Strange systems. Lonely places. Lingering ghosts. Dark speculative fiction of unsettling futures.
Behind every story is a place.
Some are remote settlements at the edge of survival. Others are quiet houses where reality begins to shift or forgotten structures that carry the memory of the lives once lived inside them. In these landscapes—factories, forests, towers, ruined cities—the past rarely stays buried for long.
My fiction often begins with a question about place: What happened here? What systems shaped this place? What remains after the people are gone?
The worlds I write about are rarely heroic frontiers. They are environments shaped by labor, history, and the quiet persistence of ordinary people trying to endure within structures far larger than themselves. Sometimes those structures are bureaucratic. Sometimes technological. Sometimes they are older things—forces that have been waiting in the landscape long before anyone thought to name them.
Step carefully. These places have long memories.
Hillary Dodge 