Author Archives: Joe

Morally Complex Fantasy for an Amoral Age

03 Monday Aug 2026

Posted by in fantasy, Literary criticism, Musings and ponderation, My Fiction, Stories, The Time of Troubles, Utopia and Dystopia

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I have been writing a swords & sorcery story.

For much of my adult life, I would have said swords & sorcery was a guilty pleasure, the adolescent male libido-fueled stuff of Conan the Barbarian and Frank Frazetta chainmail bikini posters.

Schwarzenegger’s Conan–swords and sorcery for the Reagan years.

But I’m learning to give up on needless guilt. Early in my friendship with Carlyn, I said some music I was listening to (I don’t remember what) was a guilty pleasure of mine. She replied “I intend not to feel guilty about my pleasures.” It was about the wisest thing I had ever heard anyone say. Reader, I married her for that reason as much as for any other.

So, swords & sorcery–morally complicated pulp fantasy. Less heroic, more hard boiled. Lots of fragments, at least the way I’m writing it. The city where my story is set, Kyrenaikos, is as noir a place as Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar, Raymond Chandler’s LA, or Adventure Time‘s City of Thieves.

I’m learning, too, to feel comfortable with pulp fantasy’s one sentence paragraphs, bane of my career as an English teacher.

And my story is definitely post-Conan: the protagonist is nonbinary, and the main badass is three and a half feet tall. I’m trying to draw more on the weirdness of Michael Moorcock’s Elric and the sass of Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, leavened with my classic Pitkin open endings and wry asides.

It’s also a classic Pitkin career move for me. Swords & sorcery is one of the least popular subgenres of fantasy today. Today all the buzz is around romantasy (think Sarah Maas), cozy fantasy (think Legends and Lattes), LitRPG (e.g. Dungeon Crawler Carl), and the Critical Role Industrial Complex. I definitely know how to spend dozens of hours writing something the market never asked for.

But I believe swords and sorcery is the right subgenre for the Trump years. Not just because of the noir qualities of the moment, the chaos and corruption and amorality and incompetence of the times (though for those reasons, too). Not just because Elon Musk seems almost literally to be an evil sorcerer of overwhelming power. But even more, I want to exhort readers, or maybe just myself, to (in the words of an old bumper sticker) remember who I wanted to be.

Swords & sorcery, like its sister subgenre hard boiled detective fiction, follows flawed people in corrupt situations who have a tough job to do. The protagonists of these stories may be conflicted; their motives may be impure, even mercenary at first. But they always seem to find that their moral universe cannot simply be handwaved away. The protagonists of swords and sorcery may be immoralists, but they are not amoral.

I am (like many of you) a lackluster moral example, certainly not the kind of person you’d want to rely on to restore the American republic. But we’re all we’ve got. So I teach community college by day, volunteer for Indivisible on the weekends, and write about more or less good people fighting to keep their moral compass under impossible circumstances.

And even if swords & sorcery wasn’t the right genre for this cataclysmic, corrupt moment in American history, I’m having more fun writing this story than I’ve had in a long time. I commit to taking my joys where I can find them today.

My Two Cents on The Odyssey

27 Monday Jul 2026

Posted by in Literary criticism, Musings and ponderation

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My quick take on Chistopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, now that I’ve finally seen it:

The movie is a thoroughly modern take on the ancient epic, and that’s a good thing. Homer’s poem, which I love and have taught, is steeped in Iron Age values, looking back nostalgically towards mythical Bronze Age values. Nolan takes much about what is timeless about the story—the iron law of hospitality, the value of craft, the primacy of solving problems with the mind—and leavens it with a modern acceptance of trade-offs, with our struggle with unintended consequences.

I can see why some (especially those who would prefer to return to a Bronze Age world of rapine and plunder and tribalism) would dislike the casting choices or the ending of the movie, which is a significant departure from the poem. But to me, Nolan’s movie is as successful a remix of this ancient cultural touchstone as Madeline Miller’s Circe or the Coens’ Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?

Take Courage, Young Nation!

