is taking shape again. I am tempted to simultaneously release it alongside WHO KILLED THE HUMANS?, my upcoming Sci-Fi Comedy book. Anyone I know who is into marketing has told me not to do this. That makes it sound more fun, more exciting. Imagine a Sci-Fi comedian finishing a book launch, donning a hat and a fake moustache, and then immediately launching another book.

Seems like a great idea to me.

Rising Moss

23 April 2015

she kept his words in rock pools by the back door
let them grow stagnant
discarded beside empty bottles
cigarette packs
recollections unvisited 

over time a fine green velvet grew from the words
binding whatever had not evaporated over summer
into something reminiscent of memory
little mosaics of life
yet still they waited outside

her reconstituted external memories, abandoned
she never knew
that their slow growth on a bottle of cider
left there one summer
could prompt the resurgence of inherent behaviours
buried under the bracken of her present

the bottles were never given time to grow cold
the corpses of lovers never left alone
slid in and out the drawer like birthday cards on rainy days
on that final night, when the moss crept up into her room
nostalgia kept the sun from setting

Author’s notes:

You can smell the Bowie influence in this one. It’s very GLASS SPIDER.

This poem was written for my third year poetry collection, and happens in an almost Fantasy world where every single suburban thing is alien in some way. The moss is sentient, and there are space spiders hiding in church bells. For that reason it is very much not fashionable poetry (what is fashionable is poetry about breakups, which you could argue this is, but it is still Wyrd).

I wrote the entire poem in eight minutes, which I only remember as it was for a writing exercise, after which we read them to the class, and the visiting writer told me in front of forty people he did not believe I had written it in that time. This pissed me off. Luckily, one of my tutors said something like, “That’s Phillip, he writes fast.” and I didn’t need to reply myself.

A few years later I went to a small political bookshop and found the visiting writer’s poetry book gathering dust under some love story about Jeremy Corbyn. It had waited there for eight years unsold. My poetry book, on the other hand, had sold every copy that was printed, because I had not yet printed it. Technically, I was doing better.

(don’t think about that too much, it will fall apart).

More poems?

This poem was written a few months before David Bowie’s death in 2016, an event which marked a personal change in my own life because I realised just how much his writing meant to me. Another professor remarked he was “just a rock star” and later apologised to me at a writing event, but I didn’t let it go. Not for personal, emotional reasons, but because I thought it was accidentally pretty poignant. The comment was meant as a lazy jibe, but it showed that only one Face of Bowie appeared to the person. Bowie was multifaceted, perhaps the only role model I had besides Gary Numan (who fills his lyrics with Sci-Fi stories) who showed me that I could carve out a successful life as an artist whilst doing multiple things.

I have written a small poetry book lately, without much fanfare. It’s essentially a fan project, based on Bowie. You can get it right now with the link below.

https://dl.bookfunnel.com/93wlml8b4k

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Here are four alleged truths, and an alleged lie, allegedly.

1. Aliens are real. Some of them live in the oceans of Earth.

2. Tightening a country’s borders will help protect legitimate refugees from the violence they are fleeing, by not allowing violent men to follow.

3. The moon landing, whilst physically real in the sense that humans did it, is technically ‘fake’ because we live in a simulation.

4. Nobody will ever know if bananas evolved to curve left or right, as the original straight banana is hidden in the Vatican. It is entirely possible that a straight banana might be like an incomprehensible Lovecraftian entity to a curvy narna-loving chimp. The chimp, of course, would go insane just looking at a straightened narna.

5. I got picked up by the Free the People podcast.

The correct answer was 4. Bananas did not start out straight, so don’t worry, they were not misshapen by centuries of human fiddling. Of course, you can decide yourself if the others are true or false, but the point of the list was to build up to the reveal.

Recently, I was invited to the Free The People podcast, where I talked about my ‘new’ life as a comedian, and how that intersects with Sci-Fi, and other disciplines. It has been one of those moments where I realise I am in the right place, at the right time.

I’ve enjoyed Free The People for a while, and actually know Sienna, who interviewed me, from Instagram. This comes up in the show. That said, the invitation was a total surprise. I never expected to be on the show. It has been an honour. It was a fantastic interview, for which I wish I was better dressed, but I think my words were dressed up nice, at the very least.

This is a two-parter. Stay tuned for part two. Below is part one.

Here is the Youtube link, and below this is another link, for their Substack.

Here is the Substack.

Free the People

Morbid Humor is Most Intelligent | Phillip Carter | Ep 13

Phillip Carter is a Manchester-based comedian and sci-fi writer whose work blends sharp wit with imaginative storytelling. He has performed stand-up at venues including the Manchester Fringe, Wise Guys Utah, and Bright Club, and appeared on Lego Masters in 2017. His writing has been featured by WrongSpeak Publishing, and since 2022, he’s been building a…

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16 days ago · 2 likes · Free the People, Sienna Mae Heath, and Phillip Carter

I will return with some fiction soon. As you can see I am busy right now with podcasts, comedy shows, more podcasts. Whilst 98% of you cannot make it to the first showing of AWKWARD RE-ENTRY, my Sci-Fi Comedy show, I will make you all an online version. So stay tuned.

So I somehow managed to get onto the EPIC SAGES podcast, where I told some jokes, and talked about worldbuilding in Science Fiction. It’s free to listen to, and I recommend it. Rook gave me so much space to rant that at one point I started imagining I was a horse being executed by my doctor, and I played this fantasy out in the show.

I do cover the Dunning Kruger effect in the Arts (shit writers think they are great, great writers think they are shit) and some other smart stuff, but it’s mostly me awake at 4am trying to make Canadians laugh.

I covered my experience in Game Design as well, how I built a 3-hour sidequest for a video game that was meant to be 15-minutes long. I got the highest mark ever for that game, dragging my degree into 2:1 territory (I may have abandoned script class in its favour) and I am remaking that game once WHO KILLED THE HUMANS is out, so watch this space (and my RealPhillipCarter TikTok, where I’ll be showing you the build process on livestreams).

If you don’t have the time to listen to this podcast, ‘like’ this post and email it to yourself so you can listen another time, it’s worth it.

And if you definitely don’t have any time, here’s a quick bit of worldbuilding wisdom.

The best worldbuilding (in games, books, jokes) feels natural. If everything makes sense inside a story, it keeps people engaged.

See the Save Stations in Metroid games. The save function of the game is incorporated as a Sci-Fi technology. I love this.

See you in a few days.

-Phillip

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You might remember that I am a Comedian as well as an Author.

If not, here’s some proof. It’s a picture of me doing comedy, at Wise Guys Utah.

See, some of us writer types do go outside. Don’t listen to the memes.

