John McDaid

Fiction

John McDaid is a Clarion graduate (1993) and award-winning science fiction author whose work has appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Cream City Review, and other venues. His work often explores the intersection of technology, narrative form, and mediated consciousness — ground that his song lyrics and academic writing cover from different angles.

✎ This page is a work in progress. Full bibliographic details, links to available work, and additional titles will be added soon. Contact John if you're looking for something specific.

Long-Form Work

  • Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse Hypermedia
    Eastgate Systems, 1993  ·  Hypertext novel
    One of the first hypertext novels, the literary estate of a vanished science fiction writer, distributed on floppy disk with two original audio cassettes. Reviewed in The New York Times by Robert Coover, who praised its "sheer pleasure of play" and called McDaid "a mischievous guitarist and vocalist with a gift for the inimitable phrase." A New Media Invision Award finalist. The subject of MIT Press's Traversals (2017) by Dene Grigar and Stuart Moulthrop, growing out of a 2013 NEH grant to the Electronic Literature Organization for the preservation of early digital texts. Prof. Grigar's Electronic Literature Lab at Washington State University converted The Funhouse to HTML, making it accessible on the web.
    Read it here
    Read more about it on the WSU site
  • Uncle Buddy LLM
    ChatGPT instance, 2025
    When it became possible to upload and train a custom AI, the Funhouse seemed an obvious choice: a large body of material specifically designed to create a fictional persona in the reader's mind. With this source material, you're not training it on fictional style, but rather at the raw artifact level: the Funhouse contains Buddy Newkirk's sketchbook, photo album, song lyrics, chunks of a screenplay, oracle cards, and an entire dictionary of in-universe terms. With some custom instructions and a little training, ChatGPT can reverse-engineer that into your vanished relative.
    Chat with Uncle Buddy here

Short Fiction

  • "Memento mori" Hypertext
    MFA project, 2022  ·  Interactive fiction (Twine)
    An interactive fiction work built in Twine.
    Read it here
  • "Standing By The Wall" Hypertext
    Written for the ACM Hypertext Conference, 2019  ·  Interactive fiction (Twine)
    An interactive fiction work built in Twine.
    Read it here
  • "We Knew The Glass Man" Recent
    Cream City Review, 2019  ·  Interactive fiction (Twine)
    An interactive fiction work built in Twine. McDaid was an invited speaker at the ACM conference in Hof, Germany in September 2019, where he read from and was interviewed about the work.
  • "Umbrella Men"
    The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January/February 2012  ·  Cover story
    [TK — brief description to be added]
  • "Keyboard Practice, consisting of an Aria with diverse Variations for the Harpsichord with two manuals" Nebula Finalist
    The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 2005
    Nebula Award finalist. Winner of the Media Ecology Association Mary Shelley Award for Outstanding Fictional Work. Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award finalist. [TK — additional description to be added]
  • "The Ashbazu Effect"
    ReVisions (anthology), 2004
    Sidewise Award for alternate history finalist, 2005. [TK — brief description to be added]
  • "Jigoku no Mokushiroku (The Symbolic Revelation of the Apocalypse)" Sturgeon Award
    Asimov's Science Fiction, 1995  ·  First published story
    Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award winner. McDaid's first professional short fiction sale, written following his attendance at the Clarion Science Fiction Workshop in 1993. Narrated by Hitoshi, a sentient elevator in a post-millennial library complex, the story follows the convergence of a radical scholar, a grieving believer, and an AI trying to understand what it means to choose.
    Read it here
  • [Additional stories and publications TK]
    Various venues
    Additional bibliography to be added.

Read Online

About the Work

McDaid attended the Clarion Science Fiction Workshop in 1993. Born in Brooklyn, NY the year NASA was created, his early reading included Robert Heinlein, Andre Norton, James Tiptree Jr., Thomas Pynchon, and Ursula Le Guin. The influence of that lineage runs through his fiction: rigorous speculation, attention to language, and an uncomfortable willingness to follow ideas wherever they lead.

Contact for reprint permissions, speaking, or manuscript inquiries: jmcdaid@johnmcdaid.com.