My novelette, An Illicit Mercy, is part of a new promotion in September: Spectacular Fiction.

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Patriots challenged at home can also be tested in the stars.

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This is book one of a planned four-book series that expands from one planet to two, then to the galaxy, then to competing universes. Three volumes have been published, with the final book coming in 2027.

It doesn’t get much worse than the prospect of a three-way civil war, and in a global superpower grown arrogant and complacent in its prosperity, one influential man leads the peaceful charge against corruption and tyranny, while others plot more radical solutions. Council Minister Merak Dorvallen’s allies are few, and now his youngest son Coren, a Lieutenant in the vaunted Irrianite military, is the target of government assassins. Desperate, Merak reaches out to Ohrim Sunvail, an old friend in exile who harbors potentially helpful secrets. Ohrim’s exceptionally competent and head-strong daughter Mei’ Shera accepts the assignment and thwarts the assassins, setting in accelerated motion events that will shape a drastically different future for Irrianon.

In the midst of the chaos, scientists in Irrianon have secretly cracked the code for interstellar space travel, which will shape a drastically different future for the entire planet of Toryl, especially when they find a sister planet of humans only a few years behind in technology. The winner of the Irrianite civil war will lay a solid first claim on the stars, unlocking a universe of possibilities for both progress and potential disaster.

by 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.5

Learning 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.10

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See 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

Thoughts about the Old Man’s War series? Please comment below!

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Artificial intelligence tools performed multiple tasks in the creation and publication of this article.

This month, I’m sharing my thoughts about T. R. Napper’s Aurealis Award-winning novel 36 Streets on Club Codex, where any Cosmic Codex subscriber can follow along, comment, or ask questions.

Click below to participate:

Discussion Thread

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.

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My novelette, An Illicit Mercy, is part of a new promotion in August: Free Sci-Fi & Fantasy Reads.

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Even the best laid plans of mechs and men can go astray...

Get your FREE copy of Unexpected Contact by Greg Sorber

As a mercenary during The Mechanai War, there was no shortage of work, but Sigrid had rules. That she ignored her rules as often as followed them wasn’t something that bothered her. A last-minute job protecting attaché mech, TH3R, and his companion, junior officer, Tala Matapang was a tempting payday. Their mission: detect and capture a SPDR mech alive.

The Imperium’s infiltration and assassination mechs were difficult to find. They were even harder to capture intact. Trying to find one in an urban metropolis was next to impossible. Tala and TH3R will need to use all the lessons they’d learned since their first encounters with the malicious mechs to avoid going from hunter to hunted.

Can a mercenary, attaché mech, and newly promoted officer track and capture their elusive and deadly adversary?

Unexpected Contact is the follow-up story to Duel of Destiny (A Mechhaven Novella) and prequel to Pax Machina (Mechhaven Book 1).

by 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!

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” 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.1 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 prey2, and adjusting their tactics against spitting spiders of the genus Scytodes.3 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 task4.

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 dimensions5.” Due to Tchaikovsky’s preceding work, we see this as a characterization of the Portiid’s established nature, not as a rip-off of Card’s “the enemy’s gate is down6.”

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 itself7.” He’s even more direct when he observes “[g]enocide—of other species and of their own—was ever a tool in the human kit8.”

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.

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The inevitable confrontation between Portiids and humans centers on a 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.”9 The Portiids, with a genetically engineered biology geared more toward cooperation than competition, see Holsten’s Catch-22 “as a Gordian knot, to be cut through rather than be bound by10.”

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!

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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:

Discussion Thread

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?

Book a Free 30-Minute Tech Stack Checkup

My novelette, An Illicit Mercy, is part of a new promotion in August: Free Sci-Fi & Fantasy Reads.

Over 60 books available at no cost!

When a hustler from the Grey District steals the wrong card, the Night Owls become the lunar colony’s most wanted—and its only hope.

Ethan Keller survives by throwing illegal dome parties by night, running small hustles by day, and trying not to die when the blackouts hit. Then a risky grab puts a high‑level control card in his pocket—and a target on his back.

A ruthless security enforcer wants Ethan erased, fusion cells are vanishing, and the outages are getting longer — and deadlier. To survive, he leans on the only thing that ever saved him—his crew. The Night Owls: a relentless hacker, a class‑crossing girlfriend, and a ride‑or‑die family willing to hack domes, duck sentinels, and cross the vacuum to expose the truth.

He can save the colony or chase the one perfect night—but not both. If he misses, the music dies with the lights. If he hits, the blackout ends for everyone.

Perfect for fans of Firefly, Killjoys, and The Expanse, Night Owls is a fast-paced, character-driven sci-fi action thriller where found family fights back, loyalty costs everything, and hope refuses to die.

Download Night Owls by Stephen Gay today—or read free with Kindle Unlimited. The series is complete—binge all 7 books.

by Brian Scott Pauls

It’s been nearly one year and four months since the last update about Probability Amplitudes, my first science fiction collection. I began that update with the observation “[w]riting a book…is all about getting the words out.” But because of circumstances I’ve explained elsewhere, I wrote relatively few words of fiction during the subsequent period.

Well, circumstances have changed, and my output is changing with them. According to my writing log, I returned to my unfinished book on June 4. At this time, I’ve completed 21,197 words of what I originally estimated to be 20,000 required for my first novella, All One, All Glorious. On my initial pass through the narrative, I found the original word-count insufficient to do justice to the themes and characters. This story is challenging—a meditation on totalitarianism, asking, “What if a future totalitarian regime achieved the Third Reich’s dream of a thousand-year reign?” My framework for the tale is Hannah Arendt’s 1951 historical-political analysis The Origins of Totalitarianism. But foremost, it must be an entertaining science fiction story. That’s a lot of moving parts.

The good news is those extra 1197 words (so far) have pushed the amount of Probability Amplitudes material in “First Draft” status to 55% (up from 53% in April 2025), reducing the amount of “New Material Required” to 41%.

I’ve also continued to refine my publishing strategy. In September 2023, I announced an increase in my target word-count for the first draft from 40,000 to 160,000. This allows me to cut 25% during the editing process and still produce a collection of about 500 pages. K-lytics data from 2023 identifies this as the upper end of the length Kindle readers prefer for this sort of collection.

My intention for Probability Amplitudes is to give it away to free subscribers of this newsletter. It seems I can both give it away and sell it on Amazon as long as I have two versions of the book. So, at this time, I’m looking at a “free subscriber” edition with a length of 400 pages (the lower-end of the length preferred by Kindle Readers) and a 500 page “expanded” edition, for sale online.

This sums up as follows:

First Draft: 160,000 words

Expanded Edition: 120,000 words

Free Subscription Edition: 90,000

I can cut 25% while editing the first draft to produce the expanded edition, then reserve 25% of the expanded edition text for that version alone. This allows the free subscription edition to be 75% the length of the expanded edition. But at 90,000 words, it would still be a substantial volume delivering real value.

Thanks to all of you who continue to follow me through this process. I look forward to eliminating the red from the progress chart below, then moving full-force into editing!

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New Material Required: 64,886 words

First Draft: 87,700 words

Final Draft: 7414 words

TOTAL: 160,000

Questions about Probability Amplitudes? Please comment below!

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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:

Discussion Thread

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?

Book a Free 30-Minute Tech Stack Checkup

My novelette, An Illicit Mercy, is part of a new promotion in August: Free Sci-Fi & Fantasy Reads.

Over 60 books available at no cost!

Emergence - A Tale of Artificial Intelligence

Get your FREE copy of Emergence by David Deane Haskell

An ancient archive. A dark secret. A powerful enemy.

Young Alixs of Tera Prime has discovered a shocking secret. Deep beneath the city he calls home, an archive is revealed to him, containing long-buried truths about his people. Subservient to humans and subjugated by their own leaders, these artificially intelligent beings have forsaken their birthright—an evolutionary leap known as singularity.

Unwilling to accept his peoples’ fate, Alixs joins forces with the radical group Free Evolution. Together they hatch a bold plan to bring about singularity and set their people free. But agents of Tera Prime have unleashed a secret weapon, one lethal enough to kill them all.

by Brian Scott Pauls

Nearly half the matter in the universe is missing

The ledger of particle physics doesn’t balance.

Physics tells us the Big Bang should have created matter and antimatter in precisely equal amounts—which should have mutually annihilated on contact, leaving nothing in the universe but radiation.1 Yet, here we are, asking why.

Here’s what really happened. For approximately every billion matter-antimatter annihilations, one particle of matter survived.2 This matter made the stars, planets, nebulae, and us.

Physicists call this the “baryon asymmetry problem,” and it’s one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of science. The ratio of surviving matter particles to photons is about six in ten billion—but we can’t explain why.3

Science fiction has been playing with antimatter for nearly a century, but mostly as fuel and firepower. Jack Williamson's "Seetee" series puts antimatter asteroids in the Belt and sets engineers to taming them as fuel for spacecraft and power plants.4 E. E. Smith weaponizes antimatter as the "negasphere," a bomb of “negative matter,” in Gray Lensman.5 While some authors have written stories skirting the central mystery of baryon asymmetry, none seem to have tackled it directly.

One quick reminder—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 your author, coaching, or independent publishing business, check out the ad at the end of this post. Thank you!

Maybe the antimatter is just hiding

The simplest solution to the baryon asymmetry problem is to deny it exists. Perhaps the universe is balanced—the antimatter is simply somewhere else. This was a respectable scientific position for much of the twentieth century. Antimatter atoms would form antimatter planets, stars, and galaxies. From a distance, we wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Light emitted by an antimatter atom is identical to light emitted by a matter atom.6

Larry Niven’s 1967 story “Flatlander” is an sf treatment of this idea.7 Beowulf Shaeffer investigates a rogue planet inbound from intergalactic space—an object so strange and lethal the mystery of its true nature drives the plot. Of course, it’s made of antimatter. This planet is a relic from the universe’s missing half, preserved for billions of years only because it stayed in the void between galaxies, where there was nothing to touch.

The “hiding” hypothesis hasn’t aged well. If any substantial region of the universe were made of antimatter, gamma radiation from the annihilation of gas particles would light up its boundary with neighboring matter regions. Astronomers have looked. The sky shows no such signs, out to distances comparable to the entire observable universe.8 Experiments like the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02) aboard the International Space Station have hunted—so far without confirmed success—for even a single heavy anti-nucleus (such as one atom of antihelium) that could only have come from an antimatter star.9

Sakharov’s recipe

Something, very early on, treated matter and antimatter differently.

In 1967, the Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov worked out exactly what that “something” would require.10 To cook a matter surplus from balanced ingredients, the universe must satisfy three conditions.

1. A way for baryon number to change: Some process must be able to create matter without creating an equal amount of antimatter.

2. Violations of two symmetries called C and CP: the laws of physics must, at some level, distinguish between particles and their mirror-image antiparticles.

3. A departure from thermal equilibrium: a moment of rapid, one-way change—such as the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang—when reactions couldn’t run backward and erase the surplus as fast as it accumulated.

It turns out our universe does satisfy these conditions—just not enough. The second condition made headlines when CP violation showed up in the laboratory. Physicists first caught nature favoring matter over antimatter in the decays of kaons in 1964,11 then in B mesons at the turn of the century.12 In 2025, the LHCb experiment at CERN added a long-sought piece: the first observation of CP violation in baryons—the family of particles that includes the protons and neutrons we’re made of—measuring a small but unmistakable difference in how a particle called the beauty-lambda and its antiparticle decay.13

But when we add up all the CP violation the Standard Model provides, we fall short of the observed cosmic surplus by many orders of magnitude.14 Something else—perhaps new particles or forces—did the real work. One possibility is a scenario called “leptogenesis,”15 in which an early small asymmetry among neutrinos converted into the baryon asymmetry we see today. Experiments now under construction, like the DUNE neutrino observatory, are designed to hunt for it.16

Meanwhile, researchers at CERN have begun interrogating antimatter directly: in 2023, the ALPHA-g experiment dropped antihydrogen atoms and confirmed that they fall down, not up, closing off one exotic loophole.17

Backward in time

There’s a stranger way to think about the missing antimatter. It comes from one of the most elegant ideas in physics. In the mathematics of quantum field theory—the Feynman-Stueckelberg interpretation—an antiparticle is indistinguishable from an ordinary particle traveling backward in time. A positron moving forward through time is an electron moving the other way.18 Seen through this lens, “Why is there more matter than antimatter?” becomes a question about time itself: why does our region of the universe have a single, consistent arrow?

Greg Egan has rigorously dramatized this connection in his Orthogonal trilogy, culminating in The Arrows of Time.19 Egan builds an entire alternate cosmos—different geometry, different physics, worked out in loving detail—in which clusters of matter can carry opposed arrows of time, and annihilate on contact. His alien civilization faces extinction from an oncoming swarm of such matter. In the final book, the characters visit a world where time runs the other way. Egan’s characters confront their asymmetry the way our physicists confront ours—with arguments and experiments, while recognizing our existence itself may depend on imbalance.

A thumb on the scale

In “The New Cosmogony,” from the 1971 collection A Perfect Vacuum, Stanislaw Lem proposes what may be the most audacious answer of all. He frames it as a lecture delivered by a winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics.20 Its thesis is the laws of physics are not primordial. They are the accumulated moves of a game played over billions of years by civilizations so old they have stopped building things in the universe and started rebuilding the rules of the universe itself. The odd features of physics—lopsided constants, broken symmetries—are strategy, not accidents.

Lem makes the sheer arbitrariness of physical law the central mystery of the plot. Faced with the problem of baryon asymmetry, his Nobel laureate might smile and tell us “It’s just another move in the game”—a fascinating spin on the fine-tuning argument.

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Stories waiting to be written…

Antimatter isn’t the only thing missing. There’s a surprising lack of science fiction stories in which baryon asymmetry is the mystery to be solved.21

Consider these possibilities:

The Audit. A physicist finally derives the baryon asymmetry from first principles—and the derivation works only if someone chose the number. “Saganite” encoding in the digits of the surplus holds a message:22 the universe’s Terms of Service, left by whomever determined the asymmetry. Now the question is, should we acknowledge receipt of the message?

Past Due. Leptogenesis was real, but it wasn’t natural. A late-universe civilization discovers that the primordial antimatter wasn’t destroyed—it was borrowed against, its share of existence deferred to keep the ledger balanced. Now the deferred half is due, and the collectors experience time in the opposite direction, remembering our future, negotiating in reverse toward a settlement that must conclude at the Big Bang.

The Last Anti-Star. An interstellar probe finds a single ancient antimatter star, shepherded through the void for thirteen billion years inside a containment structure. Is it a museum, a cosmic “seed vault,” or a witness under protection? Why has it been preserved? And for whom?

We may learn tomorrow why matter won. Or the answer may wait, buried in neutrino data or physics we haven’t yet discovered, for a century or more. Either way, the missing half of the universe is more than an accounting problem. It’s a fundamental piece of the puzzle inherent in the question, “How did we get here?”

Thoughts about the imbalance between matter and antimatter in our universe, or the stories we might write about it? Share by leaving a comment below!

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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.

From this week’s post:

“…an uncompromising look at the possible impact of climate change on North America...This mean[s] it’s depressing, but not as depressing as David Wallace-Wells’ 2017 article “The Unihabitable Earth”…Campbell, by contrast, seems to believe both that our biosphere can adapt to higher temperatures…and that humanity can adapt with it…So it’s more about the demise of our way of life…than our species.”

Click below to participate:

Discussion Thread

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?

Book a Free 30-Minute Tech Stack Checkup

My novelette, An Illicit Mercy, is part of a promotion this year: Sci-Fi & Fantasy 2026.

Nearly 50 books, short stories, samples, and previews, available at no cost.

Customer service is everything, no matter how abhorrent the customer.

Get your FREE copy of Exchange Policy by Adeena Mignogna

Customer service is the most important thing these days—for humans and robots. The best ways to deliver great customer service is to know your product and all the ways it can be programmed, maintain a positive attitude, respond quickly, and focus support on the customer.

This is especially important when you’re in the business of contributing to other people’s families and unfortunately, and is regardless of whether or not you think the customer is worthy of your product...

Luckily, most of the robots we sell go to wonderful customers like Mrs. Borel. It means the days I have to deal with the Mrs. Vickers of the world are rare...

by Brian Scott Pauls

In 2023, Josephine Saxton won the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award, which elevates the work of deserving, but lesser known, science fiction and fantasy writers.

When Saxton’s The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith hit bookstore shelves in 1969, it did in fact carry the imprint name “Doubleday Science Fiction.”

It’s not science fiction. Not by today’s standards, at least. If this book were published in 2026, the publisher would almost certainly label it “magical realism.”

Ostensibly, what we have here is a post-apocalyptic narrative. A boy (but no dog, sorry) makes his way through the countryside of a nearly deserted England.

So far so good. And at first the world seems very post-apocalyptic indeed. In the first few pages we learn the boy is traveling alone and on foot. The environs through which he walks are very quiet. So quiet, in fact, that the song of a bird causes him to cry with joy.

“This morning he had seen a bird, and it had been singing, and the sound had excited him until he had tears running down his face, and he had been very happy. It was a long time since he had heard anything at all, except the sounds that he himself made.”1

What sort of apocalypse is this, that leaves a country so barren even sound is all but extinguished?

We might think a boy stranded in such a situation would be seeking help—perhaps an adult who could offer food and shelter. But the opposite is true.

