When I finally stopped flip-flopping between continuing The Tech Files and flat-out remaking it as Void, I realized that the universe it takes place in needed to be far better constructed than the slapstick dimension Joe Slayer and his sometimes-friends, sometimes-enemies existed in.

That task involved laying out hard ground rules and sticking to them, reworking a world I had been creating with my writing partner, Jason Alderman, since 2002. The element that took the longest to overcome was the ratio between fantastical and science fiction elements. Neither could be allowed to overpower the other.

In most of the popular fiction I can think of taking place in similar hybrid universes, the fantastical elements - magic, ghosts, demons - take precedent over the science fiction, which is backwards in my book as the latter is the more realistically explained. Jason is far more interested in the magic, however, so it had to be equal. The solution to this is having solutions for every element that tailor to both genres. And, of course, I insisted on having more realistic themes to balance both of them out.

Checks and balances.

The Tech Files, in its incomplete entirety, can be viewed as a playlist here.

Joseph