Kurt Pankau Dot Com

This amusing piece showed up a few weeks ago in Escape Pod . I'd recommend listening to it rather than reading it because the narrator is amazing . I'm very proud of how this story turned out, considering I started writing it with nothing but a zany idea for a title and a dumb joke about bananas. Bananas feature prominently in the story--rather, a recipe for a banana cake features prominently. Prominently enough that I baked one to celebrate. The recipe for this beauty can be found at Averie Cooks . Anyway, I hope you enjoy. The story that is. Or the cake. Both really. ]{p

I'm pleased to announce that I will have a short story titled "Alienation" appearing in the December issue of NewMyths.com . Stay tuned here for more information. Or, you know, subscribe to them. You do you. ]{p

Hey, y'all. I wrote a thing. It's rather silly. You can listen to it here:

So I wrote a couple of stories and they will soon be available for you to listen to with your own human ears! On August 9th, I'll have a story on 600 Second Saga . Late October, I'll have a story in Escape Pod . I'll post specific links after they drop, or you could just subscribe to them in iTunes (or your podcatcher of choice).

I have a theory about Westworld . It's not about the world outside the park or whether or not Ed Harris is a cylon. My theory has to do with the show itself, which seems fixated on the concept of narrative. Westworld  is already drawing comparisons to Lost  and Battlestar Galactica , two shows that trafficked heavily in managing and playing with viewer expectations, but they were still narrative shows that took place in their own worlds. Westworld  is a slightly different animal. Thematically, it's about entertainment that turns against its consumer. So while it has echoes of Lost  and BG , and the obvious antecedents of the 1973 Westworld  film and Jurassic Park , I think there's a strain of influences that are more akin to The Ring  and Mulholland Drive , horror movies that invite the viewer to be just as much of a victim as the characters on screen. The former posits a world in which viewing a film is a death sentence. The latter creates a distorted and ...

Since I'm not working on a novel right now, I took the opportunity to play through a few PC games that had been on my radar, one of which is Sam Barlow's Her Story . I have some quibbles with it, but on the whole I found it very engaging as a piece of experimental storytelling. The premise is that you have been given access to a series of police interviews from the 90s, which feature a young British woman. You type in a search term and the database returns up to five videos with that search in it. You are prompted with the first search term: MURDER. Who died and why you are investigating a decades-old murder (a clock in the game establishes that it takes place in the present) are mysteries to be unraveled. The fact that this is more-or-less a game-ified version of Alta Vista is interesting in itself, but the deftness of the game is in the way it guides the player towards certain revelations. The first videos that come up give you a number of details that send you chasing do...

I've seen this meme passed around on Facebook, and while I hate propagating those things, I was intrigued by the question, so here goes. In no particular order and without thinking about it too much, here are ten books that "touched" me. I Am Not A Serial Killer  by Dan Wells This is the only book that I've ever read in a single sitting. I finished it at four in the morning. "Single sitting" is perhaps a bit of an exaggeration, because I tried a few times to put it down and go to bed, but I couldn't. This was before I had kids, obviously. The Hunt For Red October  by Tom Clancy Hunt  more or less invented the genre of techno-thriller. Clancy's later oeuvre tends to, ahem, disappear up its own ass, but this one is still highly readable. It features Jack Ryan when he was a lovable, well-meaning data-nerd who turned out to be the only person who could solve a submarine crisis. And the movie's pretty great too--Alec Baldwin is the best  Jack ...