My novelette, An Illicit Mercy, is part of a new promotion this year: 2026 All-Year Giveaway.

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If we do not, sometimes Fate does.

Get your copy of Fractured Souls by Mriana Williams

Roman’s gone AWOL so long that he is now a serious whiskey-loving deserter of Citadel, yearning for Diana Drea.

Now that she has joined Citadel, he’s taken over chasing down her little sister, Rhianna, when she runs off, because now she runs past Ianna’s atmosphere and into territory she knows nothing about.

Roman hopes to get into Diana’s good graces after hurting her when he left without telling her anything. He has some serious problems to overcome before he can compete with Rhett for her again. It may take years, if not life, which leaves Rhett, his exact double, to claim her as all his, possibly for life.

His problems are so serious, even seventeen-year-old Rhianna, who tells her older sister almost everything, knows. Can he help himself and Rhianna too after she gets herself into some serious traumatic trouble? Can Diana’s mind overrule her broken heart to finally choose between two exactly identical men once and for all or will fate decide for her forever?

by Brian Scott Pauls

Children of Memory is the weakest entry in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s original Children of Time trilogy.1 Tor published this third volume in the U.K. in 2022 and Orbit did so in the United States the next year.2 The trilogy won the Hugo Award for Best Series in 2023—a win Tchaikovsky has declined to claim because of irregularities in the administration of Hugo nominations that year.3

The Colony

The book’s premise resembles certain elements found in Children of Time.4 The ark ship Enkidu, under Captain Heorest Holt, carries its sleeping cargo to a terraformed world.5 In the first book, the terraforming project went wrong, producing a civilization of spiders. Here it goes wrong, producing a world that can support human life, but just barely. The planet Imir is marginal from the start, with soil chemistry not quite lethal to Earth life, but “wrong enough to have all sorts of long-term impacts.”6 The ocean provides no recourse: “There was also a too-big moon, which had its own moon, making the tides a wild riot. This meant settling anywhere near the sea would be a fatal mistake; so much for maritime aquaculture.”7

Generations later, Holt’s descendants live in the farming town of Landfall, where equipment is failing and harvests are getting worse.8 A militia keeps order on behalf of “the older Landfall families,” resulting in a community ruled by status and force: “The punching around here only goes one way, and that’s down.”9

The fragile ecology the terraformers created is the root of the colony’s decline: “A collapse of the resource web leads to a collapse of infrastructure which leads to the collapse of everything else.”10 Here, “everything else” includes civil society. Landfall’s ruling class needs enemies to maintain order, and when it can’t find real enemies, it invents them. Tchaikovsky captures this stark reality with phrases such as “You defined us by not being them”11 and “…find someone more them than you are, and put the boot in.”12

So far, so good. But Landfall is a dull world filled with dull characters, and while Tchaikovsky is skillful enough to convey that dullness convincingly, he’s unsuccessful in writing an interesting story about an uninteresting place.

Holt is a decent man worn to a nub, the parts of him “that wanted to scream and beat at the walls … locked away for now.”13 Liff, the main character for much of the story,14 is a clever girl15 who doesn’t receive enough opportunities to make her cleverness count. The townsfolk are a mob in waiting, and little else. The novel forces readers to spend far too much time in their company, waiting for an unsatisfying payoff.

It’s not helpful that Tchaikovsky resorts to a plot device that may still make headlines, but which creators have overused in the past quarter-century. Long-time science fiction readers are likely to see it coming, and a twist that the reader anticipates is no longer a twist.

The Corvids

Just as the strongest elements of Tchaikovsky’s excellent Children of Ruin were the octopuses and the Nodan organism,16 here they’re the Corvids and the Interlocutor.

The Corvids are Gethli and Gothi, a pair of crow-like birds traveling with the strangers,17 and they are the most humorous and most unsettling characters in the book. Each Corvid on its own is a clever animal. Together they’re…more. Their species works in bonded pairs, one partner storing and recalling information while the other analyzes and invents.18 Tchaikovsky depicts this partnership as a single mind emerging from the interaction of two entities. The birds trade “a quickfire rattle of ratchety consonants that serve as thoughts from one side of their shared brain to the other”19—as Tchaikovsky puts it, “In the space between each pair, a mind.”20

As with the spiders and octopuses, he knows what he’s talking about. Real corvids have become a major subject of research on animal intelligence, and researchers have documented tool manufacture, caching strategies that take account of which other birds were watching, and apparent planning for the future—abilities that developed independently of the great apes’ and amount to a case of convergent evolution.21 Like many real corvids, those in Children of Memory pair for life. Tchaikovsky turns the pair bond into the species’ seat of cognition.22

What makes the Corvids memorable, though, is how they characterize their own cognition. They insist, cheerfully and at length, that they are not conscious. “We’re a mistake, basically,” one of them explains; “…what we really are is a problem-solving engine.”23 Regarding those who credit them with inner lives, they remark: “They are very keen to convince themselves that we’re aware, but the evidence suggests otherwise.” They also share a disturbing observation: “Don’t tell the Humans, but it’s just the same for them.”24

This is John Searle’s Chinese Room—a system producing outward signs of understanding, while its structure would seem to make this doubtful.25 This doesn’t bother the Corvids. They find the whole question beside the point: “Neither of us need to understand anything. The understanding sits between us.”26 Real neuroscience may indicate otherwise. In 2020, researchers at the University of Tübingen recorded neurons in crows, the activity of which tracked whether a bird reported seeing a faint stimulus—a candidate neural signature of sensory consciousness in a bird.27 This might impress readers, but perhaps not the Corvids.