I felt strangely at home in America. Over 90% of my readers live in various states (of disrepair), and almost all my traditional publishing has been American too. Some months, I can have over 60% of all book sales traced back to California. I have friends there, but I’ve never physically been, even if my psychic friend thought I lived there when we first got speaking.

I’d like to do a gig there sometime.

But where am I gigging right now?

Back in 2023 I put a show together titled AWKWARD RE-ENTRY which was a mix of Stand-up comedy, Sci-Fi, and Poetry. It was a solo stand-up show about what it means to be human, all the weird mistakes we make, and how we relate to the wider universe. Here’s an image of the first show.

The show lasted two days, and was a lot of fun.

Somehow, Phillipatine returned.

Yet, unlike modern Star Wars, I like to think this show is well-written. I’ve done a lot of rewriting and chiselling, from visiting Utah to tell jokes, to a comedy course, a work in progress gig, having an audience meowing at me in my home town. I will cover all this and more in detail in a future post, for now the headline is that the gig is back, and you might be able to see it, live.

The Awkward Re-entry show returns this year, in 2026, to the UK and hopefully online too. It is bigger and cleverer. The first gig is in Buxton.

Awkward Re-entry is a comedy show about what it means to be human, how modern people relate to the universe and each other. Topics include dating apps, sucking door handles, alien abductions, parallel universes, and my giant forehead.

You have a few days on top of everyone else to go grab tickets before I announce them on social media. Only 38 tickets are available for this one (two have already gone to Press), but more dates and venues may be announced. Tickets are £7.50, or £5 for concessions (old people and benefits cheats allowed). These prices exclude tax, which I do not understand.

The first gig is

• The Buxton Fringe

• Sunday 12th July 2026

• Lee Wood Hotel, Buxton, Canyons room

• 18:30pm (with bar across from performance space)

• There is an elevator to this level from ground floor

Buxton Fringe

If you are Press, you can get a free ticket if you want to watch and review. Just comment, or email me at Press@realphillipcarter.com

I am also looking for Press connections for other projects, from poetry to Lego statues.

Any ticket sales help me to realise the reality of being a full-time storyteller. Everything, from short story sales, shirts, gigs, and streams all come together as part of a wider world of storytelling, which is why I will also be selling and signing books on the night at a heavily discounted rate for ticket holders.

If you can’t afford it and are nearby, talk to me about it.

And if Buxton is too far, don’t worry, other shows will happen.

I have scheduled some announcements for social media, but if you are reading this on 04.04.2026, you are ahead of everyone else.

Click the big orange button above to get your tickets.

Subscribe now

Subscribing is free.

I get my writing money from selling books and telling jokes.

Author’s note:

Following a quick poll on Substack Notes, I’ve settled with my idea to post excerpts of this series of stories as and when I write them. As a result, you may be reading something here which doesn’t actually make the final cut, or which slots in later into the story during final revisions. I might also repost newer, polished versions of some older chapters and scenes which proved popular the first time round.

I share these stories here, as they are, because I think you will enjoy them.

The full STEPHANIE GLITCH story looks like it will be told over several novellas, each ending with the end of an era of sorts. These will culminate in a big hardback book and a movie series, eventually, but at first will be released as eBooks and Paperbacks.

Of course I cannot share it all here for free for the same reason I don’t turn away paychecks at my other jobs; time = money, and writing these books (using only my human brain and no ‘AI’ (because I respect the time you put into reading the things)) takes time.

However, I will do my best to show you only complete scenes, so you are not left with accidental cliffhangers.

And, given it’s going to be a series of books now, the first one will be cheaper than the rest, to give people a taste of the action.

Here is what I think should be the start.

[ Click Here for your soundtrack for today’s reading ]

The ammonite shunted itself backwards through the crags in the rock, expelling seawater from its hyponome. Once past the boiling volcanic vents, the spiralling creature secreted itself deeper in the rocks, hiding. Others had tried retracting into their shells, but it was not sufficient. Whatever parasites had escaped the leviathan from the Great Unreachable had no issue scooping live ammonites from their shells.

The leviathan was a parasitised thing from which the hunters emerged. Even as its spheroid body slumped through the ocean they burst forth, launching themselves at frightening speed through the seawater from holes chewed into the leviathan’s giant body. The ammonite had seen its hulking form sliding darkly downward into the deep black trench below the ocean, and for reasons it could not understand nor express, felt drawn to that black pit which became the leviathan’s grave, like slime mould to nutrients.

But the hunters had not all left the body, and now she was down here, the ammonite had no choice but to find refuge among the volcanic vents and cave networks that littered this ancient, living rock. And so she pressed onward, spurting another jet of water, her shell hitting a stone wall, her heart feeling the harsh thump as its casing slammed into the ends of the cave.

A light like a new sun erupted from one side. It was like the light from one of the vents, but stronger, whiter. It carried with it a coldness, not heat, and its movement was like that of a living being. The ammonite was afraid. The light swept over her, shining through the slim gap between the whorls of her shell, casting a spiralling shape against a far wall of the cave. She glimpsed this briefly with her right eye, noticing that this cave wall was flat, shiny, and that lines stranger than the sutures on her shell were woven here in intricate patterns upon the thing. To her ammonite mind, it seemed as though she was nestled against the striations of an unconquerable shelled beast.

One of the hunters screamed in the heat of a volcanic vent, its horrid voice resonating dimly out through the water until it reached the ammonite as little more than a memory of pain. She turned to face the dim noise, seeing it as a sheet of rippling white sound, and briefly saw the cumbersome form of the hunter as its pearlescent skin peeled away in the vent. Already, roving pairs of Coccosteus were satiating their curiosity by tearing up this flaking, silverish skin as it floated away. The ammonite felt a rumble somewhere deep below. She propelled herself back again, tilting her body, and slotting into a crevice where the surviving hunters could not find her. She angled her shell to fit. Here she waited for them to inspect their dead companion, and watched as their strange limbs struggled to propel them through the water. The hunters were long and slim compared to the ammonite, their heads protruding not from a shell but from a torso to which was attached four long limbs. From this distance, secluded in the grey rock, the hunters looked like deformed Ichthyostega, those four-legged, tentacleless creatures who had ventured into the Dry World beyond ammonite reach, and had returned with strange vegetation in their mouths and strange glances in their eyes.

But the hunters were not Ichthyostega; they were bigger, ganglier, and could create sunlight from strange lumps on their skins. Their heads, bulbous and impractical, held one solid compound eye of near-orange colour, beyond which was a strange luminescence. The ammonite kept watch with her left eye, trying to compress from these strange creatures a hint of their origin. Had the leviathan really fallen from above the Dry World, slipping into the oceans from the Great Unreachable? Was the waterless world the Ichthyostega found a gigantic air pocket, and beyond this, was there an ocean large enough to host the Leviathan? Could such an ocean exist?

