Paul Martz is an award-winning science fiction author, technology blogger, and former punk rock drummer. His edgy, techno-smart stories are influenced by his career as a virtual reality software developer and the time he spent drumming for punk and alternative bar bands. He has many hobbies and interests. He speedsolves the Rubik’s Cube and other puzzles. He has traveled the world to view multiple total solar eclipses. Like all true nerds, he hosts websites on a closet server. A lifelong musician, he has played drums since childhood, wrote and recorded digital compositions, and ripped his entire vinyl collection to MP3. Currently, he’s learning piano. You can find Paul’s stories in Uncharted Magazine, Amazing Stories, Creepy Podcast, Punk Noir Press, and several anthologies, including Wild: Uncivilized Tales. His flash fiction piece, “More Than Electric Sheep,” placed first in Uncharted Magazine’s AI Flash Challenge, and he placed second in the 2022 Roswell Awards with “Dr. Harriet Hartfeld’s Home for Aging AIs.” Paul is blind from retinitis pigmentosa. His non-fiction has appeared in the Braille Monitor, and He blogs for AppleVis.com, a website for vision-impaired Apple users. His poem, “The Thompson River Flows,” placed first in the 2018 National Braille Press poetry contest. We caught up with Paul on the front porch of his Colorado home, where he was sipping a latte and watching the snow sublimate.
If you could travel to any alternate universe where a different version of yourself exists, what do you think your other self would be like?
If you’re like me, you’ve got a crossroads event in your past. You can open a calendar, stab that day with your stubby finger, and wonder what life might have been like if only you’d never sent in those ten Bazooka Bubble Gum wrappers for that free pair of X-ray specs. But you did, dammit. You put them on. You saw those things, and now you can never unsee them. Unholy things no eyes should behold. You wake every night screaming, your bedsheets soaked with sweat. The booze, the sleeping pills, nothing erases those unnatural images that play like B-movie horror flicks on the inside of your clenched eyelids. Now you’re in the Witness Protection Program, pretending to be a science fiction writer and former punk rock drummer, wondering if those bottom surgery scars will ever heal. If only I’d ordered sea monkeys! What was the question?
If you could choose any real-life celebrity to make a cameo appearance in one of your short stories, who would it be?
Drew Barrymore, from the 1976 Gaines Dog Food commercial. I think she was like 11 months old or something. That makes her the perfect age for my “Limbo Rock” flash fiction piece, in which teenagers have invaded Limbo, playing Chubby Checker on infinite repeat, always trying to go just a little bit lower. Well, the unbaptized babies are pissed, right? And only 11-month-old Drew can lead the counterattack. I can see her now, firing rounds from her AR-15, a bloody bandana around her upper arm, a string of drool pendulating from her chin, and her bottom wrapped in a Pampers. “Limbo Rock” be damned. Drew will rock Limbo! Can I get a twofer? One of my earliest stories featured the ghost of Jimmy Hoffa. I’m currently serializing that story in my newsletter, and AS readers can get a copy by emailing me on my website.
Name the strangest place you’ve ever written.
Did you hear about those scientists in Egypt? They used cosmic-ray muon radiography to examine the internal structure of the Great Pyramid. Cool technology. Muons are all around, a natural result of cosmic ray interactions with the atmosphere. Muons pass right through you, pass through pretty much everything. But, and this is key, their absorption rate varies depending on the density of the material they penetrate. So, these scientists load up the Queen’s Chamber with a bunch of muon detection gadgets and let ‘er rip. A few days and lots of inverse matrix math later, they’ve got a nice density map of the pyramid’s structure. You know what they found? A previously unknown chamber right above the Grand Gallery. No shit. There’s some debate about its purpose. Some think it might contribute to the pyramid’s structural integrity. Others are betting it’s loaded with golden statues, canopic jars, and really early versions of backgammon. I’ll tell you what they’ll find. Some discarded pizza boxes and a half-empty canister of Folgers. And I can’t remember where I left my Joy Division bootleg cassette, so if that turns up, have them call me.
If you could have scripted Stanley Kubrick’s Moon landing hoax, how would it differ from the original?
When I was six, I went to see 2001: A Space Odyssey on the big screen. Some might say six is a little young for that movie. A lot of it went over my head. But it gave me a life-long appetite for mind-bending science fiction. Just as important, I became a huge Kubrick fan. Saw all his movies, most more than once. So you came to the right guy. Let’s start with casting. NASA had it all wrong. I would’ve cast Jack Nicholson in the role of Armstrong. For that crucial lunar excursion scene, let’s get a camera on the surface, angled up at the Eagle, showing Nicholson axing his way through the LM hatch. And I want a close-up of his bloodshot eyes for those first words on the lunar surface: “Heeeeere’s Johnny!” For Aldrin, I’ve gotta have Malcolm McDowell. And I want pre-Ludovico treatment McDowell, sharpened up and ready for a bit of the old ultraviolence—back in the Eagle, smashing apart the HAL 9000. But here’s where I’m stuck on the script. Do they find a featureless monolith, an ancient sentinel left by aliens? Or Slim Pickens riding an atomic bomb down to the lunar surface? I’m going with the A-bomb. Because when Peter Sellers walks out of that crater to lead them to the bomb shelter, Tom Cruise is already there, orgy in progress, getting a head start on repopulation. I don’t see budget as a problem. It’s not like we’ll need to bring palm trees into England like we did for Full Metal Jacket. What a fiasco! For soundtrack, I like Strauss.
If you could have dinner with any fictional character from any sci-fi book or movie, who would it be, what would you talk about, and what restaurant would you choose?
It would be Swamp Thing, from the Alan Moore era, and the restaurant would be White Castle. Swampy would sit there in the gleaming dining area with a finger in a glass of water, slurping up a nitrogen-rich solution by osmosis. He’d probably make some philosophical comment, like, “This place grinds forests into wrappers … and calls it value.” And I’d be like, “Dude, are you going to eat those sliders?”
If you were to write a book about a group of superheroes with completely useless powers, what would their powers be?
I’d model one character after myself. He would have the ability to precision-fold fitted sheets. No one can do that. It took a while to master, but now that I’m in the Witness Protection Program, I’ve got a lot of time on my hands. Paul recently published the non-fiction book, Solve It! The Only Speedsolving Guide for Blind Cubers. He co-edited the 2024 multi-genre anthology Without Brakes, Fingers Crossed, featuring “The Tamarisk Hunter” by Paolo Bacigalupi. You can find his speculative fiction story “The Blackest Ink” in the 2024 anthology, Midnight Garden: Where Dark Tales Grow. Paul will lead a publishing workshop at the September 2025 Colorado Gold Writers Conference. Follow him at PaulMartz.com.
