I think it is finished.

So… I think WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? is finished.

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.