The ammonite’s thinking was informed by the shining material at the end of this long cave, by the strangeness of it, and the unmapped depths of these volcanic vents. The Ichthyostega had spoken of the land above the land, and the rocks that fell from the Great Unreachable, but most ammonites did not believe these tales, not least because many did not have the capacity.

Their lives, for now, were filled with the basic processes of proliferating their genetic code. Vast incomprehensible things would remain vast and incomprehensible. But some ammonites noticed, and fewer of them remembered. Fewer still were curious, and only a handful were curious enough to find their way to the corpse of the thing which had fallen from the Great Unreachable, and to carry between their eyes thoughts of vast air pockets and oceans above oceans.

And only one ammonite was fated to figure out what all of this meant. Through coincidence or destiny or some other presently unknowable mathematical force, she was here, right where she needed to be.

Weird endnotes:

I am very pleased that Minecraft (the game I am now working on getting a job playing) has brought Nautiluses to the shores of our digital worlds. Stephanie’s world is set in 2016, so she doesn’t get Nautiluses in her Minecraft world… but I am seriously tempted to change that.

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One of the first ones was this.

Debuting in 1997, it was a step up for a five-year-old me, with moving parts, antennae, and electronics. The sheer weirdness of the Insectoids theme still resonates with fans nearly thirty years later. It is what inspired me to get into Science Fiction. Well, that and watching The X-Files waaaay too early.

Which is why, for #Febrovery (a yearly Lego space rover event) I decided to bring the theme screaming back into view.

Say hello to the Insectoid Crystal Rover.

The idea here was to make something which stuck to the ‘rover’ theme of Febrovery, but which also came across as totally alien.

I wanted the original to be flatter and longer, but as I was building, this weirder shape came about, and I quite like it. The shape informed the story of the model, or MOC (My Own Creation).

The build has a front wheel assembly which can adjust to rough terrain, gears which turn insect teeth at the front, a bubble cockpit for one driver, and the original Insectoid theme wings.

Doesn’t he look happy in there?

I gave the build its own set of eyes also, and little arms with laser guns, not just because of the Rule of Cool1, but because I am telling a story here, as I am with everything I do. Comedy, Books (obviously), Minecraft streams, TikTok sketches, Stand-up, Drawings, Lego; all of it tells a story. And sometimes those stories overlap, or share a cosmos.

The story of this little fellow is that the rover part itself is alive. It is a spider, and the top part is a dragonfly. Now, today is the end of February so I had no more time to play with it, but my goal in the future will be to make it so these two parts can comfortably separate and become their own sub models. I may also change the wings, though that feels almost blasphemous to me. I could at least rig up a novel way to connect them to more modern parts, as the hinge tips of the wings I have, and their counterpart hinge bricks, broke about fifteen years ago.

Importantly, whilst I was making this digitally I tried to make it out of parts I know I have, so when I get a place big enough to swoosh toy spaceships around, I can add this beastie to my ridiculous Lego city.

The back end of it showcases some crystals that have been harvested, and glowing red energy pods. No idea why alien bugs put their starship batteries in such vulnerable places, but we have exterior testicles so I guess I can’t judge them.

There you go, testicle joke inside a Lego post. Evidently my writing voice is the common theme throughout all these disparate posts. That’s something we will get into in a future post, as I think about bringing everything I do onto a single TikTok account and confusing the hell out of our new robot overlords.

I like this spaceship rover thing so much, I sort of want to write it into THE STEPHANIE GLITCH. I have not forgotten her stories. I just needed to finish WHO KILLED THE HUMANS first, and a bit of EARTHLOOP.

Anyway, if you want to see the Instagram post about this creature, and help me on my journey to 10,000 followers (currently at 6634) click the below button. It’s free.

See Instagram post

Vomiting electrons in his kitchen because a coworker talked to him seventeen times about the weather outside that morning, Mr Bricky was not at first open to our questions, but really opened up when he saw the Bionicle shirt our interviewer was wearing.

“I never really liked the Makuta reveal. When I discovered he was just one guy in an army of almost faceless side characters, the mystery died.” Mr Bricky said.

“Do you think you could draw an analogy between Bionicle and your experiences being the first smart brick diagnosed with mental health issues?” we asked.

“The thing is, being smart is good until you are in the real world, where it is seen as a threat to the average brick. You know 99% of all bricks don’t have microprocessors?”

“They see feats of intellectualism as acts of magic. Being able to predict someone’s behaviour, or imitate a cool Sci-Fi noise from Star Wars, is enough to signal in their minds that you are a threat, and some of them resort to violence,” Mr Bricky said. “It is very rare that bullies are actually intelligent. They might sometimes have a specific spike of knowledge in one area, but they are emotionally slow, bricks who really should just be used as scaffolding in the larger builds of society as a whole.”

“Kept at the back?” our interviewer asked.

“Yeah, like the scary ones at fast food joints. We all have our uses, but they don’t see that. They, for some reason, see someone who has an entirely different life path to them, and it pisses them off. It’s not like I am going to steal their job, certainly not their girlfriend, not least because I am too busy providing sound effects and interactive play at the front of the build.”

“I am just destined for greater things,” he continued. “Like the Toa Nuva.”

Talking now about the Toa Nuva, Bionicle’s flagship heroes, Mr Bricky got a bit carried away with the metaphors to the point this comedy article had to become self aware and apologise for the confusion.

“I am sort of like Toa Kopaka,” Mr Bricky said. “I work best alone, and people think that makes me cold, and maybe I am, but it is not out of cruelty. It is just in my nature. Lewa is cheerful and acrobatic, Gali is peaceful. We all have our purposes but nobody really understands that, or if they do, they use it to be tribal. If you think about it, energised protodermis1 is basically a metaphor for having a higher IQ, a higher calling.”

“Talk to us about your diagnosis,” our interviewer steered.

“Well. I think the depression was a misdiagnosis as it is really that I have a low mood as a consequence of my environment, white walls, bland people, you know, but if the doctor has given this to me, and I can use it as a permission slip to take more time off work and work on myself instead, and my giant Lego Science Fiction diorama, then I don’t see the issue. And you know, I do have neurotypical friends. My issue isn’t with them, my issue is with cults, with tribalism. Did you know there’s an entire movement of blue bricks right now who do not associate with red bricks? They used to preach about being ‘palette inclusive’ but despite how common and ubiquitous red bricks are, in so many Lego sets, they are seen as backwards because their utility stretches farther back in time. They see us 2x4s on old box art and think we are all the same. Newer pieces on the other hand, like the 1x1 inverted corner cheese wedge2, are given preferential treatment in moc3 interviews because they are weird and odd-shaped and everyone thinks they are cool and special, but what about us 2x4 bricks who are different on the inside? I think the world has become too shallow. Everything needs to have a gimmick now.”

