The Cosmic Codex

Brian Scott Pauls
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Living in a science fiction universe... www.thecosmiccodex.com

  1. 4d ago

    “Probability Amplitudes”: Why go to the trouble of writing a book?

    Do you or someone you know need professional tech guidance for your author, coaching, or independent publishing business? If so, check out our sponsor Cloudessy, providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services. Simplify your tech stack, prevent launch failures, and build systems that actually support growth. https://marketing.cloudessy.com/30-minute-tech-stack-update/ Writing a book, I’ve learned, is a lot of work. But there’s a difference between knowing this from an intellectual standpoint and understanding it from experience as I watch the process extend through days, weeks, months, and years. “So,” you might ask, “why do it at all?” It’s a question each writer must answer to their own satisfaction. For me, the key lies in my personal relationship to science fiction. I first encountered written science fiction in third grade when my brother Steve, four years ahead of me, brought Stanley A. Widney’s “Elevator to the Moon” home from the McPherson Junior High library.1 The cover illustration portrayed two people in spacesuits, one of them beset on all sides by what appeared to be long strips of neon confetti. Something about the cover engaged my imagination in ways few books had managed previously. Nearly fifty years later, I still remember lying on my stomach in our shared bedroom, reading “Elevator to the Moon,” which I had “borrowed” from Steve—probably when he wasn’t around to object. While most details of the plot have long since slipped my mind, this blurb from Goodreads captures the essence: “Two men take what they think is an elevator which in reality is a well equipped spacecraft and end up on the moon and encounter ribbon like aliens and have other adventures.”2 Maybe this book wouldn’t stick in my mind if it weren’t for what happened one day when I couldn’t find it. I asked where it had gone, and my mom told me it had reached its due date, necessitating its return. Pleading with her to get it back, I took great affront when she characterized it as too advanced, which implied I hadn’t really been reading it. She told me I needed to stick to books appropriate for my age. This experience seared a minor middle-grade book into my memory. While “Elevator to the Moon” represents the first step of my science fiction journey, more important steps followed, in which my brother continued to play an instigating role. The next came a year or two later with a book he brought home from our local public library. And this is a book many readers will recognize—“The Zero Stone” by Andre Norton.3 As with “Elevator to the Moon,” the cover pulled me in. It featured an evocative illustration by Robin Jacques of the two main characters exploring a wrecked ship in space.4 Goodreads describes the story as follows: “Murdoc finds phenomenal powers in the stone ring that he inherits from his father but only comes to understand those powers completely through contact with an interplanetary wanderer in the form of a feline mutant.”5 Here, more of the characters and events have stuck with me over the years—a tribute to Norton’s abilities as a storyteller. She knew her audience well. Her main character is young, still learning his trade, and Norton reveals a lot about his home life before he accepts an apprenticeship with a gem merchant. She portrays his close relationship with his father, as well as his strained relationships with his mother and brother. While not my experience, these elements provided enough familiar touch-points to make Murdoc real to me. And the plot moves fast—first in the city where we meet him and then across the stars to a wilderness planet full of danger and adventure. I loved it. What I didn’t know was that “Andre Norton” was a woman. She intended this, of course, adopting the name in 1934 for her first book, ‘The Prince Commands,’ to better sell her work in a market targeted at boys—and legally changing her name to Andre Alice Norton that same year.6 Looking back, the book must have had an “About the Author” page, but if so, I didn’t read that part. It would be another two or three years until a junior high classmate sagely informed me, “Andre Norton is a man.” This revelation taught me to be careful of my assumptions about writer identities. It also served as a basis for later understanding the importance of representation in a commercial field that can be unfair to some participants. But more discoveries awaited me. My introduction to Isaac Asimov likely occurred as part of an annual tradition in my hometown. Each year, the school children of communities in McPherson County get the first or second Friday of May off for “All Schools Day,” a celebration centered on a large parade down McPherson’s Main Street.7 It also involves several activities following the parade. I don’t know if this tradition has continued, but as a kid, I always hit up the used book sale in the gymnasium of the Community Building. The size of this event impressed me. A rectangle of long tables around the perimeter of the gym held stack after stack of books, fiction and nonfiction. I most likely acquired my paperback edition of “Foundation” from one of these stacks.8 This started me on what I’ll call my “Asimov Period,” when I read as much of his science fiction as I could find, including “The Stars, Like Dust,” the first book I ever bought for myself (and the second book in what would come to be known as his Galactic Empire series.)9 It also introduced me to Asimov’s famous robot stories. “I, Robot” may be the first collection of short fiction I thoroughly enjoyed.10 I also appreciated how, as a trained scientist, he strove to make his stories scientifically plausible.11 During this same period, my brother built up a small library of his own, largely consisting of books acquired at the same used book sale. This library contained several works of science fiction, one of these being “Rocket Ship Galileo” by Robert A. Heinlein. I have since learned that this represents Heinlein’s earliest juvenile work and that many regard it as his worst.12 That may be, but I considered it gripping then, and still do today. As a ten- or eleven-year-old boy, I found the story about teenagers building their own atomic rocket ship (granted, with the help of an indispensable, skilled, and well-connected adult) grand entertainment. While not a scientist, Heinlein trained in engineering at the U.S. Naval Academy.13 His writing reflects this field’s rigor for accuracy, complementing Asimov’s, and giving the story an air of verisimilitude. And it’s a testament to his skill as a writer that even in one of his weaker novels, he still establishes the trope of “Escaped Nazis on the Moon” for future writers to explore.14 This began my “Heinlein Period.” While it may have overlapped with my “Asimov Period,” it lasted longer—basically until I ran out of Heinlein to read. I found his Future History collection “The Past Through Tomorrow” quite inspirational. It includes many short stories and even a short novel.15 I’m using its structure as a model for “Probability Amplitudes.” All these sources contributed to my love of science fiction, and as a result, my drive to write a science fiction book of my own. Widney provided the initial spark. Norton introduced me to the joy of planetary and interstellar adventure. Asimov and Heinlein taught me to value short fiction and scientific accuracy. But my growing awareness of the science fiction community may have been an even stronger motivation. As I learned about various authors, their books, and the connections they created between many of their stories, I realized that in the background lay a web of connections between writers who were also often the editors and publishers of one another’s work. I longed to be part of that community. Even as I imagined becoming an astronaut, as many kids do, I also harbored the ambition of becoming a science fiction writer. I didn’t pursue this dream for many years. I used the excuse that I needed a well-paying job before I could take time to write. Or that I needed to acquire age and experience before I would have anything important to say. Or that the chances of getting published were too slim. All these excuses had the same source—fear. On some level, I knew I’d suffered my whole life from a crippling fear of rejection. But I didn’t know why. In time, I became a technician in the science-fiction-adjacent computer industry, then the owner of a computer support company. While this kept me busy and fed my interest in computers, it never fully satisfied me. I still had a hidden problem, an obstacle that prevented me from even trying to pursue my dreams. It took a marriage to a loving and highly skilled social worker, building a family, a lot of desperation, and honest self-assessment before I recognized, confronted, and addressed what was really wrong. I don’t have the space here to tell the full story. And some of it may be too personal for me to share with the public. But I can share the problem itself. Doing so will be helpful to me, and perhaps to others. My chronic fear would often manifest as hypochondria. I spent a year or more of college in crippling fear that I’d contracted HIV, even though I didn’t fall into a high-risk group and largely avoided even lower-risk behaviors associated with infection. But this single health condition didn’t comprise the limit of my fears. Any lump, any place on my body, might be a sign of cancer. I tried to laugh this off with comments to others like, “Maybe I have foot cancer.” But this was bravado. In truth, I needed to say something instead of keeping the fear inside, where it would eat away at me. After marrying my wife, she gave me the wise suggestion that, not being a doctor or a scientist, I stop scouring full medical studies online. This turned out to be a re

  2. Oct 10

    What is dark energy?

