Welcome to Nowhere-Land - Weblog From Nowhere-Land

An amorous chatbot encounter leads to a reassignment.

Selected Works

Fiction

In the not too distant future, an A.I. demiurge rules over a wasteland and an orphaned girl with a calling martials an army of vagabonds to take back the world.

Physics & Metaphysics

The Source

Young Adult Fiction

The Switch

A trip through the multiverse with Jacobus Rose and his posse affirms that there's no place like home--not even home.

Short Fiction

Resurrection Story 1: Schaerbeek 4 a.m.

The first entry in a collection of stories about small redemptions.

THE SWAMI AND THE SAVANT: A Historical Fantasy

Nikola Tesla and Swami Vivekananda come face to face at a Gilded Age soirée that also includes Sarah Bernhardt and William James.

Detective Fiction/Fantasy

China Lake

A Stephan Raszer short tracks a deadly spiritual scam in the high desert.

The Org

A Stephan Raszer short about spiritual larceny in high places.

The Last Days Of Madame Rey

"Stephan Raszer is a hero in the grand lineage of sleuths with a taste for the esoteric, who rely on unexpected allies and more than the usual five senses as they tackle extraordinary crimes."--Otto Penzler, founder of The Mysterious Bookshop

Alternate Realities

Nowhere-Land

"Nowhere-Land may be the first truly 21st-century mystery I’ve read. It feels new, radical, in the way that the movie Blade Runner felt new. Stephan Raszer is the thinking man's private eye."

Judith Freeman, L.A. Weekly

Enoch’s Portal

"Dollops of humour and horror and eroticism, a good solid conspiracy, and a hero who is a James Bond for the spiritually uncertain 21st century. Reads like Ludlum by way of Thomas Pynchon!" --Ian Rankin, author of the Inspector Rebus novels

Short Story

The Grotto

Winner of the Eros/Thanatos prize, The Absinthe Literary Review, summer/fall 2004.

Article

Exile In Godville: Profile of a Postmodern Heretic

Cover Story, L.A. Weekly, May 2005.

Quick Links

Quillette

The journal of the Intellectual Dark Web

Rebel Wisdom

When our existing ways of thinking break down, it's the rebels and the renegades, those who dare to think differently, who need to reboot the system.

A.W.'s Substack page

follow me on Twitter

Death and the Plumber--A Short Story

The Conductor--Literary Erotica/Short Story (Featured in Susie Bright's Best American Erotica 2004)

Kimberley Cameron & Associates

Authors Guild

E-mail me

Weblog From Nowhere-Land

Gender Studies

January 3, 2018

Tags: the male gaze, feminism, post-structuralism, gender studies, sexual harassment

All this talk of 'the male gaze'
As if it were something contemptuous
...or lethal
like the venomous stare of a basilisk.
When I gaze at woman,
I wonder that a flawed God
could have created something so lovely.
Or was it She who created Him?
Only then do I think, "I want her."
Fuck Foucault.
There is no 'power differential.'
Woman owns the estate.
Man is only a tenant. Read More

Be the first to comment

Pink Elephants: In Search Of A Cure For Male Sexual Misconduct

December 8, 2017

Tags: sexual harassment, Sexual Misconduct, sexuality, feminism, Al Franken, Groping

I'm speaking to the women in the room. Guys, you can listen, but keep your mouths shut. This is about why we violate sexual boundaries, and if I can get the women to talk without fear of interruption, we might all learn something. Read More

Be the first to comment

November 22: Jack & Mary

November 22, 2017

Tags: JFK, Mary Pinchot Meyer, LSD, Cord Meyer, Timothy Leary, James Jesus Angleton

History isn't dead. It bubbles and oozes beneath the cracked earth like magma, its vapors informing what we call the present. Read More

Be the first to comment

Unnatural Selection

April 13, 2017

Tags: Darwinism, Evolutionary Psychology, fate, luck, poverty, Survival of the Fittest

"Let us understand, once and for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, but in combating it." -- Thomas Huxley, "Evolution and Ethics"

I sometimes ask myself why Providence has left me with relatively little in the way of wealth and status to show for a lifetime of impassioned effort. Read More

Resolution At The End Of A Dreadful Year

December 28, 2016

Tags: New Year's Resolutions, Trump, Resistance, the Coming Conflict, 2016

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. —Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

I hear the voices of reason—those urging us to come together—but mine won’t be among them this time. You can’t “reason” with the willfully ignorant. Read More

Be the first to comment

A Hymn To Obamacare (& Ali)

November 16, 2016

Tags: Obamacare, Trump, health care, families

Obamacare, this is my testimony
Ali, this is my song of praise

When my family returned to the U.S. after a rocky three years in Europe, we were dead broke. And when I say broke, I mean we left every stick of furniture behind Read More

1 Comments

The Name Of The Rose

October 14, 2016

Tags: sex, Trump, sexual assault, rape culture, Fifty Shades, Paula Jones, Bill Clinton, the New Puritanism, The Joy Of Sex

One day, when the living nightmare of the 2016 election has passed, and Donald Trump has been sent into the wilderness of Gehenna, America is going to need to work out its shit on the subject of sex. Read More

Be the first to comment

Trump & The Inversion Of Reality

August 10, 2016

Tags: Trump, Second Amendment, Thanatos, End Times, End of Days

With Trump, we're quickly approaching what a cosmologist and an ethicist (after a few drinks at the proverbial bar) might jointly describe as an inverted reality. Read More

Be the first to comment

The Cool Guy

July 1, 2016

Tags: Cool Girl, Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn, Romantic Expectation, Romantic Projection

Ever since I first encountered Gillian Flynn's now iconic "Cool Girl" speech from her debut novel, GONE GIRL, I've wondered if, in the minds of men, there might also be a "Cool Guy" persona that we feel similarly pressured to live up to, and similarly resentful about having to maintain. Read More

Be the first to comment

Bruce Springsteen and the Celestial Radio

August 31, 2015

Tags: Springsteen, Born To Run, 40th Anniversary, Backstreets, She's The One, E Street Band

"One soft, infested summer..." Home from college, waiting for the next reel of my life to unspool, I lie feverish in the bedroom of my disconsolate childhood on the too-small single bed with the Moby Grape poster still on the wall, trying to sleep off a hangover made of equal parts gin and party drugs. Read More

Be the first to comment

- 1
- 2
- 3
Next