Author: Alex Sherman

Alex Sherman builds speculative settings around outsiders, labor, and communities. The Tourist follows a young academic traveling to a remote mining outpost on a dark planetoid to study its squatter population’s music and culture. Chocky, the visitor’s local guide, has reasons for taking the job. Their unequal perspectives create science-fiction tension and raise questions about resource control and whose knowledge counts. Tor.com released The Tourist in 2020 as a sixteen-page work with cover art by Jun Cen. Sherman grew up near Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, earned a digital arts degree from Pratt Institute, and completed Stonecoast’s creative-writing MFA. He settled in Brooklyn, working in video post-production. The story concentrates academic curiosity and material pressure inside an isolated settlement, making observation part of its speculative world rather than a neutral act.