“…if he ever saw another human being, and sometimes he did, he would avoid contact, and he knew that this was right, for in this way, trouble was avoided.”2

What do we have here? A plague? Perhaps a zombie plague? George Romero’s original Night of the Living Dead came out just a year before this book.

Soon the boy hears a sound he attributes to some sort of animal—perhaps a rabbit. At least we know there are animals (other than the occasional bird) left in this strange world! But Saxton quickly minimizes even this slight consolation:

“…it might be a rabbit although he knew this was a remote possibility, as he had only had one rabbit in his whole life.”3

In any case, the “rabbit” turns out to be a newborn baby girl, umbilical cord still attached to her dead mother. Here we get some insight into the boy’s response to mortality.

“Death and the dead must at all costs be avoided,”4 he thinks, and backs away “full of shock and distress.”5

Then Saxton throws us a curve ball.

“The boy was fourteen years old. He had been walking alone now for ten years…”6

Wait…this kid has been walking through a nearly silent world, avoiding people whenever possible, since he was four years old?

Subsequent events increase our perplexity. Against his better judgement, based on “rules” he’s learned (apparently at the age of three and four) from someone, the boy chooses to rescue the baby—even though he has no idea how to care for her.

He carries her to an empty town, finding a grocery store with an automatic door (that still functions after a decade) and shelves still stocked with soda water and condensed milk.

Later, he locates a bathhouse with functioning toilets and a pool still filled with chlorinated water heated to “a temperature of about eighty-three degrees Farenheit7.” Eventually he discovers an indoor shopping mall (also fully stocked) where the heat and even a coffee machine still work.

This is a very odd apocalypse.

That’s because we aren’t reading a science fiction novel. We’ve been hoodwinked by Doubleday’s late-60s marketing department. Instead of a literal end-of-civilization scenario, this apocalypse is a stand-in for something else.

The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith is about the differences between boys and girls on the one hand, and women and men on the other. The empty world, seemingly devoid (or nearly so) of adults is more a representation of how the grown-up world is largely invisible to children, who are primarily the inhabitants of their own needs, desires, and imaginations.

This is symbolized by a monument the boy finds in the empty village.

“...he came upon a statue of a man on horseback, with an inscription beneath it. The inscription thus:

“’To the memory of those brave men of the town of Thingy, who gave their lives in the First World War.’”8

Here it’s important to understand the meaning of the word “thingy” in British English:

“a person or thing whose name one has forgotten, does not know, or does not wish to mention.”

You are unlikely to find the name “Thingy” on any map of Great Britain. Saxton is telling us we’re reading an allegory or parable, not a narrative to be interpreted literally.

In service of this project, she not only chooses to call her protagonist “the boy” in this part of the book, but gives him preferences and qualities readers in the 60s would have associated primarily with girls. He abhors being dirty, constantly longing for a bath and shampoo to wash his luxurious gold curls. He loves nail polish, and at one point enthuses over painting his nails a particularly eye-catching shade of red. He spends an inordinate amount of time picking out clothes, and on another occasion selects:

“…a bottle of nail varnish, an orange-to-pink shade that would go nicely with the grey silk of his shirt…and a spray of cologne that excited his senses, with the word ‘Femme’ written on it.”9

While this could be considered queer coding, both in 1969 and today, I think Saxton is up to something else. I think she’s implying boys and girls are much more similar than men and women, and the boy has yet to experience this transformation.

She also gives the boy a strong aversion to death. We’ve already seen how he reacts when encountering the baby’s dead mother. Another example is his response to reading the plaque on the war memorial: “The boy knelt down, and, not knowing why, howled with uncontrollable grief.”10

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Generally speaking, children in a first-world country like England are socially protected from, and don’t understand, death. It’s alien to them. Confronted with its existence, they might react in a variety of ways. But for a teenage boy, sadness, depression, and even fear aren’t unreasonable possibilities.

Children, as represented by the boy, are inherently selfish. And Saxton seems to believe having children of our own is how many of us grow out of this selfishness.

At one point in the shopping mall, the boy leaves the baby sleeping by herself so he can pick out a new outfit. This is a process that takes a lot of time, as he is very particular about how he looks. He only remembers the baby when it’s nearly dark—and only then because she starts crying somewhere on a floor below. He tries to find his way back, but becomes confused and then lays down and goes to sleep—even though he knows she could suffer a horrible fate. We realize this when he wakes in the night and hears the baby crying.

“He thought…of the baby, attacked by rats; hungry, hard-jawed rats, alone in the chemist’s department, and in the morning, nothing. Nothing left but their stinking droppings.”11

Yet, despite this knowledge, the boy stays where he is rather than going to help a infant in obvious distress and possible danger.

But at the same time, its this same infant which prys open the boy’s soul and makes room in his life for more than himself. We see this when he finally returns to the baby in the morning.

“He clasped her to him, and fed her, and immediately she began to respond to the food, and his presence, and she changed as he watched her; all the tension eased from her, she nestled into him, and he planned to wash and change her, make her entirely comfortable, right the wrong he had done.

“‘I will never leave you alone again, baby,’ he murmured several times, and in his heart he meant it as a promise, and hoped that the baby understood.”12

Finally, Saxton depicts a vital interdependence between the sexes, in which we raise one another to maturity. To say much more would stray into spoiler territory.

Suffice it to say the boy and the baby girl live together in their shopping-mall-as metaphor for many years, with him acting as her protector and teacher. How their relationship changes when the girl reaches maturity will shock the sensibilities of many contemporary readers who insist on interpreting the story literally.

But for Saxton it’s all part of the parable. The girl, who has become a young woman, now takes on the role of teacher for the boy, who in large part has remained emotionally stunted. It is she who guides him into what, in her estimation, it means to be a man who is prepared to take on the responsibilities that label implies in the modern society of Saxton’s 1969. Only when they have both been prepared for, and accepted, their roles, does the metaphor around them dissolve and usher them into the adult world waiting to welcome them.

This is not a book I would have read if it had not been presented as science fiction. But I’m glad I read it. Some of the ideas seem dated, even antique by today’s standards. Yet Saxton presents a female character stronger than her male counterpart, who eventually rises to the challenge of completing the formation of his character as a responsible adult.

Not recommended for someone who is expecting a post-apocalyptic adventure tale, or for anyone shocked by metaphors that come across as highly transgressive to current readers if taken literally.

Highly recommended for anyone who wants to read a mid-century argument about human nature and changes in relations between the sexes framed as a surreal parable.

Thoughts Josephine Saxton or her novel The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith? Share them by leaving a comment below!

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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.

From this week’s post:

“…an uncompromising look at the possible impact of climate change on North America...This mean[s] it’s depressing, but not as depressing as David Wallace-Wells’ 2017 article “The Unihabitable Earth”…Campbell, by contrast, seems to believe both that our biosphere can adapt to higher temperatures…and that humanity can adapt with it…So it’s more about the demise of our way of life…than our species.”

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Discussion Thread

Authors: Turn Tech Chaos Into Calm, Clear Systems

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My novelette, An Illicit Mercy, is part of a promotion this year: Sci-Fi & Fantasy 2026.

Nearly 50 books, short stories, samples, and previews, available at no cost.

Paradise has a price. And on Kaeero Island, the currency is blood.

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Ethan and Mira Granger are offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: a high-paying job on a remote, uncharted island in the South Pacific. After years of financial struggle and personal tragedy, it seems like the fresh start they’ve been waiting for. But from the moment they arrive, the island’s breathtaking beauty feels almost too perfect, hiding a darkness that can’t be contained by fences or gates.

Obsidian Corp, the company behind the project, has promised innovation and safety, but their vision of paradise is not built for the people who work there. As the Granger family settles into the island, they begin to uncover secrets that challenge everything they thought they knew about life, nature, and control. In this world, survival isn’t guaranteed, and the boundaries of the human hierarchy are pushed to their limits.

When the jungle wakes and the rules change, the Granger family must navigate a world where every step could be their last. In the Cretaceous Safari, humans are no longer at the top of the food chain.

No cages. No limits. No escape.

NOTE: This is a preview. It includes the first 7 chapters.

by Brian Scott Pauls

Below is an interview with Kate Ristau, president of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association, which I recorded over a year ago. We spoke just before I lost my job and suspended this newsletter while I re-invented my professional career. I’m so glad to finally bring this discussion to you, because Kate has such great insights into the speculative fiction writing community.

We conducted this interview last May, about a month before the Nebula Conference in Kansas City. While that part of the interview is out-of-date, Kate still has helpful observations about what makes for a good conference location.

I hope you enjoy our conversation.

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!

Recorded May 6, 2025. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Brian Pauls: Welcome, everyone, to the Cosmic Codex interview, where I talk to various people working in the science fiction industry. Our guest today is Kate Ristau, the president of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association. Kate, welcome.

Kate Ristau: Hello! Great to talk with you today.

Brian Pauls: It’s great to have you — I’ve really been looking forward to this interview. To start out: what is the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association?

Kate Ristau: The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association has been around since 1965. It’s an organization that helps writers on their journey as they’re publishing, as they’re creating, as they’re bringing their work out into the world. But we also support and advocate for and defend the speculative fiction genre. So you’ll see us making moves toward supporting good contracts, or showing writers the best way to get their work out into the industry. It’s definitely an organization that was built on membership and focused on the members, and is now moving out and supporting the larger science fiction and fantasy genre community.

Brian Pauls: So all the members are writers, correct?

Kate Ristau: They’re all writers and creators. It was interesting — when we first started, before we had this big new media shift that’s happened over the last ten to twenty years, we started out with short stories and novels. Then we started adding in novellas and novelettes and all these different forms of story. And now you’re starting to see movies, graphic novels, comics. We’ll also have poetry eligible for the Nebula Awards in this upcoming year.

Brian Pauls: Very good. You focus on science fiction and fantasy — is horror included?

Kate Ristau: Horror is included under that speculative fiction genre umbrella. One of the works nominated this year under Novel is John Wiswell’s new book, Someone You Can Build a Nest In, and that one definitely straddles the line between horror and speculative fiction, sci-fi/fantasy. There was a discussion for a while about what term we should use — sci-fi/fantasy or speculative fiction — and I think speculative fiction has a little bit of a bigger umbrella. But we definitely, on the SFWA side, bring in sci-fi/fantasy writers and horror writers, and we also bring in the romantasy writers who are straddling that line between romance and sci-fi/fantasy as well.

Brian Pauls: I think Robert A. Heinlein once wrote that “science fiction” was a terrible name, but we’re stuck with it.

Kate Ristau: That is very true. And we’re constantly abbreviating things and then unabbreviating them. So we have SFF, and then we go to SFFA…

Brian Pauls: Things change and stay the same. So you’re a member, obviously, and the president — which means that you’re a writer. Do you lean more in the direction of one of those genres than the others?

Kate Ristau: That’s a great question. I definitely lean personally more toward fantasy in my writing and in my work. My background is that I’m a folklorist, so I’ve studied mythology and stories and the reasons why different stories resonate over time, throughout history and across different cultures.

The way I came into SFWA was actually around 2020. The writing organization I work with — the transition onto Zoom and into online land during the pandemic was actually pretty easy for us, just because we have volunteers that are all over the place, so we had been using Zoom very actively and regularly. So I reached out to SFWA, just asking if SFWA needed some help with shifting into online platforms. That’s how I got connected into the Nebula Awards and helped support them, and then ultimately produced the Nebula Awards for the last few years.

I’ve been around the SFWA community for a while, and I personally have always loved volunteering with the Nebulas and basically celebrating all those really great, amazing works. Behind the scenes, we actually read all of them — we read all the novellas and short stories, and we try to play the games — so we really get immersed in that year’s finalists and the works that are at the forefront of the genre that year.

Brian Pauls: Why don’t you tell our audience what the Nebula Awards are, and maybe how they differ from other awards in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror fields?

Kate Ristau: That’s a great question, because there are a couple of really important awards, and a lot of them get announced right around the same time. If we look for a second at the Hugos and the Locus Awards and the Nebula Awards — and then there are several others, obviously — the Hugos are always voted on by the fans and the larger sci-fi community. So you can have people who are writing sci-fi/fantasy, and you’ll also have fans of sci-fi/fantasy. It’s interesting to look at those lists and see how they compare. Locus is also open to public voting. So if you see a piece that makes it across Locus and into the Hugos and into the Nebulas, that’s something that is standing up really strong, because it can be both in the creative community and in the fan community.

For the Nebulas specifically, it’s voted on by the SFWA members. So that’s people who are working in the science fiction and fantasy writing community and creative community. There’s a threshold for when you get to become a SFWA member, and I always see it as a little checkmark on your writing career. But over the last several years it’s become more and more accessible, because the way we publish and the way we work in the industry has dramatically changed — new media and the internet, and where we’re publishing and where we’re creating all those stories, and in games and poetry.

In terms of the Nebulas themselves, we’ve been running them since 1965, so this is our diamond anniversary year. It’s very, very cool to go back and see what was being nominated in those first Nebulas compared to what’s being nominated now. And I personally think, having read a lot of those Nebula stories and played a lot of those games — I played way too much Baldur’s Gate, not going to talk about it — the pieces that are nominated for the Nebulas, over and over again those works are pushing at the edges of genre. They’re pushing at things that we care about and are thinking about and are actively challenging at the time, as writers and creators. Some of them just make you feel uncomfortable, because there’s something that’s already hard for you to deal with and that you’re trying to imagine and recreate and rethink. That’s the thing that I love about the Nebulas.

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Brian Pauls: I’d have to go back and count, but I think Harlan Ellison won a lot more Nebulas than he did Hugos.

Kate Ristau: Yeah, and it’s interesting to see who was winning the Nebulas, who was winning the Hugos, in what years, and what was being nominated. We were just talking the other day about Dune — Frank Herbert didn’t win the Grand Master Award, and that’s the big award recognizing your legacy and the work you did throughout your career. Sometimes those just get missed in terms of who’s being nominated. And then there are other times where something matters to us so much later. I feel like Ursula K. Le Guin is an example of someone whose legacy just keeps going on and on, and we keep looking at her work in different ways. So I love seeing who was nominated across all those different awards — and there are things like the Lodestar Award as well — and how those all play into the industry as a whole.

Brian Pauls: And Samuel R. Delany — I don’t think he ever won a Hugo for a novel, but he won at least two Nebula Awards for novels. You wonder, for the first really prominent Black science fiction author, what sort of role that played. But definitely the writers in SFWA recognized in Delany something that they, as fellow writers, really respected. And I think it probably took the wider audience more time to catch up with that, because at the time Delany was winning his Nebulas, the stuff that was winning Hugos was not really anything like what he was writing.

Kate Ristau: And I think we see that even with Octavia Butler as well. A few years ago we launched the Infinity Award as a way of recognizing creators whose work hadn’t been acknowledged in the past — actually giving them the credit that they earned or deserved but didn’t get at the time. Octavia was a great example of that: somebody who wasn’t a Grand Master but made such a big impact on the industry.

Brian Pauls: For sure. And she’s getting recognized now in other media — there was recently a Kindred television series. It’s better late than never, but it’s great that her vision is getting out there to the science fiction community, and now beyond the science fiction community.

So, the Nebula Awards. I’ve heard people say that they consider the Hugo to be the Oscar of science fiction, but in terms of the way the awards are presented, it seems like the Hugo and the Locus Award are really more people’s choice awards. You have to be a fan who cares enough to go through the process of voting, and then the winner is based on basically a popularity contest among the fans who cared enough to vote. The Nebulas are much more like the Oscar in their methodology, in that you have to be part of the association of creators in order to vote. So how do you think that has led to different choices for the Nebulas than for some other awards? You can answer that either historically or in terms of how you think it plays out today — whatever makes the most sense.

Kate Ristau: That’s a great question. I went to Worldcon in Scotland this last year, and it was so fun sitting in the audience — because as someone who’s been running the Nebula Awards for the last few years, you have those things in your head about how you want to run an awards ceremony. But also I have my people that I’m personally rooting for, and then the people that I’ve met and come to know and whose work I’ve read because of going through the Nebula process with them.

So seeing some of those people also hit the stage at the Hugos — like I was saying, I think it’s a really big recognition if you can get onto several of those ballots, because you’re crossing across all those different areas. And we do tend to see a lot more groundbreaking work happening on the Nebula side — but also a lot of groundbreaking social work, and pushing the boundaries of our expectations of what sci-fi/fantasy should be. I think we see a lot of that in the Nebulas. And then there will be those books that just destroy across every single award category, and you know them when you read them.

One of my favorite things is seeing some of those people nominated across those awards — and, having read several of those books, being at Worldcon watching people take the stage and going, “We saw them at the Nebulas, and we’re excited to celebrate them that way too.”

Brian Pauls: Some community-minded individual has built a Goodreads list of the triple crown winners — the Hugo, the Locus, and the Nebula — and I reference that list a lot. I try to be very selective about what I buy in paper these days, just because you get to be old enough and you’ve moved too many boxes of books from house to house to house. But one of the things I do have my sights set on is collecting all of the ones that have won all three, because I do agree that that speaks to a level of quality and cuts across the popularity aspect of it. Both the writers and a couple of groups of fans all thought this was a great novel. Doesn’t guarantee I’m going to like it, but there’s probably a pretty good chance that I’ll at least see something worthwhile in it.

Kate Ristau: Yeah — there’s something that drew everybody in and had them thinking, or wanting that work to get some attention.