The Interlocutor

The second strength is Miranda, part of a scout ship crew sent to investigate a signal from Imir. She’s the expedition’s Interlocutor—a Nodan organism, the memory-absorbing parasite from Children of Ruin, now inhabiting a laboratory-grown human body.28

Miranda’s scenes in Landfall carry empathy the colonists lack for one another.29 In a fascinating reversal, the inhuman “monster” from the second novel has become the most humane character in the third.

Sentience

While Tchaikovsky’s major theme in Children of Ruin was intelligence, here it’s sentience, but in a loose sense. As often occurs in science fiction, he conflates sentience (the ability to feel sensations such as pleasure and pain), sapience (the ability to solve complex intellectual problems), and consciousness (subjective experience—the sense of being oneself).30 The second novel asked whether minds with different evolutionary histories could understand one another. Children of Memory asks how anyone—spider, octopus, crow, human, or organism—can know that there is someone home at all.

Tchaikovsky presents this mystery through the Corvids’ bargain-basement philosophy of mind. It’s clear and entertaining, better than most textbook accounts. Gethli tells Gothi that “…we can’t ever really know if we understand or not. It feels as though we do, up until the point that we’re challenged…”31

While the Corvids explain sentience (or its lack), Miranda and her other crewmates explore it. They assume that the signal they came to investigate on Imir is a sign of sentient activity, but later find reason to doubt such an assumption.32

Miranda’s very nature provides an intriguing perspective. A creature that exists as a copy of another creature and remembers being many things cannot take its own continuity for granted. What frightens Miranda is not that she feels diminished, but that she feels entirely herself. This scares her “[b]ecause it means her sense of self is fallible.”33

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Using stricter definitions of “sentience,” “sapience,” and “consciousness,” the Corvids as individuals are sentient. In bonded pairs, they’re sapient, but they may not be conscious at all. The Nodan organism is both conscious and sapient, but may not be sentient outside of a host. And humans, as the creators of the terms used to describe our own mental experience, are all three.

The plot device discussed earlier is essential to the climax of the book. Tchaikovsky uses it to examine, on a larger canvas, the same doubts the Corvids have expressed about their own “sentience” (really, consciousness). But to reach this payoff, such as it is, the reader spends most of the novel in a tedious place populated by many tedious people.

Verdict

Children of Memory is a serious novel with fascinating questions about sentience. It deserves a better story and, with a few notable exceptions, better characters.

Recommended for: Readers who finished Children of Ruin wanting more; anyone interested in the philosophy of mind, or in the intelligence of crows.

Not recommended for: Anyone who wants the plot to move as fast as the ideas.

Thoughts about Children of Memory? 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 B. L. Blanchard’s Sidewise Award-winning novel The Peacekeeper on Club Codex, where any Cosmic Codex subscriber can follow along, comment, or ask questions.

Here’s my latest comment in the discussion thread:

”I love how the indigenous society portrayed in the book takes care of all its people:

’There were few needy in Baatwitigon. They lived by the principle of mino-bimaadiziwin—the good life: be good to one another, be good to nature, and live healthy in both mind and spirit. They took care of each other and, in doing so, took care of themselves.’”

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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 this year: 2026 All-Year Giveaway.

Nearly 100 books, excerpts and samples available at no cost!

Cold War Forces Collide to Cover Up an Apocalyptic Future

Get your FREE copy of Glimpse by Daniel P. Douglas

“Five Stars! Daniel P. Douglas offers up a truly entertaining, incredibly thoughtful, wonderfully culminating read as he provokingly teases us with...a Glimpse into our future.” - Readers’ Favorite

In 1950, a small group of agents who will become known as the “Men in Black” deploy in New Mexico to cover up an event that will provide a harrowing glimpse into humanity’s apocalyptic future...

Scientists have cracked open secret alien technology from the wreckage of four crashed flying saucers. They’ve pieced together a device that creates a “glimpse” into future space-time awareness.

Meanwhile, a Russian spy has garnered stolen intelligence about the top-secret technology. But what he doesn’t realize is that a covert government agent is already on his trail.

Cold War forces collide in Farmington, New Mexico. Who will survive, and just what will everyone Glimpse?

by Brian Scott Pauls

Writing a book, I’ve learned, is a lot of work. But there’s a difference between knowing this from an intellectual standpoint and understanding it from experience as I watch the process extend through days, weeks, months, and years.

“So,” you might ask, “why do it at all?”

It’s a question each writer must answer to their own satisfaction. For me, the key lies in my personal relationship to science fiction.

