It’s the sort-of-sequel to WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? (both being novel-length short story collections comprised of existential Sci-Fi, strange satire, and sporadic 1000-word slam poems about alien abductions). And it’s good, really good. I am glad I delayed its release to fix it.

And I am glad I am not rushing you toward pre-orders today.

No, there will be no purchase links here.

WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? is a novel-length Sci-Fi / Comedy collection. It has cosmic horses, time travelling missiles, and sentient mushrooms. If you’ve read WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? there will be extra jokes, just for you. If not, who cares, this next one is a standalone.

WBTH kick-started my stand-up comedy career, as I had funny stories and poems with a Sci-Fi edge to read at those weird multidisciplinary open mics which have slowly since 2020 gone extinct. On one night, I was able to be a poet downstairs, and a comedian upstairs ten minutes later. This foreshadows the meandering through the Arts I’ve been doing (I have since become a streamer, which means people pay me to play Minecraft when I would otherwise be writing (and it helps me find new readers).

The soul of the WBTH series was always multidisciplinary. I don’t mention the handful of poems within often, because people hear ‘poetry’ and think ‘depressing’ (thanks [insert poet name]) but these are 500 to 1000-word mini tomes about glowing future humans, energy ghosts, and someone called the Inner Self, who later discovers her office job is not actually a simulated reality, but really just quite dull. She escapes, but not before having an existential crisis that bleeds over into the next universe in the book.

They are therefore not poems in the modern conventional sense. They are not short or boring. They are as long as stories, but are told in a lyrical, and sometimes highly alliterative way. I’ve been told by some readers to republish them as their own collection, and I am tempted, though I’d want to add new stuff to justify its existence, sort of like those Bowie compilations.

Anyway, I finished a 6000-word story called LOVEBOTS last night, which is all about human connection and how it might soon be circumvented by a sort of semi-sentient iPhone that you can go on dates with. The story starts with crude insults hurled at two pre-order shoppers waiting outside the LOVEBOT store in their tents, with masks on to hide their identity, and it evolves from that into a weird sort of Sci-Fi RomCom which, again, evolves into Sci-Fi horror.

I think you’ll really like it. Ironically, I haven’t sent you any of it here yet as there’s some new AI stuff on Substack and I don’t want it eating my ideas.

Beyond that, WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? still features the audience participation baked into WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? In WBTH, readers could decide at the end of a chapter whether to follow that story to its next chapter, which was typically 50 or more pages away, or to flip the page to a chapter of an adjacent universe. There were 11 distinct cosmoses in WBTH, and people could dimension-hop between them whenever they liked.

This was aided by signs in the paperback, and working buttons in the eBook.

I am doing something similar this time, but now the universe is splitting in two each time a decision is made. You can either read a dark story about mushrooms eating humans, or a funny one. You can read a silly story about aliens, or a serious one. It’s a lot of fun.

I will give you more updates soon, but know I am at NOVACON in Buxton in November 2026, selling Sci-Fi books and mingling with other authors and readers. Say hi if you’re there, I think I’ll be there the whole weekend.

Never used that word before.

Tinker’s Dam

I got thinking the other day about why I made this Substack. I wanted to share stories and jokes and poems. Of course, these stories, jokes, and poems, were my own.

The fact that I had written these stories with my brain, meant that they had a consistent style, so you were signing up for some weird PHILLIP CARTER literature.

It’s awe-inspiring for me to consider that people will travel to watch my gigs, and will buy my books, and will be excited when I draw stuff in signed copies for them.

(Video from June 2026 Geek Fayre)

you might come to events and see my gigs and buy my books sometimes (it keeps the lights on in my brain and in my house) but what about the stories that I did not write, but which I think are close to my style, and which privately, I wish I wrote first?

I didn’t think about that much until today. I had thought about it with my friends sometimes. , admittedly, and a bit of one of AJ Pagan’s and some Aaron Frale tales (I hope he uses that as a collection title) and AJ and John have guest posted here before, but what of writers I never knew, never met, but whose stories I am inspired by?

So, here’s a new type of post.

I read Tinker’s Dam, by Joseph Tinker, on the 20th of July 2026, about half an hour before sending you this email.

The story was published in ANALOG SCIENCE FACT + FICTION in November 1961, as a novelette. It concerns a nestled web of psychic agents and counteragents working for, against, and diagonally with respect to each other. It has the usual world war theming, but with a brilliant espionage angle and characters that feel alive and clever.

And people said old stories were perfunctory…

It is fantastic.

It has waited on my desks, through three house moves, since around

I love this story, and I wanted you to read it too.

I wish I had written it myself.

Tinker's Dam

I hope you forgive the double post. I missed fiction, and I wanted to show you some.

In the real world, the same can happen. I have two degrees in writing, and as much as I loved them, they did come with an atmosphere, a miasma.

There was a definite leaning toward the so-called ‘traditional’ - that is that traditional publishing (getting other people to do your covers and marketing and editing and printing for you) is supposed to be superior to anything else you can do. At my university, the general consensus among academics was that you had trad pub, and vanity pub. Self-pub in 2015 was seen as even lesser; it was for authors too broke to be financially abused by vanity presses, who sadly had to roam the world printing their own unwanted stories and begging people to read them rather than pissing their pensions away on someone called BOOK MAGIC LOVE MARKETING BOOK PUBLISH COMPANY LONDON AMAZON BOOK AMAZING DOT COM.

When we had visiting writers, they were always people who had been traditionally published. These therefore must have been the only people worth reading. There was an omission here, an abandonment, an ignorance of other methods of Being a Writer.

You were either trad, or you were not worth speaking to.

I never did believe this picture that was painted for me. Not least because I got talking to one professor who saw through the atmosphere, and who put me in touch with a fantastic self-published author. I did my final third year presentation on my belief that, by 2025 (so ten years hence), self-publishing technology, and therefore quality, would far exceed that of traditional publishing. I even included jokes about one book, because I had recently been told “You are a great comedian” by an acrobat at a poetry reading. This spun me into an existential dizziness, as I wondered, was it true? Could I be comedian, poet, author, all at once?

This plagued me until very recently, when I gave up on the categories.

I knew I was weird, and I wanted to make spaces for weird people. So I founded and I ran my own writing society and actually found visiting writers who were not traditional. One was self-pub, one was vanity pub (I am sorry friend, but you were, though I had not the heart to explain at the time).

Anyway. I did all of this, which built up to my final presentation. I said that THE MARTIAN was self-pub and was well-written, showing examples from the book. I then picked a trad-pub book that was terrible, and made a point that therefore all trad-pub books must be terrible.

As I hoped, someone pointed out this was cherry picking.

Onto the next slide.

I had another, horrible self-pub book, and a very good trad-pub book.

I made the point that the literature’s quality is not actually manipulated by the selection processes of trad-pub at all, that ‘bad’ stories sneak through and that since art is largely subjective anyway, perhaps the style of self-pub stories that is not wanted by trad-pub is not ‘bad’ but merely different, intended for audiences who don’t go into chain bookstores and don’t care what someone at The Guardian thinks about a book. They want a proper synopsis on the back, not a paid and gushing review. They go to ComicCon, they dress up in awesome Star Trek outfits, and they want action, adventure, and mystery.

And I want to provide that for them.

Sure, I was laughed at by less than a handful of classmates, but so what?

You see, if I wasn’t picked up by TOR or BAEN or someone else, my literature had to be shit. This was the idea, the atmosphere, pumped in subtly between writing modules. Because NAME OF BORING ANTHOLOGY OF BRITISH STORIES was tradpub, so it had to be good. We were shown these books and sometimes told, this is what publishers want.

I didn’t like NAME OF BORING ANTHOLOGY OF BRITISH STORIES. The stories had predictable twists which were telegraphed to the reader on page one, like the final swinging battle moves of a rhythmic video game boss, but much less fun (below screenshot is Metroid Fusion, a fantastic game). If you actually read the things properly, the ending was apparent long before the fourteen-page rant about the writer’s messy divorce, as told through the medium of three drunk men at a pub.

One of the stories was about a woman who turns into a duck. In the first page she is seen ‘pecking’ at crisps, ‘plucking’ her feathered coat, and some other duck related things. She talks almost endlessly about the ducks outside.

