Originally published on October 4, 2026 via email

Work in Progress

Work continues apace on my weird western novel that is definitely not a novella anymore, though the pace is slower than I’d like. I’m up to about 27,000 words and nearly a third of the way done. I love these characters and this book to pieces, though I’m pretty sure I’m the only person who would ever want to read it. Well…sometimes you just have to write the book you want to see in the world. Truthfully, all the time.

So here’s a bit from Chapter 3: Gin & Whiskey for the terminally curious. I’ll keep sharing until until someone shouts mercy. Buckshot is the narrator of our tale, a young orphan boy who is trying to impress his guardian, Sheriff. Did I mention Sheriff is a cyborg Sasquatch? Yeah, it’s that kind of book.

“Sheriff, ain’t you gonna ask about my clothes? Ain’t you gonna ask how I got all tore up and muddy? Ain’t you gonna ask what happened to me? It were something else—”

“What happened is you don’t got a lick of sense in you to stay out the way of things that want you ripped up, trampled, squashed, flattened, shot, thrown, or lit on fire.”

“Aw heck, I done all them things—”

“I know!”

Sheriff set his glass down. Hard. Miss Honeyspoon, she corked the whiskey.

There still was some gin left in that glass what I using for medicinal preparations for Sheriff’s arm, but I had a mind to show what a man I was, so afore Miss Honeyspoon could stop me, I threw the contents down my throat in one hard swallow.

I slammed the glass down and turned to Sheriff with a notion to explain how I confronted Old Maude and stopped her rampaging and generally took over while Sheriff was out of town, but when I drew in a breath, all hellfire came with it. I ain’t never had gin afore and I’m plumb certain I’ll never have it again. Turns out you ain’t supposed to drink gin; you’re supposed to take the rust off old horseshoes with it.

News

Writer Spotlight

Emmie Christie reviewed a dozen of my stories for her Writer Spotlight and there’s also an author interview with me about common themes and ideas that thread through my work. It’s a great comprehensive overview of my fiction output for the last few years. My thanks to Emmie for throwing a spotlight on my fiction. Check it out here:

https://www.emmiechristie.com/short-fiction-and-poetry/writer-spotlight-david-anaxagoras

Out Now — “Ladd’s Robot Repair”

My post-apocalyptic sci-fi adventure novelette “Ladd’s Robot Repair” is out now and free to read in Lightspeed!

A fiercely independent scavver boy doesn’t expect his next salvage to be an overprotective butler bot, but now his very survival depends on him.

A tale of friendship and sacrifice, a Buddy Movie between boy and robot. This story is well done and I enjoyed every word. — Budd Trippet, Tangent Online

Scavengers! Mutant children! Ravenous signal-beasts! And a rusted robot butler who won’t stop trying to care for a kid who refuses to be cared for. At its core, “Ladd’s Robot Repair” is about connection, repair, and learning to let someone in.

I saw the wreckage as soon as I crested the hill. Twists of metal, bent crane limbs, burnt servos. And what was left of Rigs—torn apart and scattered like the broken pieces of a child’s doll in a junkyard. Limbs still twitching. The sharp smell of burned engine oil hung in the air.

Scampering around the remains—tumbletots. Six of them that I could see. Completely feral and permanently children. Or maybe they never lived long enough to mature. Naked and dirt-streaked. Backs bristling with spikes of scrap metal like a protective shell. Their wild hair and eyes a mutant white. Arrows of sunlight glinted off their jagged, needle-sharp chrome teeth. They ate scrap. Metal or organic, didn’t matter to them.

This was the most fun I’ve ever had writing a story. If you read and enjoy it drop me a line or give it a boost on your favorite social media platform.

SFWA Members, you can show the story some love on the official Reading List and help others who might enjoy it to discover it.

If you prefer to read with your ears, you can enjoy the story on Lightspeed’s podcast:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lightspeed-magazine-science-fiction-and-fantasy-story/id375802058?i=1000786177565

Story Notes on “Ladd’s Robot Repair”

It seems like this story has always been something I was going to write. Being a Gen-Xer, the post-apocalypse is in my DNA, of course. It’s impossible to overstate the undercurrent of nuclear anxiety that permeated the 80s, or the deep cultural impact of The Road Warrior on everything from fashion to music videos (ask your grandpa, kids!). All things considered, I’m only surprised I didn’t write something like this sooner.

In many ways—perhaps in the most important way—“Ladd’s Robot Repair” bubbled up out of my subconscious as a response to the hyper-masculine apocalypse fantasy of violence and domination which usually takes the form of a lone, aggrieved white man on loan from a spaghetti western slaughtering masses of zombies/radioactive mutants/infected/aliens/robots or whatever stand-in for the other is handy.

My post-apocalyptic future was not going to be about who can be the strongest, biggest, baddest. That’s what gets you an apocalypse in the first place. I wanted to imagine a future where resilience didn’t require cruelty and where the work of repair—mechanical as well as emotional—holds the real power. Those are the thoughts I was exploring.

I didn’t start off with any lofty themes or intentions, though. I tend to let the characters teach me about their world.

I could picture Ladd standing behind the workbench of a robot repair shop, leather apron, smudged face, long before I figured out who he was or what to do with him. He evolved with the story of course. He lost the smock, and the workshop is now on legs, but he was there before the story took shape.

