Peevish Penman · About
About OA Allen
Carrie Bailey Allen writes speculative fiction under the name OA Allen.
Carrie is a science-fiction writer, artist, researcher, and former librarian whose interests tend to gather around strange systems: belief, power, technology, folklore, conspiracy, and the stories people construct to explain a world that often appears to contradict itself.
Reality rarely agrees with itself.
Carrie writes about what people do when it doesn’t.
A Life That Kept Moving
She studied philosophy before earning a graduate degree in information studies in New Zealand, where she lived for several years. She taught English in Chile. She moved from Oregon to North Carolina and finally settled in Vermont. Living abroad—and moving through different countries—left a permanent mark on her fiction.
With a family history that contains both sides of the colonial story, colonizer and colonized, she is particularly interested in what happens when competing versions of reality are all, inconveniently, true.
The Work
Her science-fiction novel The Bright Dark grew out of those interests, imagining a future shaped not just by catastrophe and technology but by the myths, institutions, class systems, and assumptions people build afterward. She asked what it might have been like to be Solon visiting Sais and learning about ancient civilizations.
The Delcath series started as a tribute to No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre. Carrie asked what hell could look like for workers isolated in space.
Her current work in progress, Ghost Trucker, moves further into the territory between the rational and the uncanny. After three years on the road with her husband, who worked as a long-haul truck driver during COVID, she returned with a miniature schnauzer and an appreciation for truck stops and audiobooks.
Novel
The Bright Dark
A post-apocalyptic future built from myth, technology, and the assumptions people build afterward.
Series
The Delcath Series
Asteroid miners, corporate dependence, and a tribute to Sartre’s No Exit.
Work in Progress
Ghost Trucker
Speculative fiction from the cab of a semi, in the territory between the rational and the uncanny.
Art
The Reptilian Conspiracy Coloring Book
Conspiracy culture, art, philosophy, and a sense of humor, refusing to live in separate rooms.
Before the Page
She spent years working as a librarian before a severe balance disorder and hearing loss changed what that work could look like. She also writes with ADHD, which may explain both the sprawling research trails and her tendency to become intensely interested in questions other people have sensibly left alone.
Now in Vermont
Carrie now lives in Vermont, where she writes speculative fiction about what humans believe, what they build from those beliefs, and what happens when reality turns out to be stranger than the official explanation.