“You are a smart brick,” our interviewer remarked.

“I’m not saying I wasn’t a gimmick. I am saying focusing on these things instead of working on how we can all fit into a build together, is what makes builds unstable.”

“Is this a metaphor?” our interviewer asked.

“I have no idea, I am a sentient brick. I fit in physically, but mentally? I feel like an alien in my own plastic skin sometimes.”

The interview concluded with a two-hour rant about why the later Bionicle serialised stories destabilised the delicately constructed mystery of the theme’s early years, after which Mr Bricky resolved to write his own novel about the whole thing, right after making beeping noises when someone turned him 90 degrees.

• A photo from my most recent Comedy gig

• A little clip from the show

• A short list of some of my favourite modern writers

Two nerds walk into a bar.

Pictured below is my latest open-mic gig, in which I was briefly hired as musical comedian Grant Curnow’s mic stand. You might suppose two Sci-Fi comedians at the same small venue was part of a ‘diversity drive’ by an alien superintelligence, but in reality we both knew we would be welcomed here, so here we landed.

The gig is called Smiley, and is hosted at 99 Reasons in Chorlton once every two weeks, typically by my pal Hannah Knowles (linked at the end of this post). The timing and location means that there’s always some new faces, often students who live nearby, who come to try out comedy. For me it feels like a new canvas each time, somewhere I can continue to be a newb, even if I am working on something a bit bigger than the five minutes performers are allocated. It’s also not in the city, which makes me happy. And the staff are very nice.

Why it works.

The Smiley gig works because whilst the performers are all different, we have a shared goal: to be funny. It does not matter if you’ve been on TV, done your own comedy special, or if you’re just starting out. If your goal is to make the audience laugh, so their lives are a little bit funnier by tomorrow, then you are welcomed and you fit in.

It works because we have a shared goal, a culture.

There’s no push to gather a certain number of certain types of acts here, which means people feel genuinely included, rather than commodified as they are at some other gigs. I am not my labels here, I am just someone telling jokes. That is how I want to be, so this is one of my favourite gigs.

It must be hard work running an open mic. But Hannah does a great job of it. It’s not often you return from a comedy show with an idea for a Substack post, a poem, and a bit of dialogue in a novel.

My set

Grant went back in time and retroactively returned the mic stand favour by filming my set for me. He did a fantastic job. There’s a lot I need to work on in this, but considering it was all new material, I think it went okay.

I opened with a bit on simulation theory, then moved onto why aliens don’t visit us any more, which I’d like to expand some more.

The full recording isn’t available because there’s a lot of background noise in other bits that I’m struggling to edit out, but I will do this set again sometime.

I wrote the ‘Drake’s equation’ joke in my mind outside the bar before walking in. I actually don’t like it (for reasons I’ll get into in a longer writing post), but the audience do, and my opinion on my writing has been wrong before.

I also gave out five free copies of THE COSMIC COMEDY COLLECTION since I had them in stock and I’ve stopped doing the ComicCons for now, whilst I am writing and learning, so quite happy to give them away.

@realphillipcarterSome #sciencefiction #standupfor you all. They only let me stay on Earth for diversity reasons. #memes

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Alien minds.

I wanted to show you some people whose writing I have read and enjoyed recently. We have some fiction, non-fiction, a bit of poetry, and comedy.

(substack)

(substack)

(substack)

MBlackrane (X / twitter)

Sohail Ahmed (X / twitter)

(substack)

Here’s the link to get it for free.

'buy' it now

Reviewers wanted.

In the modern world, bookstores are dominated by unthinking algorithms which base a book’s ‘exposure’ (how many people it is shown to) on its popularity (how many people have already seen it). There’s an obvious paradox there, sort of like when you are out of a job and you are told in an interview for a job that because you don’t have a job already you are not desirable for a job.

Writer’s have to bootstrap themselves into the limelight.

But, luckily, humans are still more important than algorithms.

That’s where you come in.

This is Phillip. He is 33 years old and always wanted to be an author and comedian. Phillip has sadly suffered from NOT MANY REVIEWS for some years now, and he is starting to turn transparent as a result. One day he may fade entirely, and be only dimly remembered by his favourite smells, orange and sandalwood. To stop Phillip and his writer friends from fading into obscurity, you can donate some words today.

If you are the reviewing type, please write a simple, honest review of THE COSMIC COMEDY COLLECTION on Amazon (once you’ve got it and read it), and help the algorithm remember us. The best reviews get used for ads, which really helps the books sell, which makes future books possible.

Additionally, books with over 50 reviews are eligible for complicated marketing things too boring to mention here, which I would use to make the book even more popular.

Also, if you like the book, tell a friend. It’s not like getting it will cost them any money, the book is free!

All our books are 100% human-written. We even hire human artists for the chapter art, human editors for the editing. All our readers are human too.

So if you know a human and think they would like a funny book, now is the time to contact them using your magical anxiety rectangle, or psychic powers. Whichever works.

Bonus, get another, bigger book for free (in the future)

And, if you are interested in being an advanced reader for my next personal Science Fiction + Comedy project, WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? feel free to email me at fanmail@realphillipcarter.com and I will add you to the list. I am looking for people who I can trust to write a review on the first week of the book’s release, so a screenshot of your TCCC review might earn you some brownie points. I’ve never done a big marketing push for a book before, so this is all new to me. I am open to suggestions.

I’ll also try to have some paperbacks available for UK and US based reviewers if you have accessibility issues with eBooks. Just let me know what you need and I’ll see what I can do.

If you’re a professional book reviewer / social media type of person, let me know.

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Note: Amazon should be free -soon- but as they operate outside all other retailers, and indeed outside of space and time, they take a while to price match. The book is free everywhere else.

A horrible business decision.

Back in 2015 I wanted to make a multi-author Sci-Fi anthology. But, despite being immersed in a Creative Writing undergraduate degree, I didn’t actually know that many people who were up for it. Rather than giving up, I expanded the scope to include poetry and photography, and suddenly all the world’s writers noticed me, and sent in work. That book came and went, a primordial glimmer of the ideas I was going to one day cultivate into this thing right here.

Since then I started a career in comedy, of various types, but I never forgot that Sci-Fi book idea.

So it seemed right to mix the two together.

Halfplanet Press’s first venture into multi-author anthologies, therefore, was THE COSMIC COMEDY COLLECTION.

The Cosmic Comedy Collection (originally called the Cosmic Cock’s Cosmic Comedy book, before Amazon told me the word Cock wasn’t okay on a book) is a small anthology of five bespoke, human-written science fiction comedies by five authors. I think we’ve all won awards of some description in writing and comedy now, so I probably need to brag about that and redo the cover to make room for the brag.

