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

Share

Subscribe now

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…

Listen now

2 months 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

Subscribe now

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.

Leave a comment

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

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

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.

Subscribe now

Share

'buy' it now

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)