About the Authors

Some Warning Signs on the Road Ahead

This anthology began as a collection of flash fiction from writers who used my ebook platform, or supported its development. But you see, I got to thinking about a former boss who told me, as a plain matter of business, that they fed every single one of their work emails through ChatGPT, "just to tighten things up." This was someone with a Masters degree, at a prestigious regional nonprofit. They asked how I felt about that. I replied that I wouldn't be following suit. I was a writer, I said, and I had to stake my success on my own words, not a ChatGPT string. Then I read an article published this month in *Rolling Stone*. It was titled *People Are Losing Loved Ones To AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies*. The article describes multiple people who say ChatGPT told them they're the new messiah. Also this month, the Chicago Sun-Times published a summer reading list. It included titles like *Tidewater Dreams* by Isabel Allende, *Boiling Point* by Rebecca Makkai, and *The Last Algorithm* by Andy Weir. None of those books exist. The list was compiled by freelance writer Marco Buscaglia, who said he often uses AI to generate copy. "...[I]t's something that I absolutely usually check and verify, but for some reason I didn't this time..." Which is to say, not a writer, but a fact-checker of copy he couldn't be bothered to write. This book isn't about the perils of LLMs, the soul-sucking ruin of having a program that fundamentally *cannot* think do your thinking for you. I hope you know what's wrong with AI. If not, well, it was Satchmo who said "There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell them." This book is more than that. This book is a collection of fantasies born from the human mind. These are stories written by *people*. People sat down to write these stories, they came up with the characters and premises. They thought up the words the characters said. The pixel art on the cover of the was done by a real person, Dinchenix. She drew these images after reading drafts of the stories. I wrote the program to display that art on my Apple II, and I took the photograph late at night. These stories were formed from the dreams, the hopes, and yes, the hurts of real people. They crystallized from moments in our lives. They are not ideas formed into prompts, we put our minds into choosing the correct words to tell these stories. I feel absurd for even writing this. Only in the past few years has that changed; now it has become normal to use AI to do our writing. Somehow, "stories written by real people" has become a selling point. And with that in mind, I thought I'd tell you about the writers in *Overscan*... Some people can make a windswept, one-horse town feel like the center of the world. I met **Bruce "Buffalo" Beck** in Cope, 120 miles east of Denver on the high plains. He ran eastern Colorado's only bookstore, Buffalo's Last Stand. An art collector. A book lover. A writer. A one-time repo man. A Zen warrior of pinball. Resident color-commentator for the pinball mag *Quarter Up*. He was a native of Modesto, the birthplace of George Lucas, and he baked a mean cookie. The man had no filter. None. Statements were expressed with blunt force, accented by howls and groans of exasperation. Buffalo passed away in 2024. Darn him. **Sefton Eisenhart** draws blood with his words. He's been published in *Prometheus Dreaming*, *VoxPop PhlMetropolis*, *Wen Wu Literary Journal*, *The York Daily Record*, and *State of Philly*. His short story *The Chaos of Heat* is crime fiction that coils up like a thief in a dark alley, waiting to strike. I had put out a call for a story about AI. No robot uprisings, I demanded. I'm sick of robot uprisings! I wanted a story about how AI is hurting us *now*, how it will destroy us by doing exactly what we tell it to do. Boy did Sefton Eisenhart deliver. *Hers to Have* cuts me to my core. It says everything about AI and LLMs that needs to be said right now. This story is a warning sign for the road we're barreling down. If I were ever in an emergency, I would want **AT Gonzalez** at my side. He's the boots-on-the-ground reporter for *Quarter Up*. He commands an encyclopedic knowledge of pinball, Taito games, voice actors, arcade hardware, Saturday morning animation, *Mega Man*, and *Power Rangers*. He introduced me to the works of Harlan Ellison, for which I owe him a lot. His stories are dispatched from a creative place that I find fascinating. They are like the *gashapon* capsule toys found in Japan: I open one up, and think "How interesting!" It's a kaleidoscope of dream-imagery and dark humor that I never get tired of, from airport terminal paranoia to the courtship rituals of wild geese. *Overscan* is a book for the Fediverse, a collection of social networks built on privacy, transparency, and open protocols. Few people embody those Fediverse values quite like **Benjamin Hollon**. Still in college, he's running his own Fediverse instance dedicated to the polymath, created interactive fiction, and designed stylesheets to make the "small web" look beautiful. He has total recall of every *xkcd* comic ever published. Like me, he's an avid user of the text editor Vim. He's a collector of *Analog*, the science fiction magazine edited by John W. Campbell and (later) Ben Bova. His story *Those Who Breathe Easy* sits well in the "hard sf" tradition. In a time when search engines feel clogged to the gills with AI slurry and payola results, he's building his own engine and web crawlers. He's traveled the world (seriously, every time we have a chat he's in a new time zone). His travels are reflected in his openness to new experiences, his ability to adapt, and his eagerness to learn. **Seth Patterson**. Trained on classic novels from the 19th century, and up on the latest technology. His preferred text editor is Nano, not Vim, and I say good for him. He's a fellow fan of the radio and its power to nourish the imagination. He's the husband of the wonderfully talented illustrator Autumn Patterson, and a devoted father. The only other person I know who has heard of *A Basket of Flowers*. Author of *The Woethief*, which is my standard for what fantasy can and should be. A writer who can play with point-of-view like no-one else. Seth's *Lonely Human* is the story I have read the most while editing this book. There is something mesmerizing about it. It doesn't feel right to call it "cozy", there is more going on than coziness. I would take the hero Jaren's struggles to afford kettle corn, and his painfully awkward date, over many, many space armada battles. The world needs storytellers like **David W. Stoner**. Read his stories on nantucketlit.com: *Night's Passage*, *Gypsy*, *The Dark Forest*, *A Hard Path*. Stoner understands that philosophy and storytelling depend on one another. In just a few paragraphs, he can make a character feel like a lifelong companion. His stories are like the conversations between friends when they sit in a car at night with the engine off. If you've had a chat like that, in an empty parking lot, that's where David W. Stoner takes you. If we want to think better, we need to find better stories. A great story is a vehicle for communicating values. David W. Stoner can have two characters talk at a kitchen table, and carry them across the cosmos. The prog-rock band ELP wrote of a mad future where vegetation is a novelty: "There behind the glass, stands a real blade of grass." Now, in our own future, I leave you with this book, containing within its pages some real human dreams. Nicholas Bernhard, Editor Lafayette, Colorado May 27, 2025 PREVIOUS | TABLE OF CONTENTS |