Science fiction author Rick Wilber is best known for writing about baseball, including a series of alternate history stories about real-life catcher-turned-spy Moe Berg. Wilber's preoccupation with the game is understandable given his upbringing. "My father was a major league baseball player," Wilber says in Episode 412 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "Then he was a minor league manager--AAA manager--for many years. So I grew up in dugouts and clubhouses of major league teams through the 1950s into the '60s."

In his short story "Rattlesnakes and Men," science fiction author Michael Bishop describes a town where everyone is required by law to own a dangerous rattlesnake. It's a scenario that he says is no more absurd than how America treats access to guns. "We lost our son at Virginia Tech in 2007, in the shootings there," Bishop says in Episode 322 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "I had been opposed to the laxity of our gun laws for a long, long time, and that just hardened both my wife and me on that particular point." The story features an organization called the Nokuse Rattlesnake Alliance, which forces schools to adopt living pit vipers, spends large sums to corrupt local politicians, and hides the truth about the number of snakebite victims.