I told my tutor when he asked the class ‘what do you think happens next?’ that she obviously turned into one of the ducks in the pub car park.

He said ‘you’ve read this already, then?’

‘No, it’s obvious’ I said.

I just recognise patterns.

And that’s what I realised was different about trad vs self pub.

It’s not merely stylistic, but structural. Science Fiction as a genre typically has a set up and release, a building and activating of a literary trap. And the building is subtle, clever. Other genres do this too, but the short form lit fic tends not to. Some of the stories in that anthology felt improvised, unedited. But how can this be? Is it merely style, or have stories, like modern poems, become emptier and emptier as time goes by? Has storytelling been replaced with ‘vibes’ (the new favourite word for booktok influencers owned by massive publishers). Is there a schism between us which runs deeper than the mere choosing of printing companies?

I think so.

“It symbolises the artist’s descent into mania after discovering her father never really liked the crayon drawings he put on the fridge in her youth,” said one person projecting their own insecurities onto what is, essentially (and literally) a blank canvas.

There’s a balance to be had here. I know I am being opinionated. I hope it makes this post more interesting. There are meta-styles evolving in the two spaces. Tradpubs know what they like, and they want more of that. Selfpub authors know what their audiences like, and they write more of that. Both spaces are encouraged to chase trends, but in both the best books clearly do not care for trends.

You don’t want to hold your reader’s hands and bore them witless and shitless with exposition dumps about your Sci-Fi universe’s in-universe political struggles, nor do you want to kick them into outer space and not populate that space with anything, unless of course your story is a Boltzmann Brain story.

Callbacks. Those too are missing in some stories.

I think one tradpub book which balances this very well is Amelie Nothomb’s The Character of Rain, which as I recall (see, I enjoyed some books at uni) spends a long time talking about tubes, but makes it a little bit different each time. It’s a neat little novella which does not abandon you and does not hold your hand. It is interesting. I liked it, and it is very far removed from what I would typically buy. It’s more of a big poem than a story.

Some tradpub books are fantastic, as are some selfpub books.

The point being, it should be a case-by-case decision for authors.

For me, self publishing WHO BUILT THE HUMANS was necessary and smart. It is a Sci-Fi Comedy which sometimes bursts into lyric about alien abductions and simulation theory between jokes about evolution. It would be a nightmare to find an agent for that. I’d still be looking today.

Instead, I published it in 2020.

Many of my author friends are tradpub, and I do not envy the massive effort they put into it. Perhaps I am something of a goblin, a mad scientist, as I cannot hold still for long enough to write a query.

Again, it’s up to you what works.

I worked with an author some years later whose manuscript felt improvised, like those very popular short stories. She had two boys find a pub in a forest, lights on at night, and the pub is only mentioned when they are at its door. Surely they’d have seen it beforehand? She took a while to see what I was meaning, that the light through the forest would not merely be good foreshadowing, but that it was also PHYSICALLY REAL to the story world. It made LESS sense to have the pub manifest. She revealed she had sent me a first draft, so the pub was literally new to the story universe.

I wonder sometimes if too many cooks spoil the broth. I think this happened with Dr Who, which had no internal consistency, which led less and less people to care about things because things were always undone (the writing it seems was akin to improvised dance, moving between ‘cool’ action shots without rhyme or meaning. The time eating bats never showed up again because writers could not be bothered and wanted to leave their own mark, despite engineering situations where paradox eating bats absolutely would show up to gnaw on the big delicious paradoxes).

And I think it happens to books, too.

There’s too much red tape in tradpub sometimes (for me, anyway, I know some people like it, and that’s okay).

I met a grumpy, miserable writer the other week who bemoaned their literary agent for doing a deal with them to remove a character’s pet from the manuscript in favour of going with a slight cover revision to a cover the author hated a little bit less than the last one.

Sounds like a bad deal to me.

I don’t want to deal with that. I do my own covers unless I have a vision I cannot attain, in which case I draft concept art, and get an actual artist to do something based off it (this is how MACABRE MULTIVERSE’s cover happened).

I keep and cut whatever characters I like.

And your opinion, as the reader, is a lot more important than mine.

And that’s how it should be.

Readers > Authors > Publishers

Anyway, I’ve gotten carried away.

Despite being laughed at for my opinion that selfpub would one day grow capable of doing what tradpub did, I was proven right in the end. In 2023 I was peddling copies of WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? in Gorton Cathedral, Manchester (thanks to my pal Ruth of allFM fame, for pointing this gig out to me).

I sold a handful, and near the end of the day met an older gentleman who seemed very intrigued.

“Ah, a proper synopsis at the back. Nobody does those now.”

“I agree,” I said. “We need to bring those back.”

“Too many reviews from newspapers. No room. But readers want to know what the book is about.”

“Yeah,” I said, trying to figure him out.

“Halfplanet Press. Not heard from them. Are they an offshoot?”

“Of who?”

“Can’t tell yet. But the cover is good. And the formatting is easy on the eye.”

“Thank you.”

“Is it a small team?”

“Very small team,” I said, trying not to smirk. I later revealed that the entire Halfplanet Press team was me in various guises, sometimes emailing bits to myself. He was impressed, wished me luck, and revealed he was a veteran of one of the BIG FIVE publishers. I told him the book was self-published, and he smiled and said it was amazing.

2015 Phillip was right. Self-publishing caught up, and in many cases, outran trad pub. Because we get to keep the best bits, and invent new ones.

A few years back, I was briefly querying THE STEPHANIE GLITCH and even had an agent interested in it, but we lost touch after I started posting stand-up clips on social media, and I sometimes wonder, did I need to keep playing the character of a clever author, did the rude time travel jokes put them off? Is that why they unfollowed me, thus closing their message inbox forever?

I don’t like the anxiety that trad pub can bring.

Like a 9-5 in an office, it does not suit me.

But it might suit you.

So do what suits you.

On the other end of the storytelling spectrum, I do a lot of Minecraft Streams now. I tell jokes (improv usually) and chat with people and show them how to build stuff. It is quickly becoming my day job. I love it. It’s a new way to tell stories, and I sometimes sell books from it when people look me up online and notice I am also in Barnes and Noble.

What I am saying is, writers, readers, do what works for you and do it relentlessly.

I am continually evolving, and that’s what I love about being self-pub.

For now, self-publishing works for me. But I’ve had some stories picked up by small presses, too. Am I hybrid? No idea.

So, my point all this time has been, the decision should be book-by-book.

Do what works for you, for your story, and that is how it becomes the best story it could be. Don’t fret too much about which mode is ‘superior’ and consider instead which mode suits your story.

For me, WBTH had the freedom to be weird, because I stepped away from my training and explored this weird new world called self-publishing.

I can do what I want, what readers want, and nobody stops me.

Thanks to you, I feel like I have already ‘made it’ as an author.

Buy / Free sample

“You have seventeen injuries,” one platelet chirped happily.

“Would you like medical assistance?” another asked. This was not really a question, but a polite way of saying Felix would soon be taken into the infirmary. He reached up from the wet metal floor, grabbing one by its thickened ridge, pulling himself up. The platelet turned in the air and struggled to free itself from his grip. Despite knowing his hand was fractured, the platelet shook him off.

“You will develop frostbite,” a third platelet said. As the words came from its speakermouth, the little thing slammed into Felix, nearly breaking another rib with the force it employed to make him let go. Felix coughed blood onto the grating as he fell. The platelets turned like a school of piranhas, sucking up what they could, preventing waste.

“You are deficient in iron.”

“Supplements are recommended. Shall we provide?”

“We will take you to the medical bay.”

“No,” Felix growled.

Later, Felix writhed in the hospital bed, dreaming of the platelets slamming into his head and chest. He dreamt of smashing one open: of tendrils thick and rubbery slithering out like guts from its braincase. He imagined the faces of his crew stitched into the hidden circuitry, repurposed in the endless loop that was utilitarian space. He imagined screaming. Nothing could be wasted, not even minds.

He shuddered awake in a cold sweat, shouting and thrashing and looking conspiratorially for a murder machine. A white platelet with a thick blue metal trim, outlined in gold, its body decorated to distinguish its medical expertise, floated glibly into the room, its pathetic arms outstretched from the four cardinal directions. It waved at him with these black metal bones, bowing. From this distance, in the regulated atmosphere of the hospital, Felix could see the energy aura from its hypercooled levitation plate. He grimaced, pulled himself forward, felt the icy embrace of a partially frozen quilt on his extremities.

