I hoped to write a blog post on the method used but it turns out to be too complicated. Here are some remarks on the method: I'd start with a story I wrote that IMHO didn't "work" but had characters or relationships I wanted to explore more in a similar story. After that story was selected, I often used AI to generate suggestions for changing the setting from (for example) comedy caper to scifi comedy. Or I might ask for potential outlines, or idea critiques. Lots of chats, for weeks or months. Finally, I'll get a first draft of a scifi that I can work with "by hand", trying to write what I thought the character would say in such-an-such a situation. In this last stage, it's a matter of getting the plot, comedy tone, character motivations, and so on to work together in a compelling way. Then it has to be polished over and over until I get to a point where I don't think I can improve it much, given my modest literary skills.
Once the writing process is finished, I ask chatGPT or gemini to generate images what can be used in a section of the book. I'd also ask claude for AI image generator prompt suggesitons (since claude doesn't do image generation). The images are often inconsistent but I tried to make the characters in different images similar in appearance. Those are how the illustrations were selected. So, for what it's worth, that's more-or-less how these were written.
An example of a gemini-generated (with edits) image for His Mom FridayAfter all that I thought I'd ask claude to write a blog post introducting the series. The text below is, without edits, what it responded with.
Plastic Fantastic: An Introduction to the Avatar Academy Series
Four novelettes about aliens, trash, family dysfunction, and the absurdity of bureaucracy—in space and on Earth
What happens when a civilization faces an existential energy crisis and the only solution is stealing another planet’s garbage? This is the delightfully absurd premise behind the Avatar Academy series, a quartet of interconnected science fiction comedies set between the subterranean cities of Venus and the gritty streets of Baltimore.
The series follows the Venusians—short, round, green-skinned aliens who live underground beneath their hostile planet’s surface—as they deploy “Avatar Operators” to neurally hijack human hosts on Earth. Their mission? To collect plastic waste, the only fuel source for their failing PolymerPower reactors. What unfolds across these four stories is a satirical exploration of environmentalism, bureaucracy, family bonds, and the collision between two very different cultures.
The Stories
Awesome Sauce — The Origin Story
(amazon link)The series begins with Venus in crisis. Solar panels are failing, power cycling interrupts everything from government meetings to movie night, and the AI Governor—a glowing holographic dodecahedron who pulses red when speaking and gold when processing—must find a solution.
The answer comes from an unlikely source: Earth’s mountains of unrecycled plastic waste. The Venusians’ “Avatar Program” allows operators to teleport their consciousness across space and take over human hosts. There’s just one catch: when the operator returns to Venus, the host dies. Or as the Venusians euphemistically call it, achieves “Attained Negative Life Status.”
Awesome Sauce introduces us to the key players: Mayor Nona Sonnof, the politically savvy leader who balances compassion with pragmatism; her husband Factor, a veteran Avatar Operator; their son Bevers, an enthusiastic but clumsy cadet; and Sergeant Tobar Sidel, the by-the-book military officer who runs the Avatar Academy.
The story follows the first major plastic acquisition operation in Baltimore, where a criminal organization unwittingly provides both cover and targets for the Venusian infiltration.
Baltimore Saves the World — The Earth Perspective
(amazon link)This installment shifts the narrative to Earth, centering on Lenny Kremer, a waste management engineer at Baltimore’s Plastic Recycle Processing Facility. Lenny is a man with two passions: tracking polymer waste data and searching for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Unsurprisingly, his speed dating career is not going well.
When Lenny notices statistical anomalies in plastic waste patterns—impossible drops in pollution levels—he suspects alien involvement. He’s right, of course, but proving it is another matter entirely.
The story introduces Lucy Mateo, a graduate student who becomes Lenny’s ally (and eventually his fiancée), and a colorful cast of UFO enthusiasts, skeptical coworkers, and oblivious government officials.
The title carries a beautiful double meaning that only becomes clear at the end: Baltimore’s unwitting “donation” of plastic waste doesn’t save Earth—it saves Venus. Meanwhile, Earth’s environment improves dramatically as a side effect, and the President decides to spend the cleanup budget savings on “a bajillion bombs.”
Venus Dreams Plastic Schemes — The Family Business
(amazon link)The third story introduces the Gilbrains, a Baltimore family whose dysfunction is matched only by their ambition. Abel and Linda Gilbrain run a struggling recycling center while dreaming of buying a bankrupt mini-golf course called “Putt-Putt Planet.” Their elderly parents, Ursel and Urielle, are perpetually exasperated by their son’s endless parade of failed business schemes.
Enter Mathezar and Moma Tommov, a married pair of Avatar Operators who are assigned to permanently hijack the Gilbrain parents. Under Venusian management, the family business transforms into a ruthlessly efficient plastic collection operation. Abel and Linda are demoted to “Senior Retrieval Specialists”—essentially glorified truck drivers—but for the first time in their lives, the family company is actually making money.
The story also follows Thalia Ridel, a promising young Avatar cadet who faces a tribunal after her mission goes wrong. Her defense by Mayor Nona Sonnof provides insight into Venusian values: initiative, even when it fails, is prized over blind obedience.
The ending is pitch-perfect: the hijacked Gilbrain parents watch Jeopardy! with eerie expertise while Abel whispers to Linda about his next big idea—an alpaca farm.