04 Saturday Jul 2026

Posted by in Politics, The Time of Troubles

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And I dreamed I was dying

I dreamed that my soul rose unexpectedly

And looking back down at me, smiled reassuringly

And I dreamed I was flying

And high up above, my eyes could clearly see

The Statue of Liberty sailing away to sea

And I dreamed I was flying

For we come on the ship they call the Mayflower

We come on the ship that sailed the moon

We come in the age’s most uncertain hour

And sing an American tune

–Paul Simon, “American Tune”

Happy Independence Day to my fellow Americans!

One Thousand

15 Monday Jun 2026

Posted by in Advertising, Lit News, Musings and ponderation

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WordPress was kind enough, or wily enough, to include my review of Doctor Faustus in its “Freshly Pressed” program last week. I am grateful for the traffic, which brought over 100 likes to that post–that is to say, over 10% of the total likes my posts have received over the 11 years that I have been posting to this quixotic effort I call a blog. How do I know? Well, WordPress was also kind enough, or wily enough, to award me a “1000 Likes” badge last week. I feel honored and flattered to have been liked one thousand times.

I try to be a promiscuous liker myself, and I hope that if you happen to see this post, you drop a like on a post that could use a little more love today.

A Song About a Namesake Character

04 Thursday Jun 2026

Posted by in Exit Black, Musings and ponderation, My Fiction

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One of my favorite characters from my novel Exit Black is Kassie Ng, the easily-underestimated Instagram influencer sent to chronicle her adventures on the world’s first orbital hotel. It might surprise no one that her name comes partly from Cassandra of Trojan War fame–my nod, I guess, to Homer. Her last name, though, is an homage to one of my favorite songs, the They Might Be Giants classic “Ana Ng.”

While the original song is amazing and should be much better known than it is (which I suppose one could say of most TMBG songs), perhaps my favorite version of the song is this one, by the masterful banjoist Charles Butler. I noticed today that Charles Butler’s Spotify page has exactly the same number of monthly listeners as this blog has subscribers. So from a writer who could use more readers to a musician who deserves more listeners, I salute you, Charles Butler.

Enjoy!

The Devil in the Machine

23 Saturday May 2026

Posted by in Literary criticism, Musings and ponderation, Science, Utopia and Dystopia

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My wife and I went out last weekend to see a Canon Shakespeare Company production of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus on a whim. I loved that a small scrappy company was taking it on—I had never seen the play, though I once taught the text at my college 20+ years ago. It was wonderful to watch nine actors with little more than a stage dagger and a bunch of borrowed library books for props conjure up this Renaissance classic in a theater called, appropriately, The Wyrd Hut. It was a very Portland experience.

While I often classify Marlowe and Shakespeare together because of the period in which they wrote, every time I actually encounter a Marlowe text, I am reminded that he is no Shakespeare. Comparing the two feels to me a little like comparing Georg Phillip Telemann with Johann Sebastian Bach: they were contemporaries and worked in the same stylistic language, but the depth of Shakespeare’s characters is simply of a different order than Marlowe’s.

Still, for as clunky as some of the characterizations and plot elements are in Doctor Faustus, I realized only on later reflection how perfect that play is for these times. Faustus, the German medieval genius who has grown weary of all the books and fields of knowledge that litter his desk, has decided that his real future is in magic. Why not summon the devil? Why shouldn’t he pledge his soul to Lucifer in exchange for unlimited magical power?

Sound familiar? I was reminded the next morning of Sam Altman’s infamous 2015 quip (which was apparently not a joke) “AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies.” It’s easy enough to dredge up similar self-regarding twaddle from Altman’s nemesis Elon Musk: “In less than 20 years, working at all will be optional… like a hobby pretty much…” and “If AI has a goal and humanity just happens to be in the way, it will destroy humanity as a matter of course.”

Faustus shows the same mix of (apparent) brilliance and extreme lack of introspection. And his use of the powers that Mephistopheles lends him has the same disconnect between lofty goals and tawdry, even ridiculous, triviality. Faustus’s dream is to rule the world, to remake reality for his purposes:

FAUSTUS. How am I glutted with conceit of this!

Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please,

Resolve me of all ambiguities,

Perform what desperate enterprise I will?