    Banned Books Week Day of Action Suggestions:https://bannedbooksweek.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/ALA_DayofAction_OneSheet_Final.pdfDo you or someone you know need professional tech guidance for your author, coaching, or independent publishing business? If so, check out our sponsor Cloudessy, providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services. Simplify your tech stack, prevent launch failures, and build systems that actually support growth. https://marketing.cloudessy.com/30-minute-tech-stack-update/ The expansion of the universe isn’t slowing down, but it should be. Every galaxy pulls on every other galaxy, so the expansion that began with the Big Bang ought to have been decelerating for thirteen billion years. In 1998, two rival teams of astronomers measured the deceleration using distant supernovae as standard candles1—and found the opposite. The supernovae were fainter than they should have been, which meant they were farther away than expected—so the expansion of the universe had been speeding up for the past five billion years or so.2 The discovery resulted in a Nobel Prize. It also introduced a name for the phenomenon: “dark energy.”3 Regrettably, “dark energy” is a label rather than an explanation. Some form of energy with negative pressure, spread uniformly throughout space, is pushing everything apart. Taken together, the supernova data, cosmic microwave background, and clustering of galaxies put dark energy at roughly 68 percent of all mass-energy in the universe. Dark matter accounts for 27 percent. Ordinary matter—the stuff of stars, planets, nebulae, etc.—is about 5 percent.4 Of these, we understand dark energy, the most abundant component, the least. It’s one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of science. A Cosmological Constant? The oldest consideration of what we now call dark energy preceded its discovery by eighty years. In 1917, Einstein added a term to the equations of general relativity—the cosmological constant, Λ—to hold the universe static against its own gravity.5 He dropped the term in 1931, after Georges Lemaître (in 1927) and Edwin Hubble (in 1929) demonstrated that the universe is expanding.6 But it turns out an accelerating universe requires something like a cosmological constant—a fixed energy density built into space itself, which doesn’t attenuate as space expands. Quantum field theory tells us what Λ could be. Empty space isn’t empty. It seethes with virtual particles winking in and out of existence. Such activity carries energy, and vacuum energy behaves exactly like a cosmological constant.7 The trouble is how little we observe. The simplest estimates from particle physics predict a vacuum energy density 120 orders of magnitude greater than what astronomers measure.8 Either some unknown cancellation wipes out almost all of it, leaving the small amount we find, or vacuum energy is not the answer. So what could dark energy be? Physicists suggest some answers, each implying a different fate for the universe. It shouldn’t be surprising that science fiction writers have published stories addressing at least two of them. The Big Freeze If Λ is the answer, the future is bleak. The universe never stops accelerating. Galaxies beyond our local group recede faster and faster until their light can no longer reach us, and the rest of the observable universe disappears into darkness. As Lawrence Krauss and Robert Scherrer have pointed out, astronomers a hundred billion years from now, living in the merged remnant of the Milky Way and Andromeda, will see a single island of stars in a void and no evidence the universe is expanding at all.9 Cosmology will vanish along with the distant galaxies. Eventually, life, too, must vanish. Freeman Dyson once argued that an intelligence could persist forever in an ever-expanding universe by thinking ever more slowly.10 Each thought costs energy, but the cost falls as the universe cools, and Dyson showed that a mind which cools along with it could stretch a finite reserve across infinite time—an endless series of ever-cheaper thoughts. Lawrence Krauss and Glenn Starkman showed in 2000 that an accelerating universe closes this loophole. It has a minimum temperature of its own, absurdly low but never zero, so the cooling stops and every thought has a minimum cost. In an accelerating universe, finite energy means a finite number of thoughts.11 Gregory Benford’s “The Final Now,” published on Tor.com in 2010, is Krauss and Starkman’s paper rewritten as a creation myth.12 Two beings, He and She, have made a universe and now sit at its end conversing with the One—the merged remnants of all mortal minds that ever lived. Benford’s He explains: “The accelerating expansion of space-time, which was essential in the planning of all this, none the less yielded a more constricted long-term future.” Life has tried Dyson’s remedy—it has kept “ever-cooler,” thought slowly, and hibernated “for ever-longer periods”—and run into Krauss and Starkman’s wall: “A finite system may be capable of infinite computation, but it can only store a finite number of memories.” Even the creators are bound by their own rules. But Benford gives his story the “wrong” ending. His universe finishes in a rip, with protons “popping crimson in the sky,” which a plain cosmological constant would not produce. For that, we need something more. The Big Rip Physicists characterize dark energy by a single number, w, the ratio of its pressure to its energy density. A cosmological constant has w exactly equal to −1. Current measurements put w near −1.03, with an uncertainty of about 0.03—so it’s consistent with Einstein’s constant, but not proof of it.13 And the number could, in principle, sit on the far side of −1. Dark energy with w less than −1, which Robert Caldwell named “phantom energy” in 2002, has a property nothing else in physics shares: its density increases as space expands.14 Caldwell, Marc Kamionkowski, and Nevin N. Weinberg worked out the consequences in a 2003 paper, “Phantom Energy and Cosmic Doomsday.”15 If w were −1.5, the repulsion would strengthen without limit and reach infinity in finite time—about 22 billion years from now. Sixty million years before the end, the stars of the Milky Way would fly apart from one another. Three months before, the planets would drift from the sun. Thirty minutes before, Earth would disintegrate. In the last 10⁻¹⁹ of a second, atoms would dissolve. Caldwell and his colleagues called it the Big Rip. Few cosmologists expect this. A field with w below −1 is unstable, but at this time theorists can’t exclude it based on the data.16 Stephen Baxter’s “Last Contact,” a 2008 Hugo nominee, is the Big Rip told from a garden in England.17 Baxter compresses the timeline mercilessly—his astronomers get seven months’ warning, not twenty billion years—but he follows the physics of the paper in order: superclusters first, then galaxies, then the sun, then the ground underfoot. The story belongs to Maureen, a widow tending her vegetables, and her daughter Caitlin, the astrophysicist who has to tell the world that “dark energy is pulling the universe apart.” Around them, the radio telescopes pick up a flood of signals from civilizations that have never spoken before. As the sky goes dark, Maureen understands why: “They were just saying good-bye.” It’s an unusual apocalypse story—no villain and no escape. Its only lesson is that people plant tomatoes anyway. The Big Ambiguity The Big Freeze and the Big Rip assume w remains constant. But what if this isn’t the case? If dark energy is a field rather than a constant—a scalar field slowly rolling down a potential, in the models physicists call quintessence—then its strength can change over cosmic time, and so can w.18 In 2021, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) began mapping millions of galaxies to measure how the expansion rate has changed over eleven billion years.19 In March 2025, DESI reported that its map of more than 14 million galaxies and quasars fit a weakening dark energy better than a constant one. Combined with the cosmic microwave background, evolving dark energy was preferred over the standard model at 3.1 sigma; adding supernova data pushed the preference to between 2.8 and 4.2 sigma, depending on which supernova catalog was used—suggestive, but short of the 5-sigma standard for discovery.20 Then, this July, a separate DESI analysis using absorption lines from hydrogen gas along quasar sightlines came back in agreement with the plain cosmological constant, a result the collaboration acknowledged “could indicate that the current hints of evolving dark energy may fade away.”21 DESI has finished its planned five-year survey ahead of schedule, with 47 million galaxies and quasars; the full analysis is expected in 2027.22 Euclid, the European Space Agency’s dark-universe telescope, expects its first cosmology results the same year, and NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched on August 30 to join them.23 Within a few years, we should know with greater confidence whether w is changing. This is important because different models of quintessence predict different futures for the universe. In some models, dark energy doesn’t merely weaken; it turns negative, with expansion giving way to contraction. A 2022 analysis by Cosmin Andrei, Anna Ijjas, and Paul Steinhardt found that under current constraints, the acceleration could end in less time than has passed since the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, with contraction following within roughly 100 million years.24 Cosmologically speaking, that’s just around the corner. Stories Waiting to Be Written Of the three possibilities discussed above, the Big Ambiguity alone seems to have no representation in science fiction. This makes it fertile ground for new stories: The Draw-Down. In