I am in the book, but I can assure you my story is edited also, as I had both John and Aaron look at it before publication.

How it works is there are five stories, each in an entirely different tone of comedy writing, and you read them with your brain. This does mean it is an odd book, but aren’t all of my books?

The paperback sold out at the last convention I went to, which was nice.

And now I am making the eBook free, because, well, to be honest the economy is not doing so well and I can tell because people have been messaging me to ask what my cheapest funny book is.

The answer is now, this one.

If you do get it, please do leave a review of your favourite story on the book’s page on whatever retailer you feel like writing to. If you point out your favourite story, I can show it to the author who wrote it, and it will drag them out of whatever stupor they happen to find themselves in at the time.

If you do write a review (which would be very helpful for the success of future books), you can also email a screenshot of the review to fanmail@realphillipcarter.com and I will give you a gift.

Note: I have no idea what the gift is yet, because I don’t know if anyone will do it. But if someone does, I will think of something. If you have any ideas, why not email them to me alongside your review?

The Cosmic Comedy Collection

A new Cosmic Comedy Collection will come out eventually, so the popularity of this one is very important to future books. Thank you for your continued support of weird, original fiction.

BONUS FEATURES:

I made this book before we had the capacity to hire an artist, so I did the chapter art myself. I don’t mind it. Works for comedy.

Two of my co-authors are on Substack, also.

(AJ PAGAN)

(JOHN COON)

Smart people like you enjoy it, which is why you’re here.

At once I can be a serious science fiction author, a stand-up comedian, a poet, and a game designer. Outside the diversity of my writing I have also started a new career as a Streamer, and at the time of writing have at least 163 Minecraft clips to upload to my dedicated Minecraft Tiktok, Instagram, Facebook, and Youtube. To top it all off, I -never- use AI to help (or really, hinder) me with this, I do it all myself, including the book cover design, video editing, marketing.

If it sounds like a lot of work, that’s because it is.

I have comedy and book friends who’ve advised me to cut one or two things down, but I cannot. For in my head it is all branches to the same tree. That tree being, storytelling.

And now I have a new method of storytelling.

I have been building.

Do you remember playing with Lego?

I still do it. Here’s something I made, the Trader’s Wagon Encounter.

LEGO Trader’s Wagon Encounter

I don’t write much FANTASY, but I do build it. What you’re looking at here is my new LEGO set. It comes with five figures, a tent, a stables, four horses, a bat, an owl, a pigeon, a fish, and of course the trader’s wagon itself. It is absolutely crammed with fun features, sort of like my books.

The wagon opens up to reveal a precious array of treasures from various adventures. There are loads of other features, and I will link the project below.

And, because it’s me, the carriage that carries the wagon is packed with features.

• Working suspension using rubber parts

• Two side-mounted chests for extra storage

• Wagon can detach and become its own building

• Carriage is detailed with diagonal parts, emulating age

• Lift up the boards to reveal a secret treasure

“But that’s not Sci-Fi!” you say.

Quite right. It isn’t. This next thing is.

You might be here for SCI-FI specifically. If so, I’ve got something for you, too.

LEGO Space Train

Say hello to the SPACE TRAIN. Three carriages long, and packed with features of its own, this formidable moon machine is designed to fit with both existing Lego City train layouts (fitting under tunnels, etc) and to feel at home in sprawling Sci-Fi layouts also.

The SPACE TRAIN is inspired by Lego’s classic 1980s space theme, and features brick-built classic space logo, working volcano (which erupts as the train drives past it) and a robotic arm to pick up space rocks.

You can vote for this (for free) and turn it into a real Lego set, right now.

I was on channel 4’s LEGO MASTERS in 2017, owing to some spaceships and robots I designed. LEGO is part of my creative DNA.

Hello, Phillip from the future here. I am now thanking you for your (free) support in voting for these projects. Because of your votes, I fulfilled a childhood dream of becoming a Lego designer, and this unlocked so many new opportunities for creating cool things for you all.

Voting closed on FEB 18TH 2026, but luckily, you all saw this and were able to vote on time!

Vote SPACE TRAIN

Vote WAGON ENCOUNTER

You can vote for both of these projects, and you can check out other projects by other people too. I have a lot more on the way when it comes to Lego, and a lot more coming here to Substack also.

The spaceships flying around me in this author photo are actually built with Lego. They are the Intersect Ships from Who Built The Humans? / Earthloop.

It all connects.

Vote now

I’ve not posted for a little while as I am polishing WHO KILLED THE HUMANS up, chatting with my editor about it, trying to sort out my own FRINGE show, joining a comedy writing course, writing three poetry books (silly, serious, serious), polishing EARTHLOOP (three novels, one novella), starting a new time travel novella (yes, another one, I am thinking of joking this was the first), as well as entering official LEGO designer contests. I’ve then set up new social media accounts for myself, splitting RealPhillipCarter into no less than five distinct brands per genre (comedy, books, Lego, Minecraft, and Rod Grasper). I’ve been setting up my new podcast, appearing in other people’s shows (such as Epic Sages) and reconnecting with an old friend from college who, turns out, also became a comedian. We might soon start our own comedy night. Also, I recorded, then categorised, and am now scheduling, 187 videos for my Minecraft Youtube channel. That is not a typo. And editing stand-up clips for my main channel. After that I’ve been working on making videos where I am reading WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? to the camera, and those too will be scheduled to go out on Youtube. I’ve also struck a deal with myself not to post here until I have tidied my room (this does not count as it was meant to be scheduled). It’s going okay so far. Found about eight notebooks with ‘new’ book ideas in them. And I’ve not forgotten THE STEPHANIE GLITCH, and have written a new chapter for her. I really want to get book one out by December. I think that’s everything. Oh, I might start learning to play piano and learning to drive, though not at the same time.

So I’ve been a busy little fellow, which means I briefly forgot to post about this year-long freebie shelf.

Free Sci-Fi Friday - A Halfplanet Press project

Free Sci-Fi + Horror + Thriller

Today’s giveaway lasts an entire year, and authors can continue to join it throughout. I got in early, because I love doing these things…

Read more

3 months ago · Phillip Carter

When my new socials and website are sorted, I will let you know here.

Similarly, the fringe show should also be an online thing. So you won’t miss it.

Share RealPhillipCarter

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Or, it would have been.

Bowie died close to ten years ago, and in those ten years I have had thoughts come and go about what I should do. You see, I was writing Bowie-inspired Sci-Fi Poetry back in 2015. I quit for a while when he died, picked it up in 2018, then quit again.

Today I brought it back.

This is OUTWARD TIME, which you can get for free by visiting the link below.

It’s that simple.

