Fiction
Short stories, novellas, and complete reading paths for strange little fires.
Read fictionEverything here used to be something else.
Speculative fiction, essays, and build notes by Austen Tucker.
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Four good places to enter the work.
fiction
Carl
An aging Floor-Mart android is told it is time to turn himself in, but he has only ever known how to keep working.
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fiction
Cold Boot
Jamie discovers the Zoo, a private full-dive server where nobody asks her to prove she belongs before setting another place at the table.
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essay
Rabies Capitalism
On AI, Labor, and the End of the Moat
Read Rabies Capitalism
essay
I Thought I Had a Bad Memory. I Don't.
Sighted people use the world around them to help them remember thing. When you can't do that, your brain builds something different. Something that might actually be better in some cases.
Read I Thought I Had a Bad Memory. I Don't.
AI enablement & transformation
Hire me for the hard part.
Austen is a builder and AI transformation leader who helps engineering and product teams make emerging tools useful in everyday work — not just purchased.
Featured novel-in-stories
It Takes a Zoo
A novel-in-stories about escaping the hypercapitalist grind.
7 chapters · Read online · PDFs available by chapter or as one complete edition
Essays
Ideas, reflections, and dispatches from the weird and wonderful.
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Latest
The Safe Door
What happens when a community's needs become too difficult to meet? The needs don't disappear. They go underground.
Queer Columns · September 23, 2026
The Dream Space
On rakugo's makura, James Baldwin, and the craft of earning a reader's trust before asking them to follow a story into uncomfortable places.
On Writing · September 23, 2026
Bunch
I have DID. Bunch is a private companion I built to hold the context my memory drops between alters — a build log about using AI to accommodate yourself, and what it looks like to start with the verbs instead of the screens.
Bunch · September 9, 2026
The Stepladder
I experience time more like a stepladder. In the Singularity, it gets weird.
The Singularity Log · August 6, 2026