I first encountered written science fiction in third grade when my brother Steve, four years ahead of me, brought Stanley A. Widney’s “Elevator to the Moon” home from the McPherson Junior High library.1 The cover illustration portrayed two people in spacesuits, one of them beset on all sides by what appeared to be long strips of neon confetti.

Something about the cover engaged my imagination in ways few books had managed previously. Nearly fifty years later, I still remember lying on my stomach in our shared bedroom, reading “Elevator to the Moon,” which I had “borrowed” from Steve—probably when he wasn’t around to object. While most details of the plot have long since slipped my mind, this blurb from Goodreads captures the essence:

“Two men take what they think is an elevator which in reality is a well equipped spacecraft and end up on the moon and encounter ribbon like aliens and have other adventures.”2

Maybe this book wouldn’t stick in my mind if it weren’t for what happened one day when I couldn’t find it. I asked where it had gone, and my mom told me it had reached its due date, necessitating its return. Pleading with her to get it back, I took great affront when she characterized it as too advanced, which implied I hadn’t really been reading it. She told me I needed to stick to books appropriate for my age. This experience seared a minor middle-grade book into my memory.

While “Elevator to the Moon” represents the first step of my science fiction journey, more important steps followed, in which my brother continued to play an instigating role.

The next came a year or two later with a book he brought home from our local public library. And this is a book many readers will recognize—“The Zero Stone” by Andre Norton.3

As with “Elevator to the Moon,” the cover pulled me in. It featured an evocative illustration by Robin Jacques of the two main characters exploring a wrecked ship in space.4

Goodreads describes the story as follows:

“Murdoc finds phenomenal powers in the stone ring that he inherits from his father but only comes to understand those powers completely through contact with an interplanetary wanderer in the form of a feline mutant.”5

Here, more of the characters and events have stuck with me over the years—a tribute to Norton’s abilities as a storyteller. She knew her audience well. Her main character is young, still learning his trade, and Norton reveals a lot about his home life before he accepts an apprenticeship with a gem merchant. She portrays his close relationship with his father, as well as his strained relationships with his mother and brother. While not my experience, these elements provided enough familiar touch-points to make Murdoc real to me. And the plot moves fast—first in the city where we meet him and then across the stars to a wilderness planet full of danger and adventure. I loved it.

What I didn’t know was that “Andre Norton” was a woman. She intended this, of course, adopting the name in 1934 for her first book, ‘The Prince Commands,’ to better sell her work in a market targeted at boys—and legally changing her name to Andre Alice Norton that same year.6 Looking back, the book must have had an “About the Author” page, but if so, I didn’t read that part. It would be another two or three years until a junior high classmate sagely informed me, “Andre Norton is a man.” This revelation taught me to be careful of my assumptions about writer identities. It also served as a basis for later understanding the importance of representation in a commercial field that can be unfair to some participants.

But more discoveries awaited me.

My introduction to Isaac Asimov likely occurred as part of an annual tradition in my hometown. Each year, the school children of communities in McPherson County get the first or second Friday of May off for “All Schools Day,” a celebration centered on a large parade down McPherson’s Main Street.7 It also involves several activities following the parade. I don’t know if this tradition has continued, but as a kid, I always hit up the used book sale in the gymnasium of the Community Building. The size of this event impressed me. A rectangle of long tables around the perimeter of the gym held stack after stack of books, fiction and nonfiction. I most likely acquired my paperback edition of “Foundation” from one of these stacks.8

This started me on what I’ll call my “Asimov Period,” when I read as much of his science fiction as I could find, including “The Stars, Like Dust,” the first book I ever bought for myself (and the second book in what would come to be known as his Galactic Empire series.)9 It also introduced me to Asimov’s famous robot stories. “I, Robot” may be the first collection of short fiction I thoroughly enjoyed.10 I also appreciated how, as a trained scientist, he strove to make his stories scientifically plausible.11

During this same period, my brother built up a small library of his own, largely consisting of books acquired at the same used book sale. This library contained several works of science fiction, one of these being “Rocket Ship Galileo” by Robert A. Heinlein. I have since learned that this represents Heinlein’s earliest juvenile work and that many regard it as his worst.12 That may be, but I considered it gripping then, and still do today. As a ten- or eleven-year-old boy, I found the story about teenagers building their own atomic rocket ship (granted, with the help of an indispensable, skilled, and well-connected adult) grand entertainment. While not a scientist, Heinlein trained in engineering at the U.S. Naval Academy.13 His writing reflects this field’s rigor for accuracy, complementing Asimov’s, and giving the story an air of verisimilitude. And it’s a testament to his skill as a writer that even in one of his weaker novels, he still establishes the trope of “Escaped Nazis on the Moon” for future writers to explore.14

This began my “Heinlein Period.” While it may have overlapped with my “Asimov Period,” it lasted longer—basically until I ran out of Heinlein to read. I found his Future History collection “The Past Through Tomorrow” quite inspirational. It includes many short stories and even a short novel.15 I’m using its structure as a model for “Probability Amplitudes.”