“Your symptoms are unusual,” the platelet admitted. Felix raised a bushy eyebrow; felt for a moment that a human might be controlling the thing. They were never usually this honest.

“Your body temperature is unusually cold. You sustained no injuries from touching the hypercooled plates.”

“I only touched them for a moment,” Felix added.

“Your body was frozen solid against the landing pad,” the platelet explained. It showed Felix the footage. His skin, pale and blue, was welded to the metal landing pad with a thin layer of ice.

“That’s your hypercoolers!” he insisted. It wasn’t. He knew it wasn’t. Ever since being brought back from near-death by his crew after being mauled by a Vashto; those hideous things which writhed beneath this Kairheti IV’s surface, captain Felix Pascal had been a walking icicle.

“I’m on Kairheti Three?” he asked.

“That is correct.”

“The Vashto. They remembered us.”

“More than absent-minded beasts,” the nurse said. She was stood in the doorway, keeping a safe distance from the sub-zero exhalations of the platelet machine. Felix smiled grimly, remembering the fate of his crew.

“Shit. So the scientists proved it. Those things are smart?”

“Some argue we should leave that planet. A peaceful existence now would be hard to uphold. That they might forget us by the time they start throwing spears. We should have analysed the biosphere more deeply. They have language, well, communication of their own.”

“We need to survive too,” Felix argued. The platelet moved to the foot of his bed, giving the nurse space to approach him.

“We can’t go back home, this has to be home,” Felix continued. The nurse stepped forward, hesitated, and moved back.

“Are you afraid?” she asked.

“What kind of a question is that?”

“Your hair, your eyebrows. They’ve frozen.”

Felix sat up, demanded a mirror. One was brought to him.

“Hello Mister Pascal,” the mirror said.

“No diagnostics please Cass. Just mirror.”

“My apologies,” the mirror said.

Felix stared at his face. Under the nurse’s instructions he tried out different flavours of emotion. He recalled the rage when a fellow explorer’s laziness resulted in a delayed shipment to the colony. He remembered sadness when his first crewmate died in the Vashto nests on Kairheti IV. He sailed his mind back to the horror he felt when he first saw the beasts towering above him. They were something between millipedes and prawns, large enough and long enough to swallow a human whole if they wanted to, which they never did. They preferred smaller meals, and were adept at turning humans into those meals.

“I’m still recovering from the dreamscreen,” Felix grumbled. “My suit, it made me think I was in Scotland.”

“To protect you from traumatic stress,” the nurse said.

“Didn’t work,” Felix replied. The medical platelet waited by his bedside, perfect and silent.

“When you are angry the ice develops faster, more jagged crystals,” the platelet explained. A viewscreen on its back showed the nurse what the crystals looked like.

“And when you’re sad, it’s a slower thing,” the nurse added. “Felix, this is incredible. Your body is somehow lowering its surface temperature enough to form ice, without harming you. It makes no sense.”

She had by now invited in other doctors to observe. Felix was familiar with the atmosphere in the room. Within hours, or perhaps minutes, he would be quarantined and investigated by people in white hazmats. If he died, he would be dissected. They might not even wait for him to die. The pressure to investigate his paranormal abilities might be such that a nurse would be given the wrong drugs to administer, and Felix would become an easy patient, locked in a permanent coma.

An anxiety grew within him, and he tried to suppress it, not wanting anyone to see the jagged frost developing.

“I don’t want to be your vivisection,” he said.

“I can assure you, you are here to heal,” the nurse explained.

“I’m in another dreamscreen,” he said, unable to hold it. Between him and the nurses and doctors he saw flickering images of the Vashto beasts, all claws and legs. His head ached as he remembered the first attack, the wild cat that his suit’s dreamscreen superimposed over the alien beast, the vision it presented to him that barely covered the reality. How was it so easy to believe? How did he not see through it?

“How did I get here?” he asked, “And what happened to my crew?”

A senior looking doctor stepped forth from the crowd. His coat was red and gold, his face sharp and angular.

“Mister Pascal. You nearly died in that outpost on Kairheti IV. As you know your dreamscreen presented an illusory reality for you, for you to better perform in the field without panic getting in the way. That same technology was employed in the case of your crew.”

“Records indicate a previous conversation in which a Cass unit explained to mister Pascal that there were no deaths,” the platelet said sympathetically. “Those records now need amending.”

“I was getting to that,” the doctor said. “Felix, there have since been some deaths. Our total at present is twenty-one survivors, seven missing, twelve dead.”

Felix nodded solemnly. There were no words available to him.

“now need amending,” he echoed the platelet.

Frost grew on his eyelashes.

END

Bonus worldbuilding (for the fans)

• Felix Pascal was in the second novel I ever wrote, in 2009. He reappeared years later in WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? and his story is continued in WHO KILLED THE HUMANS?

• The Platelets are one of the older aliens I’ve written, their first drafts originating around 2008. There is more to them that I will explore in other stories

• Dreamscreen tech is not stuck in the WBTH universe, Stephanie finds it too, in THE STEPHANIE GLITCH series

• Felix never used to have elemental powers, though there was one lady with electrical powers in the first novel I wrote as a teenager, who is in the same story world as Felix

• I built a working remote controlled Vashto bug out of Lego in 2007, so this is probably the oldest alien bug I’ve written

The rest of this story is featured in WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? which I would love to relaunch pre-orders for right now, but I am still polishing it. When it’s ready, you’ll find out here first, because you’re subscribed to RealPhillipCarter.Substack.com.

Thanks for that, by the way.

If so, you still just about have time to see me in Buxton tonight, doing Sci-Fi existential comedy about why aliens don’t visit us any more.

It’s inspired partly by WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? so you’ll recognise some of the weirder themes. It’s good, basically. Or at least I hope it is.

Why not come and decide for yourself?

I’ve also got sci-fi musical accompaniments from Jason Cooke, of Oscilloscope and Comedy Balloon fame.

Buxton, tonight

Upcoming posts include:

• A poem about ‘being kind’

• A comedy story

• A story from WHO KILLED THE HUMANS?

• A blog post about being a panelist for a Sci-Fi book event in Trafford

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Which is fine because I’ve not finished writing these books.

This one will be serious Sci-Fi inspired poems.

(I have actually finished this one, sort of)

This one will be a more personal thing.

And this final one will be the comedy poetry.

What do you think?

Leave a comment

Anyway, here’s a poem I wrote after a big gig yesterday. I have no idea if it makes sense, but I think it has potential.

Read widely 30.06.2026

Read widely
and your shelves will approach the universe

a book from here, a book from there
a tale from her, an epic from him
something dense will form

read wild, like an explorer
and swing between disciplines
like a monkey on a vine

stand out, dip your feet in a rock pool
and your arms in another
feel the wind of new stories through your hair
and the warmth of alien suns on your face

read one book with another’s imprint as a lens in your mind
and unlock new avenues and ideas never before connected
then add another, why not? Read five science books at once
and a fiction one, in sporadic bursts
like a pulsar illuminating an alien world

read widely, and you will upset the lower vibrational types
who only read to confirm their beliefs
and only travel on well-worn paths
but it is not their fault
they are new here

read widely, and you will transcend the tribalism
and become the New Human
you will loop back and see yourself
and see yourself seeing yourself
and see the universe within you
and your coordinates within the universe

read wide and wild, and your brain sends forth tendrils of thought
into the deepest recesses of reality, which speaks back
and like mycelial networks, connects you

you can be a bead, isolated
or you can be a bead aware of the vibrations
through the dreamcatcher
as it catches the wind
and the percussion of your own voice
as you read to nobody in particular

Notes on being multifaceted

It’s weird balancing being a poet, author, comedian, and streamer. At first I was worried nobody would ‘get’ it, but then I found my audience (hi) and it turns out many people who like one thing I make, like most of everything else. My audience (that’s you) are clever people1 with varied interests, so as an entertainer I can show up in one person’s bookshelf as a poet, author, and comedy writer.