I’ll have them fly to India for gold,

Ransack the ocean for orient pearl,

And search all corners of the new-found world

For pleasant fruits and princely delicates;

I’ll have them read me strange philosophy,

And tell the secrets of all foreign kings;

I’ll have them wall all Germany with brass,

And make swift Rhine circle fair Wertenberg;

I’ll have them fill the public schools with silk,

Wherewith the students shall be bravely clad;

I’ll levy soldiers with the coin they bring,

And chase the Prince of Parma from our land,

And reign sole king of all the provinces;

Yea, stranger engines for the brunt of war,

Than was the fiery keel at Antwerp’s bridge,

I’ll make my servile spirits to invent.

And yet, once he has the “servile spirit” of Mephistopheles to do his bidding, much of the action has all the gravitas of a Three Stooges short: Faustus becomes invisible so that he can steal the Pope’s hat; Faustus places cuckold’s horns on a mouthy knight; Faustus presents Emperor Charles V with a deepfake of Alexander the Great and his paramour.

And by the end? This brilliant doctor who once dreamed of liberating his country and altering the course of the Rhine has decided to enter into a romance with an illusory Helen of Troy. I am reminded of all of us LLM users in this moment, contemplating a servile spirit that will “read [us] strange philosophy,” unless of course we just want to use all that water and electricity and compute to cook up an AI girlfriend instead.

No spoilers (or no more spoilers), but the play doesn’t end well for Faustus. I’m more guardedly optimistic about how our Mephistophelean AI servants will treat us, as well as how the world may improve for all humanity over time. But we’d be wise to look to Faustus, that brilliant, self-deluding renaissance nerd who sold his soul and got nothing real in return for it.

In Fiction Writing Class Today

02 Monday Mar 2026

Posted by in fantasy, Literary criticism, Musings and ponderation, YA fantasy

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Today, after a peer critique of the fifth or sixth fantasy story we’ve seen this quarter, I asked my fiction writing students how many of them were into fantasy. All but three of them raised their hands.

Then I asked how many of them had read A Wizard of Earthsea. Not one of them had.

Every once in a while, I’ll wonder what I’m doing, what inner problem I’m attempting to solve by working at a community college. Then I’ll have a moment like this, and I’ll realize that if my only contribution to my students’ lives is that I turned a few of them on to Usrula Le Guin–a woman who wrote practically all her books just a couple miles away on Thurman Street in Portland–I will have done something good with my life.

And you, dear reader, do you like fantasy? Have you read A Wizard of Earthsea? If you haven’t, go pick up that little book and check it out: you’ll see something that isn’t a hundredth as famous as Lord of the Rings, and which didn’t make a thousandth as much money for the author as Harry Potter did for J. K. Rowling, but Earthsea is better than both of them. Read it, and then contend with your desire to sue J.K. Rowling for plagiarism.

And as a bonus, if you aspire to be a fantasy or science fiction writer yourself, read just the first paragraph of A Wizard of Earthsea and see how much Le Guin accomplishes without a scintilla of infodump. What’s a dragonlord? you may ask as you read that first paragraph, What’s an archmage? The answer is who knows? It won’t matter, because you’ll already be hooked.

A Meditation on Time–Ten Years Later

18 Wednesday Feb 2026

Posted by in Artificial Intelligence, Musings and ponderation

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I was trawling through some of my old posts on The Subway Test, and I noticed that I had published this one, “A Meditation on Time,” exactly ten years ago. As I reread it, I realized that a lot of what I was struggling with back then has gotten even more visible, more acute, with the advent of LLMs. It feels like a message in a time capsule to my future self. And maybe to you: I hope that time is not your enemy.

Here is what I wrote on that long-ago February day:

I have been taking my sweet time in reading Anna Karenina, a Christmas gift from my lovely stepdaughter. At the rate I’m going, I would guess I have two more months with this delicious, painful, hilarious book. Meanwhile, as I dither through this enormous work of art, it’s been hanging over my head that I don’t keep up my blog as befits a serious writer, dispensing witty remarks and novel observations at least once per week.

I really don’t yearn for “simpler times” (e.g. Tolstoy’s time), in which the world of ideas moved more slowly and people had time–from our perspective, anyway–to write long letters and long novels, to linger over an idea in a journal for months and even years. Many people of Tolstoy’s day didn’t regard their time as leisurely: they felt as rushed and harried as we do now, since the era of railroads and electricity had sped up life for them at an unprecedented rate. Perhaps in a hundred years my descendants will regard my lifestyle as leisurely, since most of us today don’t yet have Adderall prescriptions or cranial implants or other technological prostheses to speed up our rate of pumping out new ideas and reacting to new ideas we see.