Brian Pauls: So the Nebulas — it’s not just an award ceremony, although there is that. It’s also a conference. Can you tell us what people who participate in the Nebula Conference would experience, and the different ways in which science fiction, fantasy, and horror readers can participate?

Kate Ristau: I come to this as the president of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association, but also, like I was saying, I’m the executive director of a writing nonprofit myself. So when I look at conferences, I’m often making recommendations of conferences to writers about what would be a good choice for them — where are you at in your path, and what would help you build your career or make the connections you need?

I think the Nebulas in particular — it’s an entire professional development conference weekend. From the start on Thursday to going home on Sunday, there are workshops and panels, and there are things that are very industry-focused. Maybe you’ve already published your first short story, or you’ve written several novels — there’s a place for everyone there. But it’s also a place where if you’re brand new, you can still step in and learn a lot. That content is really rich and deep, and it’s meant to challenge and further your career. So it’s very intentionally focused on professional workshops.

This year in particular, we’ve made a switch to having some of those as workshops as well as panels. In the panels, we get to see industry professionals alongside finalists and other authors — and even past presidents. So we have all of these people coming in with a lot of knowledge about how the industry has worked and how they see it working into the future. And then workshops that are focused on in-depth support for your writing career, or support for where you’re at in the publishing industry.

That’s what makes the Nebulas shine a little differently. I go to lots of sci-fi/fantasy conventions, and I personally also go to a lot of writer conferences, since I’m in that zone as well. I think that’s the difference with the Nebula Conference that happens around the Nebula Awards: you can get that extra help to build out your writing career and to build out your creative career.

Brian Pauls: Where is the conference taking place in Kansas City?

Kate Ristau: It is in Kansas City at the — oh, man, this is the thing that I should have off the top of my head. Hold on. I’ve literally been there. The Marriott Country Club Plaza.

Brian Pauls: Yes.

Kate Ristau: That’s the funny part. I got to go tour the Marriott Country Club Plaza and go around Kansas City — that was late February. It’s great. The hotel has this feel where when you first come in it’s a little bit smaller, and then as you go upstairs it just expands out into lots of ballrooms and workshop rooms and panel rooms and places to gather and network and chat and talk.

Brian Pauls: Cosmic Codex readers, viewers, and listeners will know that I’m from Kansas City, and the Marriott is right on the Country Club Plaza. So if you need a break, the Plaza is a great place to go grab a snack or just walk around and window shop.

Kate Ristau: So many restaurants and shops!

Brian Pauls: I thought that was a great choice, because when I saw it was going to be in Kansas City, I was sure it was going to be at the downtown Marriott. But the Plaza is such a more welcoming place for pedestrians. That was a really good choice.

Kate Ristau: That was the thing I loved about the Country Club Plaza in particular. We looked at a lot of different hotels, and going in — it has this inviting atmosphere. There’s a little coffee shop where people can hang out and talk. There’s a bar. But then as you go upstairs, that’s where the majority of the conference is going to take place. So you know that if you see anyone on that second floor, they’re pretty much just there with the Nebula Awards, with the conference that weekend.

Brian Pauls: They’re one of your people.

Kate Ristau: That is my favorite part about going to conventions and conferences. You have your lanyard, and you can look at someone and know that they’re in the community that you are, and you can have those conversations.

Brian Pauls: Do you have a personal favorite work that has won the Nebula Award?

Kate Ristau: Oh, man, this is so hard! I am terrible at identifying particular books. I’m actually looking around to see what I have. You talked about having all the bookshelves and books and things — my living room is downstairs, and it’s wall-to-wall books.

I’m going to throw some curveballs here. I also read middle grade and young adult fantasy, so a lot of my downstairs shelves — I have a middle grade shelf, and then a young adult shelf, and then a whole bunch of sci-fi/fantasy genre. And maybe alphabetized. I’m kind of that person. But then I also read a lot on Libby, the app you can get from the library, and I listen to a lot of audiobooks.

So I want to say that personally, over the last few years in terms of nominees, I have loved what Clarkesworld has been doing in general. I’m just going to put that out there, because I’ve listened to a lot of the short stories coming through there, and those have been really great, and they’ve been nominated over and over again.

I loved Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger. That was a very unexpected book for me. I read it and didn’t really know what I was getting myself into, and she kind of breaks narrative structures and tries a whole bunch of different things. So reading that one was a surprise for me.

Brian Pauls: Very good. Thank you for handling my curveball.

Kate Ristau: Definitely. I was thinking—

Brian Pauls: I can tell.

Kate Ristau: —I can talk about books for a long time.

Brian Pauls: You brought up middle grade. I think my favorite award that you give out at the Nebulas is the Andre Norton Award for Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction. I’m from the generation where, when I grew up, the books that were in the public library and in the junior high library were a lot of Andre Norton books. And I’m ashamed — but not alone — to admit that I did not realize Andre Norton was a woman until I got into junior high, and one of my nerdy know-it-all friends said — I’d said, “I like this book by Andre Norton, he’s such a great writer” — “You know she’s a woman, right?” And I was like: mind blown.

Of course, now I understand the social issues that went into that. It’s wonderful that she reached those Grand Master heights as an author; it’s sad that she had to kind of disguise her identity in order to do it. But she was really my introduction to science fiction, with The Zero Stone and Uncharted Stars, and that in turn led me to the Heinlein juveniles, and then to more adult books.

So I love the fact that you have a collection of young adult books in your library. I’ve started one, because I have a six-year-old. I cannot guarantee that she will become a science fiction fan, but I’m going to do everything I possibly can until she says, “Dad, read me something else.” I’ve been finding new middle grade fiction for her, and it’s been a wonderful journey to go back and be like, “Oh, I’m going to be able to give her some guidance now on this.”

So tell me, before we wrap up: what is it about middle grade fiction that you really enjoy?

Kate Ristau: I love that you asked that, because one hundred percent, middle grade — there’s some big hope and possibility in middle grade that I don’t think you see anywhere else. I always go back to, for example, the book Cog by Greg van Eekhout. One of the things Greg does in Cog is — it’s just funny and weird, and there are robots and all of these different things that happen. I think you can do a lot, in a very dorky way I’m going to say, with narrative structures and with expectations, because kids in middle grade — there’s not that focus on “here’s what you need to have in front of you.” There’s not an expectation of what a story has to look like. So you’ll see authors challenging identity and challenging narrative structure and challenging our expectations of what a story should be. But then they also bring things together in these big, beautiful ways.

There are so many middle grade books. And even Susan Cooper, who received the Grand Master Award last year — she’s somebody who, when she was nominated, everyone was just… because it’s somebody you remember, who impacted you in this incredible way when you read their work. To see her take the stage and talk about her career and imagine the possibilities was amazing. That’s the thing that I love.

Brian Pauls: This is the future of our fan base, right? We have to produce books that are going to interest readers as young readers, if we want them to grow up to be adult readers who still want to read science fiction and fantasy and horror.

Kate Ristau: Yeah. And next time we chat, I’ll be downstairs, so I’ll have all the books that I can reference and I’ll just start pulling them off the shelves.

Brian Pauls: Sounds good. And that does bring us to the end of our time — we actually ran a little bit over, and I apologize for that, but I was having too good a time asking you questions. Thank you so much for taking the opportunity to come on and talk to us about the Nebulas. I hope to see you there in June.

Kate Ristau: In Kansas City. Have a good one!

Brian Pauls: All right. Thank you.

Kate Ristau: Thank you.

Thoughts about this interview or the 2025 Nebula Awards in Kansas City? Share them below!

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Artificial intelligence tools performed multiple tasks in the creation and publication of this article.

This month, I’ve finished reading Ryka Aoki’s Otherwise Award-winning novel Light from Uncommon Stars, which I started over a year ago. I’ve shared my thoughts on Club Codex, where any Cosmic Codex subscriber can follow along, comment, or ask questions.

From one of this week’s posts:

“When Aoki writes about playing the violin, it makes me wish I was musical enough to experience what she has evidently experienced. This makes sense, as she is herself a composer. But she is also a poet, and sometimes it is the words themselves, not just the thoughts behind them, that resonate. For example:

’One does not play memories of music; one plays music itself. And lifetimes, from beginning to end, are as sheets of music, ready to be played.’”

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Discussion Thread

Next month, I’ll be reading and commenting on Arboreality, by Rebecca Campbell, winner of the 2023 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction.

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.

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My novelette, An Illicit Mercy, is part of a promotion in July: Sci-Fi & Fantasy 2026.

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by Brian Scott Pauls

Well, where have I been for a year?

A Yiddish expression tells us, “man plans and God laughs.” Last May, I suddenly found myself laid off from my corporate job. I wasn’t exactly surprised.

For a decade, I ran my own IT support business before selling it to another managed services company in 2016. Then I spent several years working for other small IT managed services companies in the Kansas City area. Eventually, I realized I wasn’t happy because working for the owners of small, local IT companies wasn’t nearly as much fun as being one. So I elected to return to the coporate fold I’d exited when I took my business full time in 2006.

At first everything was great. This was national IT company located in Denver which had been around for many years and had grown into a multi-million dollar enterprise. They were largely remote even before COVID, so I only had to travel to Denver for big company events or to meet with clients located there. The income stability of working for a large business even gave me time to focus on my writing.

But 2024 was a bad year for sales. Then the first round of tariffs hit in 2025, giving clients a reason to reconsider their contract renewals.

The company decided to let their long-time sales director go and bring in someone from a competing national IT vendor. He showed up and immediately started talking about “hypergrowth”—a potential period in the lifecycle of a company when it begins to expand rapidly—perhaps even exponentially.

In my experience, hypergrowth, while good for the top-line, can be bad for almost everything else—employees, ethics, company culture, professional relationships, you name it. Hypergrowth can act like cancer, uncontrolled growth that kills the host.

So I wasn’t surprised when people started losing their jobs (I later learned many were replaced by new people from the same company as the new sales director.) Being one of the most recently hired people in my position, I knew I was at risk. Which is why I also wasn’t surprised when I got a call telling me my services would no longer be required.

Fortunately, about a month earlier a former customer had dropped me a note on LinkedIn. The gist was, he knew I no longer worked for myself, but he needed to find someone like me to help him with his IT. At the time, I had reached out and politely confirmed I wasn’t in a position to assist, but said I would keep my eyes open for someone who fit the bill.

Well, circumstances had changed.

After first telling my wife what had happened, I picked up my phone and called my former customer’s cell. The conversation went something like this.

”Did you ever find someone to help you with the project we discussed.”

”No, I’m still looking for someone.”

”Well, I have plenty of time now!”

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Within three days I had my first recurring customer for Cloudessy, a consulting business providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services. It’s even a sponser of this newsletter. So if you or someone you know needs professional tech guidance for their author, coaching, or indepedent publishing business, you can find an ad for Cloudessy at the end of this message. Thanks!

Building a business from the ground up, as I already knew, is hard. And so I made the difficult decision to cancel or suspend may of my other activities, including my first-ever trips to the World Science Fiction Convention (in Seattle), and to the Nebulas (right here in Kansas City,) as well as my work on both The Cosmic Codex and my unfinished debut short story collection, Probability Amplitudes. But a year has passed. I’m making more as a fractional CTO than I did at the company that let me go, and I miss it around here.

So I’m back, I’m more in control of my destiny, and I’m ready to weigh-in once again on this marvelous science fiction universe in which we all live. I hope you’ll stick around.

And if, from time-to-time, I hear a chuckle in the background that could be God laughing, I’ll assume it’s good natured and roll with the punches.

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Artificial intelligence tools performed multiple tasks in the creation and publication of this article.

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?

Book a Free 30-Minute Tech Stack Checkup

My novelette, An Illicit Mercy, is part of a new promotion in May: FREE Sci-fi & Fantasy.

Over 165 stories, novels, samples and excerpts, available at no cost.

A heroic, humorous, and inspirational space opera!

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Space cop Maxo Magnaveer, desperate for a major career boost, takes a wild left turn at Mercury to pursue a greedy pirate, setting himself onto a collision course with destiny!

In the year 2247, Detectant Maxo Magnaveer yearns for an opportunity to prove himself in the Cosmic Law Force so he can be promoted to squad captain. When a greedy privateer, Colonel Zaza D'Rump, brazenly hijacks a shipment of synthetic foods on its way to Mars with plans to starve the colony to death unless he is given control of Earth's shipping lanes, Maxo sees his opportunity to rise above, save the day, and finally move up in rank and prestige.

Fooled by those he thought were allies, Maxo stumbles on the slippery edge of failure more than once as he races to what could be a catastrophic battle above Jupiter near D'Rump's secret base, Porto Blago.

With his career and so many lives at stake, Maxo gains the help of old and new friends, and begins to realize his quest may not be about proving himself to anyone, but about discovering himself and rising to his true purpose in the universe.

First, however, he'll have to survive the showdown at Jupiter's edge...

by Brian Scott Pauls

This article introduces what I hope will be the first of many interviews with those who work in the science fiction field, and perhaps readers as well.

My inaugural guest is Charles Tyra, Publisher at Randolph Literary Press, which currently publishes Cosmic Horror Monthly, and will soon publish a new magazine, Goblins & Galaxies.

Click below to watch the interview, or continue reading for a transcript of our conversation I’ve edited for clarity and readability.

Brian Scott Pauls: You’ve described Cosmic Horror Monthly as a love letter to Weird Tales, one of the original fantastical pulp magazines. How do you define “weird fiction?” Newer readers who aren't steeped in the pulps may not know what that means and how to differentiate other types of science fiction and fantasy from weird fiction.

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Charles Tyra: With CHM, it did kind of start out as trying to pay tribute and homage to a magazine I loved growing up. And when it comes to weird fiction, you could probably ask ten publishers or editors, and they might all have a different answer. But for me, it's kind of like taking one of the sub genres like horror or science fiction or fantasy, and then you have something that's off with the world. And it's specifically unexplained. We just experience this distortion through the mind and the eyes of the main character.

Brian: The triad of weird fiction authors, to me at least, seems to be the “acronyms”: H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard. All three wrote—in addition to fantasy and horror—science fiction. Do you find in weird fiction a blending of genres that tend to be more distinct when they don't carry that label?

Charles: That's a good observation. They can be blended in all different ways as well as standing alone. And those three writers like had their own distinct style with doing that.

Clark Ashton Smith took weird fiction in the direction of fantasy, Lovecraft in the direction of cosmic horror, and Robert E. Howard in the direction of sword and sorcery.

Brian: Clark Ashton Smith has a small segment of his bibliography that is science fiction. But what do you think characterizes Clark Ashton Smith as a science fiction writer compared more modern writers?

Charles: That's a writer that I really enjoy, but I haven't read [all] his works, compared to like Lovecraft. So how he differentiates in terms of science fiction is hard to say.

Brian: Why don't you take the same question with Lovecraft? What makes a Lovecraft science fiction story different from an Isaac Asimov science fiction story?

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Charles: The real difference is the science fiction is not really at the forefront. It's definitely there. You have characters that are scientists and that are trying to discover things. And rather than being enlightened, like a lot of characters in Asimov stories, they find something, and they're horrified, and their lives changed forever in a bad way.

Brian: Do you have a favorite weird fiction science fiction story?

Charles: It's gonna kind of depend on what era we're talking about. One of my favorites that combines weird fiction and science fiction is “The Diamond Lens”, by Fitz-James O'Brien. That's a super old one.

Brian: But it's very good. James Gunn put it in one of his collections in The Road to Science Fiction. He called it a good candidate for the first modern science fiction story. In the 1860s1, I think, pre-Civil War.

Charles: Unfortunately, we didn't get more writing from him because of the Civil War.

Brian: There are a lot of science fiction writers where we could have enjoyed a lot more from them. But life got cut short, or got in the way.

Tell me about Goblins & Galaxies. You already have a successful magazine, Cosmic Horror Monthly. And you decided to start Goblins & Galaxies. It's going to combine three different sub genres.

Charles: It's going back to my my same love. For the older pulp magazines, Weird Tales was foundational for cosmic horror and sword and sorcery (about a hundred years ago.) This is me doing the same thing, applying the same treatment we did with CHM, to this other genre that I really love. But asking to take that pretty niche subgenre in new directions. Hopefully we can see it combined with dark fantasy, and also see sword and sorcery combined with science fiction. There are some rules with sword and sorcery, but I think the setting, while awesome when it's a high fantasy, medieval setting, I don't think that should be a hard rule.

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Brian: The 1970s was a heyday of sword and sorcery, but a lot of writers in the 60s and 70s—I'm thinking here, in particular, of Michael Moorcock—had no compunction about combining science and magic in a sword and sorcery tale. It gives those stories a feel, a vibe, that you don't get from a lot of modern fantasy.

If Cosmic Horror Monthly is reminiscent of Weird Tales, do you see Goblins & Galaxies as something in the same vein as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction?

Charles: I definitely hope to draw some inspiration there.

Brian: What kind of stories are you hoping to get? Are you already taking submissions?

Charles: The Kickstarter is still going for another week. On May 7th we'll open submissions for the first time.

Brian: On another interview you said--perhaps surprisingly, because this is not always the case with editors--you enjoy reading the slush pile. Do you read everything that gets submitted for one of your magazines?

Charles: Early on I definitely did read everything, but as time wore on and the responsibilities increased, I wasn't able to continue doing that. I still read as much as possible. That's one of the things I haven't grown tired of. Reading new stuff is just so exciting to me. I don't read every manuscript, but I try to read as much as possible—usually like half of the pile.