It’s some agents, publishers, bookers, and my fellow artists who seem not to understand this. In some cases they seem deliberately hostile to the idea that a comedian might need to take a break for a while to get their story in a book (like The Midnight Vault II), or that an author might pause the writing of a serious time travel adventure to tell rude jokes in cocktail bars, or that Sci-Fi characters can tell jokes and write poems. These people have even sometimes suggested I may not be a ‘proper’ comedian, or poet, or author, because I am not committing 100% of myself to that one art.

Which I think is ridiculous.

So I often don’t feel I fit in with the serious people or the silly people.

Here’s to putting your tentacles in multiple artistic rock pools.

Yet, I’ve found a home here on Substack, and I am glad you are all a part of this. Thanks again.

There are bigger things coming here. I’ve just finished a large part of THE STEPHANIE GLITCH which you may remember.

My photographers / Makeup

Cover 1 - Craige Barker

Covers 2 and 3 - WhenSheTakesPhotographs,

Covers 2 and 3 - Makeup by Eleanordoescosplay

I think short posts are better. That said, I have a few writings about the real world which are long and winding. If anyone has an idea of what I should do with those, please do comment.

Leave a comment

Before I became an author and comedian, I wanted to be an actor. One evening I was drinking at a friend’s house, which really does not narrow anything of my teenaged life down at all. We had one friend who didn’t drink who you will be pleased to know was also there, and also having fun.

In fact our whole crew had convened, all of us eager for the new season of Doctor Who, now David Tennant was gone. I wore a tweed jacket with a bow tie, pretending I was “the fifteenth doctor”. Matt Smith was revealed in this episode, and minutes later he was arguing with a young Amy Pond about food, and my friends and I were arguing over what odd flavour combination he’d settle on. He goes for fish fingers, and I shout AND CUSTARD.

A second later, Matt Smith does the same.

I was right.

Maybe I have magic powers, or maybe Dr Who writers could predict the outfits and dietary choices of teenaged nerds like myself. Or maybe, my pattern recognition was such that I could predict what the writers would do next…

Pattern recognition aside, Dr Who has ended now (which I also predicted), as has Keir Starmer’s apparent leadership of the UK.

So, what happens next?

Timey Wimey f*cky uppy

Keir Starmer’s resignegeneration was briefly halted by a sonic attack from a serial political heckler who won’t be named because I cannot be bothered googling him, who played ODE TO JOY1 so loud that it sounded as if the angels themselves were celebrating, which they might have been, if holes in the ozone layer didn’t suck them all off in 2006.

Citing low viewer ratings of the popular ‘reality’ TV show, THE UNITED KINGDOM, The actual United Kingdom has got rid of its old mascot, Keir Starmer, and is about to usher in someone who has been specially engineered in a laboratory to be worse.

Yes that’s right, since beginning this post, the Rose Tyler reveal was cancelled!

But it might come back.

But it might get cancelled again!

But it might come back!

Ad infinitum.

Perhaps this new person, with cartoon eyebrows and a cartoon character’s depth of understanding of the world, might have their own strange ideas.

Perhaps they will partner murderers with vulnerable pensioners in the hopes the kindness of the pensioners rubs off on them.

Maybe they’ll release violent prisoners early to stop overcrowding2

Or maybe they’ll engineer spiders that listen to your private conversations.

Or design phones out of gas so they cannot be grasped by passing phone grabbers whilst you’re using google maps to figure out where the cute coffee shop went.

Maybe they’ll lower the voting age to Minus One, meaning each and every one of your eggs and sperm can now vote.

Maybe they’ll scrap funding for the people who decide on scrapping funding, thus creating a black hole out of paradoxical £10 notes as the funding scrapping scrap funders thunder their way through scrapping the un-funding of the un-funders who funded the initial un-funds.

I know you skim read that bit. It’s okay.

Maybe pensioners will be arrested by the government as soon as their state pension rolls in, and they will be declared legally dead so nobody has to remember to turn the heating on for them in the winter. Being old will be illegal. The government would even be able to whack them (not in the mobster sense) with inheritance tax whilst they are still biologically alive, forcing them to do the grunt work of filling out all the forms.

Anything could happen.

It truly will be like an episode of Doctor Who, and not one of the good ones. In this one, if someone you know gets nearly exterminated by an alien, there won’t be another, posher alien with a proclivity for younger female companions to save them. They won’t be time-diddled out of the way, or age-regressed so they are shorter and the death bolt zips through their teenage quiff. No, they will just get dead.

And you will be swept up in a time sneeze before you can even grieve. If you don’t forget this person after several ‘episodes’ (the duration of time in which a scandal is covered by the mainstream press) then you will be given a visit from the brain worms, who will rewrite your memory of events.

And it won’t be daleks doing the lasering. No, rather than Sci-Fi murder mechs (inspired of course by real-world murder machines3) UK streets will be patrolled by stupid human zombies and intelligent robot cars alike, both of whom have their own motives for destroying you.

Worry not, however, the government under our new overlord will edit in censor-triangles which will barely cover things up, like when you got too excited colouring as a child and went outside the lines.

@girlgraveyardtriangle of death and deceit #doctorwho #classicwho #2010s #fyp

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If you want to know what really happened, you can pay a newspaper of your choice to show you the footage, who will then inundate you with their feelings and their interpretations about the footage, because honest journalism was bundled into the back of a van a few weeks ago.

Reality is no longer objective.

Now everything is an opinion piece, and I am aware of the irony. Everyone wants to tell you how to feel, how to react, and the system is watching carefully to see if the panicked reaction engineered in you can be criminalised or at the very least, labelled as a mental health condition.

Oh, the articles we’ve been showing you five times a day made you scared? Have you tried this new pill?

In this glorious endless future, you can even rent out a slice of British parkland for an approved walk. You can listen to a guided audio tour of where trees used to be, or look at a performing art piece about what frogs were. Why not venture to the castles, which have been meticulously taken apart as they represent hostile sentiment toward sieges. The castles, like life itself, are now two-dimensional representations of a much more complicated reality. But don’t look at reality. We don’t trust you with it.

In these parks there will be dog hours and dogless hours. Respect them. Don’t take dogs at dogless hours, but do take dogs at dog hours. If you fail to take a dog during dog hours, one will be allocated to you, or you will be humanely destroyed. The dog of course will have 13 prior dog arrests4 for mauling people, so you’ll be slightly safer with the dog than you would be alone in a modern shopping centre.

If you have an Alpaca, please stay somewhere between both states of being (dogged and dogless) as we have not the proper legislation in place and Alpacas are legally giraffes for the time being and it might take a decade for us to bother fixing that.

Our new immortal leader

Gliding in on a skirt of TV cables, our immortal leader god will retain all the memories of previous prime ministers, but will have none of the endearing or redeeming personality quirks which I am sure existed, and I am sure you remember from all the others. One of them had a bird living on his head, right?

Minister Prime, as it shall be called, will claim it cannot be retired like an old replicant, but will instead evolve alongside the human species and guide us gently into the light, that’s right, go to sleep now.

Fun facts!

• Whilst not biologically a Timelord, Minister Prime was in fact born on Gallifrey, the planet of the time lords5, so according to galactic law he is legally a Timelord citizen, which means that he is in fact entitled to as many reincarnations as he needs to fix the pot holes. Our bet is one hundred and twenty eight billion, seventy two million, four hundred thousand, seven hundred and fifty eight point nine new Minister Primes before you can drive your car in a suburban area without giving it the car equivalent of when you sit down too fast and crush your testicles on a bus seat.

• Minister Prime was replaced by a brain worm with delusions of grandeur at some point in the last century, but it has made precisely zero difference to policy.

• Action figures of Minister Prime were cancelled in 2030, owing to the toy company not being able to identify any actions the Minister Prime ever took.

Ooo Wee Ooo

As Britain rolls drunk down the hill of time, toward a hideous future in which a ‘meal deal’ is what the new supermarket TescLidlDi calls the weekend cannibalism special, we contemplate the technicalities of technicolour reincarnation, and what it means for all of us.

Special Effects supervisor Craig Somethingorother was asked about how they plan to do the regeneration scene where Keir is replaced by Rose Tyler.

The degeneration

Whilst cries of MAKE BRITAIN GREAT AGAIN are ridiculed for their reliance on memories of a Britain that might not have ever existed, the phrase still speaks to a powerful emotional tool.