  3. Oct 3

    INTERVIEW: Phil Drake, Director of the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction

    Register for the 2026 Sturgeon Symposium:https://sfcenter.ku.edu/2026-sturgeon-symposiumDo you or someone you know need professional tech guidance for your author, coaching, or independent publishing business? If so, check out our sponsor Cloudessy, providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services. Simplify your tech stack, prevent launch failures, and build systems that actually support growth. https://marketing.cloudessy.com/30-minute-tech-stack-update/ The following interview occurred September 21, 2026. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length. Editor’s note: The fifth annual Sturgeon Symposium takes place Thursday and Friday, October 15–16, 2026, at the University of Kansas Hall Center for the Humanities, 900 Sunnyside Avenue, Lawrence, Kansas. Since this interview was recorded, the Gunn Center has announced the winner of the 2026 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award: Alex T. Singer, for “We, the Fleet,” published in Clarkesworld in May 2025. Singer will receive the award and read from the story at the ceremony on Thursday, October 15, at 3:30 p.m. Registration and details are at sfcenter.ku.edu. Brian Pauls: Hello, everyone. I’m happy to have with me today Phil Drake, the director of the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas. Welcome, Phil. Phil Drake: Hello! Brian Pauls: I really appreciate you taking the time to come on the Cosmic Codex and talk with us a little about science fiction and about the upcoming Sturgeon Symposium. My first question: what is your own background with science fiction, and what inspired you to turn it into not just an interest, but an academic discipline?Phil Drake: Thanks for inviting me, Brian. That’s a great question, and I took a somewhat unconventional path to science fiction as a scholarly interest. When I was a graduate student, a long time ago, I was very interested in science and technology studies, particularly as they related to environmental issues. As I progressed through my PhD program, I kept returning to science fiction as a way to interrogate, through novel lenses, the practical social, technological, and scientific issues that kept emerging in my applied research. Over time I became increasingly interested in science fiction as a critical lens in its own right. I happened to be working at the time under John Rieder, a professor at the University of Hawaii who has written several great books on the study of science fiction — particularly its relationship to colonialism, and genre theory — which also animated my interest. So it was a roundabout way in, but science fiction has stayed in my life ever since. At times, professional appointments have pulled me away from it and from being able to teach it, but I’m very fortunate now to be at the University of Kansas, with an opportunity to explore it further. Brian Pauls: What path brought you to your current position as director of the Gunn Center? And maybe even before that — what is the Gunn Center? Phil Drake: The Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction was started by James Gunn, whom most of your audience probably knows. He was a faculty member at KU for a very long time, and he and his family set up the center to provide substantial support for the study of science fiction, from both a scholarly and a creative standpoint. It has evolved over the years. It has always been housed in the English department and supported by the Gunn family, and its current iteration is focused on programming and on giving undergraduate and graduate students opportunities to develop their interests, whatever they might be, in speculative fiction — science fiction and fantasy, and we’ll even include horror and some other interesting genre fiction in there. Brian Pauls: Very good. And how did you become the director? Phil Drake: Some of it stems from my publishing background. I’ve published a couple of articles in Extrapolation, and I’ve worked with the editors of Science Fiction Studies for a long time. But when I came to KU, I never really expected to reignite my scholarly interest in science fiction studies, so it was a real delight to find a very robust community here doing that work. The way faculty appointments go, openings sometimes appear quite auspiciously. The former director was appointed to a leadership role elsewhere on campus, I was coming out of a leadership role within the department, and our interests aligned. I also had a lot of connections to graduate students, particularly through finding financial support for their research. So it worked out well. The center was already a really nice institution that had been functioning well for several years; my job has been to expand its reach, get more students involved, and maybe develop some more community networking as well.Brian Pauls: I should take a moment to point out, for some of our younger listeners, that the James Gunn for whom the Gunn Center is named is not the director of the three Guardians of the Galaxy films and other Marvel and DC superhero movies. This James Gunn was a contemporary of the writers of science fiction’s Golden Age — Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Judith Merril, Ray Bradbury — and he used those connections in building the Gunn Center. He wrote science fiction himself, too. I never used to have to make that clarification, but today I feel like I need to. Phil Drake: He really did a nice job of setting us up with a library where students can come and conduct research. KU’s Spencer Research Library holds some of his really nice things, and I encourage anyone interested to come and visit. You mentioned Bradbury — Gunn’s letters to various famous authors are there, along with work by his students and some of his own drafts. It’s a real treasure trove. I barely know all that’s in there, but we have wonderful librarians who make it accessible. Brian Pauls: That’s great. I attended one or two of the Campbell Conferences, the predecessor to the Sturgeon Symposium, and it was always fascinating to be there with James leading the discussion. He would suddenly insert an observation from personal experience. One example I’ll always remember: Ted Sturgeon is famous for his maxim, Sturgeon’s Law — “Ninety percent of everything is crap.” Somebody brought that up at a Campbell Conference, and Jim said, “Well, actually, it was ‘ninety percent of everything is crud.’” Then he went on to explain how he’d talked with Ted about it. That happened over and over: these were people he knew personally. I think his biography is called A Life in Science Fiction, and that title is one hundred percent true. [Editor’s note: Gunn’s autobiography is Star-Begotten: A Life Lived in Science Fiction (McFarland, 2017).] It was fascinating to hear those stories secondhand. But speaking of Ted Sturgeon: one of the events you host is the Sturgeon Symposium, which I think is now in its fifth year. Can you tell us a little about who Ted Sturgeon was, why there’s a symposium named after him, and what its purpose is? Phil Drake: Ted Sturgeon was a New Age science fiction writer — I’m thinking of him coming out of the ‘60s and ‘70s — who produced an enormous amount of work over the years, in a variety of venues and formats: novels, short stories, TV episodes. He wrote a few episodes of Star Trek. He’s a really interesting writer, and I’ve always viewed him as having a rebellious, critical eye. When I read his work, I always feel there’s an oddness, or a social critique, that’s often very subtle — which is one of the reasons I’ve always been drawn to it. His stories are never straightforward celebrations of technological progress, for instance. There’s a dimensionality to his work that I find really compelling, and his prose is often extremely beautiful. As someone with a literary studies background, I find him an elevated version of science fiction that I can keep going back to. [Editor’s note: Sturgeon’s career began well before the ‘60s. His first science fiction story, “Ether Breather,” appeared in Astounding in September 1939, and he was a central contributor to editor John W. Campbell Jr.’s Golden Age of science fiction. Most of the work for which he is remembered appeared between 1946 and the early 1960s.]1Every year for the last five years, the Gunn Center has hosted the Sturgeon Symposium: a two-day event of creative readings, scholarly panels, and creative panels on craft — basically, discussing all things science fiction. The symposium is built around the announcement, ceremony, and reception for the Sturgeon Award, which honors the best science fiction short story of the previous year. The winner will be announced very shortly, and they’ll come out to Lawrence, Kansas, to read from their work, receive the award, and hopefully enjoy some of the presentations. Every year so far, we’ve had a theme. This year’s theme is “Changing Words, Changing Worlds,” inspired by Sturgeon’s short story “Mr. Costello, Hero.” I’m not sure how many of your audience members will know that story, but it’s a kind of how-to guide to building a fascist state. It’s in the line of Fahrenheit 451 or 1984 — great works in which language, and the manipulation of language, results in dramatic seizures of power and control over minds and knowledge. We were inspired by events in the world, and by connecting them to the historical precedents in which these issues have been discussed, although most of the science fiction we’ll be discussing will probably be from the last twenty years or so. Brian Pauls: The symposium has multiple sessions. If folks are interested in attending, what would be in store for them, and what could they choose from? Phil Drake: It varies from year to year, but typically the first day includes a couple of virtual sessions, with panelists — often from all over the world —