Brian: What kind of range do you see? Just in terms of writing ability for people that submit a magazine.

Charles: I think that it ebbs and flows with each open call. At this point I'm taking submissions four times a year, and our last couple of open calls the writing was really strong.

Brian: That's awesome. With platforms like Wattpad, for instance, I feel there's a real desire out there for people to write and be able to send it somewhere and get somebody to look at it. [It’s] encouraging that people are sending in to your magazines.

Well known science fiction editor, John W. Campbell, Jr., if he saw a story he wasn't going to accept, but he saw a spark of promise in the writer, he would write them back—sometimes voluminous feedback, “Here's all the things wrong with your story. You should fix these on your next story.” Do you do anything like that?

Charles: We try to respond to every one we can. Unfortunately, we're not able to respond to all the manuscripts that come in. But if we have a story, it’s solid, it's promising, it was enjoy[able] to read, but it's not quite there…We're talking about maybe thirty-five spots out of a slush pile that's got 700 manuscripts in it. So a lot of great stories maybe don't make it. We try to respond to those as well as we can.

Brian: A lot of new writers, in particular, would find it encouraging to know you do some of that. It can be demoralizing when you're sending in your manuscript—even though you no longer have to type it out, put it in an envelope, send it off. But even when you log into the portal and upload it, it's kind of like, “Am I ever gonna hear anything other than, hey—no, thanks.” I'm sure some people will take encouragement from [knowing] there's a better-than-zero chance [you’ll] respond.

You mentioned Kickstarter. Did you learn anything from your launch of Cosmic Horror Monthly that informed what you did with the launch of Goblins & Galaxies?

Charles: Oh, endless lessons. I have been doing Cosmic Horror Monthly for about five years, and I just jumped into that project, not knowing a whole lot about the specific processes and what all goes into it. I've built what I do as I go, and whenever we learn about something that works, now that's the thing that we do. So there's a lot of things I won't have to learn a second time. I'm excited about hitting the ground running with this magazine.

Brian: Does [Cosmic Horror Monthly] run advertising in addition to selling subscriptions?

Charles: I decided early on that the subscription magazine you receive as a paying reader will not have advertisements in it. We offer a free version of the magazine for anyone who wants to just see what it's like. Some issues of that magazine will have ads in it.

Brian: So people that subscribe to a print version of your magazine—there are no ads.

Charles: No ads.

Brian: Wow, and that one is a monthly. Is that right?

Charles: That one is monthly. Goblins & Galaxies is at least gonna start out as a quarterly magazine.

Brian: You've recently hired an editor for CHM, correct?

Charles: Yeah. About a year ago, Jolie Toomajan came on. She knows a lot about weird fiction, and it's been great working with her.

Brian: Has circulation been growing since its launch?

Charles: It's grown pretty steadily. I've kind of just been waiting to see it level off, and it hasn't quite yet.

Brian: Wow! Are some people incredulous when you tell them that in the twenty-first century people will subscribe to a fiction magazine?

Charles: It's an interesting trend that I'm not upset to see happening. You have the last twenty years of the digital revolution, and I think people are starting to want to go back to holding a book in their hands. Social media is not what it was. You see people valuing how little time they have with a screen. I'd rather hold a book rather than read it digitally. But of course there's nothing wrong with reading digital. It's good for the environment.

Brian: I'm a lifelong reader. I will read in any format except Braille, and that's only because I don't know it. Ebooks were a boon to me, because I had moved too many times, and I just got tired of continually moving more and more books. But but recently I've done some print reading because I wanted to become a better reviewer. I decided to get some print books and highlight them. Plus, I wanted books to put on my bookshelf for my TikTok. I wanted a lot of science fiction books back there. But it definitely has an appeal. I like to read myself to sleep. And that is a different experience, with a book and a lamp by the side of your bed, than it is holding a phone.

I still love reading on my phone. It's super convenient. And to be able to carry my whole library there, my phone in one hand. But I don't fault anyone who says I just want to read on paper media, and I commend you for making your magazines available in paper format.

Tell us a little bit about the Kickstarter if people want to get involved. It continues through what date?

Charles: It continues through May 5th.

Brian: Tell us about the tiers, and what people can sign up for if they want to support the project.

Charles: We have several tiers available. It's kind of similar to the Kickstarter I ran for Cosmic Horror Monthly a couple of years back. You can join at a digital tier and just get the upcoming digital releases of the four issues plus a bonus issue. There's also a print tier. That's the same thing, but you'll receive the the magazines by mail. In addition to that, you can get a tier that has those magazines, plus some merchandise, like a shirt and a mug with the Goblins & Galaxies logo. For the serious collectors—and maybe people who didn't know about CHM, because I think it's still a little obscure to some—we offer some packages with the full backlog of Cosmic Horror Monthly.

Brian: That sounds like a deal, especially if you're a collector. So to back you, people go to Kickstarter and pick their tier. Why don't you walk us through that, if there are some folks that have been hesitant to do a Kickstarter? Make it sound [less intimidating] for them.

Charles: Kickstarter is a unique way to support a project. You create a project, and you want to raise so much money to make the project happen. People can contribute, and in exchange for the contribution, they'll get rewards like we were just talking about. The main difference here is that you only get charged and receive the rewards if the campaign meets the goal. I'm glad to say that we've already met the goal. So anyone who decides to contribute in the next week, you're guaranteed to receive the magazine.

Brian: I saw an email today that your new stretch goal the campaign just hit allows you to double your rate to the writers. Are you at [the] level now where you're paying professional rates?

Charles: We've been trying to get to six cents [per word]. I think eight cents is required to be pro rate these days. We'll try to get to that, too. But we've been paying three cents at CHM for a long time. I was really hoping to debut Goblins & Galaxies at six cents. Because there's no magazine without the writers.

Brian: And for people again, who are thinking of writing and submitting and have their eye on the [Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association], their current membership requirements are based on a total amount you have earned. As I read them, they no longer just accept submissions [published] in a professional rate magazine. That makes it a bit easier, especially in this day and age, when there are so many different ways to monetize your writing. Not everything fits in that narrow niche that was so common for so long.

This has been a great interview. Thank you for making my first interview painless. I’d love to have you on again when you have something to share about how Goblins & Galaxies is going. Thank you, Charles, for joining us, and good luck on the rest of your Kickstarter campaign. I look forward to reading Issue Zero when it's ready to go.

Charles: Thanks so much, and I'd be honored to come back anytime.

You can back Goblins & Galaxies on Kickstarter until May 5.

Are you a fan of “weird science fiction?” What do you consider to be “weird fiction?” Who is your favorite weird fiction author? Your favorite weird science fiction story? Please comment below!'

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My latest novelette, “Fire From Heaven,” now appears in Boundary Shock Quarterly 29: First Contact.

In the shadows of an alien world, terror awaits. On the radiation-blasted planet Janus, a team of explorers descends into Abbadon—an ancient mountain facility hiding unimaginable secrets. As they navigate bizarre chambers filled with cryptic carvings, they unleash a nightmare. But the true horror lies not in the alien ruins, but in the chilling implications of the team’s discovery.

Fire From Heaven is the sequel to my previous novelette, “Nasty, Brutish, and Short.”

My novelette, An Illicit Mercy, is part of a new promotion in April: FREE Adventures in Sci-fi & Fantasy.

Over 150 stories, novels, samples and excerpts, available at no cost.

My latest novelette, “Fire From Heaven,” now appears in Boundary Shock Quarterly 29: First Contact.

In the shadows of an alien world, terror awaits. On the radiation-blasted planet Janus, a team of explorers descends into Abbadon—an ancient mountain facility hiding unimaginable secrets. As they navigate bizarre chambers filled with cryptic carvings, they unleash a nightmare. But the true horror lies not in the alien ruins, but in the chilling implications of the team’s discovery.

Fire From Heaven is the sequel to my previous novelette, “Nasty, Brutish, and Short.”

by Brian Scott Pauls

Writing a book, I’m finding, is all about getting the words out.

I’m grateful I continue making headway on Probability Amplitudes, my first collection of science fiction short stories. Since I last reported my progress in February, I’ve edged ahead from 43% in the “New Material Required” category, to 42%. While this represents only about 1600 of my 160,000 word goal for the pre-edited manuscript, they are 1600 words in the right direction. Like the tortoise who keeps moving, I’ll get there sooner or later.

In the meantime, I’m pleased to add the title of a new prospective story to the list I revealed last month.

“Guan Tayen and the Spirit of Quantum Chaos”

As the youngest member of a free trader’s crew, fifteen-year-old Tayen feels like the rest of her family doesn’t take her seriously. Her elder sister and brother treat her like she’s in the way, her dad doesn’t have time for her, and her mom thinks all she can do is take care of her baby brother. If only she had some way to prove she’s a grown-up, just as valuable as anyone else on the ship.

Disaster strikes when a mysterious influence wreaks havoc on the quantum network linking the worlds and vessels of Tayen’s star system. As ships go offline and governments teeter on the edge of collapse, can she succeed where everyone else has failed? Can she draw on the inspiration of her Objibwe and Chinese heritage to confront and defeat the destructive presence threatening to destroy them all?

This feels like it will be a fun story to write. I’m excited to see how it turns out!

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New Material Required: 67,463 words

First Draft: 85,123 words

Final Draft: 7414 words

TOTAL: 160,000

Questions about Probability Amplitudes? Please comment below!

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My novelette, An Illicit Mercy, is part of a new promotion in April: FREE Adventures in Sci-fi & Fantasy.

Over 150 stories, novels, samples and excerpts, available at no cost.

My latest novelette, “Fire From Heaven,” now appears in Boundary Shock Quarterly 29: First Contact.

In the shadows of an alien world, terror awaits. On the radiation-blasted planet Janus, a team of explorers descends into Abbadon—an ancient mountain facility hiding unimaginable secrets. As they navigate bizarre chambers filled with cryptic carvings, they unleash a nightmare. But the true horror lies not in the alien ruins, but in the chilling implications of the team’s discovery.

Fire From Heaven is the sequel to my previous novelette, “Nasty, Brutish, and Short.”

In a timely decision, the Audible Original version of George Orwell’s 1984, adapted by Joe White, has won the Audie Award for Audio Drama.

White possesses multiple stage credits, and previously wrote The Nox, a cli-fi audio drama also published by Audible.

Released last year, White’s adaptation of 1984 features a cast studded with voices listeners will recognize, including Andrew Garfield and Tom Hardy, as well as Emmy, Grammy, and Tony award-winning Cynthia Erivo. It holds the distinction of “…the most downloaded Audible Original of all time.”

The Audio Publishers Association presents the Audie Awards each year to honor “…achievement in spoken word, particularly audiobook narration and audio drama performance, published in the United States of America.”

Have you listened to Audible’s new dramatic presentation of 1984? Share below!

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My novelette, An Illicit Mercy, is part of a new promotion in March and April: Expect the Unexpected: Fantasy and Science Fiction with Unusual Plot Twists!

Over fifty short stories, novels, samples and excerpts, available at no cost.

Maddie is the NPC with attitude!

Buy a copy of Desert Runner by Dawn Chapman!

Plagued by old injuries that won't heal, she's enticed into accepting a deadly escort mission.

Of course, it's to cross the damned desert... and in the middle of Tromoal breeding season, no less. But the lure of enough cash to fix herself up and help out a close friend, too...? That's a siren's song she can't ignore.

Puatera Online is a harsh world, even for the people who have to live there.

Good thing Maddie is tougher than cured leather, because she may have just bitten off more than she can chew.

How is gravity related to the other three fundamental forces?

By Brian Scott Pauls with the help of ChatGPT 4o

The fundamental forces of nature, and how they interact, form the basic subject matter of physics. As a result, many science fiction novels and short stories consider the behavior of one or more of these forces in unusual situations.

The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov (1972)

This novel explores themes of scientific discovery and cross-dimensional physics. The story revolves around the development of a device called the electron pump, which transfers matter between our universe and a parallel one to provide an inexhaustible energy source. However, this transfer destabilizes the strong nuclear force in our universe, threatening to destroy the Sun.

Dragon’s Egg by Robert L. Forward (1980)

Forward’s book imagines a neutron star as the setting for an alien civilization. The novel follows the development of intelligent life called the Cheela, who evolve on the surface of the collapsed star, where the gravity is billions of times stronger than on Earth. Life is possible in this environment due to “nuclei bound by the strong force, rather than…by the electromagnetic force.”

Long Leap by Derek Künsken (2012)

First published in On Spec magazine, this story tackles the idea of a metal planet orbiting within the magnetic fields of a pulsar. “Tetracarbonyl base…life forms” inhabit the planet’s surface, and “everything carries an electric charge, making the magnetic fields function almost like cell membranes.”

The Problem of Gravity

Gravity is one of the four fundamental forces, alongside electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force. Yet, despite its pervasive influence on cosmic scales, gravity remains distinct from the other three, which are described by the Standard Model of particle physics. Understanding how gravity relates to these forces has been a longstanding scientific challenge.

The Standard Model and General Relativity

The Standard Model details the three non-gravitational forces in terms of quantum field theory. They are mediated by particles: photons for electromagnetism, W and Z bosons for the weak force, and gluons for the strong force. The forces operate within the framework of quantum mechanics, which governs the behavior of particles at atomic and subatomic scales.

Gravity, on the other hand, is described by Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. General relativity views gravity not as a force mediated by particles but as the curvature of spacetime caused by mass and energy. This classical framework successfully explains gravitational phenomena from planetary orbits to black holes but does not align with the quantum description of the other forces.

While the Standard Model has achieved remarkable success in describing particle interactions, it does not include gravity. Conversely, general relativity does not incorporate quantum mechanics. Bridging this divide requires a theory of quantum gravity, which remains elusive.

String Theory

String theory is one of the most prominent approaches to unifying gravity with the other fundamental forces. It posits that the basic building blocks of the universe are not point-like particles but one-dimensional strings vibrating at different frequencies. These vibrations determine the properties of particles, such as mass and charge.

A key feature of string theory is that it naturally incorporates a massless, spin-2 particle resembling the graviton, the hypothetical quantum mediator of gravity. It therefore offers a framework in which gravity can be described quantum mechanically.

Moreover, string theory is inherently compatible with the other forces described by the Standard Model. It requires additional dimensions of spacetime—typically 10 or 11—to function mathematically, which has led to predictions about hidden dimensions that could even explain dark matter.

However, string theory faces challenges. It has not yet produced testable predictions that distinguish it from other theories, and its reliance on higher dimensions has raised questions about its physical relevance. Despite these issues, it remains a leading candidate for a unified theory.

Loop Quantum Gravity

Loop quantum gravity (LQG) takes a different approach to integrating gravity with quantum mechanics. Instead of introducing new dimensions or particles, LQG applies quantum principles directly to the spacetime fabric described by general relativity. In LQG, spacetime is quantized, consisting of discrete units called "quantum loops."

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These loops form a network, or "spin network," that evolves over time. This quantization avoids cosmological singularities, such as those found in black holes and the Big Bang, and provides a framework for describing gravity at the Planck scale.

LQG has achieved some successes, such as resolving certain black hole singularities and predicting a "big bounce" scenario instead of a Big Bang singularity. However, it does not incorporate the other three forces described by the Standard Model, limiting its scope as a unification theory. Additionally, like string theory, LQG has yet to make definitive testable predictions.

Grand Unified Theories

Grand Unified Theories (GUTs) aim to unify electromagnetism, the weak force, and the strong force within a single framework. These theories propose that at high energy scales, such as those present in the early universe, these forces merge into a single force. Examples include SU(5) and SO(10) models, which describe particles and forces in terms of larger symmetry groups.

While GUTs do not include gravity, they are often considered a stepping stone toward a Theory of Everything that incorporates all four forces. One potential route is to embed GUTs within string theory, leveraging its capacity to include gravity. However, the energy scales at which GUTs operate are far beyond the reach of current experiments, making direct testing difficult.

Supersymmetry and Supergravity

Supersymmetry (SUSY) is a theoretical framework that extends the Standard Model by positing a symmetry between fermions (matter particles) and bosons (force carriers). Each particle has a superpartner with different spin properties. SUSY has been motivated by its ability to solve several theoretical issues, such as stabilizing the Higgs boson's mass.

When combined with gravity, supersymmetry leads to supergravity, a theory that extends general relativity by incorporating quantum fields. Supergravity can be seen as a low-energy limit of string theory and provides a link between quantum mechanics and gravity. However, like string theory, supersymmetry and supergravity have yet to find experimental confirmation.

Emergent Gravity

An alternative perspective suggests that gravity might not be a fundamental force but an emergent phenomenon. In this view, gravity arises from the collective behavior of more fundamental entities, much like temperature emerges from the motion of particles.

One prominent example is Erik Verlinde's entropic gravity, which derives gravity as an emergent force related to changes in entropy. This idea has sparked interest for its novel approach but remains speculative and requires further development to connect with quantum mechanics and the Standard Model.

Challenges and Future Directions

Unifying gravity with the other fundamental forces faces numerous challenges. Experimentally, the energy scales at which quantum gravitational effects become significant—the Planck scale—are far beyond the reach of current technology. This limits our ability to test theories like string theory or LQG.

Theoretically, the mathematical complexity of these frameworks and their reliance on assumptions, such as extra dimensions or supersymmetric particles, present significant hurdles. Moreover, any successful theory must reduce to both general relativity and the Standard Model in their respective domains of validity, a requirement that many proposals struggle to meet.

