Atompunk is a genre of speculative fiction that features a post-apocalyptic world based on the society and technology of the 1950s—1960s Atomic Age. Key features are a level of “camp” or levity, which helps counter the darker themes of the stories, which cover the trials people have endured, and some stories even dip a toe into “new weird” themes inspired by H.P. Lovecraft.
Astropunk is similar to Atompunk but also features space-opera-like space travel, as it was imagined during the Atomic Age in the 1950s and 1960s.
Raypunk is similar to Astropunk but does not feature the dystopian elements of Atompunk.
In college, Brandon and two friends developed Netrek III to modernize the game Netrek, bringing in full color, audio, and other innovations. Netrek is the first Internet team game and is the oldest Internet game still actively played. It pioneered many technologies used in later games and has been cited as prior art in patent disputes.
He also drove the open source project ColdC, which was a programming language and MMO game engine before MMO’s existed. Originally known as C–, created by Greg Hudson as his grad-student project at MIT, Brandon picked up and ran the OSS effort under the ColdC umbrella for several years.
In addition to video games, he’s contributed to many other OSS projects, including FreeBSD, the original NCSA HTTPD (later Apache), and more.
He’s fluent in 25+ programming languages, although his current favorite is Elixir.