Ian Patterson's Blog

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How do you come back to yourself? When you look in the mirror and see someone foreign, someone so destroyed and misused that you think it can’t be you, how do you rectify that? The memory of myself haunts me. My body used to be this larger than life thing. Everything I ever needed. Ruined in its own way sure, but held at the edge of perfection. When I stare at my reflection now, my chest aches.

Or maybe there was always this me, somewhere inside that...

BOX NEWS NOW: We interrupt your programming with breaking news of alarming developments at the southern containment zone. Security sources have confirmed a large caravan of illegal migrants breached the barrier using industrial-grade mining equipment and crude electromagnetic devices to disable surveillance systems, all likely stolen. This event is part of a surge in increasingly sophisticated breaches of the southern containment wall this year. Authorities would like to remi...

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Across the galaxy, a pod of Blue Whales move. Slow, deliberate, fixated. Three behemoth creations that swim through the inky void between Mars and the tiny rock orbiting the Earth. They have none of the animal grace of their namesakes. They are things removed from nature. Their beauty is not in their form, but in their pure function. Silver rings, pristinely smooth, connected to central hubs by long, tubular spokes—they rotate in silent rhythm ...

I almost never send out real newsletters. The point of this publication is to celebrate first-draft fiction and give readers early glimpses into my novels in progress. But I’ve had some exciting news recently, and I wanted to keep you all informed on where things are heading over the next few years!

I’m returning to the Narrator Cycle with a prequel novella set long before the events of Transference. Transition is an ...

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Steam from the coffee Christa made cups my chin and caresses my face. Its warmth is the only comfort here. My stomach’s too sour to drink it, even the smell is nauseating. In the shower, I heaved my insides out until there was only bile.

Then I kept going.

The lights are too bright, the gravity crushes me against the floor. Did she turn it up higher? My head pounds. I feel sweaty, feverish. My hands won’t stop shaking so I keep them spread ...

Hi Everyone,

With the end to SNAP and WIC benefits set to expire in November, I’m joining the Read a Book, Feed a Neighbor fundraiser to donate money to my local community. This is a grassroots effort started by , who has a list of participating authors at the link above. Please share this widely! We are hoping to get other authors and readers to join in so that we can make a difference together, and give back to the communities that supported us.

If you have extra to give, consider donating to y...

I’d like to offer this event from my childhood to you. I think my memories are half made up of dreams that I randomly cataloged at some point. Thankfully, I’m not the only one to remember this one. I originally wrote this down a year ago, and my friend just shared her catalog of photographs with me. The dissonance between what I remembered and reality is shocking, and I’ll preserve that here as well. Some of these images were taken on subsequent trips that I wasn’t there for.

Pretend we’re tradin...

I hate AI. LLMs, the pursuit of AGI, the whole lot. This should come as no surprise to anyone that’s been in this space for very long. I’ve written stories about it (We, The Hollow Men, I Hope This Email Finds You Well, other older pieces), I’ve been clear how mad it makes me that my books (and millions of other author’s) were blatantly stolen to feed it, and I’ve made open arguments against its use. It’s a mirror, a bias amplifier, it’s built on stolen works (visual and written...

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I float in the darkness. My brain spins. Another night, another empty bottle of whiskey. Another slide through zero gravity. My stumps ache. I slap at them and the motion sends me cartwheeling, I think. I can’t tell without light and I don’t care enough to turn them on. I’ll either crash into a wall or I won’t. Schrödinger’s drunk. Only the direct observation of the crashing or not crashing will resolve this.

“Life’s a blessing.” I slur th...

Don’t this look like the dark?

I chop the onions and saute them in butter and oil and as they sizzle and effervesce I do not cry. I am cold. I am practiced in shutting my eyes when I feel pain so I stir the burning remains and listen to another news story about children starving, genocide, protests in the street, bombings, casual fascism so common it’s overwhelming but - I. Do not. Cry.

I look out into the s...