Minor Differences Repeating Forever (and other stories) - Spencer's January 2026 Wrap Up

A story series finished!

Like many East Coast and Midwest-inhabiting Americans, I spent a significant portion of my January shoveling my way out of snow. Perhaps relatedly, January was a (relatively) slow productive month for me. It was, however, the month that I spent finalizing and publishing the last few stories of my first series of interconnected short stories—a sci-fi/horrorish series all set in the same world of The Zoothesia Protocols: a system that governs how mass-adopted AR implants allow and restrict perception.

There are 6 total stories, and, lucky for me, I think the 6th is the best of the bunch. They’ve all come out in Protocolized and can be found here!

https://protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/t/zoothesia

I’ll have more writing news coming in February, but this series was a big lift for me, and I’m really happy with how the world came together.

So instead of the usual, in celebration, I’ve put together 2 things for this post:

1. Some thoughts on a (for me) new writing task—writing multiple stories set in the same world! If you’re embarking on a challenge like that (or you want to see what a short story writer struggles with when trying to stretch beyond the limits of a single narrative) I hope it’s useful!

2. Inspirations/readings that helped inform each of the stories as I worked through them.

The Process:

Since it’s a central image in the series, I thought I’d use a “prism” metaphor to talk about the project of solo-writing a longer/extended world through short fiction here.

Weird horror author Brian Evenson once described the tendency many writers have to “write the same thing” over and over again. Rather than dismissing this, he describes it as “the prism thing. Like light through a prism, and you’re turning it slowly and reflecting the same light at a different angle or on a different plane over and over.” I think this also describes the process of writing out an extended world.

In this sense, writing an EU felt a lot like the world was a prism, and the stories were bands of light being shone through it.

The first three stories, then, were experimenting with different angles into the world/prism. My early, central challenge was reintroducing the world/rules in a way that served as an entry for new readers while remaining engaging for returning readers. The solution here was rotating the prism slightly, finding different refractions/breaks in the rule set--different failure modes, blind spots, or implications (story 1: lays out the big picture rules: presence must preserve... i.e., people are hidden from people who will hurt them; story 2: how do people try to hide themselves from others given those rules; story 3: how does the system handle people who are dangerous to almost everyone?) Even by story #3, I was relying on formal (POV) uniqueness to make the story stick. Early stabs at story #4 felt like retreads/remixes. It felt like I wasn't adding much to a reader anymore. Part of this was, I think, that the rules had gotten to a level where, upon setting up any story, it was VERY obvious how the rules would intersect, what the failure mode would be, etc. With a narrow band of light (small character(s) with singular problems), it was obvious by now how things would refract.

Stories 4 and 5 felt less like experiments in rotating the prism and more experiments widening and deepening the complexity of the beam of light. Rather than narrow-band small-scale characters, story #4 explored someone interacting with the economic market as a day trader. This meant I was no longer simply sieving a character through the conceit, but passing a larger, more ‘scaled up’ band through more parts of the prism at once. Big questions emerged here. (i.e., story #4, Day Traitor: “How would two predictive models that regulate and prefigure action interact?”) With a wider beam I could explore intersecting refractions and things got more interesting. Story #5 (Missing Not at Random), I took a more mystery-coded form of storytelling, but also integrated more mysticism and religiosity into the world, again a wider band.

Then, by the time I got to the final story, I felt like I knew the prism well enough to just, well, present it. The story takes on the history and future of the Zoo in a more totalizing way. The central character is the prism, rather than the light. It took those 5 stories to enable me to write it. Learning the contours, the way it responds to inputs, its internal architecture, and external aesthetics. A lingering question I have is whether or not the final product could be read fully without being set up with the 5 stories that prefigure it. Maybe one of you all could let me know?

And finally, because certainly what we all need is more things to add to our reading lists, here are a few pieces that helped inspire and fuel the tank, as it were.

Perception Must Preserve

• Olga Ravn’s The Employees (something about contact with strange, quasi-aperceptual objects evoking uncontrolled emotional reactions very much foregrounded this series.

• Timber Stinson-Schroff’s writings on Safety (in a protocol context) were a big part of this series’s genesis, too. His “Safe New World” essay in the Protocol Reader, especially.

Would You Stop Following Me if I was a Worm?

• Yuck!: The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust. An interesting analysis of disgust!

The Predation Circuit

• Dexter x Solbej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume: the empty, solitary spaces in Balle’s ongoing novel series and watching a narrator apart in some way from the world walk and talk their way through them helped here a lot.

Day Traitor

• Manufactured Present (by Sachin). His concept of Casino time, and thoughts on gambling and prediction in general, were both pretty essential in connecting two predictive models (economy and Zoothesia) in the series.

• Monster Culture (Seven Theses): This essay (h/t to Sachin, who first shared this Jefferey Jerome Cohen piece, again here). This essay on monsters and their representation and meaning within culture was vital as I turned, increasingly, toward thinking about the Zoothesia Protocols as a (monstrous) character within the world.

Missing Not at Random

• If you like(d) the “report” style form this took, I owe 100% of that idea to Sofia Samatar’s tremendous story “Walkdog.” There’s a density of emotion packed into (relatively) simple prose that makes this whole story so rich and thick, and it taught (and continues to teach) me much about using unique forms in fiction.

Minor Differences Repeating Forever

• Three stories were highly influential in this series finale (which arose in a conversation with Venkatesh Rao on the possible storyshapes of protocol fiction and fiction more generally):

  • The Last Question by Issac Asimov

  • The Map by (aforementioned) Venkatesh Rao

  • Exhalation by Ted Chiang

• All three of these stories are defined by what I’d consider an (at least attempt at) exponential escalation within a narrative. Asimov’s takes on the entire future of humanity and the cosmos itself; Rao’s Map on the slow, then rapid, adoption of a new (first descriptive, then predictive!) transformational technology; Exhalation explores a sentient creature discovering entropy and the inevitability of his and all species’ far-future erasue. All are defined by a particular escalation I find science fiction remarkably adept at capturing. This escalation was the primary challenge I set myself in this final piece, which explores the history and future of the central protocols!

That’s it, for now! I’ve got a story coming out in Nature: Futures in a couple of weeks; and a new anthology on silence I have a story in that should be coming out soon, too! More on that later.

Happy February, y’all! Stay warm.