  4. Sep 28

    A critique of Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Children of Ruin"

    Register for the 2026 Sturgeon Symposium:https://sfcenter.ku.edu/2026-sturgeon-symposiumDo you or someone you know need professional tech guidance for your author, coaching, or independent publishing business? If so, check out our sponsor Cloudessy, providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services. Simplify your tech stack, prevent launch failures, and build systems that actually support growth. https://marketing.cloudessy.com/30-minute-tech-stack-update/ Children of Ruin is the strongest book in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s original Children of Time trilogy. Last month, I critiqued the first novel, in which he explores the development of jumping spiders into an intelligent species across thousands of years—and what happens when they encounter humanity. Children of Ruin keeps to the eight-appendage theme by tackling octopuses. Tchaikovsky published Children of Ruin in May 2019, four years after Children of Time.1 It won the British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Novel of 2019.2 I’ll review the third volume, Children of Memory, next month. Cloudessy, my consulting business providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services, is a sponsor of this newsletter. If you or someone you know needs professional tech guidance for their author, coaching, or independent publishing business, check out the ad at the end of this post. Thank you! Emulating its predecessor, Children of Ruin jumps (like a spider!) between two time frames.3 In the “past,” an Old Empire terraforming crew arrives at a distant system, finding a life-bearing world they name Nod. It possesses a biochemistry built on elements hazardous to humans and organic molecules evolution never produced on Earth.4 Mission commander Yusuf Baltiel stays to study Nod, but his eccentric colleague Disra Senkovi takes the terraforming equipment to the system’s ocean world, Damascus, along with a tank of octopuses and a supply of the same nanovirus that, light-years away, is busy uplifting the Portiids from Children of Time.5 Thousands of years later, in the “present,” we encounter an expedition of the spider-like Portiids, accompanied by “Humans” (as Tchaikxovsky styles the humans modified to co-exist with them6). Aboard the Voyager—with the uploaded, much-altered Avrana Kern along as ship’s mind—the crew follows fragmentary radio signals to the same system, hoping to find lost cousins.7 What they find instead is a spacefaring octopus civilization in the middle of a catastrophe above a quarantined planet. Like the spiders in Children of Time, Tchaikovsky’s portrayal of the octopuses benefits from his strong grasp of evolutionary biology.8 For insight into cephalopods, he credits Peter Godfrey-Smith’s 2016 book, Other Minds, in the acknowledgements as “an invaluable research aid.”9 Cephalopods are a good choice for this second book. Our last common ancestor with the octopus lived some 600 million years ago, and was probably a flattened worm a few millimeters long. From that point, cephalopods followed a completely separate evolutionary track to a surprising intelligence.10 Dispersed nervous systems, with more than half of their roughly 500 million neurons in their arms rather than their heads, provide octopuses with something closer to mental committees than our compact, unified brains.11 Tchaikovsky’s octopus characters exhibit a vocabulary describing this very different neurology. “The Crown sets strategy, but battlefield tactics are the province of the Reach, those sub-nodes that run the arms.”12 An octopus fights with its whole body, even aboard a spaceship: “her skin sings a furious hymn of battle and her arms calculate vectors and suggest firing solutions.”13 Tchaikovsky derives a psychology from these creatures’ physiology, and a society from that psychology. Octopuses communicate in color with their skin, and in posture with their arms and the rest of their body.14 Their discourse carries far more mood and subtext than hard information.15 And a creature with no fixed body plan has no fixed convictions: the octopuses “hold no certainties” and don’t “let themselves be ruled by tradition or history or even how they themselves felt yesterday.”16 The octopuses reflect real-life biology, but the life on Nod is brilliant speculation. At first, Baltiel’s scientists don’t recognize what they’ve found. When a crew member falls ill, a colleague insists nothing native could be responsible; Earth life is too different from Nodan life, and “[p]arasites are the most specialized of specialists!”17 They evolve to thrive within very specific environments, which could in no way resemble the human body. She is right about Earth and catastrophically wrong about Nod. The terraformers have disturbed a colonial organism whose cells encode and share memory, “microscopic cells trading encoded understandings like Earth bacteria exchange immunity genes.”18 It learns whatever it absorbs, and it is very, very curious. The organism, as the book calls it, isn’t a villain in the classic sense. It’s a mind with a different evolutionary history, which can infect and hijack the nervous system of any potential host it encounters.19 Having never met anything it could not become, the organism has no concept of a boundary between itself and the rest of the universe. Every infection is, from its perspective, an act of friendship.20 Kern, the only character in the story with the experience to grasp the organism’s nature, sums up the challenge of trying to fight it: “I do not believe it would be possible to impose controls on it that it could not circumvent or subvert.”21 This ability to hijack human minds raises the question of what it means for the compromised individuals.22 As the Portiid scientist Fabian wonders regarding the hijacked human Lante: “Was there a Lante, at the end, and was she aware of what she had become?”23 Kern, who has herself been human, hybrid, program, and ant colony in turn,24 knows the uploaded Lante exists only when the organism consults her, then is “gone like a blown candle until the organism wants her again...”25 Still, amid these travails, Tchaikovsky weaves a thread of hope. Yes, he subtly insists, minds shaped by different evolutionary histories will find one another profoundly difficult to comprehend. But there will always remain a realm of experience common to all intelligent life. And while it may be narrow, this shared territory provides the foundation for mutual understanding and cooperation. Tchaikovsky highlights the philosophical concepts at issue here. The Human and Portiid linguists confront Thomas Nagel’s problem directly, building tools “so that the anthropoid brain can grasp what it is like to be a spider,”26 and asking whether the two kinds of experience are “intrinsically incompatible.”27 Senkovi, uplifting his octopuses millennia earlier, encounters Wittgenstein’s conundrum: “If a lion could speak, as the man said, we could not understand it.”28 The Human Helena, negotiating with the Damascans while they hold her prisoner, catches herself relying on “anthropomorphism as a yardstick of what alien minds can conceive...”29 Tchaikovsky deftly orchestrates instances of contact between his various species. When the octopus Paul suddenly realizes Helena is grieving as he himself might, “It makes Paul think of the creature as a fellow living thing in a way he hadn’t before.”30 The Portiid scientist Viola, confronted with evidence of the organism’s consciousness, concludes: “‘Convergent evolution. Perhaps it is something that any life would attain, eventually.’”31 The novel proposes that happiness, sadness, and the feeling of home are each “another commonality between species.”32 In Children of Ruin, Tchaikovsky posits that if life developed consciousness on Earth, it can develop it elsewhere. And he believes that when we encounter it, we will be able to recognize it and find “siblinghood” with it, as unusual as it may be.33 The biggest weakness of Children of Ruin is its structure. Children of Time asks us to follow two storylines across thousands of years and maintains continuity with the elegant trick of recurring Portiid names. Children of Ruin also presents a pair of storylines, but increases the size of the cast. The plotline set in the past gives us Baltiel, Senkovi, Lortisse, and Lante. The present has Helena, Portia, Meshner, Fabian, Viola, and Kern, plus a rotating slate of octopuses—Paul, Solomon, Lot, Noah, Ruth, Abigail, and Ahab. The octopuses’ recurring Biblical names, like the Portiids’ names before them, indicate each represents multiple individuals across generations. In addition, the human characters are more numerous than in Children of Time, and spread across a longer period, making it harder for them to serve as the backbone of the overall plot. Despite these flaws, Tchaikovsky’s deep exploration of the problem of other minds, from multiple directions, makes Children of Ruin a better novel than the already good Children of Time. The Damascan civilization stands beside the Portiids as one of the most convincing non-human societies in recent science fiction, and the Nodan organism is a notable creation of scientific speculation. Recommended for: Readers of hard science fiction who want truly non-human aliens, and anyone who has read and enjoyed Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds. Not recommended for: Readers who need one protagonist to follow through a story, or who didn’t appreciate the jumping back-and-forth between eras in Children of Time. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thecosmiccodex.com