Nostalgia is the weapon which our new unnamed overlord will use against us.

Human traffickers tell PHD engineers from far away lands that Britain is a land of pissless red phone boxes, polite Hugh Grant characters bumbling about on the tube apologising to each other, and quaint boat races and poetry recitals. These aspiring tech wizards will be in love with the idea of Britain, and who can blame them? They will be told that they will come here and be happy and rich, and definitely will not be bullied into being underpaid food delivery drivers who have to sleep in car parks, within puking distance of the nearest night club.

Nostalgia shall lure them here. Poverty shall trap them.

And in the background an endless procession of new leaders will fade in and out of existence, like the blinking of a lighthouse from afar.

History repeats

It is often said that history repeats itself because re-runs are cheaper than new shows. Our leaders can keep regenerating, keep promising us beautiful things, but one day we might need to stop relying on the weird posh man who lives in a cupboard and uses alien technology to rewrite history.

That is why I propose a spin-off series to the UK, just like Dr Who had its own spin off series. We shall call it…

MorningWood.

And I think we shall set sail tomorrow, and perhaps start our new home… hmmm… I dunno, I’ve heard there’s this big place called Turtle Island…

COME TO MY COMEDY SHOW PLEASE I HAVE SOLD MAYBE 3 TICKETS.

Comedy time

Endnote:

But, despite being enrolled on a Creative Writing degree, I did not know enough Science Fiction authors to make it work (one). I retired the title, tried to bring it back again for a Lego Bionicle fan fiction magazine (another story for another time) and shelved it once more.

It took a few years to find enough Science Fiction authors to make my book publisher dreams come true.

One such author is John Coon, who you may recognise. We find a lot of readers through each other, so there’s a good chance you already read ’s stuff. Like me, he’s a Science Fiction author (and Poet) who runs a small press. This post is about him, in a roundabout way, because he’s going through some weird stuff and I want to help out.

The infodump from OUTER SPACE!!!

If we return to 2015, we see an almost beardless Phillip Carter scampering around a writing event. This younger, more idealistic Phillip picked an unconventional set of lectures for an aspiring author. He sat through one about publishing (which he found a little bit depressing), another about book marketing teams (which he found very depressing) and another about the whole process, as summarised by an author and her handler, some representative from the big press who had bought the rights to the ideas that crystallised a few inches in front of her forehead (this one Phillip found the most depressing, but also enlightening in its own twisted way).

He did not attend any of the ones on writing. He wanted only to see if he could do the publishing himself, and if querying was worth the effort.

In the big press lecture, with silent nodded permission from the handler, the author fielded questions from the audience mostly unattended. One man in a long dark orange overcoat complained that his book had not yet been picked up, boasted there were “people online very interested” and was almost escorted out for being annoying before he regained sentience and stopped interrupting. The agent/handler said “We are not literary gatekeepers” and whilst the audience laughed, I drew in my notebook in response to that a Sci-Fantasy human with an ornate spear, tribal dress, stood before a desert bereft of books. This ‘literary gatekeeper’ resides somewhere on my bookshelf, even now, eleven years later, though at the time of writing I have lost it.

The dark orange jacketed man would later show up at the pub (where I was trying to network with small presses, knowing I wanted to build my own) and would push his business cards underneath my full pint glass after I had already said no, then taken one anyway after he had insisted, then politely ended the conversation. He had mistaken me for an agent, and for someone who would take kindly to being force fed business cards.

But back in time some hours, in that fateful lecture hall…

Someone else asked the author about the title, remarking perhaps insensitively that it did not seem to fit the book. The author glanced nervously to her handler, then sadly to the audience. With hesitant and not consistent permission, she talked to us about how she did not choose the current title, that the book for many years had had a better, more suitable title that the marketing team simply did not like. The agent turned to the audience and said “But it’s a good title, isn’t it?” and a few old ladies nodded.

The author nodded too, but I could see the sadness in her eyes.

I thought, why go to all this effort to not be happy with the end result?

I think it was then, in November 2015, that I decided to be self-published. This was of course not a permanent decision, but more a choice to see self-publishing as a legitimate, and in some cases superior, alternative to traditional publishing (I did a presentation on this some months later, which wasn’t well received, but which proved prophetic. Andy Weir was one case study).

This set up my eventual friendship with John, another selfpub owner who owns his own small press. We were, despite not knowing each other yet, creating similar businesses at the same time.

My career [alleged] suicide

Fast forward a few years, and I still didn’t know any Sci-Fi authors.

But I was building a new social media presence on Twitter.

Not knowing the complex social nuances of pre Musk twitter, I had stumbled into a speed pitching event and pitched a book. Unfortunately, I had accidentally used the ‘wrong’ hashtag for this pitch, and had about forty almost identical literary agents warn me I might be blacklisted for this thought crime alone, that my book (which I loved and still love, I was chiselling at it last night) could now be doomed.

One said I was “misusing a hashtag just for agents to garner clicks”

What I was actually doing was using the hashtags I had been shown in other author’s tweets…

Another went as far to say “Your book sounds really interesting, it’s a shame that…” before the threat of cancellation, which made it all the more personal, and looking back, hilariously childish.

I don’t remember the rest of them and I don’t care enough to look.

Admittedly, after a weird few personal years this probably stressed me out more than it should have. But the threats of blacklisting from people who try their hardest to pretend they are not gatekeepers to the literary scene (whilst writhing in manic ecstasy when they actually get to be gatekeepers and to threaten to cancel someone) made me wonder if I was now marked for career [alleged] suicide; If my book would be found with seven bullet wounds to the back of its head, wearing its favourite concrete shoes, and somehow on fire despite being at the bottom of a murky lake in this increasingly complex analogy.

All of this because I used a Wishlist hashtag instead of an Author one.

Nobody paused to explain my thought crime politely. They just went feral.

I was judged before I had a chance to explain myself.

And I took it seriously. These people were professionals, speaking on their professional accounts. So surely they meant what they said?

I only mention this because after all of this, I felt quite alone.

One of the first people who cheered me up was John.

I found John on my new Twitter account (yes, dear reader, I got tired of the messages on the pitching one and deleted it). I was new (again), and I was putting the feelers out for a literary/comedy podcast (returning soon) that was tentatively called STRANGE STORIES WITH PHILLIP CARTER.

I struggled to find guests at first. The first person to give me a chance (beside my Bowie expert pal Jo Lion) was John Coon. We met on a joke I posted to twitter, or perhaps I asked him directly to join the podcast after seeing him tweeting about his books. I think it was the last one, but I am not sure.

He said yes to a podcast with seven followers.

John turned up as a professional and offered me his time. I knew from the first few minutes I was speaking to someone who would soon be a bestselling author. In fact in our first episode I told him as much, and made a bet with him that it would be about a year and six weeks.

I think I was about three weeks off my prediction.

Even then, John had (and still has) a day job outside the fiction writing to support himself.

In the years hence, we have become good friends. We share a mutual seething hatred for those writing memes people steal from Tumblr teenagers about how horrible being a writer is. My go-to is “Other hobbies are available”.

My belief is that writing should be fun, not just for you the reader, but for me the writer. Sure, there’s hard parts (I dislike editing) but the fun is in the figuring it out. It’s a puzzle you build around yourself. If you hate writing, go paint instead. Life is finite. Make it fun.

After the show I became good friends with John. We did a follow up show the next year where I got to interview John Coon, the bestseller, and also John Coon, my new friend.

We did a Devilish Bookworms pod together, where I made the cover for THE COSMIC COMEDY COLLECTION inside Minecraft whilst John made the hosts laugh about weird aliens he had invented.

We’ve got a few more projects rolling away in the background. We are both in THE COSMIC COMEDY COLLECTION (Halfplanet Press) and MACABRE MULTIVERSE (Halfplanet Press), and I am in RIPPLES IN SPACE (Samak Press).

And in 2024, after my Utah trip was abruptly cut short due to the ill health of my original host, John rescued me and drove me through Salt Lake City to explore. When I suspected my motel might be a bit dangerous at night (it was), John graciously kept my treasures safe in his car. He took me to a supermarket to get supplies for my motel stay, and picked me up each morning for a new adventure. We went up the mountain, played skiing simulators, and saw deer. He took me to a fancy burger joint that neither of us could really afford, and I had a strawberry milkshake larger than my head (well done America, this is hard work).