All these sources contributed to my love of science fiction, and as a result, my drive to write a science fiction book of my own. Widney provided the initial spark. Norton introduced me to the joy of planetary and interstellar adventure. Asimov and Heinlein taught me to value short fiction and scientific accuracy. But my growing awareness of the science fiction community may have been an even stronger motivation. As I learned about various authors, their books, and the connections they created between many of their stories, I realized that in the background lay a web of connections between writers who were also often the editors and publishers of one another’s work. I longed to be part of that community. Even as I imagined becoming an astronaut, as many kids do, I also harbored the ambition of becoming a science fiction writer.

I didn’t pursue this dream for many years. I used the excuse that I needed a well-paying job before I could take time to write. Or that I needed to acquire age and experience before I would have anything important to say. Or that the chances of getting published were too slim.

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All these excuses had the same source—fear. On some level, I knew I’d suffered my whole life from a crippling fear of rejection. But I didn’t know why.

In time, I became a technician in the science-fiction-adjacent computer industry, then the owner of a computer support company. While this kept me busy and fed my interest in computers, it never fully satisfied me. I still had a hidden problem, an obstacle that prevented me from even trying to pursue my dreams.

It took a marriage to a loving and highly skilled social worker, building a family, a lot of desperation, and honest self-assessment before I recognized, confronted, and addressed what was really wrong. I don’t have the space here to tell the full story. And some of it may be too personal for me to share with the public. But I can share the problem itself. Doing so will be helpful to me, and perhaps to others.

My chronic fear would often manifest as hypochondria. I spent a year or more of college in crippling fear that I’d contracted HIV, even though I didn’t fall into a high-risk group and largely avoided even lower-risk behaviors associated with infection. But this single health condition didn’t comprise the limit of my fears. Any lump, any place on my body, might be a sign of cancer. I tried to laugh this off with comments to others like, “Maybe I have foot cancer.” But this was bravado. In truth, I needed to say something instead of keeping the fear inside, where it would eat away at me. After marrying my wife, she gave me the wise suggestion that, not being a doctor or a scientist, I stop scouring full medical studies online. This turned out to be a relief as the practice exacerbated my concern rather than alleviating it.

But my fears extended beyond hypochondria, to social anxiety (especially regarding interaction with women) fear of getting fired (and I got fired a lot before starting my computer business) and fear of going to hell (a contribution from certain childhood evangelical Sunday School teachers in my largely quite wholesome Mennonite tradition.)

Still, hypochondria led me to an answer. One night, I found myself awake in bed, far too late into the night, worrying about an unlikely medical concern I can’t even remember. I knew it to be unlikely and told myself so. Then, the question occurred to me—could I have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder? Of course, I grabbed my phone from my nightstand and Googled OCD. I remember thinking, “This is what Nikki told me not to do.” But I felt I was on to something.

I didn’t find a medical study, but a description of OCD, so close to my experience, it couldn’t be coincidence.

Soon after, I sat in my doctor’s office, explaining 35 years of struggle. When I’d finished, he said,

“Well, I’m no psychologist, but based on your symptoms, I don’t have a problem diagnosing you with a pretty severe case of OCD.” I walked out with an SSRI prescription, which has made my symptoms manageable for the past six years.

If you’re wondering what all this has to do with my book, the first activity I took up after getting my OCD under control was writing science fiction. I wrote my first short story in years. Then, I wrote another, for a competition on Wattpad—and won. A few stories later, I thought maybe I could sell my writing. I began listening to self-publishing podcasts, and within a few years, I started this newsletter.

So why go to all this trouble? Because I’ve wanted to be a science fiction writer since I was a kid. Widney, Norton, Asimov, and Heinlein instilled this desire in me at an early age. I allowed a mental health condition to stop me for a long, long time. But that condition is under control at last. This is my opportunity to surpass the limitations that hemmed me in all those years. I’m going to take it.

Do you face mental health challenges you’d feel comfortable sharing? 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 B. L. Blanchard’s Sidewise Award-winning novel The Peacekeeper on Club Codex, where any Cosmic Codex subscriber can follow along, comment, or ask questions.

Here’s my latest comment in the discussion thread:

”I found the following highlight evocative:

’Without dreams, he could only access part of the knowledge he needed to make good decisions for himself and his sister. It was like part of his soul had been amputated, and what remained was bloody and exposed.’

This seems like a good characterization of where Chibenashi is at, following the second murder.”

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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 October: Free Sci-Fi, Fantasy, & Science Fiction.

Over 150 books available at no cost!

An EMP Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller

Get your FREE copy of EMP: When the Lights Died by Sawyer Grange

She promised her children one normal Saturday. Then the lights died.

Claire Morgan was supposed to spend the day with her children.

No work calls.

No hospital.

No broken promises.

Then the EMP hit.

Lights failed. Phones died. Cars died in the streets. And Claire was trapped miles from home while her children were left in the dark.

Her only chance is Grant Keller, a blunt paranoid prepper with an old truck, a hidden cache of supplies, and a rural property built for the end of the world.

Claire used to think he was crazy.

Now he may be the only way back to her kids.

But her children are not just waiting alone in the dark. One neighbor has started taking control of the street, and he knows exactly which children have no parents at home.

There is no rescue coming. No working grid. No safe road through the city.

Just one mother, one unlikely ally, and a desperate race to reach her children before the city tears itself apart.