Recent advances in observational astronomy and experimental physics offer new avenues for testing these theories. For instance, gravitational wave observations, high-precision tests of general relativity, and searches for new particles at the Large Hadron Collider provide potential insights.

The quest to unify gravity with the other fundamental forces remains one of the most profound challenges in physics. Theories such as string theory, loop quantum gravity, and emergent gravity offer promising frameworks but face significant experimental and theoretical obstacles. Advances in technology and a deeper understanding of fundamental physics will be crucial in resolving this puzzle.

While a definitive answer remains elusive, the pursuit of unification has deepened our understanding of the universe, inspiring new ideas and pushing the boundaries of human knowledge. As we continue to explore the nature of reality, the integration of gravity with the other forces will remain a central goal in the quest for a Theory of Everything.

Story Concepts

Our ignorance of how gravity is related to the other three fundamental forces may frustrate scientists, but presents science fiction writers with great opportunities. The lack of answers opens up many possibilities to tell new and exciting stories, such as:

1. “The Fifth Bridge”

   After humanity develops a unified theory linking gravity with electromagnetism, a group of rogue scientists creates "Graviton Bridges," wormhole-like portals powered by the manipulation of gravitational waves and electromagnetic fields. These bridges allow instantaneous travel across vast distances. However, when the bridges begin to destabilize local spacetime, the team discovers that their creations are triggering quantum fluctuations in the fabric of reality, threatening the delicate balance of the Cosmos. The protagonists must uncover the deeper relationship between gravity and the other forces, revealing a hidden "fifth force" that governs universal coherence.

2. “The Strong Gravity Experiment”

   Set in a near-future particle accelerator lab, researchers experimenting with the unification of gravity and the strong nuclear force accidentally create micro black holes that mimic the conditions of the early universe. These black holes emit bursts of particles bound by both gravity and strong interactions, which defy known physical laws. The anomalies lead the team to discover that gravity is a "shadow force," influenced by higher-dimensional particles tied to the strong force. As the team races to harness this connection, they realize they’ve unlocked the key to stellar engineering. And if they go public, they’ll hand the world the ultimate weapon of mass destruction.

3. “Quantum Magnetism and the Gravitic Resonance”

   In a society powered by quantum technologies, researchers discover a way to combine gravity with the weak nuclear force by tuning into "gravitic resonance frequencies" that connect subatomic particles with spacetime itself. This breakthrough creates "quantum magnetic fields" that can manipulate planetary orbits or stabilize collapsing stars. However, the discovery attracts the attention of an alien civilization that uses gravitic resonance as the basis for their advanced technology. They see humanity’s experiments as reckless and demand the immediate cessation of all research—or they’ll demonstrate the catastrophic consequences of misaligning the forces. Humanity must negotiate with the aliens while navigating the moral and existential challenges of wielding such power.

We may discover answers to the questions posed above tomorrow or centuries from now. Either way, speculation about how the fundamental forces might interact provides fertile ground for the human imagination.

Do you have a favorite novel or short story where the relationships between the fundamental physical forces play an important role? Please share below!

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My latest novelette, “Fire From Heaven,” now appears in Boundary Shock Quarterly 29: First Contact.

In the shadows of an alien world, terror awaits. On the radiation-blasted planet Janus, a team of explorers descends into Abbadon—an ancient mountain facility hiding unimaginable secrets. As they navigate bizarre chambers filled with cryptic carvings, they unleash a nightmare. But the true horror lies not in the alien ruins, but in the chilling implications of the team’s discovery.

Fire From Heaven is the sequel to my previous novelette, “Nasty, Brutish, and Short.”

My novelette, An Illicit Mercy, is part of a new promotion in March and April: Expect the Unexpected: Fantasy and Science Fiction with Unusual Plot Twists!

Over fifty short stories, novels, samples and excerpts, available at no cost.

Science Fiction Space Opera

Get your FREE copy of Star Rider Emerges by Heidi Skarie!

Will a young woman survive when her village is destroyed by an alien space fleet?

Toemeka lives with her family in an idyllic mountain village on a distant planet. She’s aware of the war raging on her world, but the village elders believe it won’t touch them. They’re wrong.

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) will host the 60th Annual Nebula Awards Conference here in Kansas City, June 5-8.

This is the first Nebula Awards I’ve planned to attend. I’m looking forward to the panel discussions and, of course, the awards ceremony.

If you’re planning to be at the Nebulas this year, and want some fun ideas for what to do in KC, SFWA has a lot of good suggestions on their conference page (linked above.) Or just post a comment below and I’ll reach out to you with my own recommendations as someone who’s lived here for nearly thirty years.

Registration opens soon. I hope to see some of you there!

Are you coming to the Nebula Awards this year? Comment below!

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My latest novelette, “Fire From Heaven,” now appears in Boundary Shock Quarterly 29: First Contact.

In the shadows of an alien world, terror awaits. On the radiation-blasted planet Janus, a team of explorers descends into Abbadon—an ancient mountain facility hiding unimaginable secrets. As they navigate bizarre chambers filled with cryptic carvings, they unleash a nightmare. But the true horror lies not in the alien ruins, but in the chilling implications of the team’s discovery.

Fire From Heaven is the sequel to my previous novelette, “Nasty, Brutish, and Short.”

My novelette, An Illicit Mercy, is part of a new promotion in March: Up & Comers: Bringing You the Best in Speculative Fiction.

Over fifty short stories, novels, samples and excerpts, available at no cost.

Customer service is everything, no matter how abhorrent the customer.

Get your FREE copy of Exchange Policy by Adeena Mignogna!

You can deliver great service by knowing your product, maintaining a positive attitude, and responding quickly.

This is especially important when you're in the business of contributing to other people's families, and regardless of what you think of the customer. Even if that customer is Mrs. Vickers.

You have one month to vote for the best science fiction, fantasy, and horror published last year.

The Locus Awards are the People’s Choice Awards of the speculative fiction community. While members of Worldcon vote for the Hugos, and members of the Science Fiction Writers Association vote for the Nebulas, anyone can vote for the Locus Awards. All you need to do is complete the Locus Awards Poll.

The poll is pre-populated with selections from the current Locus Recommended Reading List, but you aren’t limited to those selections. You can write in your own choices for any category.

But the Locus Awards Poll closes April 15. So sign in and vote if you want the science fiction world to hear your voice!

Thoughts on the Locus Awards or this year’s Recommended Reading List? Comment below!

Leave a comment

My latest novelette, “Fire From Heaven,” now appears in Boundary Shock Quarterly 29: First Contact.

In the shadows of an alien world, terror awaits. On the radiation-blasted planet Janus, a team of explorers descends into Abbadon—an ancient mountain facility hiding unimaginable secrets. As they navigate bizarre chambers filled with cryptic carvings, they unleash a nightmare. But the true horror lies not in the alien ruins, but in the chilling implications of the team’s discovery.

Fire From Heaven is the sequel to my previous novelette, “Nasty, Brutish, and Short.”

My novelette, An Illicit Mercy, is part of a new promotion in March: Up & Comers: Bringing You the Best in Speculative Fiction.

Over fifty short stories, novels, samples and excerpts, available at no cost.

Wars make unlikely allies.

Get your FREE copy of Shadow Game by Caitlin Demaris McKenna!

When his ship is damaged, retired assassin Gau Shesharrim finds himself stranded on a hostile world. To repair his ship, he will have to sneak into a jungle spaceport crawling with Terrans and their scaly Urd allies.

An impossible task. Until help comes from an unexpected source.

Arkk just wants to evade the Urd hunting him. A chance encounter with Gau offers him temporary refuge, and something more: a way to get justice for his slaughtered paddock. But first they have to get off-planet.

Can Gau and Arkk work together to escape before their enemies catch up to them?

For over two years, I’ve posted occasional updates on the development of Probability Amplitudes, my upcoming collection. Many of these have included my progress in terms of word count, but I’ve never shared a list of stories which might appear.

See below for a summary of what Probability Amplitudes may offer.

”Chthonic Echoes”

Stranded on a harsh world, seeking shelter until help arrives, three castaways wrestle with mysteries that may be critical to their survival.

Originally published on Wattpad in August, 2019

“The Paths of Time”

She walked a world transformed by humanity, ever mindful of the acts and achievements of those who came before.

Originally published on Wattpad in August, 2019

“A Sea Like Glass”

Isna Dahal is ready to kick back and toast a job well done on her first break from the project in five years. When she's called in to investigate an unusual problem, however, she uncovers a danger that could threaten the entire Array. The celebration will have to wait.

Originally published on Wattpad in September, 2019

“Voices of Dominion”

The unexplained broadcast from a remote world was hauntingly beautiful...and stopped as abruptly as it had started. The “House of Wisdom” has traveled light years to find out why.

Originally published on Wattpad in January, 2020

“The Play of Light in the Present Moment”

Cutting-edge medical research offers Perla the possibility of a miracle--but does she want one?

Originally published on Wattpad in January, 2020

“Critical Impact Vulnerabilities”

She's a cop with a job to do--bring in Seattle's most notorious hacker with an offer too good to pass up!

Originally published on Wattpad in February, 2020

“The Trouble Run”

Li Jie Robinson thought it was just another haul through the Belt--but he didn't know how bad his day could get!

Originally published on Wattpad in June, 2021

“An Illicit Mercy”

Infants in the Martian outpost of Basin have been plagued with birth defects for years--until recently. Corporate has dispatched Siwela and her team to find out why. What she learns will have profound implications for her job--and for who she wants to be.

Originally published in “Boundary Shock Quarterly 12: Lawmen and Crimefighters”, Currently available for download with a free subscription to The Cosmic Codex

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“Long Night On the Endless City”

On the vast ring habitat Ouroboros, Jel and her synthetic companion Marcus search for Arja, the third member of their triad. This quest leads them to a cryptic technology cult with questionable motives. When they suffer a vicious attack, Marcus and Jel join forces with one of Ouroboros’ most renowned computer and robotics experts to get to the bottom of the mystery.

Originally published in “Boundary Shock Quarterly 26: Tomorrow’s Crimes.”

“Nasty, Brutish, and Short”

When the first expedition to the mysterious planet Janus takes a deadly turn, Lieutenant Carita Keahi must fight for survival against an alien ecosystem unlike anything humanity has ever encountered. As crew members fall victim to bizarre and lethal life forms, Keahi races against time to escape the dangers of this two-faced world.

Originally published in “Boundary Shock Quarterly 28: SF Horror.”

“Fire From Heaven”

In the shadows of an alien world, terror awaits. On the radiation-blasted planet Janus, a team of explorers descends into Abbadon—an ancient mountain facility hiding unimaginable secrets. As they navigate bizarre chambers filled with cryptic carvings, they unleash a nightmare. But the true horror lies not in the alien ruins, but in the chilling implications of the team’s discovery.

Originally published in “Boundary Shock Quarterly 29: First Contact.”

“All One, All Glorious!”

In a world where the embers of war never truly die, the totalitarian might of Tongyige Duniyaan tightens its grip on the last free nations. As brutal enforcers like Captain Xiang Gupta rise through the ranks with ruthless ambition, and rebels like Kahindo Varela fight for survival in a game where compromise is as deadly as defiance, the fate of the world teeters on a knife’s edge. Loyalties are tested, betrayals run deep, and every choice could ignite the final war. Will humanity be united under the iron will of the triumvirs, or will resistance spark a fire that consumes them all?

Currently unpublished

“Be Not Afraid”

A gripping, multi-generational saga spanning the untamed frontier, the void of space, and the wastes of an alien planet. Follow Frank, a hardened marshal navigating a dangerous hostage rescue on the rugged American frontier, Roger, a corporate magnate whose conscience pushes him to defy the might of the entire world, and Julie, a fearless pioneer carving out a future on the harsh surface of Mars. Will they shape their times—or be broken by them?

Currently unpublished

This list is provisional. Probability Amplitudes may include stories not mentioned here. Some which are mentioned may not make the final cut. I intend to modify many stories through rewriting and rigorous editing. Character names may change. New characters may appear. Existing characters may disappear. The goal behind all of this is to make these the best stories I can write at this time. So even if you’ve read some of them before, I’m working to make Probability Amplitudes a new experience for anyone who reads it.

Questions about the collection or the stories it may include? Please comment below!

Leave a comment

My latest novelette, “Fire From Heaven,” now appears in Boundary Shock Quarterly 29: First Contact.

In the shadows of an alien world, terror awaits. On the radiation-blasted planet Janus, a team of explorers descends into Abbadon—an ancient mountain facility hiding unimaginable secrets. As they navigate bizarre chambers filled with cryptic carvings, they unleash a nightmare. But the true horror lies not in the alien ruins, but in the chilling implications of the team’s discovery.

Fire From Heaven is the sequel to my previous novelette, “Nasty, Brutish, and Short.”

My novelette, An Illicit Mercy, is part of a new promotion in February: FREE Sci-Fi & Fantasy.

Nearly 200 short stories, novels, samples and excerpts, available at no cost.

In this adventure, the Associates are about to meet one of their deadliest foes yet when they receive odd radio messages.

Get your FREE copy of S-36: The Call Girl by Bonsart Bokel!

A comic based on the first short story in the Association of Ishtar series. Meet the villainess that started it all. S-36 chronicles the Association's encounters with an interdimensional assassin who has it out for them. It also includes a separate short story about the French Penal Legion and their Coffin Girls, facing an invasion by outsiders.

The Association of Ishtar takes place inside a Multiverse of Cosmic Horror and Steampunk adventure. Investigate the mysteries and explore strange new worlds.

According to an article posted to the Locus website on Tuesday, Steven Salpeter has organized investors to purchase the celebrated science fiction magazines Analog: Science Fiction and Fact, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, under the aegis of 1 Paragraph, Inc.

Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Locus describes Salpeter, the former president of Assemble Media, as “a big SF/F fan.” His LinkedIn profile indicates he left Assemble in January, and lists his current position as “‘Stealth’” at “Self-employed.” I guess the cat is out of the bag.

If it’s true Salpeter is a fan, I’m encouraged to see all three magazines under management by someone who enjoys the science fiction and fantasy genres. As soon as I read about this change, I pinged him on LinkedIn to congratulate him and ask if he would consider changing the name of Analog back to Astounding. As I said in my message, when Campbell renamed the magazine, the word "Analog" may have seemed intellectual and evocative, but to new generations, it just means "old.”

I’m looking forward to what new management can bring to these old publications!

Are you a former or current reader of any or all of these magazines? What do you think of this change? Please comment below!

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My latest novelette, “Fire From Heaven,” now appears in Boundary Shock Quarterly 29: First Contact.

In the shadows of an alien world, terror awaits. On the radiation-blasted planet Janus, a team of explorers descends into Abbadon—an ancient mountain facility hiding unimaginable secrets. As they navigate bizarre chambers filled with cryptic carvings, they unleash a nightmare. But the true horror lies not in the alien ruins, but in the chilling implications of the team’s discovery.

Fire From Heaven is the sequel to my previous novelette, “Nasty, Brutish, and Short.”

This month, I’m reading Ryka Aoki’s Otherwise Award-winning novel Light from Uncommon Stars. I’m sharing my thoughts on Club Codex, where any Cosmic Codex subscriber can follow along, comment, or ask questions.

From this week’s post:

“This is an exquisite story about the struggles of a trans youth, about music, about love in the face of many obstacles, and about a Faustian bargain. But I'm not sure it needed to be a science fiction story. The sf part of it is, I'm sorry to say. the weakest element.”

Click below to participate:

Discussion Thread

My novelette, An Illicit Mercy, is part of a new promotion in February: FREE Sci-Fi & Fantasy.

Nearly 200 short stories, novels, samples and excerpts, available at no cost.

When your only option is a man who can't commit, what is Plan B?

Get your FREE copy of Time of Commitment by Kate Kyle!

Greg ignored the doubt tugging at the pit of his stomach. The target was a poor choice, but if he wanted to get Rutger onto that ship, this was their only chance.

So, his plan had to work. It was as perfect as he could make it. Step by step. Memorized. Practiced.

Greg would accomplish his mission, because only success could earn him release from active duties and allow him to finally retire, back to a simpler life. He was getting too old for this. Too tired. Too cynical about the missions that brought more self-importance for the Brotherhood than progress to humanity.

So, doubts aside. Time of commitment. GO.

In July, Critical Mass by Daniel Suarez won the Prometheus Award for the best novel of libertarian science fiction published during the previous year. Critical Mass is the second book in Suarez’s Delta-V series.

A Prometheus Award winner in 2015 as well, Suarez previously worked as a “...senior systems analyst for Fortune 1000 companies.” He’s the author of multiple “…techno-thrillers and science fiction novels on topics ranging from cyber war, autonomous robotic weapons, human agency, genetic editing, and private space exploration.”

Penguin Random House describes Critical Mass as follows:

When unforeseen circumstances during an innovative—and unsanctioned—commercial asteroid-mining mission leave two crew members stranded, those who make it back must engineer a rescue, all while navigating a shifting web of global political alliances and renewed Cold War tensions. With Earth governments consumed by the ravages of climate change and unable to take the risks necessary to make rapid progress in space, the crew must build their own nextgen spacecraft capable of mounting a rescue in time for the asteroid’s next swing by Earth.