We went up another mountain the next day and explored Utah’s museum of natural history, where I took a photo of almost every plaque (about 700 photos) to browse on my flight back to the doomed UK. Thanks to John, I got to see the Jane Goodall exhibit in the months before her passing.

John even kept me in his house like an ailing plant on the last day of my trip, and drove me to the airport. What could have been a very expensive and dull end to my adventure had turned into something inspiring.

And now John might need my help, and I am very far away.

John’s dad got in an accident recently, and has had his left leg amputated above the left knee.

John himself is still waiting to find out if his own hand will be permanently disabled after an accident whilst gardening for his dad, in which he lost the top of his thumb.

(A part of me was tempted to get that thumb picture and paywall it, but that’s my own twisted sense of humour, and not John’s).

So I wanted to give my friend a morale boost, and helpfully some additional income to keep him going through this hideous time, so this post is about that. I’ve always meant to do a feature post for him, so here it is.

Indiana Jones, in Space.

That’s how John once described the ALIEN PEOPLE chronicles, his bestselling series. And it is a simple, punchy descriptor I remain jealous of after five years. John writes Sci-Fi with style, and I am a big fan of it.

If you are interested in reading John’s books, please do let him know. At this point, right now, it would help him enormously.

• Amazon page for John’s books (Best for money + reviews)

• Bookshop.org page (second best)

• Direct (John’s own bookstore) (still pretty good)

• Apple books

• Rakuten Kobo

• Barnes & Noble

Here’s to human authors who need repairing from time to time.

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Original title was ‘Evil Wheelchair Users from Outer Space’ and you shall see why very shortly.

I’m glad Dr Who is dead.

[But was it already a zombie by the time it was diagnosed with dead?]

[Back in 2023,] Doctor Who published a short ‘minisode’ thing for Children In Need1. In it, the 14th Doctor, played again by David Tennant because the BBC only has seven actors, does some time paradox stuff and accidentally names the Daleks, as well as replacing their pincers with a plunger.

All this is pretty funny for reasons too lore-complex to get into, but the general gist is that Dr Who is back, and that this episode felt like a non-canon advert. It looked good, it sounded good, and the dialogue was pretty decent too.

But it showed a pretty major change.

Davros is outside his transport unit.

Nice to know he has trousers on the bottom. I always imagined he’d have his Kaled nuts out in that thing, like he was in a zoom meeting for his inappropriate behaviour at work and was moments away from another offence.

But this minisode was not simply a non-canon piece just for Children In Need. Showrunner Russel T Davies has since stated that this minisode is setting up some real lore for the main show.

The robo-wheelchair beneath Davros is dissolving much like Roald Dahl’s literature2, paved over by a new, more polite society, or something.

So it’s not as simple as a prequel to Davros, this is a solid rewrite of the show’s lore, which has some people upset. I’ve done my fair share of doomscrolling and from my perspective, about half the people talking about this don’t think Davros was ever really a wheelchair user in the first place.

To them, the difference is between a wheelchair and a small tank.

I’ll let Jeremy Clarkson worry about the finer details there.

I have to say, I think the second person makes a point. Why can’t Dr Who stories do that? It’s a shame RTD took the time to respond in the way he did, because ignoring this comment would have somehow felt less ignorant. Now it just looks like RTD picks and chooses what things to care about each morning [edit: perhaps depending on what’s popular].

The death of continuity

Retroactively editing huge, important main players in what little shreds of solid canon3 we have left feels like the easier solution to a widening problem.

[at first, but you later realise this just makes more holes]

As a writer, I’d have left Davros well alone, and written in some characters who are good guys [in wheelchair-like devices]. You could do it in interesting ways.

What if we ventured to a parallel reality where Davros had a change of heart? This could provide an interesting concept episode for devoted fans, and show those handful of [imaginary] idiots who base their entire worldview off sci-fi shows that disabled people can be nice as well. You could even tie it to the parallel universe Rose Tyler is stuck in, the one which is not accessible unless the writers need it to be. You know the one. It had those paradox-eating bat things which never turned up to eat any of the numerous, larger paradoxes during Moffat’s run.

[The show even got meta with the cracks in time from Matt Smith’s Doctor]

The show’s internal logic is rupturing…

Anyway.

Imagine if the Doctor found himself with a long-term companion in a wheelchair who was nice and not evil. How might that play out? This has been on people’s minds since at least 2005, when Laurence Clark wrote,

“But wouldn't it be good to have some disabled actors playing actual disabled characters in the new series? […] It'd be a welcome change from us being embittered, vengeful, evil, cured, alien or exterminated by Daleks!”4

I agree. It would be fantastic to have disabled people play disabled people, rather than weird Sci-Fi caricatures, which is part of the deeper issue here.

Retcons

When interviewed in Doctor Who Unleashed5, Russell T Davies said Davros’ old look isn’t coming back at all, as it “associated disability with evil”.6

RTD isn’t the only person on board who has this issue with the wheelchair rep[resentation] in Dr Who:

"We had long conversations about bringing Davros back because he's a fantastic character," Davies began, but added that "time, society, culture and taste has moved on, and there's a problem with Davros of old, in that he's a wheelchair user, who is evil."

Continuing, Davies said: "I had problems with that, and a lot of people on the production team had problems with that; associating disability with evil – and trust me, there's a very long tradition of this.

"The world changes, and when the world changes, Doctor Who has to change as well."

Tropes can indeed sneak into media. Here is ‘bad man with face scar’ #489.

It’s also interesting to note that in the same film this character is from, Avatar, the protagonist Jake Sully is in a wheelchair due to a spinal injury. He can’t afford the surgery for this, but the military is perfectly happy wrapping him up and sending him across the galaxy in a spaceship to have his soul downloaded into an empty clone body of a blue fella from the magic floating rock planet. This, apparently, was easier than finding a surgeon.

I’m in the UK and I’ve waited for NHS appointments before, I get it.

[I like this, it’s going in my comedy show]

Keeping up with the times

In the Dr Who Unleashed interview, Davies said:

‘I’m not blaming people in the past at all, but the world changes. And when the world changes, Doctor Who has to change as well. So we made the choice to bring back Davros without the facial scarring7 and without the wheelchair – or his support unit, which functions as a wheelchair.

‘I say, this is how we see Davros now. This is what he looks like. This is 2023. This is our lens. This is our eye. Things used to be black and white; they’re not anymore. Davros used to look like that, and now he looks like this. We are absolutely standing by that.’

And yet, making Davros able-bodied [plus these statements about it] makes the story even more black and white than before. Now, we know there will be NO MEAN PEOPLE IN WHEELCHAIRS.

What about all those aspiring disabled evil scientists?

[Edit: I have a friend who is evil, and he is in a wheelchair. I love him]

We could have just abandoned Davros.

[Edit: but then Dr Who would need to rely on something other than nostalgia, but it knows nostalgia prints money (noting any parallels with publishing?)]

A comedian’s perspective

Back in 2005, the BBC published the article “Retardis: Doctor Who and disability” by Laurence Clarke, a comedian who uses a wheelchair.

“The first ever disabled character to appear in the series was Dortmun, the stereotypical 'crippled scientist' who helped the resistance during The Dalek Invasion of Earth. Feeling that he was slowing his comrades down, and armed with just a couple of small bombs, Dortmun stupidly cast aside his wheelchair and walking stick to take on a few Daleks single-handed. Needless to say, the bloody fool got exterminated within seconds. Whilst this may have appeared noble and brave to a sixties audience, today it just seems staggeringly stupid!”

“In the past, it's fair to say that a lot of Doctor Who's portrayals of disability were less than positive. A large number of so-called 'monsters' were portrayed as evil because they looked different.”

[I am very glad I am remaking this article, because Laurence Clarke’s article just jumped to the top of my reading list]

Later in the article, it references a Daily Mirror interview, where Russell T Davies said, “It's very difficult to employ persons of restricted growth when, as our producer Phil Collinson says, 'Bloody Gringotts and the Chocolate Factory are filming at the same time”.

Canon-friendly representation

I think, rather than changing the past, we could have even had an anti-Davros, someone who used the very same technology, perhaps a Thal escaping the Thal-Kaled conflict, who then travels the universe trying to make it a little better. There are enough gaps in the Dr Who lore to make space for this without effecting the existing canon, which is a fragile and battle-scarred thing already.

