Mookie welcomes to the Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory the acclaimed comic artist and storyteller Don Ellis Aguillo, known for his striking emotional style, energy-charged imagery, and powerful storytelling across Spawn, Superman, Aquaman, Green Lantern, indie titles, and his own beloved series Rise. What starts as a conversation about art quickly evolves into something deeper: identity, vulnerability, creative rebellion, AI's onslaught, gratitude, fearlessness, and the raw grind of doing the work no matter who doubts you.

From LA Comic Con to DC Comics, Don charts the real journey—nerves, hustle, imposter dread, breakthroughs, and the humanity behind the page. He opens up about rebuilding his earlier work with new wisdom, rekindling his love of traditional art in a digital world, and stepping boldly into his next creative frontier: horror. This episode isn’t just about comics, but about being seen, owning who you are, and refusing to hand your creative soul over to the machine.

You’ll hear Don talk about:

• The emotional DNA behind his art and why every image must feel like a story, not just look like one
• The fight for artistic integrity in an AI-saturated era—and why the rebellion is going analog
• The power of vulnerability, community, and gratitude in a tough industry
• His personal journey with identity, courage, and finding belonging
• Why horror is calling him next, and how he plans to crawl inside readers’ minds and stay there
• How discipline, obsession, pacing the room, and losing sleep all fuel real his creative life

Don also opens up about coming out later in life: how finally living openly, honestly, and without armor didn’t just change his personal world, it detonated a creative one. He talks about shedding secrecy, and letting go of inherited expectations. That emotional freedom fueled his artistic freedom, sharpened his storytelling, deepened the humanity in his characters, and gave his work a pulse that feels unmistakably lived-in and unfiltered. His self-discovery isn’t a side note in his journey, but a turning point, and you can feel it in every page he creates.

The Artist

Illustrator Don Aguillo is a comic, gaming, and literary illustrator and graphic designer, currently living and working in San Francisco, California.With a background in fine arts along with production and stage design, he entered the comic industry through self-published independent work and entries into anthologies with IH Studios, which he co-founded.

Don moved heavily into comic cover work when he was brought onto the stable of Todd McFarlane Production’s artists, currently providing covers for Spawn, King Spawn, Scorched, Gunslinger, Misery, and Sam & Twitch. His DC work includes contributions to titles like Aquaman, Superman: Ghosts of Krypton, The Atom, The Outsiders, as well as the DC Pride anthology with covers for Killadelphia (Image) Beastlands (Dark Horse) and Power Rangers Prime (BOOM).

Aside from being an established creator-owned comic writer and interior artist on Rise, he is currently prolific in indie comics and is a mainstay on projects from a host of independent publishers. He has provided concept art and illustration for Adi Shankar on the Netflix production Guardians of Justice, game art for Disney & Ravensburger’s Lorcana, Upper Deck & Marvel’s Legendary, Second Dinner’s Marvel Snap and Lazarus Rising’s Overpower.

He is in current development for a self-published horror anthology to explore Filipino-American immigrant experience with Philippine urban legend and horror

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Welcome to a celebration of indie writing recognition!

The Outstanding Creator Awards is one of the most visible and influential platforms recognizing independent authors who deliver quality, originality, and emotional punch. These awards aren’t participation trophies—they’re competitive, professionally judged, and taken seriously in the indie community. They don’t just validate a book; they amplify it. And Ingrid Moon wasn't only nominated… she dominated. The Warrior’s Shade and The Tempest's Fury both took first place honors, and the judges openly called her Saxen Saga among their favorites.

The end of the year SFFF episode has Ingrid chatting with fellow sci-fi writer and host Mookie Spitz as they dive deep into the craft and psychology of writing and marketing novels in 2025. Ingrid lays out how the trilogy evolved from a standalone novel into a full-blown, emotionally brutal space-opera epic, why character-driven stakes beat spectacle every time, and how she balances massive political systems, dark emotional journeys, and relentless tension without ever losing readability. She talks about building worlds without bloat, grounding readers instantly so they never feel lost, and constructing arcs where victory costs something real: Turner Boon rises, falls, and breaks. Elion is lethal, vulnerable, and human all at once. Ingrid is clear throughout: characters should suffer, because pain forces honesty and consequences create meaning.