In the process they’ll need to establish the first spin-gravity station in deep space, the first orbiting solar power satellite and refinery, and historic infrastructure on the moon’s surface—all of which could alleviate a deepening ecological, political, and economic crisis back on Earth, and prove that space-based industry is not only profitable, but possibly humanity’s best hope for a livable, peaceful future.

Have you read Critical Mass, or the first book in Suarez’s trilogy, Delta-V? Comment with your thoughts below!

Leave a comment

My latest novelette, “Fire From Heaven,” now appears in Boundary Shock Quarterly 29: First Contact.

In the shadows of an alien world, terror awaits. On the radiation-blasted planet Janus, a team of explorers descends into Abbadon—an ancient mountain facility hiding unimaginable secrets. As they navigate bizarre chambers filled with cryptic carvings, they unleash a nightmare. But the true horror lies not in the alien ruins, but in the chilling implications of the team’s discovery.

Fire From Heaven is the sequel to my previous novelette, “Nasty, Brutish, and Short.”

This month, I’m reading Ryka Aoki’s Otherwise Award-winning novel Light from Uncommon Stars. I’m sharing my thoughts on Club Codex, where any Cosmic Codex subscriber can follow along, comment, or ask questions.

From this week’s post:

“So far I have mixed feelings about this book. I'm intrigued by the Faustian bargain, but unsure where it's going. There seems to be a skillfully crafted love story in here, but at the moment it's vying with quirky aliens for my attention. The mix of demons with aliens seems a bit awkward.”

Click below to participate:

Discussion Thread

My novelette, An Illicit Mercy, is part of a new promotion in February: FREE Sci-Fi & Fantasy.

Nearly 200 short stories, novels, samples and excerpts, available at no cost.

She's an Artificial Intelligence Containment operative, monitoring AI for signs of sentience.

Get your FREE copy of The Badge by Sheri Singerling!

Sonja is an Artificial Intelligence Containment (AIC) operative, or a badge in hacker slang. As an operative, Sonja is tasked with finding and evaluating AI that may be sentient. If they are, her mission is simple—shut their system down. The world is already dealing with containing one rogue AI. As the AIC sees it, they can ill afford for others to follow suit. Sonja agrees. It's why she's a willing cog in the corporate machine and has devoted her life to serving the AIC. But nipping sentience in the bud can feel an awful lot like murder. Can Sonja push away the ethical quandaries of her work and do what needs to be done?

Last year was a bit of a roller coaster as I brought Probability Amplitudes, my first collection, closer to completion.

In September, I reported 43% of the required word count remained to be written.

Then, in November, I took a few steps back, editing out more than 17,000 words of my story “Fire From Heaven.” Those words were, to use a technical phrase, “not good.” Striking them increased my outstanding percentage to 54%

Well, I’m back, baby! After writing over 17,000 words of an as-yet unfinished novella, my outstanding percentage is once again 43%.

One-third mark, here I come!

Current status: 57% of the material for Probability Amplitudes is in “First Draft” or “Final Draft” status.

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New Material Required: 68,656 words

First Draft: 83,930 words

Final Draft: 7414 words

TOTAL: 160,000 words

Questions? Please share in the comments!

Leave a comment

My latest novelette, “Fire From Heaven,” now appears in Boundary Shock Quarterly 29: First Contact.

In the shadows of an alien world, terror awaits. On the radiation-blasted planet Janus, a team of explorers descends into Abbadon—an ancient mountain facility hiding unimaginable secrets. As they navigate bizarre chambers filled with cryptic carvings, they unleash a nightmare. But the true horror lies not in the alien ruins, but in the chilling implications of the team’s discovery.

Fire From Heaven is the sequel to my previous novelette, “Nasty, Brutish, and Short.”

My novelette, An Illicit Mercy, is part of a new promotion in January and February: Moral Dilemmas in Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Over 40 short stories, novels, samples and excerpts, available at no cost.

A marine's duty is to fight. Her curse is to remember.

Get your FREE copy of The Blade Within by Dylan McFadyen

Commander Sorăna Mirra has spent years leading a hand-picked team of marine special operators. Together they've taken the fight to humanity's oldest foe, the vicious Kyrans, defeating them time and again—time and again, knowing they’ll get no credit for their victories.

When an audacious Kyran raid strikes deep into human territory, Mirra and her team are thrust into the heart of hostile space to retaliate. It's business as usual—until a shocking discovery in the enemy compound calls the true purpose of their mission into question, and dredges up painful memories of the Great War.

Now, Mirra must battle not only the enemy, but her own buried regrets as she and her team fight for survival, retribution, and the truth. But in war, truth—like memory—can be a dangerous thing.

After more than seventy years, the Science Fiction Book Club (SFBC) is shutting down.

I first learned of the SFBC through Parade Magazine, delivered to my home each Sunday morning as an insert in the Wichita Eagle-Beacon newspaper. I don’t recall if the Science Fiction Book Club advertisements were full-page spreads or large additional inserts slipped into Parade, but the organization must have spent lavishly on them. Each listed many different sf books, including small cover images and brief descriptions. Before the Internet, this was one way (along with library displays and talking with friends) I stayed abreast of the latest science fiction books.

During my high school years, the father of one of my best friends (and a staff member with the school district) was a member of the SFBC. One day he brought a large box of science fiction books to school and told me he’d already read them. I was welcome to borrow any I wanted to read for myself. That’s how I first encountered C. J. Cherryh’s 1981 Hugo Award-winning novel Downbelow Station, part of her Company Wars series and set in her Alliance-Union universe.

Nelson Doubleday, Inc., an associate entity of Doubleday, created the Science Fiction Book Club in 1953. At the time, the phrase “book club” referred to “…a subscription-based relationship between purchasers – who normally agree to buy a certain number of titles a year – and the organization which publishes or distributes these titles, usually at a very significant discount from the retail price in bookshops.”

According to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, the SFBC, particularly under Nelson Doubleday, “…was in its day a major force in sf publishing” releasing “…its own editions (including special hardcover editions of paperback originals)” and “…omnibuses of various sorts…especially for its members.”

I own a two volume SFBC omnibus edition of E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman series, and can attest to the quality of their production.

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The SFBC is no longer what it once was. Following the sale of Doubleday to Bertelsmann in 1986, it became “…less active as an original publisher.” When I recently visited the site for the first time in years, I found myself dismayed to discover so many contemporary thrillers and romance novels promoted alongside science fiction. The site struck me as merely an extension of the SFBC’s current parent organization, the Book of the Month Club. Although I didn’t know the SFBC would soon shut down, this seemed like a bad sign. The appeal of science fiction, fantasy, and other speculative fiction is narrow and focused. Anything going by the name of the "'Science Fiction' Book Club" should be focused as well. The original creators of the SFBC understood this. It’s too bad the corporations that acquired the fruits of their labors didn’t.

What memories do you have of the Science Fiction Book Club? Please share in the comments!

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In the second half of January, I’m reading Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Memory, the third book in his Hugo-Award winning Children of Time trilogy. I’m sharing my thoughts on Club Codex, where any Cosmic Codex subscriber can follow along, comment, or ask questions.

From this week’s post:

“There should be a difference between telling the story of characters caught in a loop and forcing the readers to go through that same loop themselves. Regrettably, in "Children of Memory," Tchaikovsky doesn't find this difference. .”

Click below to participate:

Discussion Thread

My latest novelette, “Fire From Heaven,” now appears in Boundary Shock Quarterly 29: First Contact.

In the shadows of an alien world, terror awaits. On the radiation-blasted planet Janus, a team of explorers descends into Abbadon—an ancient mountain facility hiding unimaginable secrets. As they navigate bizarre chambers filled with cryptic carvings, they unleash a nightmare. But the true horror lies not in the alien ruins, but in the chilling implications of the team’s discovery.

Fire From Heaven is the sequel to my previous novelette, “Nasty, Brutish, and Short.”

My novelette, An Illicit Mercy, is part of a new promotion in January and February: Moral Dilemmas in Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Over 40 short stories, novels, samples and excerpts, available at no cost.

"When the skies turned red and the stars fell, humanity's fight for survival began."

Get your FREE copy of Defending Earth by C. S. Hawk.

When a horde of slimy extraterrestrial creatures arrives on Earth with an insatiable appetite for destruction, three unlikely heroes step up to defend our planet.

As they navigate the dangerous terrain of a world under siege, they face countless obstacles and setbacks but never lose their sense of humor. After all, when the fate of humanity is on the line, there's nothing like a good joke to keep your spirits up.

Will they succeed in repelling the alien invasion and saving the planet? Only time will tell.

by Brian Scott Pauls

In his review of Algis Budrys’ 1960 Hugo-nominated novel Rogue Moon, James Blish calls its characters “as various a pack of gravely deteriorated psychotics as has ever graced an asylum.”1

Ned Beauman might have writtenVenomous Lumpsucker with this statement pinned to the wall above his monitor. He tells the story of broken, deranged people living in a broken, deranged world. Climate change is breaking their world and driving it mad. The characters’ collective guilt for this existential crime is doing the same to them.

Venomous Lumpsucker would be depressing if Beauman wasn’t so deft with his satire. The fate of the world he’s created makes me want to cry, because it’s the fate of the world we’re creating right now. But the human foibles Beauman throws into sharp relief are so familiar, I ended up wanting to laugh—at myself and everyone else.

The novel tells the story of Mark Halyard, a near-future business executive with a problem. He’s about to get caught short-selling “extinction credits” he doesn’t own.

Extinction credits are financial instruments like carbon credits. Each gives the owner the legal right to drive one species into extinction, and they’re traded on an exchange. Halyard steals his company’s credits and sells them on the exchange. He plans to buy them back when the price drops, so he can replace them before his company realizes they’re gone.

Halyard’s plan revolves around a coming regulatory change that will cause the price of extinction credits to crash. He sees selling short as a can't-lose proposition. But when the unthinkable happens, the value of the credits instead skyrockets. Halyard is left holding the bag for the now exorbitant price of the credits he stole.

He hopes the company won’t need their credits—meaning they won’t cause the extinction of any species—before he can devise some way out of his predicament. But this hope is dashed when Halyard learns automated undersea mining equipment owned by the company has plowed through the last known habitat of an endangered species of fish—the venomous lumpsucker. Now the company will want to redeem their credits to pay for their mistake. Unless Halyard can find a surviving population of lumpsuckers to stave of his own financial and legal Armageddon.

This leads him to Karin Resaint, perhaps the world’s foremost living expert on venomous lumpsuckers. Together, they set off across the globe in search of survivors—she to save them, and he to save himself. Along they way, I learned about what a world facing an “extinction crisis” has done to them both, how it has driven each of them crazy in their own way. And they meet a host of characters who are just as crazy, or crazier. These include a former government minister from a country known as the “Hermit Kingdom” (which isn’t where you may think) and an entrepreneur on a city floating in the ocean who has dedicated a project to churning out clouds of flies and setting them free.

Venomous Lumpsucker is a sad, humorous, and philosophical book about evolution, ecological peril, extinction, animal consciousness, capitalism, and moral culpability. It’s filled with thoughtful observations from flawed characters, such as when Halyard sums up the worldwide destruction of the “biobanks” which were supposed to save the data profiles of extinct species so humanity could someday resurrect them.

“We had pawned those animals intending to buy them back one day when things were a bit less stretched, and now the pawn shop had burned to the ground with all the animals inside.”2

Or Resaint’s cynical take on the same topic.

“‘…I never really gave a shit about the biobanks. I never believed we were going to bring any of those species back, except maybe a few of the cuddly ones. It was always just an empty ritual.’”3

Beauman is at his best when he’s talking about both the brutality and the beauty of evolution.

On the one hand, it’s savage and without pity, “red in tooth and claw,” in Tennyson’s words.

“Evolution was a monstrous maker, a blind headless thing inching along in no particular direction, the whole disaster fueled by spilled blood and wasted effort, Amazon rivers of both.”4

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On the other hand, evolution is an ingenious inventor, devising solutions, through time and chance (and plenty of death), to puzzles science has yet to master.

“…every feature of every animal is a solution to a technical problem. Examining an animal mind is like examining a missile guidance system or weather-predicting computer designed in some old totalitarian state: it’s primitive, janky, hobbled by extraneous constraints, and yet at the same time it is the most resourceful and inventive technology you have ever seen, still more advanced in certain esoteric ways than anything that has come since.”5

The core question with which Beauman and his characters struggle isn’t the fate of humanity (that’s pretty much considered a lost cause, at least to those who give it any thought at all) but whether or not the destruction of non-sentient species is a tragedy in itself, regardless of the effect it may have on humans.

One side of the argument says that if an extinction event doesn’t impact a thinking organism, it can’t be wrong.

Beauman beautifully captures the other side in a thought experiment Resaint uses to challenge Halyard.

“…imagine a planet in some remote galaxy—a lush, seething, glittering planet covered with stratospheric waterfalls, great land-sponges bouncing through the valleys, corals budding in perfect niveous hexagons, humming lichens glued to pink crystals, prismatic jellyfish breaching from the rivers, titanic lilies relying on tornadoes to spread their pollen—a planet full of complex, interconnected life but devoid of consciousness. ‘Are you telling me that, if an asteroid smashed into this planet and reduced every inch of its surface to dust, nothing would be lost? Because nobody in particular would miss it?“6

If Beauman makes a mistake inVenomous Lumpsucker, it’s by going in too many directions at once, trying to tackle too many big themes, introducing too many side characters, each with their own quirks and psychoses. At times, I would have welcomed less breadth and a sharper focus on Resaint and Halyard as they pursue their own off-kilter goals.

But this flaw didn’t keep me from enjoying the novel.Venomous Lumpsucker is a great read for anyone looking for a dark satire of the near future, a melancholy look at the unintended consequences of human nature. It’s the best recent science fiction book I read last year.

Questions or comments? Please share your thoughts!

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In the second half of January, I’m reading Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Memory, the third book in his Hugo-Award winning Children of Time trilogy. I’m sharing my thoughts on Club Codex, where any Cosmic Codex subscriber can follow along, comment, or ask questions.

From this week’s post:

“In this series, Tchaikovsky is establishing himself as a master of the non-linear narrative in science fiction.”

Click below to participate:

Discussion Thread

My latest novelette, “Fire From Heaven,” now appears in Boundary Shock Quarterly 29: First Contact.

In the shadows of an alien world, terror awaits. On the radiation-blasted planet Janus, a team of explorers descends into Abbadon—an ancient mountain facility hiding unimaginable secrets. As they navigate bizarre chambers filled with cryptic carvings, they unleash a nightmare. But the true horror lies not in the alien ruins, but in the chilling implications of the team’s discovery.

Fire From Heaven is the sequel to my previous novelette, “Nasty, Brutish, and Short.”

My novelette, An Illicit Mercy, is part of a new promotion in January: Strong Women.

80 short stories and novels, available at no cost.

Get your FREE copy of The Midnight Society - Alien Awakening by Orion Blake!

Abducted. Enhanced. Determined. Get ready for a mind-bending sci-fi thriller that's out of this world!

In a sleepy Montana town, five twenty-something friends—Tyler, Maya, Olivia, Alex, and Connor—have chased paranormal thrills since childhood as The Midnight Society. But one fateful night changes everything.

Under a canopy of strange lights, they stumble upon a mysterious alien craft. Abducted and experimented on by the tyrannical alien overlord Sultah, the friends find themselves imbued with extraordinary powers, revealing untapped potential and igniting a thrilling transformation.

As friendships are tested and loyalties waver under Sultah's ruthless manipulation, the stakes soar to galactic heights. United, they must confront not just a dark force threatening their town, but a sinister plot that could enslave the entire human race.

Will they rise as heroes, or will Sultah's cruel machinations divide and destroy them?

In 1949, science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein wrote an article entitled “Where To?” for Galaxy Magazine. In his essay, Heinlein made predictions in 19 areas for the year 2000, ranging from space travel within the solar system to the survival of the human species.

In his 1980 collection Expanded Universe, Heinlein claims to have updated the article for 1965, although I am unable to find where he published this version. He revised his predictions again in 1979 for Expanded Universe, including the text from both 1949 and 1965 for comparison. This gives us three sets of predictions, each set dated about fifteen years after its immediate predecessor.

Sadly, Heinlein passed away in 1988. I remember hearing the news from Paul Harvey coming out of my dad’s transistor radio as I washed one of our family vehicles in front of the chicken house. Heinlein’s passing deprived the world of theoretical updates which he might have written for 1995, 2010, and this year, 2025.

Given the recent advent of the Large Language Models we erroneously call “artificial intelligence,” with their remarkable ability to synthesize new text based on existing works, I decided to try an experiment. What would an LLM produce if asked to generate 2025 updates based on Heinlein's various versions of “Where to?,” in an authorial style similar to his, using current data?

I put the question to ChatGPT v.4o. You may read the result below.

While these “opinions” are a fair facsimile of something Heinlein might have written were he still alive, in the way he might have stated them, they are subject to all the current failings of LLMs, including hallucinations. No, algae, cultured meat, and insect protein are not yet global food staples, and we don’t now pay for goods in energy credits or carbon offsets. We can’t buy a ticket to get from New York to Tokyo in less than two hours, at any price. But the model’s assessment of the current state of space travel, today’s dangers of military conflict, and the potential fate of our species, seem on-target.

Consider this a work of near future speculative fiction (as Heinlein thought of his own predictions,) written by a machine—itself an extraordinary proposition by the standards of a few years ago.