This morning as I read my ten pages on the bus, I was taken by Tolstoy’s words about time: Prince Shcherbatsky is reacting to being told that “time is money,” and he says, “Time, indeed, that depends! Why, there’s time one would give a month of for fifty kopeks, and time you wouldn’t give half an hour of for any amount.”

It occurred to me as I sat with that quote today that I have given away lots of time in my life for fifty kopeks, or for less. When I returned to graduate school in my thirties, I was so excited to be able to take classes at public expense (since I am an employee of the state, my classes cost $5 per course)–I often joked with people that I had spent more money on parking tickets than on tuition when I was in grad school the second time. I feel thankful to the Great State of Washington every time I think of what I learned there.

But I also made a huge blunder by valuing my labor at zero in those days. The courses cost $5, so my degree must only cost about $100, no? Yet, of course there was the massive opportunity cost of my shutting myself up for years to read academic papers on ecology and statistical analysis: there were hikes I didn’t take, other skills I didn’t learn, traveling I didn’t do. I’ve written in a couple of my stories from that period about students who get into ecology because they love spending time outdoors in nature, but that their ecological studies lock them up in a lab for months on end doing gas chromatography or grinding up plant tissue samples.

I’ve come home with a fever tonight–ironically, the fever is what has slowed me down enough to be able to meditate about time in this blog post. And I have realized that as I age, I am becoming less and less willing to give up time to others (that is, to people I don’t love) for any amount. Even if by magic I could, I wouldn’t give up this feverish time tonight–unpleasant as it is–for money. I’m sure I have my price for taking on more work, but I’m realizing that the price is much, much higher than a community college would typically pay. I would just rather have the time.

Pitkin’s Got a New Story

07 Saturday Feb 2026

Posted by in fantasy, Journeys, My Fiction, Stories

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I’m pleased to announce that I have a new story, “Dryad,” dropping tomorrow in the excellent speculative fiction magazine Black Cat Weekly. It’s my first fantasy publication in some time, as well as my first story in a long time from the John Demetrius cycle that I have been writing on and off for years.

To be honest, it’s been a while since I’ve had any short fiction at all come out: my last published short story before “Dryad” was “Nomenclator of the Revolution” two and a half years ago (to be fair, I did publish a novel and complete another novel in that two and a half year space–I just wasn’t working on short fiction as much). This is my first date with Black Cat Weekly, but they have been wonderful to work with, and I’m in love with the cover art, by the late, great Steve Hickman. If you want to get your dark fantasy on, I hope you will check out “Dryad!”

A Strange Glimpse in a Dark Time

23 Friday Jan 2026

Posted by in Musings and ponderation, Politics, The Time of Troubles, Utopia and Dystopia

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A few months ago, my wife and I picked up an old LP of the Stevie Wonder masterpiece Innervisions from a record store in Hood River. It’s maybe my favorite Stevie Wonder album, and it definitely has my favorite Stevie Wonder song, “Higher Ground.”

My wife and I start most mornings playing one side of a record while we get ready for work, and last Wednesday, feeling beat down by the killing of Renee Good and the apparently bottomless appetite that the Trump administration and the MAGA crowd have for brutalizing people that don’t agree with them—or who in in many cases just look like they maybe weren’t born here—I felt like I would do well to listen to “Higher Ground.”

But when I dropped the record onto the turntable, I noticed something on the record that I hadn’t seen before:

My first thought on really looking at the label was “why the hell does it say Cara B?” That’s when I realized that we had bought a 1973 Spanish pressing of the record! And about thirty seconds after I figured that out, it occurred to me: this album was pressed in Barcelona when Spain was still a fascist dictatorship, during the final years of the Franco regime.

Something about that sight gave me an odd jolt of hope: that even a repressive authoritarian like Franco—head of one of the longest-lived right wing dictatorships in the 20th century—couldn’t keep out the liberating voice of Stevie Wonder. And neither can a predator and thug like Trump, nor the predators and thugs who work for him, prevent people from liberating themselves. Don’t give up, people.

Here’s the song of the moment for me: sleepers, just stop sleeping.