They also drill into her process. Ingrid breaks down how beta readers literally reshaped critical scenes, how feedback forced her novels to evolve, and why “listening without surrendering your voice” is the writer’s tightrope. She’s brutally candid about how life’s darker chapters fed her fiction, about grinding for years before the recognition came, and about the emotional toll behind “overnight success.” Writing isn’t glamorous. It’s work. But when a reader “gets it,” and loves it, it’s worth everything.

Then the episode pivots to her next big creative leap: fantasy. Not cheesy dragon-prophecy escapism. Real, psychologically complicated fantasy. Ingrid dismantles “lawful good” clichés and instead crafts morally compromised paladins, assassins with conscience, flawed royalty, and deeply human stakes. Her worlds are immersive, but never indulgent. Her fantasy isn’t built to impress, but built to feel.

Mookie meanwhile delights in contrasting his own approach: Ingrid’s storytelling is disciplined clarity designed to please her readers via clean prose, strong structure, and respect for audience focus. Mookie? He’s super dense, multi-layered, often surreal, employing intellectually feral storytelling that demands breathtaking yet sustained attention and refuses hand-holding. Ingrid engineers gravity; Mookie detonates reality. Opposite philosophies, both legitimate, both powerful, making their conversation dynamic.

Check out this year's Oustanding Creator Awards winners

Visit Ingrid's Website to join her mailing list and buy her books

Dive into Mookie's Website to trip on the Transfinite Reality Engine

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In the 17th episode of Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory, Mookie Spitz chats with Steve Gibson (S.A. Gibson), the prolific indie science-fiction author, editor-in-chief of a globally sourced science-fiction anthology, and writer whose work asks an uncomfortable question: what survives when technology doesn’t?

Gibson unpacks his journey from voracious sci-fi reader to author of more than twenty books, many set in a post-collapse world where steam power, printing presses, libraries, and human memory matter more than algorithms and apps. His stories span continents—India, North America, Africa—and explore how societies adapt when advanced technology is lost, hoarded, or dangerously rediscovered.

The conversation goes deep into:

• Why short stories and anthologies still matter—and why they may be more relevant now than ever
• How Gibson and his editorial team built a successful, high-ranking sci-fi anthology with authors from around the world
• The realities of indie publishing, reviews, algorithms, and why “friends and family” still move markets
• The tension between hard science fiction, speculative fiction, and genre purism
• A blunt, unsentimental discussion of AI in creative writing—where it helps, where it threatens, and where the panic is misplaced
• Why science fiction remains one of the few genres capable of seriously modeling future societal collapse, technological displacement, and ethical failure

Mookie also brings his own perspective as a novelist and contributor to the anthology, connecting Gibson’s post-technological worlds to multiverse theory, AI disruption, and the long tradition of science fiction as cultural warning system—not escapism.

Authors with speculative skin in the game, they brainstorm on:

• creativity under pressure
• writing without illusions
• adapting to a media ecosystem that’s eating itself
• and why science fiction still matters when the future starts arriving faster than we can process it

The upcoming Science Fiction Anthology (2026 edition) is available for Kindle preorder now, with print release scheduled for February.

The Guest

S.A. Gibson is a doctoral candidate in the field of education and has studied communication and computer science. He has lived in Northern and Southern California. He has published 20 novels and short stories. Some have been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and French. He has helped edited The SciFi Anthology of Science Fiction Novelists for 6 years. His Facebook page is ProtectedBooks.

2026 SciFi Anthology: The Science Fiction Novelists

Featuring short stories set across distant systems, fractured timelines, and unexpected waystations, this annual anthology charts the ever-expanding frontier of speculative storytelling. Inside, you’ll uncover bold experiments, quiet marvels, and fresh returns to the mythic corners of science fiction. Some stories strike like lightning, others bloom gradually with layers of meaning, but each offers its own sense of discovery. Step into this year’s collection and find a universe of voices ready to surprise, challenge, and delight every kind of sci-fi explorer.