The point of OUTWARD TIME is not to be a mere homage, however. I am not a popular Netflix show, I want to do things my way. So, if you have no idea who David Bowie is, that does not matter, because the poems within this book are 100% original, unique, and weird. They are just a little closer to Fan-Fiction, Parody, and Literary Response than anything else I have written.

OUTWARD TIME is a short poetry collection designed around the idea of a time-travelling man or woman, rediscovering their own past anew. It is not clear if they are in the future or the past, and in that way the protagonist relates to the Cosmic and Primordial Bowie, who they see briefly on television, defending long hair for men.

The collection also comes with a hefty postscript, explaining my process as a poet with an autobiographical aside about how I came to be a poet, and how Bowie played a part in that.

Intrigued? Here’s a poem from it.

TROPHY WALL

there’s a brachiosaur vertebrae mounted to the wall
and she picks ammonites and counts their whorls
casting herself in very different worlds
away from time-worms

the new people say when the moon is empty
and all the stars are dead
she’s out in space living free in our ignorance
but she’s really in our head

The mini collection is free.

Outward Time

Okay. I am going back to WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? See you all in a few weeks or days or other temporal interval. Missy the Missile has an adventure to go on.

These coincidences are a lot of fun, especially if you ascribe significance to them.

But why was I looking at birds today?

A few months ago we had a poll to decide what sort of content you’d like to see, and a few of you wanted to know what research my human brain does before writing human stories.

Now, as I’ve not yet sunk my brain into a vast tank of nebulous sources / sauces and mixed it around until it becomes murky and confused, so I can often recollect what research I’ve done for each story. A few years ago, my university poetry collections were inspired by Futurism articles, and now I enjoy science videos on Youtube. I’ve gone through a lot of Richard Dawkins and Roger Penrose (books and videos) for my heavier books; and for a short story about a pigeon I am currently working on, I’ve just realised it might be helpful if I learn about bird language too.

Because I like my worlds to be detailed.

How fortuitous. I was going to just show you this because it is cool (and therefore is ‘general research’ - stuff I learn but not for a specific story, which no doubt will show up somewhere eventually) and now it has a proper reason to be slotted into the expanding universe of stories and research.

The pigeon story this bird research should1 show up in is WHO REBUILT THE HUMANS? which is the book coming -after- WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? so you’ve got a while left to wait considering WKTH isn’t even out yet.

But it is being edited, and it is looking like the launch will be Summer 2026. About which, I am looking into merging a comedy show with a book launch, perhaps for THE MANCHESTER FRINGE. I will let you know how this goes.

So, today I turn my computer on to write, set up a Youtube playlist, and find in my recommended bar a video about bird grammar (linked at the end of this email).

It is fascinating. I am going to have to watch it a second time this morning to reabsorb it. Professor Toshitaka Suzuki ponders if our distant ancestors might have, at some point in time, understood the complex languages of animals.

I think we did. Maybe long ago we could ask the animals about the lands ahead, plan accordingly.

But now we have drifted so far from the natural world thanks to our tremendous capacity for invention, that we have now a new linguistic landscape, a simulation of reality. You are in that simulation right now, as you disentangle the pixels on your screen into symbols, which in turn open out like flowers to reveal context and code. This word here makes sense to you because you learned it, and all the relationships and underlying codes which make the word ‘word’ mean something.

And at the same time, you’ve probably forgotten how to ask magpies where the nearest river is.

Or, it is more true to say, someone before you forgot it, and didn’t pass it on.

We have ‘invented’ storytelling2, a device which animals definitely already had, but we added layers of detail to. Intergenerational stories enabled humans to collect information over generations much faster than evolutionary processes could pick up on. But isn’t that itself evolutionary? Our capacity to pass information (and fart jokes) down from generation to generation is why I didn’t have to reinvent the computer in order to send you this email.

What a timesaver that has been.

Thank you, past clever people.

Anyway, bird language.

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Petticoat

bombardier’s dream was sold upstream
kept in glass and dressed up obscene
this petticoat funded with plundered gold
can barely protect against the cold

blue and white turns green-grey at night
as the sun bows for the endless moon
and expensive coats and watches and homes
feel like trinkets beneath the coming doom

the market street is all but dead
and poor mother is still off her head
and there’s something in the radio about the effects
of wasting a life running away from dread

outside, nuclear winter is wrapping up warm
as leader-men construct their swarm
of Übermensch with glowing eyes
their favourite nightmare reaching the skies

And immediately after, a FREE FICTION FRIDAY post.

Free Sci-Fi Friday - A Halfplanet Press project

FFF - Sorry I'm late!

Sorry I’m late everyone, I had some real-life stuff to deal with and I don’t always schedule these emails far in advance, as I am always looking for new promos to share with you…

Read more

4 months ago · Phillip Carter

but I’ve been meaning to share some Sci-Fi with you recently anyway, so here’s some. It’s from my next book WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? and it is a triumphant return for Tin Foil Tim, a fan favourite character from WHO BUILT THE HUMANS?

I don’t do trigger warnings, but since we are online and you’ve not picked up the book and pored / pawed your way through it to this page, I feel I probably should tell you that there’s stuff about cattle mutilation, alien abductions, and very brief suicide mention in this story. There’s also foil underpants, and a beef burger.

Who Killed The Cows, Man?

A tweed-clad man with round glasses and rustling trousers ambled into the lecture theatre from the leftward entrance.

“You are late, Mister Tim,” he scolded himself in a mock-nasal tone. Several students laughed, whilst others privately calculated just how much of their student loans they had lost to these mysterious exhibitions.

“If any of you were wondering, the new cover of my old book just came in.” Tim slammed a striped paper bag down on the side of his lectern, grimacing as the mic, already on, picked up a whining ghost of the sound.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. Then, remembering an old promise, clapped his right hand toward the assembled students by rapping his fingertips against the palm. One of the students got half way out of their chair and launched a plastic-wrapped muffin Tim’s way.

“Thank you Alan,” Tim said. “As I was saying. Old book, new cover. Behold.”

As the professor unwrapped the books he had removed from the library, and the singular new edition he had also removed from the library, the students chattered amongst themselves.

“I hear he’s took the alien off the front,” said a redhead.

“Too graphic. Distancing himself from the probing thing.”

“Still calls himself ‘Tin foil Tim’ though, doesn’t he?”

“Of course. You can hear his underpants crumping during one to ones.”

“Crumpling,” another student corrected.

“No. Crumping.”

“Creasing, rustling. Like his balls are old leaves.”

“Old leafy balls Tin foil Tim.”

“Hey Alan, does Tim have leafy balls?” teased one student, playfully.

“No, but your mum does,” Alan snapped back.

“Enough about my deciduous testicles,” professor Tim said, surprising the students with his above average hearing. “They’ve got my name wrong.”