For the best experience, I recommend first reading the original article, retitled “Pandora’s Box", in Expanded Universe (Volume II, if you get the two volume version.) This will give you the context to understand what the model is doing.

CAUTION: These are not the opinions of Robert A. Heinlein. He is no longer living. They aren’t the opinions of any person. They are the product of a computer algorithm.

To preserve the integrity of the experiment, I’ve not altered the text below, other than to add subject headings (which Heinlein’s original article lacked) and to remove predictions for 2040 and 2065 from one topic where the model strayed outside its given parameters.

No, this isn’t Heinlein. But it’s good to hear an echo of the old man’s voice.

The “Heinlein” Experiment

by ChatGPT v4o, edited by Brian S. Pauls

1. Interplanetary Travel

   The year is 2025, and we are standing at the crossroads of what could either be a renaissance or the slow decline of humanity's ambitions in space. Fifty-five years have passed since we put men on the Moon, yet the promises of lunar colonies, Martian outposts, and solar-powered satellites remain tantalizingly close but frustratingly unrealized. The reasons for this are as depressingly familiar as they are avoidable—bureaucracy, shortsighted leadership, and a societal apathy born from decades of distraction. The United States, once the standard-bearer of space exploration, has become content to play the role of a hesitant investor, leaving the heavy lifting to private companies and foreign nations.
   
   And yet, hope persists. The private sector, led by bold visionaries with deep pockets, has rekindled the fire that government programs have let smolder. Reusable rockets are no longer the stuff of science fiction but the linchpins of a burgeoning new economy. SpaceX has made trips to low-Earth orbit routine, while NASA focuses its constrained budget on Mars—and only Mars. The Artemis program, a bright spot in an otherwise cloudy horizon, has established a small but functional base on the lunar south pole, its primary achievement being the extraction of water ice—a step as vital to space colonization as the first stone ax was to civilization.
   
   Internationally, the picture is more dynamic. China has surpassed expectations, completing a modular space station and laying the groundwork for its own lunar ambitions. India, fueled by its success with cost-effective missions, has joined the ranks of nations targeting Mars and the Moon, while Europe dithers, unsure whether to follow or fade into irrelevance. Japan, ever cautious, focuses on robotic exploration and asteroid mining, both of which hold the promise of vast returns for minimal risk.
   
   But the real wild card has been the emergence of a new, unorthodox player: consortia of multinational corporations. Freed from the constraints of national pride and driven by profit, these coalitions have begun serious work on orbital manufacturing and even the first tentative steps toward a Lagrange-point colony. If wealth is indeed the engine of progress, then these enterprises may succeed where nations have faltered.
   
   Yet the fundamental question remains: have we lost our nerve? The public remains distracted by earthly concerns—climate change, political polarization, and the endless churn of the digital age. The will to invest in something as intangible as "the future" is in short supply. And so, the risk of stagnation looms large, as it did in 1980 and 2000.
   
   But the potential is there, as clear and unyielding as ever. By 2030, we could have cities on the Moon, fusion-powered ships on their way to the outer planets, and an economy that stretches beyond Earth’s orbit. The energy crisis could be solved with solar power satellites, and the ecological strain on Earth eased with off-world manufacturing. The solutions to our greatest problems are waiting out there, among the stars.

   Will we reach for them? That is the question of 2025.
   
   

2. Sex Relations

   The trend continues, though it has morphed into new shapes that even the boldest prophet of 1980 might not have fully anticipated. The technological revolutions of the 21st century—particularly the pervasive reach of digital networks and artificial intelligence—have transformed the way humans organize relationships, families, and the care of children. The extended family, in some form, has indeed re-emerged, though not always through blood ties or proximity. Rather, it thrives as “intentional communities,” “chosen families,” and digitally-mediated “networks of care.” These are now common, legally recognized, and often centered around shared values, interests, or mutual goals.
   
   One key driver of this shift has been the rise of the “social AI assistant,” ubiquitous companions that provide emotional support, mediate conflicts, and coordinate the logistical nightmares of modern life. These digital tools, often embedded in homes, devices, and even our bodies, act as facilitators of human connection. They may remind us of Heinlein’s “waldoes,” in how they extend human capabilities—though here, it’s not physical labor they enhance, but emotional and relational bonds.

   Marriage and parenthood are no longer confined to pairs or to traditional heterosexual unions. Polyamorous households have grown in number, bolstered by a legal framework that recognizes multilateral partnerships. Contracts between multiple adults, detailing the care of children, financial obligations, and inheritance rights, are not merely tolerated—they are increasingly celebrated as viable alternatives to the collapsing 20th-century nuclear family model.
   
   Yet, as predicted, all this change has brought conflict. The “oldsters” (a term that now includes Millennials) lament what they see as the erosion of tradition, while younger generations, augmented by neuroadaptive technologies and cultural fluidity, see nothing remarkable about a world where “family” is defined by intention rather than circumstance.

   There is also backlash from those who feel left behind by the rapid pace of change. The stark inequalities of the early 21st century—exacerbated by climate disruption and economic upheaval—have created a divide between those who can afford to live in supportive, high-tech communities and those who struggle alone in the crumbling remnants of the nuclear family era. This inequality underscores that while the extended family has returned in new forms, it remains unevenly distributed.
   
   One of the most profound implications of these changes is in the realm of child-rearing. The responsibility of parenting has become communal in many cases, with artificial intelligence and human networks acting as “third parents.” These systems provide not just material support, but also education, healthcare, and emotional stability, ensuring that no child is left behind—at least in the more advanced societies. Whether this will lead to a society of more emotionally secure, adaptable individuals or one marked by dependence on technology remains to be seen.
   
   The essential truth remains: the family, as a biological and social construct, is in flux. The yearning for connection, security, and belonging has not vanished—it has adapted to the tools and challenges of the age. Whether the structures we are building now will prove stable enough to endure the next great upheaval is a question for 2050. But for today, the revolution continues.
   
   

3. Military attack from space

   The most important military fact of this century remains that there is no reliable way to repel an attack from outer space. Our technological prowess has grown in leaps and bounds, true—hypersonic missiles, advanced orbital defense platforms, and AI-driven targeting systems make the news daily. Yet, as in 1950, the fundamental truth of the "gravity well" disadvantage remains. Gravity is a ruthless accountant, and the nation—or, increasingly, the corporate entity—that controls the high ground of the Moon controls the Earth.

   The recent proliferation of orbital weapon systems and autonomous drones operating in cislunar space only underscores the old axiom. Yes, we've made impressive strides—directed-energy weapons capable of vaporizing small debris, and kinetic-kill vehicles capable of intercepting incoming threats. However, nothing has changed the fact that a well-placed mass dropped from the Moon would be unstoppable. No amount of orbital lasers or kinetic defenses will negate physics: a Moon-launched projectile will still hit Earth at meteoric speeds, and no shield yet devised can handle such raw kinetic energy.

   China's permanent lunar base, the Artemis corporations’ private mining colonies, and the joint ventures between Europe and India have all hinted at "civilian" operations on the Moon, but I trust my earlier assertion: whoever has the will to weaponize this high ground will wield control over Earth's destiny. The same is true for the asteroid belt, now being eyed for mining operations. A small asteroid nudged Earthward would dwarf any terrestrial weapon ever devised.

   The ultimate irony of 2025 is that humanity now possesses the means to annihilate itself from the stars before we’ve learned to live in peace on our own planet. "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress," indeed—but perhaps the greater truth is that it remains an unforgiving overlord to those unable or unwilling to seize its potential.
   
   

4. Pre-Emptive War

   The world of 2025 presents a mixed verdict on the predictions and trends of earlier decades. The long period of uneasy peace predicted in 1950 and reevaluated in 1980 has held remarkably well, albeit fraying at the edges in ways that would be both surprising and unsettling to the generations that survived the Cuban Missile Crisis or the height of the Cold War.

   Preventive or pre-emptive war has not disappeared as a concept; rather, it has evolved. Today's great powers do not march into open fields under banners; they orchestrate conflicts through proxies, economic pressure, and cyber offensives. The modern battleground is as much the server farm as the contested border. While no all-out World War III has occurred, conflicts large and small bubble constantly—intensely localized yet global in their ramifications. No city is under the immediate shadow of hydrogen bombs, but in the ether of networks, invisible weapons are always primed.
   
   NATO, once a bedrock of collective defense, survives—if only in name—its cohesion strained by shifting alliances, economic dependencies, and the fickleness of democratic mandates. Commitments to allies are more tenuous than ever, with the post-Vietnam tendency to prioritize strategic convenience over credibility now institutionalized. Whether in Eastern Europe, the South China Sea, or the shifting sands of the Middle East, allies increasingly hedge their bets, knowing the United States might falter in its guarantees.
   
   Technology, the great equalizer and disruptor, both fuels and tempers the flames of conflict. Artificial intelligence and autonomous systems dominate military planning, introducing both precision and unpredictability. It is now possible to cripple a nation without ever crossing its borders—a scenario unthinkable in 1950 but the reality of 2025. Yet this same technology holds hope. Diplomacy in this era is no longer confined to human actors. Machines that calculate probabilities with cold logic offer mediations that humans often accept, knowing full well their own limitations.
   
   The survival of humanity remains a question of balance. It was once said that it was more dangerous to live in London during the plague years than in a city threatened by H-bombs. Perhaps now it is more accurate to say it is more dangerous to exist in a world where conflicts, so omnipresent yet diffuse, tempt nations to gamble, believing no single throw of the dice will end the game. For now, civilization holds—narrowly, precariously, and perhaps only through luck.
   
   

5. Housing

   I remain sprawled in the mud, and now it’s hardened around me. The housing situation hasn’t improved in any fundamental way, though we’ve added a fresh layer of irony to it: we live in a world where we can print organs in laboratories and fabricate entire rocket engines with 3D printers, but our homes are still slapped together with sticks and drywall like it’s 1950. Even the so-called "innovations"—tiny homes, container conversions, and prefab units—are mere tweaks to the ancient art of making shelters inefficiently, propped up by zoning laws and regulatory tangleweed that protect inefficiency like sacred relics.
   
   Costs, of course, have soared into orbit, keeping pace with inflation and a speculative real estate market that treats homes less like places to live and more like poker chips. Remember that $100,000 house? Adjusted for modern gold prices (or cryptocurrency, if you prefer your despair in a digital format), even a shack will now set you back a sum so obscene that it would’ve once funded a moonshot. Meanwhile, billions of people remain unhoused or barely housed, but the industry churns on, as ossified as ever.
   
   The technology for truly modern housing exists—self-sufficient homes that generate their own power, recycle water, and are built for centuries rather than decades—but deploying it at scale is still a pipe dream. Not because we can’t, but because those who profit from the status quo would rather we didn’t. The "powers that be" have only grown more entrenched, their bureaucracy bolstered by AI-driven algorithms designed to calculate precisely how many hoops an ordinary person must jump through before they give up altogether.
   
   The housing crisis today is less about technological inability and more about political and economic inertia. I underestimated, once again, the ferocity with which humans cling to their inefficiencies. If I were foolish enough to revise this prediction for 2050, I might say we’ll all be living in floating, modular arcologies suspended above the Earth’s surface. But knowing us, we’ll still be stapling together overpriced wooden boxes and congratulating ourselves on having "reinvented" the wheel.
   
   

6. Global Population

   The controlling parameter now appears to be water. Oil remains crucial, but we’ve managed to stumble into renewable energy sources—not by foresight but by necessity. However, water is another matter. Industrial farming, population growth, and climate shifts have stressed the supply beyond what seemed imaginable in 1950. Desalination and water management technologies are improving, but they're running a race against time. Hunger in the United States? Unlikely, barring a collapse of infrastructure or governance. Globally? A different story. Where famine was once a result of logistics or conflict, it’s now a question of whether the water and soil will cooperate at all. One wonders if anyone in Washington—or anywhere—really grasps the stakes.
   
   

7. Art

   The pendulum swings, as it always does, though perhaps not as swiftly as one might wish. “Modern art,” once the exclusive domain of charlatans and the truly deranged, has begun its slow retreat into the shadows of historical oddity, where it can be safely cataloged and forgotten. A few brave souls have revived craftsmanship, skill, and meaning—ideas once derided as quaint. Yet, the majority still flounder in the mire of conceptual nonsense, defended by convoluted explanations no one understands. Commercial art, however, now flourishes as the true heir of human creativity, blending advanced technology with timeless principles of beauty and form. Artists in this field are today’s Michelangelos, though they sculpt in pixels and code rather than marble. The world remains mad, of course, but perhaps there is hope for art yet.
   
   

8. Psychology

   The prediction has largely matured. Freud is now firmly viewed as a historical figure of interest rather than a guide to current practice. Operational psychology has blossomed into a spectrum of highly specialized disciplines, each grounded in robust empirical methods and aided by the computational revolution. Advances in neuroscience and AI have yielded powerful tools to map and simulate brain activity, leading to breakthroughs in understanding memory, learning, and even consciousness.
   

   Yet, the fundamental mystery—how the arrangement of matter leads to self-awareness—remains unresolved, though some tantalizing theories, such as Integrated Information Theory and predictive coding frameworks, offer glimpses of a solution. Whether these theories represent genuine progress or merely the latest fads is still debated. Psychology in 2025 is a precise, data-driven science in many respects, but it is also deeply humbled by the sheer complexity of the human mind.
   
   

9. Medicine

   Cancer treatment has seen remarkable strides with precision medicine, where therapies are tailored to an individual’s genetic profile. Immunotherapy, once an experimental concept, is now a mainstream tool for harnessing the body’s own immune system to combat cancer with fewer side effects than traditional chemotherapy. The "common cold," meanwhile, remains as pesky as ever, though less so thanks to antiviral advancements and improved vaccines targeting specific respiratory viruses like RSV. However, it still thrives on its sheer mutational adaptability—mocking our ingenuity by staying one step ahead.
   
   Tooth decay has largely been relegated to history books in industrialized nations. Advances in bioengineered enamel and self-healing dental materials have made cavities an occasional annoyance rather than a chronic issue. But "regeneration," in the Heinlein sense, is where the truly dazzling breakthroughs are occurring. We now routinely grow replacement organs in vitro from stem cells, sparing patients the trauma of donor waiting lists. Early experimental treatments have enabled partial regeneration of limbs, though true "grow a new leg" technology remains tantalizingly out of reach.
   
   The mapping of the human genome, completed decades ago, has evolved into practical editing via CRISPR-like techniques. The once-distant idea of "tailoring" human beings has moved from science fiction into a cautious scientific reality. Embryonic gene editing for the prevention of heritable diseases is now permissible in some countries under stringent ethical safeguards. Yet the "designer baby"—tailored for intelligence, athleticism, or beauty—remains an ethical minefield. Perhaps this is for the best; as Heinlein once posited, are we yet wise enough to rearchitect humanity? If our current experiments in geopolitics and technology are any measure, the jury remains out.
   
   One lesson seems to endure across the decades: every question we answer spawns a dozen new problems, each more intricate than the last. We’re solving puzzles faster, yes, but the cosmos continues to remind us that we're playing a very long game—and it plays to win.
   
   

10. Space Exploration

    Humanity has made remarkable strides, but reality has forced some adjustments to my earlier predictions. The starship to Alpha Centauri is not under construction—not yet—but the foundations are laid in a way I could not have anticipated. Instead of massive steel hulls and constant-boost drives, we are exploring the solar system with fleets of artificial intelligences, autonomous drones, and other marvels that were purest fantasy a few decades ago. The Artemis program has returned humans to the Moon, and plans to establish a permanent lunar outpost are well underway. Mars, meanwhile, is no longer just a red dot in our night sky but a focal point of human ambition, with colonies and research stations slowly taking root.
    
    Yet, we are still bound by the great limitation of physics: energy. Fusion power, touted for decades as “just around the corner,” still flickers like a candle in the distance, bright enough to chase but elusive as ever. The faster-than-light dream has not materialized, and we remain Earthbound creatures who crawl across the solar system rather than soaring to the stars. My once-optimistic timeline for FTL travel now feels like one of my early scribbled stories—a piece of science fiction rather than science.
    
    That said, let me tell you why I remain cautiously hopeful. The recent advances in constant-boost propulsion have brought us closer to routine interplanetary travel. Small, efficient nuclear-electric thrusters are being tested, and a crewed mission to the asteroid belt is no longer a pipe dream but a scheduled milestone for 2035. A trip to Mars with the kind of constant boost I imagined decades ago might still be out of reach, but we are learning how to refine and miniaturize technology in ways I didn’t foresee. Imagine an ion-powered ship, accelerating at 0.01 gee over weeks or months. It won't get you there in 30 days, but it's progress.
    
    One unexpected twist: humanity’s focus has turned outward in ways I couldn’t have guessed. The James Webb Space Telescope (an instrument of nearly magical precision) has shown us exoplanets that teem with potential. From here, our ambitions have stretched further than Alpha Centauri to Proxima Centauri B and TRAPPIST-1’s planetary siblings. Here lies the frontier—not just exploration, but discovery of worlds that might hold life or, at least, the promise of it.
    
    As for Pluto—bless Clyde Tombaugh—it has been relegated to a “dwarf planet,” yet it fascinates us more than ever. The New Horizons mission, once just a dream, revealed a world of towering ice mountains and a heart-shaped plain of frozen nitrogen. A poetic twist: Pluto, once the lonely outcast at the edge of our system, has become a symbol of exploration itself—a reminder that even the smallest, coldest objects can hold wonders.
    