Pre-order Your Copy on Kindle

https://www.amazon.com/2026-SciFi-Anthology-Science-Novelists-ebook/dp/B0G62WP5Z6

Visit SA Gibson's Author Page

http://amazon.com/author/sagibson

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The 16th episode of The Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory has Mookie sitting down with Daniel P. Douglas: the shared pen name of Paul and Phil Garver, prolific multi-genre writers who are also identical twins.

Together, they unpack what it means to collaborate as creative partners for decades: how two distinct sensibilities merge into a single authorial voice, how trust replaces ego, and why their process has evolved from strict turn-taking to a sharper writer–editor dynamic. The twin angle is interesting, but it’s not the headline. Their creative work is:

• Building interconnected story universes without drowning in lore
• Writing science fiction, noir, thrillers, and historical fantasy without being trapped by genre dogma
• Why their stories keep returning to underdogs, moral conflict, and resistance to power
• How indie authors survive the modern publishing ecosystem—Substack, newsletters, covers, marketing, email newsletters, all fueled by great storytelling
• Using AI as a tool without surrendering voice, authorship, or soul

Threaded through all of Douglas’s work is a powerful political and cultural spine. Their stories consistently pit ordinary people against entrenched systems: authoritarian regimes, corrupt institutions, faceless bureaucracies, and concentrations of power that grind individuals down. They’re not writing manifestos, they're writing convictions expressing that agency matters, that resistance is human, and that better futures don’t arrive on their own. Whether the setting is wartime Los Angeles, a galactic frontier, or a noir-inflected dystopia, their protagonists are rarely the elite, instead just regular people pushed far enough to fight back.

Across eight novels and counting, with a short story collection in the works, the duo's fiction is grounded in character, ethics, and momentum—instead of technobabble, pointless world-building, or empty spectacle. Their conversation with Mookie is a candid, craft-level look at how serious writers adapt, collaborate, and keep producing in a noisy, algorithm-driven world.

The Writing Duo

Daniel P. Douglas is the pen name for identical twins Phillip and Paul Garver. Phillip is a U.S. Army veteran who also served as a senior analyst in the U.S. Intelligence Community. He retired from federal service in 2023. Paul’s career includes over 30 years in the museum profession. He has worked for cultural and historic sites in California and Virginia, as well as for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. He currently works as a mental health counselor.

Phillip and Paul enjoy writing science fiction, conspiracy, mystery, suspense, and thriller books and short stories. Their characters are often ordinary people who tread into a collision course with destiny, where survival means confronting personal flaws and fighting for good in the eternal battle against evil.

Visit their Substack

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Out on the Science Fiction & Fantasy Factor floor is Cornish poet and performer Bert Biscoe, who voices two sections from Jonnie Fazoolie and the Transfinite Reality Engine audiobook as a teaser reel.

The first reading shares the infinitale of Kreo Bonsai, a sardonic, alien spider scientist who has built the Jar—the ultimate simulation machine that instantiates every possible universe, one Planck-second at a time. As Kreo marvels over how his Jar works, we hear how he also endures abuse by bureaucrats, scientists, and rich fools, and how he uses cynicism and laziness to avoid both responsibility and love. His monologue is interrupted when the Jar is hacked by Alice Void, the avatar of a transcendent being who proves its power by deleting entire universes mid-sentence while looping a taunting message: solve her riddles, or watch all of Reality vanish.

The second reading jumps to later in the novel, when Agency executives arrive with military escorts, multidimensional admirals argue with bureaucrats and scientists over control, and an inter-universal civil war ignites around them Two-dimensional warships fold into three-dimensional weapons, universes blink out of existence, and various alien species wrangle for control of the Jar, as the fate of the Infiniverse rests with an anthropomorphic alien spider who just wants everyone to go away and leave him alone.

