Sam A. Miller Went from YouTube Stick Figures to Science Fiction

By Andy — 2026-09-24 — Literary News

I watched a YouTube video about the history of pigeons once. It had a stick figure. That was about ten years ago, and by now Sam A. Miller's had 4.8 million of us do something similar.

He's now written a book.

Still Lost: Tales from the Year 2080 is his first one, a collection of science fiction stories set in a world where an impossibly advanced alien race has already solved the obvious apocalypses—climate, nuclear weapons, superintelligence gone wrong. The problem, as it turns out, is still us. Humans. The existential threat we pose to ourselves.

What struck me reading about Miller's approach was something he said in a recent podcast conversation: he picked science fiction because he's what he calls "a generalist," which is a nicer way of saying he doesn't know anything deeply. Science fiction, he reckons, lets you pull together technology and philosophy and whatever else and make something larger than the pieces. You don't need to be an expert. You need permission to improvise.

That DIY ethos runs through everything. He self-published the thing first—put a fake copyright page in with a line that basically said, "Literary agents, email me here." One did. Then Penguin Random House showed up. The new edition has two extra stories that weren't in the self-published version, including one called "Agency," which is about a football league where athletes are allowed any enhancement imaginable. It started dark and grim and didn't work, he explained. It felt predictable. So it got cut. Then later he added it back because he'd lived through enough by then to write it with real weight.

The book includes what Miller calls story notes—something he borrowed from Ted Chiang's approach to the same thing. They're like liner notes. Not citations. Not academic apparatus. Just Miller explaining what he was doing and why, especially in the stories that drew from his own experience with addiction. He wanted to be clear: these characters aren't punching bags. He's punching at himself. At his past self. Talking to it.

That matters, actually.

There's a kind of honesty in that move—in saying, I'm using these fictional people as a mirror, and if you see yourself in them, you're not the target. I am. It takes the edge off the darkness. It gives it permission to exist.

What Miller's figured out, after a decade of teaching strangers about pirates and plague doctors and dead presidents through a stick figure, is that you can shift genres entirely without losing your voice. YouTube taught him rhythm. It taught him constraint. Short, clear sentences. Funny sentences. Sentences that know they need to earn your time. Those things didn't disappear when he moved to fiction. They just found different homes.

The aliens in the book are hyper-advanced and sarcastic, which is funny if you think about it—the most powerful beings in the universe showing up and getting exhausted by human nonsense. They solve everything except the part that matters.

That's where the stories live.

Source: "An instant self-published online bestseller, STILL LOST is a refreshingly wry look at the world in the year 2080." — Penguin Books UK