  5. Sep 20

    “Probability Amplitudes”: Editing in 2026

    Do you or someone you know need professional tech guidance for your author, coaching, or independent publishing business? If so, check out our sponsor Cloudessy, providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services. Simplify your tech stack, prevent launch failures, and build systems that actually support growth. https://marketing.cloudessy.com/30-minute-tech-stack-update/ Register for the 2026 Sturgeon Symposium:https://sfcenter.ku.edu/2026-sturgeon-symposiumIn 2023, with regard to Probability Amplitudes (my first science fiction collection), I shared my “intention to produce the highest quality work possible.” But I didn’t discuss what this might look like, beyond “[r]ounds of editing (by an experienced editor, not by me)” following “alpha- and beta-reading.” In the intervening three years I’ve acquired numerous tools, both physical and virtual, to make this job easier and less expensive—while letting me get the most out of paid, professional editing.Of course, the larger the number of tools, the easier it becomes for the editing process to get out-of-hand. To avoid this, I recently used Claude to create an editing/publishing outline, indicating where each tool best fits (based on Claude’s training data, as this is a subject beyond my own expertise). At this time, the process includes 14 separate tools, ranging from a method for creating character attributes that don’t all conform to my own biases (using the Dungeons & Dragons character generation system from the Moldvay Basic rules) to multiple software editing tools (AutoCrit, Hemingway, and ProWritingAid) to three different card decks—one each for story-building, character motivation, and self-editing (Sefirot Fabula, intùiti, and Edito, respectively). While complex, the purpose of this process is to allow me to put my best work in front of both editors and readers.I’m sharing the tool list and resulting outline for those readers and fellow writers who might find it helpful. It’s unlikely a large number of authors will want to use exactly the same tools, in exactly the same way. But perhaps what I’m doing will prove instructive for those who might want to create something similar for themselves. Tools Below are the tools I’ve chosen to incorporate into my process. Each is listed by name, the part of the process it addresses, and the format (website, software, card deck, etc.). AutoCrit: Dialogue ratio, adverb frequency, and pacing markers, compared with published work in the genre (website)Claude: Text indexing and search, streamlining work with Sefirot Edito (q.v.; artificial intelligence)CritiqueMatch: Critique partners and beta readers (website)Critters: Critique community (website)D&D Moldvay Basic: Characteristic generation, randomized to provide a variety of character types (ebook)Dialogue Doctor: Dialogue-based character design and growth (worksheet and ebook)Hemingway: Sentence length, adverbs, passive voice, and readability (website/software)Mind Prober: Personality profiling (software)1ProWritingAid: Line editing, grammar, and consistency (software)Scrivener: Word processor with character sketch templates (software)Sefirot Edito: Self-editing (card deck)Sefirot Fabula: Story-building (card deck)Sefirot intùiti: Character motivation (card deck)SFF Online Writing Workshop: Critique partners and possible professional review (website)Editing Process: Mixed-Length Collection (Self-Published) Flash fiction through short novel, with interstitial notes Legend: 🔴 Required · 🟡 Preferred · ⚪ Self-directed THE CHARACTER CHAIN Six steps, each feeding into the next. CC1. Character Generation (D&D: Moldvay Basic) — generate physical and mental baselines. Unexpected outcomes can produce opportunities (e.g., a high-Charisma, low-Wisdom result creates an interesting dynamic). Remember that six numbers describe a character’s capability, not who they are as a person. CC2. Personality Profile (Mind Prober) — build the character’s personality and psychology on top of CC1. CC3. Neuro-Variance — for each important character, pick a mental health category where they sit outside the expected range. Don’t treat this as a diagnosis. Use it to push the character in surprising directions. Guard against stereotyping; clinical categories make it tempting. Give the character a tendency that creates an obstacle to something they want. CC4. Sefirot intùiti — derive drives, motivations, and hang-ups from CC1–CC3. CC5. Scrivener Character Sketch — consolidate. Come back to this document while drafting. CC6. Character Voice/Growth Worksheet (Dialogue Doctor) — Five voice components, the character’s growth arc, and a list of important scenes based on these elements. Dialogue Doctor vs. Sefirot Fabula — CC6’s scene list and Fabula’s HERO’S DEVELOPMENT cards answer the same questions. Run CC6 first, then import its scenes into Fabula. Reversing this can cause Fabula’s archetypes to pull the character toward generic qualities instead of letting Dialogue Doctor differentiate them. Sefirot Edito vs. AutoCrit — Edito prompts while AutoCrit measures. Edito’s cards ask whether a scene belongs in the story; AutoCrit counts dialogue ratio, adverb frequency, and pacing markers, then compares them against published work in the genre to supply outside perspective. Where the two overlap regarding pacing, follow Edito’s process, referring to the AutoCrit report for clarification when a pacing problem is suspected but not obvious.PART ONE — PER-PIECE LOOPS TRACK A — Flash (under ~1,500 words) A1. ⚪ Premise — use Fabula: ASSETS if it helps.A2. ⚪ Character check — skip the character chain. Run CC6’s five voice components alone as a one-minute distinctness test.A3. ⚪ First Draft — draft in one sitting where possible.A4. ⚪ Drawer time — leave it a day or two.A5. ⚪ Revise and read aloud — at this length, merge these two steps. Run ProWritingAid Chapter Critique.A6. 🔴 Critique reader — or SFF Online Writing Workshop (OWW)/CritiqueMatch/Critters.A7. ⚪ Final pass — run ProWritingAid and Hemingway. TRACK B — Short story (~1,500–7,500 words) B1. ⚪ Premise — use Fabula: ASSETS selectively.B2. ⚪ Character chain — run full CC1–CC6 for the lead. Run CC1, CC2, CC5 for anyone else who matters. Keep the arc section light — many short stories turn on a change of understanding, not behavior.B3. ⚪ Minimal planning — build the CC6 scene list, then import into Fabula: CHARACTERS and EDITING cards if non-linear.B4. ⚪ First DraftB5. ⚪ Drawer time — leave it days to two weeks.B6. ⚪ Self-revision — run Edito: First revision. Read the whole story in one sitting. Run AutoCrit structural reports: pacing, dialogue ratio, show-vs-tell. Run ProWritingAid Chapter Critique.B7. 🔴 Critique group — choose OWW for turnaround time and the Editors’ Choice opportunity; choose Critters for a high volume of stories to be critiqued.B8. ⚪ Revision passB9. 🟡 Line edit — spend the most revision effort here. Run Edito: Third revision, ProWritingAid, Hemingway, AutoCrit line-level reports. Check against the CC6 voice components.B10. ⚪ Read-aloud passB11. ⚪ Self copy-edit pre-pass — run ProWritingAid. TRACK C — Novelette / Novella (~7,500–40,000 words) C1. ⚪ Premise and research — use Fabula: ASSETS.C2. ⚪ Character chain — run full CC1–CC6 for protagonist and one antagonist or foil. Run CC1, CC2, CC5 for the rest.C3. ⚪ Outlining — import CC6 scenes into Fabula: full HERO’S DEVELOPMENT. Use EDITING cards for sequencing.C4. ⚪ First DraftC5. ⚪ Drawer time — leave it weeks to months.C6. ⚪ Self-revision — run Edito: First revision. Address plot, character arc, structure, setting. Run AutoCrit structural reports. Run ProWritingAid Manuscript Analysis.C7. ⚪ Revision pass — run Edito: To Do / Thoughts / Done.C8. 🟡 Content pass — run Edito: Second revision. Read aloud chapter by chapter for pacing.C9. ⚪ Revision passC10. 🔴 Beta readers — recruit readers who will read the full piece and provide feedback. Treat OWW and Critters as supplementary at best; they cap at 7,500 words. Run ProWritingAid Virtual Beta Reader first to catch obvious problems before presenting to beta readers.C11. ⚪ Beta follow-up revision — re-run AutoCrit structural reports against the beta feedback. When readers report a pacing problem, the reports can help identify the cause in the text.C12. 🟡 Line edit — run Edito: Third revision, ProWritingAid, Hemingway, AutoCrit line-level reports. Check the CC6 voice components.C13. ⚪ Read-aloud passC14. ⚪ Self copy-edit pre-pass TRACK D — Short novel (~40,000+ words) Run the full novel pipeline. This is where the character chain really shines. D1. ⚪ Premise development and research — use Fabula: ASSETS.D2. ⚪ Character chain — run full CC1–CC6 for the protagonist and two other arc-bearing characters; that maps onto Fabula’s three CHARACTERS cards. Run CC1, CC2, CC5 for supporting cast. Refer to the CC5 sketches throughout the drafting process.D3. ⚪ Outlining — build the CC6 scene lists first. Then import them into Fabula: all 18 HERO’S DEVELOPMENT cards, three CHARACTERS cards tracking parallel arcs, EDITING cards for narrative order.D4. ⚪ First DraftD5. ⚪ Drawer time — leave it months.D6. ⚪ Self-revision / second draft — run Edito: Pre-editing, then First revision. Run AutoCrit structural reports for a baseline. Run ProWritingAid Manuscript Analysis.D7. 🟡 Alpha readers or critique partnersD8. ⚪ Revision pass — run Edito: To Do / Thoughts / Done.D9. 🟡 Manuscript assessment — get an editorial letter only. Fund this before any other paid stage on this piece.D10. 🟡 Developmental pass — run Edito: First revision. Assess against Fabula as a diagnostic. Check the CC6 arcs against the text of the draft. Run AutoCrit structural reports and genre comparison.