The universe is massive, it is entirely possible that we missed an anti-Davros all these years.

[Though, knowing current Dr Who writing quality, she would no doubt be called Sorvad, and the Doctor would spend an inordinate amount of time discovering this is Davros, but backwards]

Davies also made a pretty decent point about the purpose of this minisode8.

"Because it's Children In Need night... where issues of disability and otherness come right to the front of the conversation."9

Can’t disagree with that. If it has to be changed, that’s a good time to do it.

Whilst we’re on the subject, one could argue that the Dalek’s plunger-arm is reinforcing harmful stereotypes.10

Can you break a broken canon?

But Doctor Who, like Rick and Morty, is one of those sci-fi canons which has had so many tangents and cowriters that it doesn’t really have a canon.

It is, essentially, a fan-fiction of itself.

Time paradoxes do or do not matter depending on who is writing it11, entire swathes of lore can be rewritten, and death is almost totally irrelevant unless for timey wimey reasons, [or an actor leaves] it is suddenly permanent.

Jokes aside

I do have one genuine issue with the minisode, however.

The Tardis does the entry Vwoorping before crashing, and that sound is not altered by it coming in close to the camera. There should have been some noticeable doppler effect and there wasn’t.

Do better, RTD.

[unless of course, in years hence a timey wimey excuse may be made]

Ultimately, I think the usual complaint of 'breaking the lore' doesn't apply to Doctor Who, as its lore changes with each new writer. Remember when time paradoxes were important? Remember when character deaths carried meaning? All that's gone now. It has zero narrative stakes. Every episode is universe-ending so there's no more drama to be mined from that idea. Ultimately, I think this was the easy way out for the writers. The harder, better choice would be to write in a new character who uses a wheelchair who maybe isn't genocidal.

[the following added 2026]

I am glad Doctor Who is Dead.

Now, even though I was once a huge fan, I am glad Dr Who is dead.

It last died before my time, and was revived when I was entering my teenage years. My first experience was with the non-canon (for no good reason) Daleks Invasion Earth, which I still adore, and the revival was awe-inspiring for this little sci-fi geek. But the show had its cracks for a while. It suffered from the constant regenerations of its writers, each of whom either promised to stick to canon and didn’t, or promise to move beyond old canon and then relied on old canon for viewing numbers. Broadly I think a show like this needs either a singular writer, or a story bible within which which new writers must operate. It’s not that retconning12 the lore of the show would necessarily break it, but that the last few writers have not done a good job of it. Huge swathes of lore, like the Doctor’s own origins, purpose, evolutionary history, personality, and past regenerations, have become playthings for writers unaware of just how in love with those stories their audiences were, and still are. These writers have taken the crystallised idea of THE DOCTOR from their audience’s heads, and said NO, YOU ARE WRONG ABOUT THIS, AND THAT, AND ALSO THIS BIT OVER HERE.

And it is jarring. Not because the audience are immovable but because the justification is not enough. Why keep messing with the old story when you could instead write new ones… The obvious answer is that the show is constantly regurgitating its own nostalgia back at itself. I fear that NewNewWhoWho will just be the Doctor addressing the audience directly, saying “Do you remember the Slitheen? Do you remember Daleks? Do you remember when the toys didn’t cost £900? Do you remember proper stories?” like a shit Peter Kay13 parody.

Ultimately, the New Who writers did not earn their audience, they inherited them, and that holds a disconnect which I think should be considered. There is no penalty for writing a shit Doctor Who episode. Perhaps there should be.

Just give us some more remote controlled daleks and stop writing for a while. Let us have our fan fiction. We were pretty good at it.

I might post some of my own, soon. David Bowie shows up.

Because of course he does.

If you like time travel and Bowie references, check out WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? - I wrote it, but other people who are not me think it is pretty good. It’s got time travel, jokes, logically consistent canon, and stories you can navigate in almost any order. I’ll be signing some later today actually, at that Geek Fayre I mentioned (though you can also grab signed ones on TikTok shop, and unsigned ones basically everywhere).

[and our time machine takes us back to the distant year, 2023]

And now, I leave you with this horrendous AI image, and a parody of Simon and Garfunkle’s sounds of silence.

My gig (tomorrow) starts at 8pm. It will not be streamed, but it will be the first rehearsal of the gig, so streams are coming soon.

You can expect:

• tiny aliens

• jokes about sci-fi and literature

• a poem about frozen fish

• a poem about door handles

• jokes about shame

This first draft will be messy, so it is free.

The Ape and Apple Manchester.

8pm.

Wednesday 10th June 2026.

Date: Saturday, 6th June, 2026

Time of event (when the event will be open to the public): 10:30am – 3:30pm Venue:

Urmston Library

34 Golden Way

Urmston, Manchester (England, UK)

M41 0NA

Here it is, looking like some giant server rack.

Now, I have to quickly say that all events on this day are SOLD OUT but the library itself is still open to the public.

It seemed wrong not to send you an invite just because of this, but I must let you know it will be busy, or full.

I will be signing a limited number of copies of:

WHO BUILT THE HUMANS

MACABRE MULTIVERSE

THE COSMONAUT WHO DIED TWICE

That said, if you miss out on these, I now have signed copies on the TikTok shop, which I will announce properly soon.

CELEBRATION OF READING

At 2pm, I will be talking about accessibility in fiction, especially about how WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? is designed so as to be as silly or as clever as you want it to be - with its 11 universes broken into 47 easy-to-read chapters.

That makes the book “ADHD friendly” according to an old friend who told me it was the first book he’d manage to finish in four years. This is my obvious selling point (shame it took me five years to figure that out), and more books in that series are coming, but I will also be talking more widely about the writing process, about adventure, and coming up with new ideas from interdisciplinary spaces (why can’t Sci-Fi contain poetry?).

I think, ultimately, that a lot of the writing industry is losing its sight of what makes literature FUN, and I dedicate my existence to rectifying that by being as weird as possible, as long as it makes storytelling sense to be.

Urmston Books and Board Games seem to be ahead of the crowd when it comes to keeping literature FUN. It is an honour to be invited, and this time tomorrow, I will be writing my thoughts about the event here for you all.

I want to say thanks to my photographer for the event, Craige, as well.

2:00pm - 3:00pm: Imagined Worlds

Find out about the growth in popularity of speculative fiction genres in recent years, the breadth and depth of books on offer, why some ideas transcend genres and why people love exploring new worlds. In association with the BFS.

Panellists:

Phillip Carter, Eliza Chan, Thomas D. Lee, Alethea Lyons (chair)

Won’t be there but want to listen to me being clever anyway?

Conveniently, I have also got a pre-recorded radio show coming out on Hannah’s Bookshelf, at exactly the same time.

Hannah's Bookshelf

And, since it is FREE SCI-FI FRIDAY, you simply must be made aware of the year-long promo I joined. The stories are free, all those authors want is to know your email address so they can email you weird stuff forever, sort of like what I did a while ago.

All-year promo

More weird stuff is coming. Watch this space.

In a few weeks, I will be doing my own sci-fi inspired standup comedy show at Buxton and Manchester fringes. I’d have done Edinburgh too, but I think it is too late now, and I only just managed to afford setting the other two up.

I wanted to make the show more accessible, and considering most of my readers are in America, Buxton is a bit far.

So, let’s try an online show.

This will be a WORK IN PROGRESS show.

Topics will include:

• alien abductions

• time travel

• embarrassing memories

• gravity-dilating foreheads

The show could be hosted here on Substack, so you should be notified in the minutes before it goes live anyway. It might also be on my Discord, if I can figure that out, as you’d be able to actually laugh and reply live.

I am still working on this.

Now, the complicated bit.

Timing.

I want to make sure you can see this show, so I want to do it at a good time.

You can vote for a time below.

When considering what time you’d prefer the show, please convert your chosen time from your timezone where you live, to LONDON, as I live in the UK. If you are thinking “I live in New York so 9pm in NY is good” clicking 9pm on the poll will not mean you get 9pm New York time. It will mean you get London time.

So please think up what time works for you, then convert it to LONDON.

https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/

You can use that above thing to do it.

Then, tell me what day of the week works.