The truth is I often write about kids because adults are boring. Kids Ladd’s age are naturally facing a crossroads. They are in the process of figuring out who they are going to be. Also, they don’t have the kind of baggage that grown ups have, so they have a more interesting take on the world. I tend to write about boys specifically because I want to examine masculinity, and explore the nurturing, caring, empathetic qualities of boys and men.

This is also a look at what kind of world we are leaving for our children. We’re not just mortgaging the future, we are bankrupting it. So it seems only fair that a child should get to have their say. Ladd’s the one that has to deal with the consequences of our actions.

And finally, I was deliberately undercutting the Warrior of the Wasteland trope. Ladd is not Max Rockatansky, not by any stretch. He can try to act tough, but we know under the leather jacket and goggles, he’s just a vulnerable 12-year-old boy. Now the threats in this world aren’t just there for the protagonist to blow away with a sawed-off shotgun. They represent a real danger, and have to be dealt with in a much different fashion.

Things I love

Robots. I love robots. In anticipation of my own robot story’s publication, I posted 25 Days of Robots on Bluesky. These were bots that influenced me in one way or another, the ones that fired my imagination.

It was a blast revisiting old bots and thinking about what they meant to me. My robot obsession was such that I once taped a cardboard “control panel” to my chest and wore it to school under my shirt all day. Another time I created my own tiny companion bots but was told in no uncertain terms that, no, I could not take them out to dinner with us. Of course, my favorite robot of all time, the one that started my mania, came to me via UHF. If you don’t know what UHF is, it’s basically your television having a hallucinogenic fever dream and then spitting signals at you from an alternate dimension.

Something unexpected happened when I started putting robots next to each other. Some patterns emerged about the way robots were treated in stories. How we regard them often depended on who they were substituting for in a story. This was especially telling with female-presenting robots.

The Fembots are pure male fantasy: beautiful, programmable, obedient, and, if you like, deadly. Yes, deadly. Because no male fantasy is complete without the power to destroy. Fembots are beautiful guns who fawn over you and serve you. They are women without the inconvenience of agency.

Alicia in The Twilight Zone’s “The Lonely” at first seems a more humane version of male robot fantasy. She’s affectionate, emotionally expressive, and devoted. But when she becomes inconvenient, when her emotional needs are too demanding, she is violently disposed of by the men in charge.

And that’s what makes Grandma in “I Sing the Body Electric” such a remarkable exception. She’s not a sex object, not an assassin, and not a tragic artificial woman whose existence is primarily about what she can provide to a man. She’s a caregiver—but not mindlessly obedient or subservient. Rather, she understands the emotional needs of the children, pushes back when needed, helps Anne through grief, and when her purpose has been fulfilled, she is the one to make the choice to leave.

Support Lightspeed Magazine

Lightspeed Magazine, along with its sister publication Nightmare, is having a Kickstarter. Think of it as a subscription drive with awesome rewards.

Probably you’ve noticed, if you’ve followed my fiction for any length of time, that I frequently turn up in the digital pages of Lightspeed. My first professional sale was to Lightspeed, back in August of 2021, and my most recent story appeared in Lightspeed this last August 2026. I’ve now published seven stories there, with another one on deck.

I’ve published fiction in other places, of course, but Lightspeed gave me my start. They’ve been a particularly good home for my stories. Without Lightspeed there would be no cyberpunk boy salvaging robots in the apocalypse. No birds mysteriously manifesting from a kid’s bodily orifices. No new messiah engineered by machine monks and birthed among the garbage in a dark alley under the morning star. No lonely boy whose wounded heart is barely held together with spider silk.

Lightspeed/Nightmare Kickstarter is at 2/3rds of their goal as of this writing, with less than two weeks to go. If you’ve enjoyed any of my stories that have appeared there — or if you just like having a professional, paying market for great science fiction and fantasy—consider supporting the magazine.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lightspeedmagazine/help-fund-lightspeed-year-17-and-nightmare-year-15

That’s the news for this month. Subscribe for more and thanks for reading!

ICYMI

If you’re just joining the party, here’s a rundown of what I’ve been up to and where you can find my work.

Coming Soon

“How to Survive a Corn Maze”, dark fantasy flash fiction forthcoming in Lightspeed Magazine.

Out Now

A boy. A bot. An apocalypse. My novelette, “Ladd’s Robot Repair”, is free to read in Lightspeed Magazine. You might also enjoy “‘We Require an Engine,’ Said the Testicle Collective”. Visit my Bibliography for a full list of my fiction and other works.

I am the SFWA Andre Norton Nebula Award finalist author of The Tower (Recorded Books, 2025), narrated by Christopher Gebauer. Available wherever audiobooks are sold, or check your local library.

I wrote for Nickelodeon’s Glitch Techs, an animated sci-fi adventure about teens who hunt video game monsters that have broken out into the real world. I also created and co-executive produced Amazon Studio’s first live-action kids and family series, Gortimer Gibbon’s Life on Normal Street, about an ordinary suburb that hides extraordinary magic.

About

Anaxagology is a free monthly(ish) newsletter from author and speculative fiction writer David Anaxagoras featuring essays, previews of works in progress, behind-the-scenes story notes, reading logs, and the occasional giveaway. Subscribe now! You can learn more about Dave at his website, or follow him on Bluesky.