  6. Sep 13

    What in the worlds is dark matter?

    Do you or someone you know need professional tech guidance for your author, coaching, or independent publishing business? If so, check out our sponsor Cloudessy, providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services. Simplify your tech stack, prevent launch failures, and build systems that actually support growth. https://marketing.cloudessy.com/30-minute-tech-stack-update/ Five-sixths of the matter in the universe is a mystery to us. Now, we might have taken a step closer to figuring out what it is. Maybe. On September 1, the team running the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment searching for dark matter reported a development at a conference in Tendo, Japan. Nearly a mile underground in an old South Dakota gold mine, the team watches a tank containing ten tons of ultra-pure liquid xenon. Going through 220 days of data collected in 2023 and 2024, they found a flash of light—the signature of a xenon nucleus recoiling with 248 kiloelectronvolts of energy it picked up from a source no known background phenomenon explains. They calculated the significance of the event at 2.6 sigma—meaning the background would throw off an event like this roughly once in two hundred tries. That isn't enough to call the detection a "discovery," which typically requires five sigma or higher. They didn’t claim to have seen direct evidence of dark matter. But they saw something interesting.1If LZ, or another experiment, repeats this finding, it could have major ramifications for astrophysics and cosmology. Dark matter out-masses all the rest of the matter in our universe at a ratio of about five to one,2 and yet we don’t know what it is. In 1933, Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky determined the galaxies in the Coma cluster were moving too fast for the cluster’s visible mass to hold them together. Something else—he called it dunkle Materie3—had to be supplying the necessary gravity. The astronomy community basically ignored his finding for 40 years.4 Then in 1970, Vera Rubin and Kent Ford measured how fast the outer regions of the Andromeda galaxy rotate and found the same problem—the edges were turning nearly as fast as the middle, which Newtonian gravity flatly forbids unless the galaxy’s mass is distributed in ways that don’t match what our instruments detect.5 Fast-forward to 2006, when a team led by Douglas Clowe mapped a pair of galaxy clusters caught mid-collision. The gas in the clusters—which is where nearly all the ordinary matter lives—had piled up in the middle, slowed by the impact. But gravitational lensing showed the center-of-mass to be separated from the center of the gas by a significance of eight sigma. They called their paper: “A Direct Empirical Proof of the Existence of Dark Matter.”6 The cosmic microwave background provides additional confirmation. The Planck satellite’s measurements fix cold dark matter at roughly five times the density of ordinary matter. Everything we can identify—gas, planets, nebulae, stars, galaxies, quasars, etc.—amounts to about a sixth of the material universe.7 Everything else is invisible and intangible, detectable to us only by its gravity. So, what is it? Maybe it’s not invisible, just really hard to see… Before we dive into speculative explanations, let’s address the simplest possibility. Perhaps dark matter isn’t really exotic; it’s just faint—burnt-out stars, drifting planets, stray black holes. These are often called massive compact halo objects (MACHOs). Anything dense enough passing in front of a background star will briefly brighten it by gravitational lensing, so the idea is directly testable.8 The EROS-2 survey watched millions of stars in the Magellanic Clouds for 6.7 years. If the Milky Way’s halo were made of objects around four-tenths of a solar mass, roughly 39 lensing events should have shown up in the bright-star sample—only one did.9 The cosmic microwave background and Big Bang nucleosynthesis independently cap the total amount of ordinary matter far below what the galaxies' gravity demands—no matter how faint that matter might be.10Whatever holds the galaxies together, it isn’t made of the same stuff we are. Science fiction is on the case. Three novels in particular—Mike Brotherton’s Spider Star, John Gribbin’s The Alice Encounter, and Stephen Baxter’s Ring—each take a different approach to dramatizing the problem. WIMPs to the rescue? If dark matter isn’t just ordinary matter that’s hard to see, maybe it’s a particle no one has found yet. The favorite candidates for decades have been “weakly interacting massive particles” (WIMPs)—hypothesized to be heavy, stable particles produced in abundance in the early universe and left over when the cosmos thinned out.11 But we’ve hunted for a long time and nothing suitable has turned up. LZ published its low-mass results last December, based on 417 live days—the largest dataset any dark matter detector has ever assembled—and found nothing between three and nine proton masses.12 Meanwhile ADMX is searching for another, much lighter, proposed particle called the “axion”, with no success to-date.13 Mike Brotherton is a working astronomer, as well as a science fiction writer, and knows his physics. His novel Spider Star, a WIMP story, includes a planet made of weakly interacting matter, and a starship drive that scoops and pushes WIMPs as fuel14—a fascinating premise, and possibly even realistic, but as of now, still hypothetical. Maybe it’s a whole second world We have no good reason to conclude only one type of particle comprises dark matter. Ordinary matter has a dozen fundamental particles, multiple forces, and a periodic table. Dark matter could have the same—dark electrons, dark electromagnetism, dark chemistry—coupled to us by gravity and almost nothing else. The most elegant version is mirror matter, in which dark matter adheres to an exact copy of the Standard Model, with every particle getting a mirror twin.15 Earlier this year, theorists published predictions for electromagnetic signatures of mirror stars which have captured ordinary atoms.16Mirror matter is the driving conceit behind John Gribbin’s The Alice Encounter. Gribbin, an astrophysicist by training and a popularizer by trade, builds his novel on “Alice matter.” This is "looking glass" stuff, much more plentiful than normal matter, arranged in a roughly spherical distribution around the flat disk of our galaxy. Beings composed of Alice matter, and more advanced than we are, have noticed the “contamination” of normal matter in the universe and have decided to investigate.17 Inside the Sun? Whatever dark matter turns out to be, if it interacts with ordinary matter at all, some of it should end up in the cores of stars. Stars like our sun sweep up dark matter as they move through space, and a particle that scatters off a nucleus of normal matter along the way can lose enough speed to be stranded. Gravity does the rest, settling the captured particles into the core.18 In Stephen Baxter’s Ring, the fourth novel in his Xeelee series, the downloaded mind of a woman named Lieserl is lowered into the Sun and abandoned there for five million years. She finds the star inhabited by “photino birds.” These are dark matter creatures that colonize stellar cores, drain the energy that drives fusion, and age the stars prematurely into white dwarfs incapable of killing the photino birds in supernovae.19 The “photino” is the proposed supersymmetric partner of the photon, and in the 1980s it was among the leading candidates for cold dark matter.20 Maybe there is nothing there at all The unfashionable possibility is that the discrepancy is real and the interpretation is wrong. Perhaps gravity behaves differently at very low accelerations, and no missing substance is required. Mordehai Milgrom’s Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND), proposed in 1983, fits galactic rotation curves with a single new constant.21 MOND detractors point to the work on colliding galaxy clusters by Douglas Clowe and his colleagues mentioned above, but MOND’s advocates were still publishing rebuttals earlier this year.22 Stories waiting to be written… Cold Company. If dark matter can lose energy, some of it may have settled into a thin disk lying in the plane of the galaxy, which the Sun crosses roughly every thirty million years.23 A geologist and a physicist argue for decades about whether the impact record is a coincidence or a timetable—and about which of them will have to be wrong in public. The Long Fog. Due to something called the “neutrino fog,”24 dark matter detectors hit a wall no practical modifications can bypass. The answer lies permanently below the noise. A story about the last generation of experimentalists, what a scientific culture does when it proves a question unanswerable, and those who refuse to accept this limitation. Alice’s Argument. An homage to Isaac Asimov’s The Gods Themselves,25 further exploring one of that book’s most provocative premises. A laboratory converts a gram of ordinary matter into mirror matter, then converts it back. But it returns changed—edited. Someone made of mirror matter is sending us a message. First contact must be conducted a gram at a time, in a medium where no one can verify anything, and the negotiators on our side cannot agree on whether the other party is a government, a machine, or a child. What comes next The Vera C. Rubin Observatory began its ten-year survey of the southern sky this summer, and will map dark matter, in part, by the way it bends light across the visible universe.26 The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched on August 30 and is less than three months from its post at L2, where it will pursue a similar objective.s Underground, the LZ team keeps working, waiting to learn whether their recent detection is repeatable. Maybe one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of science won’t remain unsolved for long. Th