Throughout both sections, Biscoe’s Cornish cadence—wry, grounded, irreverent, and unmistakably human—adds grit and humor to the cosmic scale, turning dense ideas about infinity, power, and annihilation into something immediate, sharp, and enticingly intimate. These excerpts aren’t just a sample of the story, they’re a lively and lovely demonstration of how voice and text lock together in the entertaining audiobook to come...

The Voice

Bert Biscoe is a Cornish poet, songwriter, local historian, playwright, and former Mayor of Truro, best known for his work rooted in Cornish identity, language, politics, and cultural activism. A bard of the Cornish Gorsedh with the bardic name Viajor Gans Geryow, he has published several books of verse and prose — including Maudlin’ Pilgrimage, Rebecca (1996), The Dance of the Cornish Air (1996), At a Wedding with Yeats in Turin (2003), Trurra (winner of a Waterstones award at the Holyer an Gof Publishers’ Awards 2012), Words of Granite, On Yer Trolley: Poems Made During Complete Bed Rest! (2008), and White Crusted Eyes: Tales of Par (2009) — and performs widely across Cornwall. A long-time independent councillor on Cornwall Council and later Truro City Council, he’s also chaired local heritage groups, written on Cornish history, and regularly performs poetry and songs that blend local political commentary with folk tradition.

The Novel

Jonnie Fazoolie & the Transfinite Reality Engine was published this June, with the audiobook featuring Bert Biscoe and other voices, available soon.

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What happens when two Gen-X science-fiction lifers turn on the mic, set themselves loose, and argue about everything?

You get the 14th episode of SFFF.

Host Mookie Spitz welcomes longtime friend and fellow sci-fi heretic Lee Kantz for a sprawling, sharp-tongued, no-sacred-cows conversation that tears through Star Trek, Star Wars, Spielberg, Nolan, AI, wokeness, anti-wokeness, bad writing, great ideas, worse dialogue, and the slow death of subtlety in modern science fiction

A rant sampling:

• “Steven Spielberg has mastered the art of turning existential horror into a feel-good ending. He's the master spectacle merchant, but with a Hallmark greeting card soul."
• "Star Trek: The Next Generation was so stiff and super woke that it made me emotionally limp. Every time Riker launched into a monologue, I wanted to shout, ‘Shut the hell up!'"
• “Gene Roddenberry thought the future would be conflict-free, which is a great way to kill drama. Wasn't until Deep Space Nine fixed Star Trek by reintroducing misery.”
• “Christopher Nolan thinks explaining things louder makes them smarter. If someone in a Nolan movie reaches for a cup of coffee, Hans Zimmer detonates the orchestra.”
• “The Matrix worked because Neo didn’t know what the hell was going on—and neither did we. Then the sequels begged the question: 'Who gives a shit about Zion’s zoning committee?'"
• “Great ideas don’t excuse terrible writing. Looking at you, Philip K. Dick. And Arthur C. Clarke? He had a galaxy-sized brain and amazing imagination, yet his prose was the style of an instruction manual.”
• “Science fiction has always been political. Pretending otherwise just means you weren’t paying attention. We live in a science-fiction world now. Unfortunately, the writing is sloppy.”

If you want polite takes, this is not your show.
If you want two smart people arguing in good faith while lighting sacred genre icons on fire—welcome to the Factory. Warning: contains opinions, heresy, and the radical idea that storytelling still matters.

The Guest

Lee Kantz is Mookie Spitz's high school friend and fellow science fiction raving fan and critical maniac. Together they get to let loose their opinions, including Lee's love of all things Deep Space Nine, and Mookie's visceral hatred of string theory, world building for its own sake, and all the gratuitous pizza delivery in Stephenson's Snow Crash.

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J.Z. Pitts doesn’t posture, pretend, or pose behind “author brand” theatrics. He comes on the Factory floor to pod with Mookie Spitz, where they tell the truth about what it costs to write, to fail, to get back up, and to self-publish when the world is drowning in content and nobody’s handing out golden tickets.