She left them once. She won’t fail them again.

by Brian Scott Pauls

The expansion of the universe isn’t slowing down, but it should be.

Every galaxy pulls on every other galaxy, so the expansion that began with the Big Bang ought to have been decelerating for thirteen billion years. In 1998, two rival teams of astronomers measured the deceleration using distant supernovae as standard candles1—and found the opposite. The supernovae were fainter than they should have been, which meant they were farther away than expected—so the expansion of the universe had been speeding up for the past five billion years or so.2 The discovery resulted in a Nobel Prize. It also introduced a name for the phenomenon: “dark energy.”3

Regrettably, “dark energy” is a label rather than an explanation. Some form of energy with negative pressure, spread uniformly throughout space, is pushing everything apart. Taken together, the supernova data, cosmic microwave background, and clustering of galaxies put dark energy at roughly 68 percent of all mass-energy in the universe. Dark matter accounts for 27 percent. Ordinary matter—the stuff of stars, planets, nebulae, etc.—is about 5 percent.4 Of these, we understand dark energy, the most abundant component, the least. It’s one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of science.

A Cosmological Constant?

The oldest consideration of what we now call dark energy preceded its discovery by eighty years. In 1917, Einstein added a term to the equations of general relativity—the cosmological constant, Λ—to hold the universe static against its own gravity.5 He dropped the term in 1931, after Georges Lemaître (in 1927) and Edwin Hubble (in 1929) demonstrated that the universe is expanding.6 But it turns out an accelerating universe requires something like a cosmological constant—a fixed energy density built into space itself, which doesn’t attenuate as space expands.

Quantum field theory tells us what Λ could be. Empty space isn’t empty. It seethes with virtual particles winking in and out of existence. Such activity carries energy, and vacuum energy behaves exactly like a cosmological constant.7 The trouble is how little we observe. The simplest estimates from particle physics predict a vacuum energy density 120 orders of magnitude greater than what astronomers measure.8 Either some unknown cancellation wipes out almost all of it, leaving the small amount we find, or vacuum energy is not the answer.

So what could dark energy be? Physicists suggest some answers, each implying a different fate for the universe. It shouldn’t be surprising that science fiction writers have published stories addressing at least two of them.

The Big Freeze

If Λ is the answer, the future is bleak. The universe never stops accelerating. Galaxies beyond our local group recede faster and faster until their light can no longer reach us, and the rest of the observable universe disappears into darkness. As Lawrence Krauss and Robert Scherrer have pointed out, astronomers a hundred billion years from now, living in the merged remnant of the Milky Way and Andromeda, will see a single island of stars in a void and no evidence the universe is expanding at all.9 Cosmology will vanish along with the distant galaxies.

Eventually, life, too, must vanish. Freeman Dyson once argued that an intelligence could persist forever in an ever-expanding universe by thinking ever more slowly.10 Each thought costs energy, but the cost falls as the universe cools, and Dyson showed that a mind which cools along with it could stretch a finite reserve across infinite time—an endless series of ever-cheaper thoughts. Lawrence Krauss and Glenn Starkman showed in 2000 that an accelerating universe closes this loophole. It has a minimum temperature of its own, absurdly low but never zero, so the cooling stops and every thought has a minimum cost. In an accelerating universe, finite energy means a finite number of thoughts.11

Gregory Benford’s “The Final Now,” published on Tor.com in 2010, is Krauss and Starkman’s paper rewritten as a creation myth.12 Two beings, He and She, have made a universe and now sit at its end conversing with the One—the merged remnants of all mortal minds that ever lived. Benford’s He explains: “The accelerating expansion of space-time, which was essential in the planning of all this, none the less yielded a more constricted long-term future.” Life has tried Dyson’s remedy—it has kept “ever-cooler,” thought slowly, and hibernated “for ever-longer periods”—and run into Krauss and Starkman’s wall: “A finite system may be capable of infinite computation, but it can only store a finite number of memories.” Even the creators are bound by their own rules.

But Benford gives his story the “wrong” ending. His universe finishes in a rip, with protons “popping crimson in the sky,” which a plain cosmological constant would not produce. For that, we need something more.

The Big Rip

Physicists characterize dark energy by a single number, w, the ratio of its pressure to its energy density. A cosmological constant has w exactly equal to −1. Current measurements put w near −1.03, with an uncertainty of about 0.03—so it’s consistent with Einstein’s constant, but not proof of it.13 And the number could, in principle, sit on the far side of −1. Dark energy with w less than −1, which Robert Caldwell named “phantom energy” in 2002, has a property nothing else in physics shares: its density increases as space expands.14

Caldwell, Marc Kamionkowski, and Nevin N. Weinberg worked out the consequences in a 2003 paper, “Phantom Energy and Cosmic Doomsday.”15 If w were −1.5, the repulsion would strengthen without limit and reach infinity in finite time—about 22 billion years from now. Sixty million years before the end, the stars of the Milky Way would fly apart from one another. Three months before, the planets would drift from the sun. Thirty minutes before, Earth would disintegrate. In the last 10⁻¹⁹ of a second, atoms would dissolve. Caldwell and his colleagues called it the Big Rip. Few cosmologists expect this. A field with w below −1 is unstable, but at this time theorists can’t exclude it based on the data.16