Once I’ve got a few votes, and I know people want to see it, I will figure out a good time.

Free Fiction Friday is back, here, on the RealPhillipCarter Substack.

I’m moved it back here after a year, not because it wasn’t working over at Halfplanet (it was working brilliantly), but because I juggle a lot of things, and I realised I don’t want you to have to juggle a lot of things either.

I want your reading experience here to be as smooth as possible, so the stories are not hindered by a clunky user interface, such as needing to sign up to two newsletters.

I have created this FREEFICTIONFRIDAY subletter today, which gives these posts their own subsection to exist in. You won’t see them on my home page, as the links expire over time (this one expires next week), so they fade away after you read them, making space for my own long-lasting fiction posts.

So without further delay, I wanted to share some FREE FICTION FRIDAY stories which expire soon.

The first one is

BEYOND HUMAN

You can click the image, the QR, or the button to access it. You can also scan the QR if you fancy reading it on your mobile, and you’re on PC right now.

Beyond Human

More freebie shelves will arrive in the coming weeks. For now, I am preparing for my Manchester Fringe gig, seeing if I can wangle some last-minute accommodation in Edinburgh, and figuring out a big book launch for WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? which is currently with my editors.

Subscribe now

Here’s the second episode I did with FREE THE PEOPLE, where I talked about aliens, simulation theory, and why we can’t agree on anything any more.

If you’re wondering about my author photo in this preview image, it’s from a poetry gig. I am holding a notebook upon which I taped an early prototype cover for WHO BUILT THE HUMANS.

Today’s promo is BEYOND HUMAN, a promo just for non-human characters, such as lawyers1. It’s a free promo that I think you will love2

Bad jokes aside, this is a great promo, and I am proud to be in it.

Beyond Human stories

It has been a long time since I wrote something of any length in fiction.

Actually, I finished the first draft to WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? recently, penned a few poems, and edited my submission for THE MIDNIGHT VAULT… what I mean is that it -feels- like it’s been a long time. And I suspect that none of this recent writing feels real, or proper, or ‘me’ not because it is different structurally or spiritually, but because of the circumstances in which I write it.

You see, I’ve not turned my phone off and done some me-time writing for a while. And whenever I do, I write about Stephanie. So, having lots of emails and texts to answer, and doing a lot of audience-facing stuff as a streamer (two hours a day yelling at Minecraft at least), I had no time for quiet contemplation. And THE STEPHANIE GLITCH needs that. So I had no time to write stuff for her.

Instead I’ve been doing other things. I’ve got a few comedy shows coming up, a few short stories in places. I’ve taken a comedy course and I am now teaching myself book marketing (late, I know). But today I turned my phone off, and sat in the quiet for a while.

Here is an excerpt from what I wrote today, without any context so you might enjoy it as its own thing.

I don’t write this book in order, so posting in order is impossible.

Ahead was a frozen puddle, formed in a dent in the pavement. Stephanie walked carefully around it, noticing within it cracks which shone out like frozen light beams from an impact point. She paused, pressing the tip of her shoe into the ice. A fat bubble moved underneath the surface as the ice cracked, moving like a runaway universe as jagged lines spread out like a spider’s web. She pressed further with her right foot, and the layer of ice snapped off, sliding up and over the larger piece. She imagined ancient life trapped within Antarctic ice, viruses, bacteria, aliens, then turned her imagination to the fascinating lines which cut through the frozen water. She thought about rutilated quartz, about the inclusions of minerals and metals. She watched as the large bubble wobbled and meandered toward a crack she had made across the puddle beneath the ice.

Wanting to make a game of saving it, Stephanie ambled to the other side, almost slipping, and pressed her tow lightly on the ice, changing the angle of the ice sheet so the bubble found a delicate point between emerging from one side or the other. The bubble was metastable, precariously waiting for more cracks to form, or for the sheet of frozen spacetime it was sandwiched beneath to slide, or pivot, or tilt in such a way as to allow its escape and its death. Stephanie had already envisioned it, which of course made it more likely to transpire. The bubble would slide up and out of the puddle beneath the ice, and it would pop, merging with the atmosphere above as a ruptured unicellular lifeform merges with its surroundings, as a decaying animal merges with the soil, the trees, the wind.

She imagined a tiny space traveller from inside the bubble could escape the bubble universe before it broke the surface of the puddle, finding their way into a smaller bubble which would use the grooves formed by the thinner cracks to navigate their way to relative safety. The metastable bubble universe might burst, but a part of it would have long ago popped off, losing mass and energy as it traversed the risky ley lines, but maintaining just enough to sustain its resident civilisations. This was how tiny lifeforms survived inside rocks and ice, and it might be how future life forms would survive the end of a reality. Stephanie inhaled, and remembered the cherry-flavoured drinks from some nights before, the conversation with Emma, the fish that didn’t know it was in a bowl. This bubble was a bowl balanced on a rickety table.

A car trundled past, and Stephanie briefly remembered she was supposed to be heading to college. She flinched, and a triangular chunk of ice broke off, glinting in the sunlight. The fat bubble escaped and died, its heat death quick and inconsequential. After all, nothing was really lost. The air inside was air in the atmosphere now, and no doubt Stephanie had inhaled some as her imagination played with the blade of ice that had foretold this breaking. She imagined the ice as a long broadsword of solidified light or printed crystal, something medieval yet futuristic. She thought about another version of herself ‘falling’ up from the reflected world to do battle with her. Then, finally, she snapped out of it.

What did you think?

Leave a comment

If you enjoyed this, stick around. The full series is still in development and will come out eventually. It is 100% human-written, because it is about humans. It is also very weird.

NO LESS THAN THREE LITERARY AGENTS HAVE IN THE DISTANT EONS BEHIND US, EMAILED ME ABOUT EARLIER, MORE PEDESTRIAN VERSIONS OF THIS BOOK AND SAID THE INDUSTRY IS “RISK-AVERSE”. THAT’S A REAL QUOTE AND I AM SHOUTING IT AT YOU BECAUSE I AM STILL SHOCKED BY IT. THIS BOOK DOES NOT NEED TO BE NORMAL FOR PEOPLE TO LIKE IT. WHAT IS NORMAL ANYWAY? WHO BUYS NORMAL?

I apologise for yelling. If you are still here, I want to invite you to take a look at a tree frog I made out of Lego as well, because I think you might like it. It’s the green fella you’ve been seeing hanging out between the paragraphs above.

https://www.bricklink.com/v3/designer-program/series-11/4920/red-eyed-tree-frog-habitat

As always, voting is free. This time, the doors close on 24 May 2026.

If I get in, I will be paid for my design (handsomely) and can use that to fund audio books. There’s a plan here. It’s a weird plan, but a plan nonetheless.

About that. Anyone good at business loan / arts grant applications?

As I logged into my draft2digital dashboard today to check my sales and reformat WHO BUILT THE HUMANS so as to align with the upcoming WHO KILLED THE HUMANS and WHO REBUILT THE HUMANS books, I noticed that I had hit 999 books sold overall.

This is a huge milestone.

Even if we consider that most of these are from currently-free eBooks, such as THE COSMIC COMEDY COLLECTION or one of my sometimes-free short stories (I cycle these so one is always free, somewhere), it is still a milestone. People didn’t have to click my stories and download them, but they did.

So thank you.

And, this count does not include books sold at conventions and fairs, which is around 200 at the time of writing.

Nor does it include those sold on Amazon before I got draft2digital. So we are probably closer to 2000.

It is very weird to look at that number.

Thank you everyone for supporting this sci-fi / comedy journey.

I will have more news soon about upcoming gigs and books. Stay tuned,

And before I go, I was also featured on Hannah’s Bookshelf pick-and-mix, where listeners can join the show and review books.

My review is at 1hr 23mins in, but I recommend listening to the entire show, as there are lots of other book review and commentary as well.

https://www.mixcloud.com/Hannahs_Bookshelf/hannahs-bookshelf-pick-and-mix-09052026/

I have hundreds of draft posts on Substack, and I am currently reviewing each of them (alongside published ones) to see which ones deserve saving for new readers who find themselves along the automated mailing list.

I’ll still be here for FREE FICTION FRIDAY, spoilers, and satire, of course.

You don’t have to choose between the newsletters.

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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