Author's Letter: Thoughts on Sci-Fi in 2026
Hello everyone, I wanted to write a short, personal letter to all the subscribers and readers with some thoughts and updates on what you can expect going forward.
First, this has been a big year for The Next Horizon. I published close to 100 short stories, which is not an easy thing to do. This culminated in the “Twelve Days of Sci-Fi” in which I published 12 stories for everyone to read. The entire collection was also made available in a short story collection available for Kindles.
In 2024, I had shared a lot of short stories. Every story was roughly the same in length, a few thousand words at most.
This year, I did experiment a bit more with writing longer. Taking advantage of public domain, I took Popeye on an intergalactic adventure through space. Several more novella-length stories were also published including the most recent Youth is Wasted on the Young.
In terms of writing even longer, I have also spent time putting together a full-length novel that I hope to share with literary agents next year.
While short stories do work well in many contexts, they are not always the right way to tell a story, or incorporate a sci-fi idea, or give characters a narrative arc. My short story approach was not necessarily bad, but it did mean there have been many story ideas I have let lingering since I hadn’t known how to tell it in that format.
I’ve been keeping a list of ideas that I update whenever I have a new idea so that I don’t lose it. Not all of these are necessarily good ideas, but all of them do deserve a bit of my time to consider it. At the moment, this list is at about 300 items. Additionally, I have about six months of stories sitting in my drafts ready to publish.
Up to this point, I’ve been publishing two stories: one on Thursdays for everyone and one on Tuesdays just for subscribers. Through the year, I’ve been developing a new plan and that begins with a whole rethinking of what this newsletter is meant to be.
The Next Horizon is going to be rebranded a new logo and an updated mission. The new sci-fi ‘zine’ will be named Nebulas & Nanobots which is a name that both evokes a variety of sci-fi themes and is distinct enough to be easily found by a search engine.
This rebranding will include a much better discovery system. You can already see the top navbar has been updated with a variety of categories to help you find stories of a given type more easily. The homepage tags will also be updated with more specific kinds of stories. At this point, there are over 200 available for you to read in the archive.
But the rebranding is going beyond just some aesthetics. I want to double down on what’s working here and give people more reasons to subscribe.
I will be modifying the publication schedule. Every Thursday there will still be a sci-fi short story available for everyone. On Tuesdays I plan to publish flash sci-fi stories for everyone, stories that are byte-sized and under a thousand words. They will explore interesting ideas but would be hard to stretch out into something longer.
I also want to do more micro-categories. For instance, your phone today will connect to a 5G network to get data and emails, but what might 7G look like? I have a few stories in mind that I’m planning to share.
I plan for every Monday to be devoted to sharing serialized stories exclusively for subscribers. Speaking of subscribers, you can get a 30-day free trial.
This year I’ve published Popeye and the Battle for Earth, The Last Elder of History, Libertopolis: Chrome and Atoms, and Youth is Wasted on the Young. In the next year, I will be working on even more novellas. Already I am in the middle of a sequel to The Maltese Falcon, which is entering the public domain. How will this story incorporate sci-fi? You’ll need to read it!
There are other novellas I want to write which will take a specific idea and really go deep into it. With the longer lengths, I’ll be able to write richer characters and explore themes in more detail.
This means there will be three posts a week: Mondays will give subscribers the next chapter. Tuesdays will give everyone something quick to digest. Thursdays will be short stories for everyone.
Subscribers will also get an additional benefit. Every month I’ll be sharing with them an exclusive Author’s Letter which will give readers more context on the stories I published that month along with things I’ve been reading and thinking about for the future. It will give sci-fi lovers even more.
I want to thank all the readers. This has been a fun year for me and I’ve only become more enthusiastic about writing as the year has gone on. I’m looking forward to my next writing projects and I hope you are too.