Trip(ping) through Space with Josh Pearce

Josh Pearce has published more than two hundred stories, reviews, and poems in a wide variety of magazines including Analog, Asimov’s, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Bourbon Penn, Cast of Wonders, Clarkesworld, Diabolical Plots, Kaleidotrope, Locus, Nature, On Spec, and Weird Horror. Find more of his writing at fictionaljosh.com. One time, Ken Jennings signed his chest. His author site can be found here.

Josh is the author of “Our Child” from Issue 13, along with “Lacus Odii (Lake of Hate)” and “Buttons and Soap” from Issue 9.

His previous Radon interview can be read here.

Q: When we last spoke in 2025, you were practicing writing shorter and faster, and hoping to iterate quicker. Have you succeeded?

Kind of. At the beginning of 2026, I told myself I was going to stop writing short stories for at least a year and focus on finishing a novel. If I needed a break from long form during that period, I could always write some poetry. Well, I've made progress on the novel and written a ton of poems, but I also wound up writing another three or four stories, and only two of them came in under 5,000 words.

I'd call that mixed results. I've also been converting some of my old, unsalable flash stories into narrative poems.

Q: As a prolific author, what do you feel is the overarching trajectory of your writing?

After a quick look at my list of fiction, and trying to think back over those past ten or so years, it seems as though I started out trying to write hyper-logical, puzzle-box stories, like mysteries in space: for example, "And Then There Were Infinite" in New Myths, or "Triumph of the Skies" in Kasma. Then I started writing weirder, and my poetry really bled into my prose. My recent pieces, like "Witches in Cold Mountain Halls" in The Skull & Laurel or "The Spider at the Heart of It" in Interzone, are essentially tone poems. I think the next step up from "weird" is "full surrealism."

Q: What was the impetus of “Our Child”?

I ate a bunch of mushrooms and went to a laser show at the planetarium. They showed a high-def image of the whole Earth, like it was 3D almost, and then zoomed out so quickly it truly felt like I was flying away. Probably the closest I'll ever experience to space travel. And what’s that Tsiolkovsky quote about Earth being the cradle of humanity?

[“The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever.”

— Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

—Radon Editors]

Q: What is your favorite line from the poem that you want readers to linger on the longest?

"while Cassini ran fingers

through night's hair

like shepherd moons"

The Cassini gap and others in Saturn's rings look to me like someone combing out long strands of hair.

Q: What responsibility, if any, do you think a poet has to society, history, or their audience?

Evolution is the only obligation. In fact, I don't think the poet has any responsibility to anyone or anything. ("Art for art's sake" is good slogan, though of course MGM is not making art for its own sake, it's making art for massive profit.) However, purely in the interests of a healthy, perpetuating society, art cannot be stagnate. The poet should be doing, or at least attempting, something new. Otherwise we end up with a culture that is always looking backward, and never on where the world is going.

Conversely, if a society wishes to have a soul instead of a hollow shell, it has a responsibility to the poet and to all its artists. Once a society moves past hunter-gatherer or subsistence farming, it has an excess of resources, including a surplus of time. That time is then used in pursuits other than those of pure survival: leisure activities, sport, art, etc. Unless we want to be a society of automatons working entirely to maximize profit (and who are we maximizing profit for?), then society must use its vast riches to the benefit of all its citizens, to allow each of them the time and space to create art. Livable minimum wage (or universal basic income), universal healthcare, paid maternity leave (or universal basic income), shorter work weeks (or universal basic income), free housing, did I mention universal basic income?

Q: Do you write to answer a question, or do you write the question?

The question is always, "What if...?" in this field, isn't it? I definitely write to the question, but the problem with short fiction is that I usually don't have enough time to fully answer it, or follow the premise to every logical conclusion, within the word-count limits. What if Indiana Jones was having a mental break down? What if humans could clone themselves internally? What if we used parasitic tongue lice as automatic translation tools? The possibilities are endless; stories need an ending.

Q: We haven’t found your Ken Jennings story played out in any prior interview. Would you like to tell the tale for us?

I used to work at a local indie bookshop. This was after Ken Jennings was champion but before he was the host of Jeopardy!, and he was on tour to promote one of his trivia books, and our store was one of his stops. So I wore my "Suck It, Trebek!" T-shirt and asked him to sign it after the reading. Alas, the shirt is lost to the years and many washings.

Q: Was there any music (1-3 songs) that you think would make a good mini-setlist for your story? Either ones that may have been on your mind, or ones that give readers a good idea of the themes?

Something psychedelic and cosmic, right? I think "Spacemama" and "Magic Eye" by Solar Fields are fitting. For something more high-energy, I'd go with “(T-T)b” by Anamanaguchi.