Sci-Fi Reading Recommendations: Winter 2025 Edition
Bunker Dispatch
Snow. Mind the cold, but don’t let it take prisoners. Someone strangled the trees.
Better get some reading done? 🤷♂️
In this newsletter:
Why is this lunatic emailing me?
What to expect this month
M.P. Fitz’s Winter Sci-Fi Reading Recommendations
The Nihilist’s Horoscope (It’s back!)
S e c r e t s
The Backlist
Free eBook Giveaways
I just wanted this list to have eight things
Next time lock your door
Hi there! The dog is mine now.
If you’ve been around and have read me; we’re groovy— you’re great. A lot of you just came my way (shout out to Benjamin Wallace, congrats on the recent book launch!) so I’ll introduce myself real quick and let you know what to expect. I’m M.P. Fitzgerald, an unwell sci-fi author/ c l o w n . I write post-apocalyptic parodies and darkly humorous sci-fi.
Also, I write scary things.
If you missed your free books from me or just want to grab some more, follow this link. Leave a review if you love or hate them. You’ll be getting short stories from me in your inbox about once a month (most of those are free), sometimes more, along with newsletters like this one where I give you/recommend stuff and fucking gaslamp1 you about books that I’m totally working on.
What to expect this month
I’ve been super-mega hard at work on a short story I intend to send ya. Maybe two, well see. I’m working on an experiment I’d like you to see when it is ready. So keep an eye out on that inbox of yours. I tend to send out on a Friday or a Tuesday depending on my mood or what the moon whispers (the s e c r e t one).
M.P. Fitz’s Sci-Fi Recommendations
Before we begin, it’s Black History Month and
’s Black Kidds Read Too has an extensive list of black authors releasing work this very month. The first month’s sales can often inform the rest of an author’s career, so please check out his list and load up your bookshelf. A better list you will not find, so do that now, my sci-fi recommendations aren’t going anywhere.Speaking of…
I can’t wait for you to dive into this. Everything below I’ve read and can vouch for. Some of them are brand new, some of them are brand new to me, two are free and the other is worth every penny.
First up…
’s Disposal
This fucking guy, I swear. I know I’ve recommended his stories to you in the past so if you missed that pay attention now: this dude pisses me off on how consistently good he is. Disposal is a Sci-fi horror short (be warned, Andy is usually traumatic, even when he is being tame) that asks “What if Doordash or Uber let you kill people”? First, I don’t care what it’s for, you should be tipping your delivery guy, and second: oh sweet Christ. Andy ticks me off because he keeps beating me to the punch with this kind of satire and I love him for it. Disposal is told through a litany of internet reviews about the service, which technically makes it an oral history (I think?). Oral history in fiction is my favorite kind of thing and it is dead hard to do it well.
★ ★
“Are you kidding me!!? Apparently Thrillium injects dispos with magnesium salts prior to deployment, specifically to spoil the taste of their meat! Whaat? You have to pay to remove the injections, another $800??? This is just a pure cash grab from yet another greedy company. There is no reason to do this other than to shake down loyal customers for more money.”
You should be paying attention to this guy. Read Disposal here.
Harlan Ellison’s Greatest Hits
If for some reason you don’t know him, Ellison had more awards than I would ever have the patience to list. The only things I had read by the cantankerous maniac were A Boy and His Dog (which was a huge influence on my A Hppy Bureaucracy), I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream, and his script for Star Trek’s The City on the Edge of Forever (I am a giant nerd). Loved each of those so I was more than excited to pick up this paperback. I had a right to be excited. In particular, The Deathbird is my favorite and it made me re-think how sci-fi can be written, and Jeffy is Five made me cry. “The AM Hate speech” is obligatory, here’s my favorite passage from I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream:
“He was the Earth, and we were the fruit of the Earth; and though he had eaten us, he would never digest us. We could not die. We had tried it. We had attempted suicide, oh one or two of us had…
…Don’t ask why. I never did. More than a million times a day.”
10/10, I’m glad Ellison is dead. Buy the collection here.
’s The Everett Hypothesis
Listen: this piece gave me a goddamn creative crisis. Emil cut his teeth in formal minimalism (see: Chuck Palahniuck), and uh… crime. The guy is an editor running the largest fiction collaboration on Substack (the 9 Story Hotel, a Horror Noir collection— super cool, check it out) and he’s a damn good writer (a kind human, too).
The Everett Hypothesis is named after the “many worlds” theory of the same name. This will not be a Disneyfied multiverse-thing. Honestly, it is a ride best read for yourself, so I’ll just let the quote pull you in:
“And somehow it has my face, my height, sorta looks like me. We deliberate with me pointing a gun at its head and decide yeah, we could use the company, maybe it can play Spotify still or has wifi, can charge our dead phones, whatever.”
