Francis Bass: 23 books

Joseph Yanyuk, known by his screen name, “Chimaera,” is a speedrunner—someone who attempts to beat a video game as fast as possible. In this short play, Chimaera is livestreaming a speedrun, discussing a convention he just attended in Moscow, and getting ensnared in a spat with another speedrunner,...

In the year 2045, a group of politically conscious high school seniors decides to organize a youth rally—a protest to lower the minimum voting age. Just before the protest is scheduled to happen, a massive ice sheet breaks off of Antarctica, causing global flooding. The youth rally becomes a demand...

In this fifteen-minute play, four college students meet to plan a party, and end up sidetracked by an argument about the savior of the world. Just a few months after he defeated the Himalayan, allegations of sexual abuse have emerged around Dawa the Savior. This issue turns from small talk among a...

Without warning, thousands of alien spaceships have appeared above major urban areas around the globe, and some have descended to devastating effect. Although the aliens have expressed a lack of ill intentions, and a desire for “recreation,” no one really knows what they are doing on Earth. The...

In Grozny, the first ever all-robot military unit fights an integrated army of humans and robots. The clash is viewed by five American travelers in an airport café—a veteran, a journalist, two young sisters, and a barista—as the events unfold on TV. Each traveler has a different connection to...

Between the ages of six and ten I read a lot of YA and middle grade books, and a lot of book series—but as far as I was concerned, A Series of Unfortunate Events and Harry Potter were the only series that mattered. A decade later, A Series of Unfortunate Events was the series I most cared about...

Two brothers, asteroid prospectors, are awoken when an asteroid lands somewhere along the boundary between their little plot, and the enormous plot owned by their neighbors. They drive out to see on whose plot the rock has fallen, and who can claim it as theirs to sell. As they do, they argue about...

This fifteen-minute play follows two characters—Raymond Mare and Sandra Holt—as they vie for control of Sandcastle Isle. Ray is the CEO and inheritor of Mare Realty, an old, moneyed company which has a near total monopoly on the Floridian beach island. Sandra Holt works for the newer, less successful...

A couple decades in the future higher education has evolved, and Academic Campuses (sometimes referred to as “monasteries”) offer an affordable, though longer and more intensive, alternative to universities. In this hour-long play, the student editors of the Marietta Academic Campus’s literary...

This past spring semester I needed to fulfill my university honors requirements, so I “contracted” a creative writing class focused on time, by designing an additional curriculum of nine plays that I would read and respond to—all of them dealing with time in some way. Thus, Play Time—nine...

A collection of four plays set in worlds not quite like our own—one a fictional medieval embassy from a country devastated by plague and civil war, another an academic institution so insular and study-focused it's nicknamed a "monastery"—each with a brief afterword providing commentary...

A collection of four sci-fi stories exploring various futures, ranging from an isolated asteroid colony governed by questionable politicians, to an alien invasion so overwhelming that the sky over Atlanta is blacked out by spaceships, each with a brief afterword providing commentary on the origins...

Volt is the leader of the Anarchists, an official gang on the De.mocra.cy server. In a near-future internet filled with highly regulated, highly restrictive MMOs, the De.mocra.cy server is entirely self-regulated, affording unprecedented freedom of speech and freedom of violence to its users—until...

In the near future, bioengineering companies create neutralizers—unicellular organisms that can destroy sex hormones in the brain, improving the academic dedication of students. Silver Path, a new performing arts school, is a pioneer in requiring that its students be neutralized. This kind of environment...