Stephen Baxter’s “Last Contact,” a 2008 Hugo nominee, is the Big Rip told from a garden in England.17 Baxter compresses the timeline mercilessly—his astronomers get seven months’ warning, not twenty billion years—but he follows the physics of the paper in order: superclusters first, then galaxies, then the sun, then the ground underfoot. The story belongs to Maureen, a widow tending her vegetables, and her daughter Caitlin, the astrophysicist who has to tell the world that “dark energy is pulling the universe apart.” Around them, the radio telescopes pick up a flood of signals from civilizations that have never spoken before. As the sky goes dark, Maureen understands why: “They were just saying good-bye.” It’s an unusual apocalypse story—no villain and no escape. Its only lesson is that people plant tomatoes anyway.

The Big Ambiguity

The Big Freeze and the Big Rip assume w remains constant. But what if this isn’t the case?

If dark energy is a field rather than a constant—a scalar field slowly rolling down a potential, in the models physicists call quintessence—then its strength can change over cosmic time, and so can w.18 In 2021, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) began mapping millions of galaxies to measure how the expansion rate has changed over eleven billion years.19

In March 2025, DESI reported that its map of more than 14 million galaxies and quasars fit a weakening dark energy better than a constant one. Combined with the cosmic microwave background, evolving dark energy was preferred over the standard model at 3.1 sigma; adding supernova data pushed the preference to between 2.8 and 4.2 sigma, depending on which supernova catalog was used—suggestive, but short of the 5-sigma standard for discovery.20 Then, this July, a separate DESI analysis using absorption lines from hydrogen gas along quasar sightlines came back in agreement with the plain cosmological constant, a result the collaboration acknowledged “could indicate that the current hints of evolving dark energy may fade away.”21 DESI has finished its planned five-year survey ahead of schedule, with 47 million galaxies and quasars; the full analysis is expected in 2027.22 Euclid, the European Space Agency’s dark-universe telescope, expects its first cosmology results the same year, and NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched on August 30 to join them.23 Within a few years, we should know with greater confidence whether w is changing.

This is important because different models of quintessence predict different futures for the universe. In some models, dark energy doesn’t merely weaken; it turns negative, with expansion giving way to contraction. A 2022 analysis by Cosmin Andrei, Anna Ijjas, and Paul Steinhardt found that under current constraints, the acceleration could end in less time than has passed since the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, with contraction following within roughly 100 million years.24 Cosmologically speaking, that’s just around the corner.

Stories Waiting to Be Written

Of the three possibilities discussed above, the Big Ambiguity alone seems to have no representation in science fiction. This makes it fertile ground for new stories:

The Draw-Down. In a nod to Larry Niven’s “The Missing Mass,” astronomical surveys confirm dark energy is weakening, just not uniformly.25 It is weakest in one direction, toward a supervoid a billion light-years across. A cosmologist realizes something is consuming the vacuum at an accelerating rate. What will this mean for the universe, and whom, if anyone, should she tell?

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Turnaround. Steinhardt’s model was right. The expansion has already stopped—we just don’t know it yet. A far-future civilization, built on the expectation of a Big Freeze, detects blueshifted light from a distant galaxy, forcing them to reimagine their entire civilization. A society built on patience, and designed for indefinite time, now faces a deadline.

31 Candles. A graduate student on an overnight shift at Rubin Observatory detects a Type Ia supernova over six billion light-years away, and it’s dimmer than it should be—as if w has moved. This is the first evidence since DESI’s hints faded that dark energy isn’t constant after all. It will take thirty more supernovae and four years to be sure. If confirmed, it’s not the end of the world, it’s the beginning of not knowing when it ends.

We may learn in 2027 whether Einstein’s constant is really constant. Or the answer may wait for Roman’s five-year survey, or for physics we haven’t imagined.26 No matter which way we find out, it is likely to change our understanding of the universe in significant ways.

N.B. The claim that no published story yet centers on evolving dark energy is a conclusion from a survey of the Fraknoi index, the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, and related searches.

Do you know of a story based on the evolving dark energy of the Big Ambiguity? Please comment below!

Leave a comment

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

This month, I’m sharing my thoughts about B. L. Blanchard’s Sidewise Award-winning novel The Peace Keeper on Club Codex, where any Cosmic Codex subscriber can follow along, comment, or ask questions.

Here’s my latest comment in the discussion thread:



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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.

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When honor among thieves is broken...

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by Brian Scott Pauls

The following interview occurred September 21, 2026. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Editor’s note: The fifth annual Sturgeon Symposium takes place Thursday and Friday, October 15–16, 2026, at the University of Kansas Hall Center for the Humanities, 900 Sunnyside Avenue, Lawrence, Kansas. Since this interview was recorded, the Gunn Center has announced the winner of the 2026 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award: Alex T. Singer, for “We, the Fleet,” published in Clarkesworld in May 2025. Singer will receive the award and read from the story at the ceremony on Thursday, October 15, at 3:30 p.m. Registration and details are at sfcenter.ku.edu.