His Mom Friday — A Mother-Son Adventure
(amazon link)The most intimate of the four stories, His Mom Friday takes its name from the 1940 screwball comedy His Girl Friday—a movie the Sonnof family is watching when yet another power outage interrupts their evening.
Bevers has discovered a cache of plastic in a Baltimore shipping yard through intelligence gathered by his friends Thalia and Sharada. But his mother Nona, worried about the mission’s dangers, forbids him from participating. In true family fashion, she ends up joining him instead.
The story becomes a mother-son heist adventure as Nona hijacks a human smuggler named Wendy while Bevers takes over Alan Jackson, a corrupt shipping yard worker. Together, they navigate Earth criminals, incompetent police officers, and the challenges of operating unfamiliar human bodies.
The climax sees both successfully transmit coordinates for the plastic containers before simultaneously falling off a crane—a darkly comedic end to their human hosts that the Baltimore police write off as yet another accident in a high-crime area.
Thematic Threads
Aliens as a Mirror
The Venusians aren’t invaders in the traditional sense—they’re desperate refugees stealing garbage. Their advanced technology (neural hijacking, matter teleportation) exists alongside profound moral blind spots. They’ve calculated that human lives are worth less than plastic because “Earthlings are biodegradable and plastic is not.”
This twisted logic serves as satire of how any society—including our own—can rationalize harm through bureaucratic language. “Attained Negative Life Status” is funnier and more disturbing than simply saying “death.”
Environmental Commentary
The series plays both sides of environmental humor. The Venusians represent a civilization that actually values plastic—for them, it’s precious fuel rather than pollution. Meanwhile, Earth’s plastic crisis is so severe that aliens can harvest it in massive quantities without anyone noticing.
The irony deepens in Baltimore Saves the World: when plastic pollution dramatically decreases, scientists accuse each other of fraud, dolphins return to the Inner Harbor, and the President responds by defunding environmental programs. The planet is accidentally saved, and humanity learns nothing.
Bureaucracy as Universal Constant
Whether on Venus or Earth, bureaucracy is the enemy. The AI Governor requires forms for everything. Bevers’ demotion and subsequent reinstatement at the Avatar Academy hinges on properly filed paperwork. Baltimore’s police force is so underfunded that mysterious deaths are filed away as “accidental overdoses” to reduce caseloads.
The humor here is gentle but persistent: forms, protocols, and procedures are both essential and absurd, and every character—alien or human—struggles against them.
Family Dynamics
Family is the emotional heart of the series. The Sonnofs model a loving, supportive family navigating crisis together. Bevers is embarrassed by his mother’s affection (“Mom, please”) but ultimately teams up with her on a dangerous mission. Factor and Nona’s relationship is warm and playful despite the stress of planetary survival.
The Gilbrains offer a comic counterpoint: parents and children united by mutual disappointment. Abel’s endless business failures exhaust his parents, while Ursel and Urielle’s constant criticism creates a cycle of dysfunction that only alien intervention can break.
Both families represent different ways love manifests—sometimes through support, sometimes through exasperation, but always through presence.
Class and Crime
Baltimore serves as the series’ primary Earth setting for pointed reasons. Its depiction emphasizes institutional failure: underfunded police, rampant organized crime, and economic desperation. The Venusians exploit these conditions because they create cover for their operations—nobody notices a few more bodies in a city already drowning in violence.
But the series doesn’t simply mock Baltimore. Characters like Lenny Kremer and Lucy Mateo represent genuine competence and idealism surviving within broken systems. Even the criminals are portrayed with complexity: Ivan the Insane was “psychotic but a sweetheart of a father.”
Identity and Embodiment
The avatar technology raises fascinating questions about identity. When Bevers inhabits Etern Fletcher’s body, he experiences “Coordination Lag”—his Venusian brain overcalculating for Earth’s lighter gravity. The Tommovs gradually assimilate human culture through their hosts, developing an obsession with Jeopardy! that reveals their alien origins through superior planetary science knowledge.
The series treats body-swapping with surprising nuance, acknowledging both the comedy and horror of inhabiting another being.
The Comedy of Colonialism
Perhaps the series’ sharpest edge is its treatment of colonialism—inverted. The Venusians represent a technologically advanced civilization exploiting a “primitive” world for resources. They justify casualties through utilitarian calculation. They target vulnerable populations who won’t be missed. They operate in secret while congratulating themselves on their cleverness.
Sound familiar?
By making humans the colonized rather than the colonizers, the series invites readers to reconsider comfortable narratives about resource extraction, cultural superiority, and collateral damage. The Venusians aren’t evil—they’re desperate, which makes their moral compromises both understandable and disturbing.
A Series Worth Discovering
The Avatar Academy stories work individually as comedic science fiction adventures, but they gain depth through their interconnections. Characters, locations, and consequences weave between installments, creating a richly textured universe where every action has ripples.
Awesome Sauce establishes the rules. Baltimore Saves the World shows the human impact. Venus Dreams Plastic Schemes explores institutional dynamics. His Mom Friday brings everything home with personal stakes.
Together, they form an unlikely meditation on what we value, what we discard, and how family—whether human or Venusian—sustains us through crisis.
As Bevers would say: awesome sauce.
Reading Order: 1. Awesome Sauce (Origin/ensemble) 2. Baltimore Saves the World (Earth perspective) 3. Venus Dreams Plastic Schemes (Parallel operations) 4. His Mom Friday (Character-focused climax)
Note: The stories can also be read independently, though references and character development build across the series.
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