  7. Sep 3

    John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series wins the Hugo

    Do you or someone you know need professional tech guidance for your author, coaching, or independent publishing business? If so, check out our sponsor Cloudessy, providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services. Simplify your tech stack, prevent launch failures, and build systems that actually support growth. https://marketing.cloudessy.com/30-minute-tech-stack-update/ Greg Bear Birthday Humble Bundle:https://www.humblebundle.com/books/greg-bear-birthday-bundle-open-road-media-books?hmb_source=&hmb_medium=product_tile&hmb_campaign=mosaic_section_1_layout_index_3_layout_type_threes_tile_index_1_c_gregbearbirthdaybundleopenroadmedia_bookbundle&_gl=1*2thjm5*_up*MQ..*_gs*MQ..&gclid=CjwKCAjwwL_UBhAjEiwAEhuT5J6I3YtOIs2Ik9j35W4nlkDiNJBpz19T17oP3Hy94Vx6r4klmG_ZwhoCdIEQAvD_BwE&gbraid=0AAAAACzVokDVr7jJ6gZ2jgVi7LtdRGu3qby Brian Scott Pauls This past Sunday, the World Science Fiction Society presented the Hugo Awards at LAcon V in Anaheim—the 84th Worldcon. Fantasy continued to dominate the novel categories, with one big exception. John Scalzi won the Hugo Award for Best Series with his seven (to date) novels in the Old Man’s War cycle. Tor published the first book, Old Man’s War, in 2005, and the most recent, The Shattering Peace, in 2025.1 Just a reminder that Cloudessy, my consulting business providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services, is now a sponsor of this newsletter. If you or someone you know needs professional tech guidance for their author, coaching, or independent publishing business, check out the ad at the end of this post. Thank you! Born in 1969 in Fairfield, California, Scalzi received an AB in philosophy from the University of Chicago, where he edited the student paper and freelanced for the Chicago Sun-Times.2 In the nineties he worked as a film critic and opinion columnist at the Fresno Bee, then two years as an in-house writer and editor at AOL.3 In September 1998 he started his blog Whatever, still active today.4 Scalzi discovered the value of “shareware” marketing early on. In 1997 he wrote Agent to the Stars as an experiment, to see if he could handle writing at novel-length. In 1999 he posted it for free on his website, asking readers to mail him a dollar if they liked it. By 2004 he’d received about $4000 from satisfied fans.5Learning from this experience, Scalzi serialized Old Man’s War on the blog in 2002.6 Then he sent Tor editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden a link to an essay he’d written about the experiment. Two days later, Nielsen Hayden replied, “as the blurb cliché goes, I couldn’t put it down.” Tor published the book in 2005. The next year it received a Hugo nomination for Best Novel and won the John W. Campbell (now Astounding) Award for Best New Writer.7 The Best Series win is Scalzi’s fourth Hugo, following Best Fan Writer in 2008, Best Related Book in 2009 for Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded, and Best Novel in 2013 for Redshirts.8 In 2015 Tor signed him to a thirteen book contract over ten years.9 Scalzi lives with his wife in Bradford, Ohio.10See below for the description of Old Man’s War, the first novel in the series, from the publisher’s website: "John Perry did two things on his 75th birthday. First he visited his wife’s grave. Then he joined the army. The good news is that humanity finally made it to the stars. The bad news is that, out there, planets fit to live on are scarce—and alien races willing to fight us for them are common. So: we fight. Far from Earth, the war has been going on for decades: brutal, bloody, unyielding. Responsible for protecting humanity, the Colonial Defense Force doesn’t want young people; they want people who carry the knowledge and skills of decades of living. You’ll be taken off Earth, never to return. You’ll serve two years in combat. And if you survive, you’ll be given a homestead of your own on a hard-won planet light-years from home. John Perry is taking that deal. He thinks he knows what to expect. But the actual fight is far, far harder than he can imagine—and what he will become is far stranger.11" This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thecosmiccodex.com

  8. Aug 27

    A critique of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Children of Time”