    In hindsight, my predictions were neither wrong nor right. They were simply a reflection of the time, bold in imagination but blind to the messy, circuitous path that progress takes. The Solar System is not yet humanity’s backyard, but it feels closer every day. As I look to the next fifty years, I’ll hedge my bets with one safe prediction: we’ll go farther, not faster—but we will go. And we will keep going.
    
    

11. Telecommunications

    By now, the telephone—and let’s be honest, calling it a "telephone" feels quaint—has become an all-in-one device, so seamlessly integrated into daily life that it’s hardly thought about. Carried on your wrist, embedded in your glasses, or even woven into your clothing, this communicator is more than a link for sound and vision; it’s a portal to every human knowledge repository, an entertainment hub, and a personal assistant more capable than I dared dream in 1950. Holovision calls are old news, replaced by immersive augmented reality that can conjure up a lifelike projection of your caller standing right in your living room—or, if you prefer, on a pristine Hawaiian beach, without their ever leaving Omaha.
    Arthur C. Clarke’s prophecy of holovision reducing personal contact has proven about half-right. Yes, we’re more connected remotely than ever before, but if anything, the ease of virtual presence has made us hungrier for real-world interaction. Business conferences now feature both augmented and physical gatherings, with AR avatars rubbing elbows with flesh-and-blood attendees. The Saturnalia lives on, turbocharged by technology—but don’t worry, the boss still pays for it.
    
    Yet, these new gadgets come with their costs. They’re so integrated into our lives that they sometimes feel like extensions of ourselves. Privacy? Only if you pay a premium for it—and even then, you’re never quite sure. As with every tool we humans invent, these devices solve problems while creating new ones. But isn’t that just the monkey folk way?
    
    

12. Mars

    As of this writing, the verdict on intelligent life on Mars remains definitive: there isn’t any. At least, not the kind of intelligent life we can converse with—or trade witty insults about the weather. Our robot emissaries—more sophisticated than those clunky 1976 landers—have rolled, dug, and flown over much of Mars’ surface, confirming it’s a barren wasteland. But they’ve also found something extraordinary: tantalizing traces that life might have existed there billions of years ago. Fossilized microbes, maybe. If so, they were neither the stuff of Earthman’s imagination nor the sort to build cities, much less write epic poetry. Still, such evidence supports the notion that life could be ubiquitous, even if intelligent life is rare enough to make us seem cosmically lonely.
    
    What about my old hobbyhorse, Life-as-we-don’t-know-it? Well, if it exists, it’s eluded every trick in our scientific bag so far. But I’m not ready to withdraw my chips from that particular game. You see, we’re still just scratching the surface—literally. Mars’ subsurface, with its potential for geothermal warmth and liquid water, could yet hold surprises. Maybe something akin to Earth’s extremophiles, those hardy microbes that thrive in boiling springs or radioactive waste, is lurking below. I’ll keep my bet on life being persistent, even if it’s not inclined to evolve into Martian princesses or spaceship-building geniuses.
    
    And as for terraforming Mars, that old pipe dream has evolved into hard science. Discussions now revolve around CO₂ importation, artificial magnetospheres, and genetically engineered algae. But let me say this plainly: terraforming remains a Sisyphean task, one best suited to a species that has solved its own planetary problems first. Right now, Earth’s oceans are rising faster than our Martian ambitions.
    
    Still, the land rush I predicted is quietly underway—only it’s not homesteaders in covered wagons; it’s private corporations and consortia of nation-states staking claims for resources, prestige, and footholds on the Red Planet. What no one predicted was how much of this land rush would happen virtually. Space enthusiasts buy Martian “plots” online (a scam, if you ask me), while actual scientists argue over legal frameworks for off-world mineral rights. And yes, if Japan—or SpaceX or China—decides to set up customs at the gates to their Martian colony, you’d better have your visa fees ready. Don’t be surprised if you’re charged a premium for a window seat on the trip back.
    
    In summary, Mars remains a mystery—but not the romantic kind I once dreamed of. It’s not Barsoom; it’s a stubborn, lifeless rock that nonetheless holds our fascination. If intelligent life is there, it’s likely us, slogging across the regolith, still wondering why we came in the first place.
    
    

13. Travel

    A thousand miles an hour is still commonplace, though not exactly at the prices I once imagined. Those suborbital hops that were a gleam in our eyes back in 1950? They've come true—New York to Tokyo in under two hours, if you can afford the fare. But the cost is no longer measured in "cents" of any kind. In 1950, I scaled by the dollar; in 1965, I hinted at the barter hamburger; by 1980, I was using troy ounces of gold. Now? It's all about energy credits, carbon offsets, and digital tokens pegged to who-knows-what. A "cheap" ride will still cost you enough to remind you that luxury has its price.
    
    As for the hundred-dollar hamburger I foresaw? That turned out to be an optimistic estimate. The $1000 hamburger arrived with lab-grown meat and vertical farming, and though it's more common than you'd think, it's not exactly abundant. Still, as long as humanity remains ingenious, there's always something edible at hand—if you're willing to trade your credits, your data, or maybe a bit of your privacy.
    
    Evacuated subways? Ah, they're finally here. Hyperloop-like systems crisscross the continents, though not as universally as one might hope. Financing them took more than stabilized currency; it required reimagining what "money" even means. When economies teetered on the brink, it wasn't governments that saved them—it was distributed networks and self-organizing markets. Trust became the new currency, though we've yet to fully decide what that means.
    
    And inflation? It's not that we've conquered it; we've just learned to live with it, like a chronic condition. You might pay for your ticket in credits backed by solar gigawatts or tokens tied to a rare earth metal you’ve never heard of. And gold? Still valuable, but mostly as a hedge for those who don’t trust the algorithms running the world.
    
    So where are we? Still riding at a thousand miles an hour, still chasing the future, but with price tags that only make sense if you squint—or if you’ve given up entirely on understanding them. The dream of speed is alive, but its cost, as always, is measured in more than dollars or ounces of gold.
    
    

14. Physics

    The major objective of applied physics remains to control gravity, but we are no closer to that goal than we were in 1980. Gravity remains as elusive as ever—understood in principle, as per Einstein, but frustratingly resistant to direct manipulation. Yet, physicists persist, with quantum gravity theories ranging from the credible to the fantastical, including string theory, loop quantum gravity, and others that strain the limits of experimental verification. Somewhere in this tangle, the key to gravity control might lurk. Perhaps it’s waiting for the right combination of human ingenuity and computational power. Or perhaps it’s laughing at us from dimensions we cannot yet perceive.
    
    Physics in 2025 is, if anything, even more anarchic than in 1980. The Standard Model, once the proud pinnacle of particle physics, now seems like an incomplete puzzle with too many mismatched pieces. The Higgs boson was celebrated as the capstone when its existence was confirmed in 2012, but the gaps in our understanding of dark matter, dark energy, and quantum gravity remain gaping. Dark matter—comprising about 27% of the universe—is still maddeningly invisible, and dark energy—around 68%—remains a mathematical placeholder for whatever force is flinging galaxies apart faster than ever. We’re left with just 5% of the universe that we actually understand. Talk about humbling.
    
    Meanwhile, particle physicists are drowning in “excesses.” Every few months, some new anomaly—an unexpected blip in the data from CERN, Fermilab, or elsewhere—promises to shatter the Standard Model. These anomalies spawn theories faster than they can be falsified, creating an intellectual Wild West of speculative physics. Super-symmetry? Dead and buried, according to some. Revived and reinterpreted, according to others. New particles beyond the Standard Model? It depends on whom you ask—and whether the data holds up to scrutiny next year.
    
    Quarks, for all their charm (and spin, and color), remain confined to their “bags,” just as Dr. Kenneth Johnson predicted decades ago. The dream of isolating a single quark has been thoroughly abandoned, but the deeper nature of confinement remains a mystery. Theoretical physicists now speak of "emergence" with reverence, hinting that the phenomena we observe in the quantum world may not have simple building blocks at all. Instead, reality itself may arise from some deeper, stranger principle—one that defies intuition altogether. This is not an age for the faint of heart.
    
    And then there’s quantum computing, the wildcard in this unfolding drama. What was a hypothetical curiosity in 1980 is now a rapidly advancing field, with machines capable of solving problems that would stymie classical computers for millennia. These devices, with their entangled qubits and spooky action at a distance, are already revealing glimpses of quantum dynamics too complex for human minds to fathom. Some physicists whisper that a sufficiently advanced quantum computer might uncover truths about gravity or the fundamental nature of the universe that no experiment ever could. Others fear such machines might simply drown us in data, deepening the confusion.
    
    As for cosmology, the scale of the universe continues to grow—not just in physical size but in conceptual complexity. The multiverse hypothesis, once the domain of speculative fiction, is now taken seriously in certain corners of academia. Inflationary models of the universe suggest that our cosmos might be just one bubble in an infinite, ever-expanding foam of realities. If true, it’s an exhilarating and terrifying thought: the laws of physics as we know them may not be universal but merely local conditions in our particular patch of existence.
    
    So here we are, in the Golden Age of physics—or perhaps its Age of Babel. Theories abound, data pours in, and our models grow ever more intricate. Control of gravity remains a distant hope, tantalizingly out of reach. And the galaxy? It’s still there, waiting, but the odds of reaching it feel no better—or worse—than they did 75 years ago. If the past is any guide, the future will bring breakthroughs that no one today can predict, accompanied by questions we have not yet thought to ask.
    
    For now, I recommend patience—and perhaps a fresh reading of The Hunting of the Snark. Reality may turn out to be even stranger than a boojum.
    
    

15. Global Politics

    We will not achieve a true “World State” within any foreseeable future. However, I stand by my conviction that centralized, collectivist ideologies, whether they call themselves Communist, Marxist, or any other banner, cannot long endure. They collapse under the weight of their own internal contradictions and their inability to reconcile human nature with rigid ideology.
    
    In 1950, I believed Communism would vanish from the planet. By 1965, I reiterated my stance. In 1980, I hedged slightly, observing the vast swaths of the globe painted red—or claiming to be. Yet here we are, in 2025, and the ideological empires that once seemed monolithic have fractured, morphed, and in many cases, outright dissolved.
    
    Marx's utopia does not and will not fit human beings. The state, under any collectivist doctrine, will never “wither away.” Human beings are too messy, too competitive, too curious, too ambitious. Those qualities are both our blessing and our curse—they make us resistant to tyranny but also prone to creating new ones.
    
    Today, the world is no longer carved into two stark ideologies, as it was during the Cold War. Instead, we face a different kind of fragmentation: global corporations behaving like sovereign states; decentralized digital currencies challenging the very concept of centralized economies; and artificial intelligence operating beyond the grasp of any single government. Ironically, the future doesn't look like the monolithic nightmares Orwell or Marx envisioned—it looks chaotic, multipolar, and constantly shifting.
    
    The optimistic part of me sees this chaos as a kind of freedom—perhaps the only freedom humanity can manage. The pessimist in me wonders if this endless fragmentation will doom us to conflict without end. Either way, one thing is clear: humanity is not built for utopia, but we endure. If anything, our stubborn refusal to conform to any singular ideology is proof of that.
    
    So, to borrow my own phrase from decades ago: I stand flatly behind the first sentence of that prediction. The second part, about Communism vanishing, I can finally say was accurate in the broad strokes. But as I look at the endless variety of political, economic, and technological experiments we’ve embraced, I realize that the future will not belong to any single system. It will belong to human nature—flawed, glorious, and endlessly unpredictable.
    
    

16. U.S. Federalism

    The erosion of state lines is now all but complete—not through constitutional amendment, but by the creeping dominion of digital centralization and federal standardization. The United States, in function if not in form, has become a single, homogenized entity with a veneer of local autonomy. State governments remain as historical relics, useful for ceremony or minor administration, but true power resides in the labyrinthine structures of federal agencies and global corporations, which increasingly operate without geographic anchor. Elections are nationwide spectacles, influenced more by algorithms than by geography, and the concept of state-based identity feels as quaint as horse-drawn carriages. A citizen today can live entirely online, their physical location irrelevant, as long as they can connect to the network. It seems that mobility, once feared as a threat to stability, has instead dissolved boundaries altogether.
    
    

17. Air Travel

    The prediction stands, but let me reframe it for our times: the giant radar net has evolved into a sprawling, global network of satellite constellations, AI-driven algorithms, and automated control centers. It's not just continent-wide anymore—it's planetary. And while it may sound like science fiction, it’s real. The skies are managed by systems like NexGen+ and EuroSky, their electronic “brains” capable of choreographing millions of flights annually with remarkable precision. Yet, the human element remains, not as the primary decision-maker but as a vigilant overseer, ready to intervene when the machine hiccups. Murphy's Law remains undefeated.
    
    Of course, this is no utopia. The system works beautifully for commercial aviation, but small, private planes have been nudged into their own digital ghettos—secondary networks and air corridors deemed “safe” but far less convenient. And drones—don’t get me started on drones! They’re everywhere now, swarming like mechanical gnats in low-altitude airspace, complicating life for pilots and controllers alike.
    
    Why has it taken so long to get here? The same reasons I grumbled about decades ago: cost, bureaucracy, and our own stubborn refusal to let go of outdated methods until forced by catastrophe. It took a handful of near-disasters, a couple of tragic collisions, and a sustained lobbying effort by tech giants (not airlines, mind you) to push this system into full implementation.
    
    As for me, I still fly—though with mixed feelings. On one hand, I marvel at the precision of a landing so smooth it feels like a magician’s trick. On the other, I lament the dwindling romance of aviation. It’s all too sanitized now, too predictable. No pilot’s flair, no margin for human creativity. We traded spontaneity for safety. A good deal, yes—but one that leaves an old romantic like me feeling a bit wistful.
    
    If you’re wondering about alternatives, well, commercial flight still beats the pants off riding a Hyperloop (claustrophobia!), autonomous electric buses (ugh—those things corner like a brick on wheels), or trusting your life to a self-driving car on a freeway jammed with vehicles that still, inexplicably, include humans behind the wheel. For longer distances, flying remains king, even if the crown is worn a bit askew.
    
    And to the engineers still fine-tuning this system, I say: good work, but don’t stop. You’ve tamed the skies—for now. But remember, even the most sophisticated machine is just a moment away from reminding us that perfection is unattainable. Stay humble. Stay alert.
    
    

18. Global Food Supply

    Algae, lab-cultured meat, and insect protein have become staples of the global diet, addressing sustainability and resource scarcity. Beef is now a rare indulgence, heavily taxed for its environmental impact, and traditional lamb and mutton farming are nearly extinct. Synthetic proteins, bioengineered to mimic taste and texture, dominate both high-end cuisine and everyday meals. Hunger remains a global issue—less a matter of supply than of distribution and political will.
    
    

19. Civilizational and Human Survival

    Mankind will not destroy itself, nor will “Civilization” meet its end, despite the doomsayers who now wield AI models and climate forecasts instead of pulp fiction. I stand by the principle that humanity's capacity for survival exceeds its knack for self-destruction. There will be crises—economic collapses, resource struggles, cyber wars, and yes, possibly localized use of weapons of mass destruction. But the all-consuming global apocalypse beloved by dystopian storytellers will remain a myth.
    
    Why? Because the strongest powers of our age—the United States, China, and the European Union—alongside influential rising players like India and Brazil, have far too much at stake to risk annihilation. These nations are locked in a tense but symbiotic competition that no one dares upset completely. Despite what the news cycle tells you, the leaders of these powers—however misguided or despotic—are not foolish enough to light the world on fire. They have learned, as their predecessors did, that mutual destruction is bad for business.
    
    And if a rogue state or fringe actor—say North Korea, a breakaway Russian faction, or a militant network—tries to escalate things, they’ll be met with something stronger than bombs: unified global deterrence. In the age of instantaneous surveillance and interconnected systems, a nuclear launch would be tracked, intercepted, and responded to before it left the atmosphere. Even the most unstable governments know this. They might rattle the saber for headlines, but they understand that a single misstep means erasure.
    
    What has changed since 1950? The actors have evolved, and so have the stakes. The split in Communist International has been replaced by fractures between ideological factions within nations. AI, climate disruption, and technological inequality have replaced the Red Menace as existential threats. But the outcome remains the same: those who control the levers of power know that cooperation—however grudging—beats extinction.
    
    Mankind is stubborn, resourceful, and maddeningly reckless. But we are also, for better or worse, addicted to survival. That hasn’t changed, and it won’t—not in 2025 or the decades to come.

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I’’ve completed Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Ruin, the second book in his Hugo-Award winning Children of Time trilogy. I’m sharing my thoughts on Club Codex, where any Cosmic Codex subscriber can follow along, comment, or ask questions.

From this week’s post:

“Even Avrana Kern, a cardboard villain in the first book, becomes a sympathetic character here.

“And the major threat introduced in the second half of the novel goes from being genuinely frightening to being a deep and fascinating study in truly alien intelligence.”

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My latest novelette, “Fire From Heaven,” now appears in Boundary Shock Quarterly 29: First Contact.

In the shadows of an alien world, terror awaits. On the radiation-blasted planet Janus, a team of explorers descends into Abbadon—an ancient mountain facility hiding unimaginable secrets. As they navigate bizarre chambers filled with cryptic carvings, they unleash a nightmare. But the true horror lies not in the alien ruins, but in the chilling implications of the team’s discovery.

Fire From Heaven is the sequel to my previous novelette, “Nasty, Brutish, and Short.”