National Science Fiction Day (today, January 2) feels like permission.
Permission to look up from the practical, the predictable, the already-mapped—and ask, what if the universe has a sense of humor?

I’ve loved science fiction for as long as I can remember. As a child, I was captivated by Star Trek: The Original Series—not just the stars and strange worlds but the idea that exploration could be thoughtful, curious, and ethically complicated. That stories set light-years away could still be asking very human questions about power, restraint, cooperation, and consequence.

That early spark never left.

Today, I’m quietly celebrating a long-term science-fiction project that has been growing in the background like a constellation you only notice once you stop staring at your feet. It’s a world shaped not by conquest but by consequence. A place where attempts at control don’t succeed—they rebound. Where extraction becomes transformation. Where force misfires and something unexpectedly benevolent takes its place.

This is not a story about heroes saving a planet.
It’s about a planet that doesn’t need saving.

The setting is luminous and strange (see picture above of one of its landscapes): continents resonant with mineral intelligence, skies tinted by an atmospheric veil that bends light and intention alike, and ecosystems that behave more like collaborators than resources. Visitors arrive believing they are explorers. They leave having been… edited. Gently. Thoroughly. Often against their will.

Threading through it all is a narrator who does not belong to any empire, species, or moral comfort zone—a watchful, amused presence who understands far more than she explains and explains far less than she knows. She interrupts. She mocks. She tells the truth sideways. If you’re looking for a tour guide, she is not it. If you’re looking for a mirror, she very much is.

Science fiction has always been the best place to talk about things we’re not ready to admit directly:

• That extraction has consequences
• That “progress” is not morally neutral
• That intelligence doesn’t always look human
• That systems pushed too hard eventually push back

Those were the questions that hooked me as a child—and they’re still the ones guiding my work now.

This project leans into them without turning them into lectures. It lets landscapes speak. It lets mistakes echo. It lets beauty act as both invitation and trap.

On National Science Fiction Day, I’m honoring the genre the way it deserves—not with lasers and inevitability, but with curiosity, defiance, and a refusal to believe that domination is the highest form of intelligence.

Some worlds don’t want to be owned.
Some stories don’t want to be rushed.
And some futures are quietly waiting until we’re ready to imagine them differently.

Today feels like the right day to say: I’m still listening. ✨ If you are curious about my work in progress, you can check out these links:
Sample 1
Sample 2