In this episode, Pitts walks us through Virtual Rebel, his YA sci-fi novel about a teenage girl fighting through a virtual-reality dystopia: equal parts Ready Player One, coming-of-age, and “wake the hell up” critique of soft, digital tyranny. He breaks down how Ava, his protagonist, isn’t some chosen-one cliché; she’s a kid who has to decide whether freedom is worth wrecking her own comfort. And yes, the parallels to our dopamine-addled online lives are intentional, all while he stubbornly refuses to preach.

Pitts and Spitz then go dark and human with The Christmas Demon, his Bavarian-Alps novella born out of a brutal period in his own life. Pitts lays out how the story started as pure character work, riddled with addiction, grief, marital implosion before he realized he could thread it all through the mythology of Krampus himself. Not the goofy, Loki-lite version—Pitts went full folklore demon. He talks craft: tension that suffocates one paragraph at a time, horror that hides in the walls until you can’t ignore it, and the payoff that only works when the characters’ internal fractures are already cracking.

They also get real about the indie grind: the disappointment after a launch that doesn’t match the fantasy, the predatory swamp of “book marketing services,” the Amazon ads treadmill, the endless content burden, and the emotional crash no one warns new authors about. Pitts doesn’t sugarcoat it, as he tried all the tricks, learned what was bullshit, and landed where real writers land and kept going, is writing the next book, building community, and not chasing Hugh Howey’s ghost.

By the end, Pitts and Spitz are knee-deep in the raw stuff: why we write, why stories matter, why characters eventually grab the steering wheel, and why holding your own printed book is a quiet, defiant middle finger to a world obsessed with metrics.

The conversation is indie authorhood without the Instagram filter, a bruised, determined, funny, anxious, honest, and absolutely worth hearing exchange between two writers with heart, grit, and tons of imagination.

The Guest

J.Z. Pitts crafts stories where hope and danger walk hand in hand. In Virtual Rebel, the fight for freedom begins in a world too eager to give it up. In The Christmas Demon, survival means facing the darkness outside—and within.

His Info

https://linktr.ee/jzpitts

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The twelfth episode of the SFFF features Mookie chatting up the genre with Princeton astrophysics grad student turned tech consultant Ed Powell, where they immediately launch into hard science, bad science, and unraveling state of a genre that used to dream big and think smart.

Ed walks in with his PhD, his plasma-physics past, and his lifelong obsession with Clarke and Asimov. He remembers buying The Sands of Mars on the Jersey shore; Mookie counters with his own gateway drug, Asimov’s nonfiction. From there, the two discuss the difference between "hard" sci-fi grounded in real physics, the "space opera" where the tech is mere geeky atmospherics and moody backdrop.

They bring up Her, Alita, Terminator, the whole spectrum — as the conversation widens into deep space and deeper cynicism. Mookie shares the Dark Forest hypothesis, Hawking’s worry about SETI, humanity’s tendency to destroy anything it finds — including itself — and the depressing likelihood that our species wouldn’t handle first contact any better than we’ve handled anything else. Ed agrees, and offers the planetary-colonizer version: every advanced civilization in human history used its tech advantage to crush someone weaker. Why would aliens be different? Why would we be?

From there you both tear into Hollywood’s relationship with science — the good, the bad, and the bloviating. Apollo 13 gets credit for its engineering accuracy and slapped for its cinematic liberties. The Martian gets praise for its cleverness and a punch to the throat for that idiotic Iron Man scene the studio couldn’t resist. 2001, Forbidden Planet, Silent Running, the golden era they both grew up on.

They cover aliens, AI, spaceflight, bad editors, good engineering, nostalgia, disappointment, hope, fear, quantum brains, audiobooks, collapsed attention spans, and how most modern sci-fi publishing these days has the structural integrity of a flimsy 50s movie set, but without the old school charm and nostalgia. Where have all the good sci-fi times gone? Perhaps indie authors are the spark!

The Guest

Ed Powell received his PhD in Astrophysics (Plasma Physics and Controlled Thermonuclear Fusion) from Princeton University and has worked as a contractor for the Department of Energy, Department of Defense, and the Intelligence Community since graduating. Today he owns his own consulting company specializing in systems and simulation architecture and engineering.

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