    Do you or someone you know need professional tech guidance for your author, coaching, or independent publishing business? If so, check out our sponsor Cloudessy, providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services. Simplify your tech stack, prevent launch failures, and build systems that actually support growth. https://marketing.cloudessy.com/30-minute-tech-stack-update/ Stream the Hugo Awards Ceremony 2026:https://www.youtube.com/@lacon-onlineGreg Bear Birthday Humble Bundle:https://www.humblebundle.com/books/greg-bear-birthday-bundle-open-road-media-books?hmb_source=&hmb_medium=product_tile&hmb_campaign=mosaic_section_1_layout_index_3_layout_type_threes_tile_index_1_c_gregbearbirthdaybundleopenroadmedia_bookbundle&_gl=1*2thjm5*_up*MQ..*_gs*MQ..&gclid=CjwKCAjwwL_UBhAjEiwAEhuT5J6I3YtOIs2Ik9j35W4nlkDiNJBpz19T17oP3Hy94Vx6r4klmG_ZwhoCdIEQAvD_BwE&gbraid=0AAAAACzVokDVr7jJ6gZ2jgVi7LtdRGu3qby Brian Scott Pauls If you put Andre Norton’s “The Stars Are Ours,” Robert A. Heinlein’s “Orphans of the Sky,” Frank Herbert’s “Dune,” David Brin’s “The Uplift War,” and Vernor Vinge’s “A Deepness In the Sky” in a blender on ‘high,’ you might get something like Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Children of Time.” This is a description, not a criticism. “Immature poets imitate;” Eliot tells us, “mature poets steal...” Refugees from a ruined Earth escaping to the stars, a generation ship fallen into savagery, an epic sweep of future history, terrestrial species uplifted to sentience, even a culture of intelligent, spider-like “aliens”—none of this is new. After more than a century of genre science fiction, new ideas are rare. But Eliot also said “…bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” Tchaikovsky isn’t necessarily better than Norton, Heinlein, Herbert, Brin, and Vinge, but without a doubt he gives us a unique and memorable combination of these elements. In 2023, Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time series won the Hugo Award for Best Series, and this first book won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2016. I’ll review the following volumes, Children of Ruin and Children of Memory, over the next two months. Also, please remember Cloudessy, my consulting business providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services, is now a sponsor of this newsletter. If you or someone you know needs professional tech guidance for their author, coaching, or independent publishing business, check out the ad at the end of this post. Thank you! Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Children of Time begins with Dr. Avrana Kern’s plan to seed a terraformed world with monkeys, along with a nanovirus meant to accelerate their evolution. When a sabotage attack kills the monkeys, the nanovirus escapes and infects other species already on the planet, including a population of Portia labiata (“jumping spiders”.) Kern survives in suspended animation emerging at long intervals to watch over the world below. Thousands of years later, the ark ship Gilgamesh approaches the planet after fleeing a ruined Earth. This results in a confrontation with Kern, now psychologically unstable after long isolation, who is unwilling to share “her” world with the unexpected and unwelcome refugees. Tchaikovsky structures Children of Time in a back-and-forth narrative which compares and contrasts the gradual development of the “Portiid’s” spider civilization with the technological and cultural decline of the humans on their decaying starship. Of the two, the Portiids are the most fascinating. Trained in psychology and zoology, Tchaikovsky is at his scientific strongest when depicting how arthropod-type species think and behave. The real life Portia labiata ranks among the most cognitively studied arthropods. Experiments have documented specimens selecting routes before moving, executing detours that carry them out of sight of their prey, and adjusting their tactics against spitting spiders of the genus Scytodes. From this framework, Tchaikovsky constructs a believable, and (which is more important here) a believably non-human society that nevertheless piques our curiosity and sympathy. The Portiids even develop biotechnology allowing them to build computers out of ants: Each colony has been carefully trained, by subtle manipulation of punishment, reward and chemical stimulus, to perform a specific service, giving the great minds of the spiders access to a curious kind of analytical engine, using the cascading decision trees of the colony’s own governance as gearing. Each colony is good for a very limited set of related calculations—a vastly skilled yet vastly specialized idiot savant—and retraining a community of ants is a long and painstaking task. Tchaikovsky goes to great lengths constructing a new species we’ll accept as “real.” And when the Portiids reach orbit, he drops an observation worthy of Orson Scott Card in Enders Game: “They are a species that is well made for a life of constant free-fall around a planet. They are born to climb and to orient themselves in three dimensions.” Due Tchaikovsky’s preceding work, we see this as a characterization of the Party’s established nature, not as a rip-off of Card’s “the enemy’s gate is down.” Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! This post is public so feel free to share it. One of the novel’s weaknesses is that, except for Kern (and by the end she’s no longer even a real exception,) none of the humans are as interesting as the Portiids. What’s worse is, they’re also often neither likeable nor memorable. Once again, Kern’s an exception—she’s memorable because she’s unlikable. Tchaikovsky may have made a rare mistake here. He uses, as one of his primary human point-of view characters, Holsten Mason, a classicist whose main role is to decipher the ancient language used by Kern, which proceeds that of the ship by thousands of years. Linguistics may make for a fascinating academic discipline, but it’s not necessarily a source of gripping drama. The predominant role of the humans, other than as a source of familiarity to the reader, is as a foil to the developing Portiid civilization. Tchaikovsky describes humanity, represented here by escapees from a planet their species itself has killed, as “…devastating the fauna of planet Earth, and then turning on its own sibling offshoots, and then at last, when no other suitable adversaries remained, tearing at itself.” He’s even more direct when he observes “[g]enocide—of other species and of their own—was ever a tool in the human kit.” This stands in stark contrast to the more harmonious, if still imperfect, approach of the Portiid species and civilization, a harmony rooted in genetics and their nanovirus-influenced evolutionary history. The inevitable confrontation between Portiids and humans centers on thought experiment in game theory known as “The Prisoner’s Dilemma.” Holsten imagines contact as such a dilemma: “We’d never be able to communicate, and even if we could, we’d still be those same two prisoners forced to trust—and risk—or to damn the other in trying to save slightly more of our own hides.” The Portiids, with a genetically engineered biology geared more toward cooperation than competition, see Holten’s Catch-22 “as a Gordian knot, to be cut through rather than be bound by.” The Portiid’s proposed solution for cutting through that knot will land differently for different readers. Some will see it as a clever way to wrap up the book’s conflicting lines of reasoning. Some may find it an affront to what it means to be human. And while both are valid points, neither may be strong enough to elevate the literary status of Children of Time from “good” to “great.” But as the introduction to a series, Children of Time works well enough. The world-building alone likely suffices to entice many readers to pick up the next volume, Children of Ruin. Recommended for: Fans of space adventure, epic future history, and compelling “alien” species. Not recommended for: anyone looking for a large cast of gripping human characters Thoughts about my critique of Children of Time? Please comment below! Artificial intelligence tools performed multiple tasks in the creation and publication of this article. This month, I’m reading Rebecca Campbell’s Ursual K. Le Guin Award-winning novel Arboreality. I’m sharing my thoughts on Club Codex, where any Cosmic Codex subscriber can follow along, comment, or ask questions.Click below to participate: Authors: Turn Tech Chaos Into Calm, Clear Systems Your email platform doesn’t talk to your course host. Your CRM doesn’t connect to your payment processor. And somewhere in that gap, you’re losing sales you’ll never be able to trace. Tech chaos is one of the most common—and costly—problems facing author businesses today. According to a study from Slack, the average business owner loses up to 96 minutes of productivity every single day to fragmented tools. That’s three full weeks of wasted time per year. Cloudessy’s fractional CTO services can help authors, coaches, and independent publishers simplify your tech stacks, prevent launch failures, and build systems that actually support growth. Ready to stop fighting your tech? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thecosmiccodex.com

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Living in a science fiction universe... www.thecosmiccodex.com

Information

  • Creator
    Brian Scott Pauls
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    108
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Brian Scott Pauls
  • Show Website
    The Cosmic Codex