“What does it say?” asked Alan.

“Tim foil Tin.”

“Ah that’s not too bad, most people won’t notice it,” the redheaded student replied. Alan nodded in agreement.

“Well that’s not the point, is it? I don’t much care if readers notice, as long as they enjoyed the book. What bothers me is that I notice, and more importantly, that this thing went through seven rounds of edits. There’s a typo in the first one you know.”

“And nobody cared,” another female student said, reassuringly.

“But is the cover good?” a second asked.

“Oh, it’s very good,” Tim smiled. He held aloft one of each edition. The older edition depicted a handsome alien with its arms around Tin foil Tim, covering his private parts.

“I will never understand why the publisher made me change it to this,” Tim said. “Sales rose, sure, but why? What kind of person would want this in their front room?”

The later edition of Who Probed The Humans? featured a shadowy hill, a silhouetted UFO, and pine trees. It was much more ominous, and felt much less like the cover to some cheap dirty magazine.

“Can we start the lecture now please, we have exams in a few weeks,” one student asked.

“Nerd,” professor Tim quipped. He put the books down, pressed the remote control in his jacket pocket, and the huge screen behind the lectern lit up.

“You had that on you the whole time?”

“I was busy. You know once you get out of university, if you get out, you might need social skills to navigate the world. Consider the preceding minutes as a starter course in talking to humans,” Tim said. He stretched, cracking his knuckles and adjusting his tweed jacket, stroking the velvet elbow patches, an old habit.

Behind him the giant whiteboard had an image projected upon it. A farmer’s field in the early morning. All the cows dead. All faces and eyes removed with surgical precision. No blood.

He clicked the clicker in his hand and watched as the image changed. This time it was a close-up. This particular cow had small burn marks made below the nasal cavity, and what appeared to be tiny boreholes at the top of the skull.

“Can anyone suggest what fate may have befallen these bovines?” Tin foil Tim said, his undertrousers rustling.

“Angry horse,” yelled one student.

“Nope.”

“Vengeful horse?” yelled another.

“No.”

“Horseplay gone wrong?” bellowed a third.

“I am deducting final marks off anyone who mentions horses,” Tin foil Tim said.

“I have a theory,” said a boring looking man in a crisp black suit. Tim did not recognise this student, but it was always nice to have more seats filled, so he didn’t think to quiz them about it.

“Go on,” Tim prompted. The man adjusted his black sunglasses.

“It was a suicide.”

The audience, Tim’s students, turned to this mysterious stranger, then moved their attention to their professor. It was no secret that Tin foil Tim had loosened his grasp on intergalactic ‘conspiracies’ in recent years, but surely this inane suggestion would reignite that conspiratorial flame in his heart.

Tin foil Tim hummed, grumbled, lifted a finger as if to begin a rant about interdimensional space crabs. Then he stopped himself.

“You know, you may have a point,” the professor said. Clearly he had left his soul in his other tweed suit. His biggest fans shook their heads, and the other students barely lifted theirs off their desks.

“You know, I thought it would be aliens.” One student looked over her notebook. Professor Tin foil Tim pretended not to hear her.

“He’s finally lost his mind,” another student said.

“No, he’s pacing the room. He must still be smart!” a Alan interjected, without a hint of sarcasm. By the looks of him, he had modelled himself after the aging professor pacing helplessly below.

“Thank you, Alan,” Tin foil Tim said.

“Aluminium Alan,” Alan’s friend said, tapping his friend on the shoulder with a friendly fist.

“Quite right, though I assure you I am undeserving of the fandom. Regardless. I like to hope I still have my wits about me, and I hope the rest of you can see through my more rebellious, conspiratorial age and engage in conversation about this case.”

He clicked the clicker again, bringing the students’ attention back to the whiteboard. Upon it was an image of a floating ball of greenish-blue light, hovering low above the farmer’s field.

One student stuck her hand up in the air.

“Professor. Is that an alien ship?”

“No,” Tin foil Tim replied. “It’s a whiteboard.”

“I mean in the picture.”

“Oh. No.”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s swamp gas,” the mystery student said.

“Aliens,” another student chimed in.

“Aliens don’t exist.” said Tin foil Tim, stunning the room into silence.

“What?!”

“Well, those specific aliens don’t exist.” Tin foil Tim’s voice echoed back at him from the back of the lecture theatre as a dim murmur. Some years ago, that arrangement of words would have made him hysterical with laughter.

“But what about your books?” Alan asked. Tin foil Tim could almost hear his admirer’s heart breaking into pieces.

“Well,” Tin foil Tim began. He removed his hands from his pockets and began gesturing as he spoke. “I would hope that my early work is still valuable literature even though I have moved beyond its framing. The message, after all, is not the messenger. I believe I should have been clearer, however. What I mean to say is that the aliens that abduct cows are not real. Cows lack both the means and the motive to develop interstellar travel and later time travel, so there would be no reason for some future cows to loop back and experiment with their own ancestors in some bizarre incestuous paradox, as aliens did with us,” he explained.

“But I thought you said alien intervention explains away anything,” a young woman replied. She was sat with a beef burger in one hand, phone in the other. Tin foil Tim raised a curious eyebrow her way.

“Oh, I’m a long way beyond that Cynthia. I realise now that I had entrapped myself in the very same conceptual cage which I would often paint around my adversaries, namely that I invented my own ‘god’ figure to magically insert itself in any gap that needed filling,” Tin foil Tim said. A student chuckled in the background, but Tim continued, “Except that ‘god’ was a little green alien.”

Cynthia nodded to signal her understanding. Aluminium Alan adjusted his home-made elbow pads and sighed.

“So, aliens are still real, just not ones that abduct cows?”

“Yes,” Tin foil Tim replied. “There is simply no reason to abduct a cow. What would be the point? What could one glean from a cow abduction? What secrets are held within cow brains that we do not already know?”

There was a long silence. Nobody had an answer because it was true. Cow brains had been extensively mapped; all their secrets were out. There was nothing within a cow that was not known by even the most idiotic human toddler. Cow science was the first complete science. Humans had even done the bonus levels.

“What we are to do here today,” Tim said confidently, trousers rustling, “Is to probe the deepest annals of human thought, to fully and passionately penetrate this matter. And in doing so we need to create some truly seminal research.”

The students were listening at last. Tin Foil Tim walked back to the whiteboard and clicked the clicker again. He swiped a few more times until he came across a picture of seventeen cows lying dead in a circle.

“Brains removed. Complete exsanguination. That’s removal of the blood. Eyes removed. In some cases, tongues too. Write that down, not all of them lost their tongues.”

The students scribbled hastily in their notebooks. Cynthia took a photo of the whiteboard.

“What in God’s name are you doing?” Tin Foil Tim asked.

