The Red Rain series largely exists because of cover designs. I mocked up the cover for What We Talk About When We Talk About Brains as a pre-made when I lost my job back in 2022, and loved it so much I wanted to write a book to fit it.

I ended up releasing those stories as individual titles because I’d made a cover design for my short-lived magazine project, where the first Red Rain stories appeared, and loved those so much I wanted to use them.

So it’s a very design driven project.

But before all that, the real seed was a goof I did back when I worked at the Writers Centre here in Brisbane. I was joking with friends about the film Midnight In Paris, and Cory Stoll’s incredible turn as Ernest Hemingway in the film, and riffed on one of his speeches to create a sci-fi with Stoll’s psuedo-Hemmingway voice.

The assignment was to rescue a colony that had been overrun by xenomorphs. There were eight of us, nine if you counted the android, but he had malfunctioned after being hacked by separatists and could not support us as he had when I first met him. But he was strong and made of polycarbonate steel, and he walked bravely into the elevator that took us to the lower levels. And the air was thin, without the air-scrubbers functioning, and there were aliens in the tunnels. And the plan was to send the android in first, all his glitches be damned, and if he could just hold it together long enough for the heavy bolters to get into position, we could eliminate the first wave of xenomorphs and give the rest of us a fighting chance.

I posted this to Facebook way back when I still worked an office job, and it still makes me giggle every time it shows up in my memories. Aliens style xenomorphs really are just zombies, after all. They come in swarm and they reproduce using the people they capture.

They’re just faster and freakier.

Either way, the idea lodged into my head, which is why I occasionally produce projects like a zombie series written in the style of realist literary authors like Raymond Carver.

Now I’m pondering whether it’s time to do a Hemmingway-style sci-fi series to go with it once all the GenrePunk titles are live on the Brain Jar site…

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