Follow this to read The Everett Hypothesis. You’ll thank me (or hate me) later. Emil is also going through some tough shit (this is an understatement). Spare the man some coin, or spread the word about his story if you can’t. Please and thank you.
…and now for something completely different. It’s…
The Nihilist’s Horoscope
It has never been easier to make friends, “Wavy Lines,” never. Think of them less like friends and more like opportunities, and you know what? There are a LOT of opportunities to be had ahead of you. With social media at your fingertips, making friends is as easy as hitting “send,” and you can’t spell “friends” without “send.”
Ninety friends? That’s impressive! Wasn’t that easy? But is that all you can make? Aim for two hundred! There you go! Don’t know them? That’s okay; they are only strangers because you haven’t met. Introduce yourself; hit “send.” My, aren’t we popular? Your friend list is in the thousands! Remember, you can’t spell “friend” without a digital keypad. Just keep clicking those friend requests until the sun burns out.
Have enough? Excellent. Execute plan “Dopple-Horse.” Paste those hurried and barely coherently written lines from your psychotic manifesto on top of screen grabs from your local news channel and post them onto your account immediately. Is any of it true, does what you have unleashed upon the world carry any weight in reality? It doesn’t matter; your fragile paranoid psyche has no way of knowing anymore. Now watch, watch the bubbles in your brain churn out “truths” for your “friends” to share. You will see your own haunted memes posted by people you don’t know; you will see lambs guided to the slaughter.
Then you will switch to a different social media service because that old one just got too toxic, you know?
Download the full Nihilist’s Horoscope for free here.
S e c r e t s
I participated in a “Stream of Consciousness P.O.V.” writer/artist workshop last week, run by
of Ether Dreams. The idea is that everyone brings a large pile of words, mix them in a hat (or skull, or chalice…) and pull three of them for another writer. Whatever random three words you get, that’s your prompt. It was super groovy meeting these people— they’re all lunatics, which is best. I ended up putting on some eerie sounds and writing just whatever came to me, doing my best to avoid writing the specific words from the prompt and instead going for “how they felt” or using close/vague synonyms. What I got ended up being some sort of “haunted jazz” that I sent to you and named Saturnal Cancer.Also birthed from that workshop (that I know of, so far) is
’s flash, titled MOTHER, which is full of disturbing but lovely poetry, ’s very cool notebook page (doodles!), and ’s Brownian Motion, which is raw and like everything Nick produces; well-written as hell! who I mentioned above also dropped this monster, which will likely be going through my head for weeks to come. ’s entry, Drowned/Out had me muttering “fucking poets” for a whole day after reading it, the same way you might curse a chef after you bite into something delicious.Give these five creators a look if you haven’t already. Just the best.
If you are a writer, or otherwise creative, I seriously recommend keeping an eye out for the next workshop.
M.P. Fitz’s Backlist
Novels:
The Happy Bureaucracy series:
A Happy Bureaucracy (Post-apocalyptic Parody)
Fear and Loathing in the Wasteland (Post-apocalyptic Parody)
Post-Apocalyptic Pirates (Post-apocalyptic Parody)
Memos from the Wasteland (Post-apocalyptic Parody)
Standalones:
The Nihilist’s Horoscope (Dark Humor)
Existential Terror and Breakfast (Finished serial and anti-novel)
Short Stories:
Saturnal Cancer (entry to ’s Stream of Consciousness POV Workshop)
The Public Humiliation of Brian (“Social Anxiety Horror”/Cyberpunk/Humor)
Roko’s Lathe™ (Cyberpunk)
Recursive Panopticon (Cyberpunk)
Radio Cthulu (Cyberpunk/Horror/Humor)
The Museum (Speculative Fiction)
Atomic Death and Taxes (Post-apocalyptic Parody)
Sunny Day (Horror)
Mother’s Day (Horror)
Does anyone know how to get barnacles off of their porch? (Horror/Humor)
Podcast Audiobooks:
A Happy Bureaucracy (Post-apocalyptic Parody for your ear holes, music by Dust Mice)
Free eBook giveaways
This Sci-fi & Fantasy promo has more free eBooks than I have the patience to count, and the Totally Awesome But Very Humble promo is multi-genre and includes No Dogs in Philly by
(who I mentioned above).Goodbyes are lies
I’ll see you soon with a short story. If you like what I do, or can’t afford a fully paid subscription, send a coffee my way?
Stay hoopy frood,
-M.P. Fitzgerald
M.P. Fitzgerald is the author of A Happy Bureaucracy, a post-apocalyptic parody novel. He writes darkly humorous sci-fi and is seriously taking your dog with him.
Yes, the term is gaslamp, not gaslight, you were mistaken and misremembered it… because you’re crazy.
Heyyyy - thanks for the mention my friend!
🤗I kiss you