“Saving notes.”

“How are you expected to recall context from a single blurry photograph?”

“You managed,” Cynthia said under her breath. Professor Tin foil Tim raised an indignant eyebrow this time, lowered his shoulders, and considered defeat.

“No,” he said. “That was different. Here you have the choice of clarity, of using your brain, which may I remind you aliens have yet to scoop out, unless I am sorely mistaken, and process what you are reading. You have the privilege of a mind, and by proxy the obligation to use it, for the benefit of your species.”

Cynthia shrugged and took another bite of her burger.

END (for now)

You can’t order WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? yet as it’s currently being edited, a Kickstarter may show up soon. For now, why not try the first book? It’s only £1 right now (limited time).

You can read the books in this series in any order. They are weird, multifaceted, multidimensional short story collections. For example in WBTH, the 11 universes are split across 47 chapters. If you read the book left-to-right you explore them all with equal attention, but the book actively invites you to try other routes, giving you teleport pads and dimensional wormholes through which to follow your favourite story to its conclusion quicker, leaving behind jokes and tales you can rediscover later.

It’s good, basically. I need to get better at marketing it, but it’s good.

You’ll like it.

https://books2read.com/wbthspecial?format=ebook

A Bowem is a poem inspired by David Bowie in an anachronous way. It is not a mere retelling of his stories, nor is it a direct response to any lyric or interview, but it is rather a new tale told as if in conversation with the entirety of Bowie’s catalogue, bringing together past and future in a way as to make the brains of anyone fizzle, even if they don’t know a thing about Bowie.

Importantly, if the knowledge of Bowie was entirely erased from humanity, a Bowem still has to make sense. In that way, it is its own creature.

I invented Bowietry in 2015, and I’ll do a post talking about it soon, but for now, here’s the first Bowem. Several small collections will come out over the next few years, with the first one at least being free.

This Bowem also uses the Collapsor (tm), a poetic device I invented in 2015 also. The Collapsor, if you’re not familiar, allows for English words to be superimposed in a quantum superposition whereby the reader (or listener) can settle on different tracks, or worldlines, leading the poem to multiple different emotional or narrative conclusions, or many simultaneously. It is this weird element of poetry that actually inspired the dimension-hopping chapters in my debut book Who Built The Humans? (which, by the way, is now on sale for only one dollar everywhere, including Amazon, who finally caught up with the pricing (link below)). Here, the Collapsor is in a peculiar place, the title, and gives the reader the chance to read the poem’s title as Arthurian, Arcturian, or both.

Ar[th/ct]urian

jiving out in space so high
the red star knows what’s up
screws the airlock nice and tight
takes his protein and takes his flight

round and round goes all our heads
sweeping sliding down grassy hill
mother would be oh so worried
but doctors put her on a pill

now she sines and waves as we crash and burn
cardboard spaceships spinning
and the future’s been written so there’s little left to learn
and mother stands there grinning

the town psych ward overflows with laughter
as papers flood with unwritten tears
and comics smeared, their reputations
left no room for childish fears

in the conservatory, someone lied about you
and in the library, someone lied about the universe
shelves are filled with dead men’s daydreams
from the profound to the perverse

so this isn’t a world, it’s a parody
it’s not a play, it’s an outburst
this fleeing town, this fleeting time
is little more than a starburst

and they don’t want knowledge, they want deities
to push them from place to place
they hope that, flicking through our story, some lonely god
might pause and remember their face

END

That’s the first Bowem in the Bollection of Boweitry, which will be published in January 2026.

It will be free.

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Merry Christmas everyone!

The sales pitch from outer space!

And, if you were after buying yourself Who Built The Humans? for Christmas, now is a good time to do it, as it is down to 1 dollar in all retailers.

WBTH

WBTH is my debut Novelthology of 11 Sci-Fi and Comedy universes, each battling over 47 chapters that you can read in any order, making the book as simple or as complex as you like.

WBTH also contains a mini Sci-Fi poetry collection titled THE ON-SERIES in which the world ends in various delirious ways thanks to your choices as the reader. This is where my popular character Tin Foil Tim came from. This was also my first published poetry collection, hidden inside WBTH as its purpose there is to appear once every three chapters like a satellite, to tell jokes about the heavy concepts either side of it (such as AI, the afterlife, and vanity presses).

Gamma Day is a short story about two sisters surviving in a post-post-post-post apocalyptic London. You know how apocalypses are. You wait ages for one, and then three turn up.

Since it’s a near-future London there are no more phone thefts because the phone thieves got eaten by aliens. But there are aliens, and since they’ve run out of thieves they’re out to eat anyone else. There’s also a subterranean shrine to Freddie Mercury and David Bowie, a whale skeleton, and some glowing alien moss which might actually be on the human’s side.

You can check out my interview (and find the book) below.

Strange New Worlds

One on One with Phillip Carter: Part Deux

Samak Press published its first science fiction anthology, Ripples in Space, in September. Through the end of the year, I’m spotlighting contributing authors to the anthology in exclusive one-on-one interviews…

Read more

4 months ago · 1 like · John Coon

I could not have done it without you.

My weird Science Fiction Comedy debut WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? is still chugging along five years after publication, and it’s nearly time for the second book in the series to come out. Right now, WHO KILLED THE HUMANS is with my editor, who I can afford in part because of your support of WHO BUILT THE HUMANS.

The reception to my DOLLAR DISCOUNT for Christmas has been so warm that I’ve decided to leave it up a while longer, in case your inbox was full and you’ve only just gotten to this email and are thinking “what? there was a discount”.

Yes, there was.

You could have missed it.

But I am keeping it open.

WHO BUILT THE HUMANS?

• In Who Built The Humans? most stories end with signposts to other chapters in their universes. You can follow these, or teleport onto the next page to hop across the eleven Sci-Fi and Comedy dimensions, meaning each new adventure through the book changes its tone based on what you desire.

• In Who Killed The Humans? Phillip soars in orbit around that old format, refusing to redo past successes, instead building on them with a personal new approach set inside the indecisive mind of Gordon, who you may recognise from Who Built The Humans? This time, reality splits along two or more timelines every time Gordon has to make a “cosmically relevant decision” such as what topping to have on his pizza. This is important stuff!

• In Who Rebuilt The Humans? the dimension-hopping characters and surreal, poetic approaches to Science Fiction concepts made popular in Who Built The Humans? are brought back into shocking focus. Here, advanced alien beings see the reconstruction of Earth and its Humans as little more than a game, but as alien centuries come and go, our new invisible overlords discover something about us that reframes how they see themselves. This is Phillip Carter at his mind-bending (and sometimes ridiculous) best.

If you are at all curious about WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? now is the time to get it, it won’t be this cheap again for a long time!

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0CW3H6DV4