Brian Pauls: Hello, everyone. I’m happy to have with me today Phil Drake, the director of the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas. Welcome, Phil.

Phil Drake: Hello!

Brian Pauls: I really appreciate you taking the time to come on the Cosmic Codex and talk with us a little about science fiction and about the upcoming Sturgeon Symposium. My first question: what is your own background with science fiction, and what inspired you to turn it into not just an interest, but an academic discipline?

Phil Drake: Thanks for inviting me, Brian. That’s a great question, and I took a somewhat unconventional path to science fiction as a scholarly interest. When I was a graduate student, a long time ago, I was very interested in science and technology studies, particularly as they related to environmental issues. As I progressed through my PhD program, I kept returning to science fiction as a way to interrogate, through novel lenses, the practical social, technological, and scientific issues that kept emerging in my applied research. Over time I became increasingly interested in science fiction as a critical lens in its own right.

I happened to be working at the time under John Rieder, a professor at the University of Hawaii who has written several great books on the study of science fiction — particularly its relationship to colonialism, and genre theory — which also animated my interest. So it was a roundabout way in, but science fiction has stayed in my life ever since. At times, professional appointments have pulled me away from it and from being able to teach it, but I’m very fortunate now to be at the University of Kansas, with an opportunity to explore it further.

Brian Pauls: What path brought you to your current position as director of the Gunn Center? And maybe even before that — what is the Gunn Center?

Phil Drake: The Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction was started by James Gunn, whom most of your audience probably knows. He was a faculty member at KU for a very long time, and he and his family set up the center to provide substantial support for the study of science fiction, from both a scholarly and a creative standpoint. It has evolved over the years. It has always been housed in the English department and supported by the Gunn family, and its current iteration is focused on programming and on giving undergraduate and graduate students opportunities to develop their interests, whatever they might be, in speculative fiction — science fiction and fantasy, and we’ll even include horror and some other interesting genre fiction in there.

Brian Pauls: Very good. And how did you become the director?

Phil Drake: Some of it stems from my publishing background. I’ve published a couple of articles in Extrapolation, and I’ve worked with the editors of Science Fiction Studies for a long time. But when I came to KU, I never really expected to reignite my scholarly interest in science fiction studies, so it was a real delight to find a very robust community here doing that work.

The way faculty appointments go, openings sometimes appear quite auspiciously. The former director was appointed to a leadership role elsewhere on campus, I was coming out of a leadership role within the department, and our interests aligned. I also had a lot of connections to graduate students, particularly through finding financial support for their research. So it worked out well. The center was already a really nice institution that had been functioning well for several years; my job has been to expand its reach, get more students involved, and maybe develop some more community networking as well.

Brian Pauls: I should take a moment to point out, for some of our younger listeners, that the James Gunn for whom the Gunn Center is named is not the director of the three Guardians of the Galaxy films and other Marvel and DC superhero movies. This James Gunn was a contemporary of the writers of science fiction’s Golden Age — Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Judith Merril, Ray Bradbury — and he used those connections in building the Gunn Center. He wrote science fiction himself, too. I never used to have to make that clarification, but today I feel like I need to.

Phil Drake: He really did a nice job of setting us up with a library where students can come and conduct research. KU’s Spencer Research Library holds some of his really nice things, and I encourage anyone interested to come and visit. You mentioned Bradbury — Gunn’s letters to various famous authors are there, along with work by his students and some of his own drafts. It’s a real treasure trove. I barely know all that’s in there, but we have wonderful librarians who make it accessible.

Brian Pauls: That’s great. I attended one or two of the Campbell Conferences, the predecessor to the Sturgeon Symposium, and it was always fascinating to be there with James leading the discussion. He would suddenly insert an observation from personal experience. One example I’ll always remember: Ted Sturgeon is famous for his maxim, Sturgeon’s Law — “Ninety percent of everything is crap.” Somebody brought that up at a Campbell Conference, and Jim said, “Well, actually, it was ‘ninety percent of everything is crud.’” Then he went on to explain how he’d talked with Ted about it. That happened over and over: these were people he knew personally. I think his biography is called A Life in Science Fiction, and that title is one hundred percent true. [Editor’s note: Gunn’s autobiography is Star-Begotten: A Life Lived in Science Fiction (McFarland, 2017).] It was fascinating to hear those stories secondhand.

But speaking of Ted Sturgeon: one of the events you host is the Sturgeon Symposium, which I think is now in its fifth year. Can you tell us a little about who Ted Sturgeon was, why there’s a symposium named after him, and what its purpose is?

Phil Drake: Ted Sturgeon was a New Age science fiction writer — I’m thinking of him coming out of the ‘60s and ‘70s — who produced an enormous amount of work over the years, in a variety of venues and formats: novels, short stories, TV episodes. He wrote a few episodes of Star Trek. He’s a really interesting writer, and I’ve always viewed him as having a rebellious, critical eye. When I read his work, I always feel there’s an oddness, or a social critique, that’s often very subtle — which is one of the reasons I’ve always been drawn to it. His stories are never straightforward celebrations of technological progress, for instance. There’s a dimensionality to his work that I find really compelling, and his prose is often extremely beautiful. As someone with a literary studies background, I find him an elevated version of science fiction that I can keep going back to. [Editor’s note: Sturgeon’s career began well before the ‘60s. His first science fiction story, “Ether Breather,” appeared in Astounding in September 1939, and he was a central contributor to editor John W. Campbell Jr.’s Golden Age of science fiction. Most of the work for which he is remembered appeared between 1946 and the early 1960s.]¹

Every year for the last five years, the Gunn Center has hosted the Sturgeon Symposium: a two-day event of creative readings, scholarly panels, and creative panels on craft — basically, discussing all things science fiction. The symposium is built around the announcement, ceremony, and reception for the Sturgeon Award, which honors the best science fiction short story of the previous year. The winner will be announced very shortly, and they’ll come out to Lawrence, Kansas, to read from their work, receive the award, and hopefully enjoy some of the presentations.

Every year so far, we’ve had a theme. This year’s theme is “Changing Words, Changing Worlds,” inspired by Sturgeon’s short story “Mr. Costello, Hero.” I’m not sure how many of your audience members will know that story, but it’s a kind of how-to guide to building a fascist state. It’s in the line of Fahrenheit 451 or 1984 — great works in which language, and the manipulation of language, results in dramatic seizures of power and control over minds and knowledge. We were inspired by events in the world, and by connecting them to the historical precedents in which these issues have been discussed, although most of the science fiction we’ll be discussing will probably be from the last twenty years or so.

Brian Pauls: The symposium has multiple sessions. If folks are interested in attending, what would be in store for them, and what could they choose from?

Phil Drake: It varies from year to year, but typically the first day includes a couple of virtual sessions, with panelists — often from all over the world — presenting mostly scholarly work on whatever speculative fiction interests them. We try to group them by theme. If you show up in person at the University of Kansas, at the Hall Center for the Humanities, where it’s being held this year, there will be a good range: probably half scholarly panels and half panels dedicated to creative writing and the craft of writing.

We’re not doing this year, but in previous years we’ve had panels on teaching science fiction. Those are always an interesting way to see how faculty in different disciplines — from the hard sciences, to the humanities where I come from, to the social sciences — use science fiction to engage with topics in their own fields. It’s funny: science fiction seems to excite everyone across disciplines, so it tends to be a very vibrant discussion.

In addition to all of that, there’s the awards ceremony on Thursday afternoon. Lunch is served both days, and that can be a fun opportunity to interact with other writers, scholars, and fans of science fiction. It’s open to the community, and registration is about $20, so it’s very cheap. With registration you get a T-shirt, the lunches, and free parking, and it’s usually pretty relaxed. If you’re a student in any program, you can check the student box and attend for free.

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This year, on Thursday night, we’ll also have a reading by graduate students of excerpts from their creative science fiction. That will be in downtown Lawrence, and it’s open to the public as well.

Brian Pauls: When you talked about the theme, you touched on the way words — and, by extension, stories — can be used as a means of control, and conversely, I suppose, as a means of liberation. That’s a relevant theme right now. A couple of days ago I was commenting online, because I’d just finished a book by Ray Nayler — he won the Hugo Award a couple of years ago for The Mountain and the Sea. [Editor’s note: Nayler’s debut novel, The Mountain in the Sea (2022), won the 2023 Locus Award for Best First Novel and was a Nebula finalist. His Hugo Award came in 2025, for the novella The Tusks of Extinction.] His new novel, Where the Axe Is Buried, is set in a future world struggling with authoritarian states — very relevant — and it’s also a discussion of how AI might play into that. I was responding to somebody, and it occurred to me to say something to the effect that I wish we lived in a world where science fiction could just be escapism — where we didn’t have reasons for it to be anything else. But it has always served this more important role, going back to the very beginning, and certainly during World War II. It has also been misused from the other side. I wonder whether you have any observations to share, ahead of the symposium, about the role science fiction plays in our world.

Phil Drake: I’m of the belief that all cultural expression provides a kind of trace, or reveals a symptom of broader social conditions. In literary studies that’s a fairly conventional approach, and that’s my background. But I feel that science fiction brings a level of intensity and accessibility to examining those issues.

Take Faulkner, for instance. Faulkner’s lovely — beautiful, literary — but people who aren’t familiar with him, who just pick up a book and don’t have a lot of time to get used to that prose, may struggle. Science fiction typically hooks an audience much more quickly. Often there’s adventure and excitement; often there are very problematic scenes, settings, and themes as well. But it throws social critique in front of a reader — or a viewer, if we’re talking about film — in a way that makes us consider these questions whether we want to or not, and it does so in a delightful way. Thinking about societal change, about how structures and relationships and power operate — these big questions — doesn’t have to feel so elitist and alienating. We can think in practical ways about how science fiction might comment on our lived worlds. As you say, it touches almost everything, so it seems very organic to me to draw on it. In pretty much any class I teach — even when I wasn’t thinking about science fiction as a scholarly field — I’ve always included science fiction texts, just because they’re so vibrant.

Brian Pauls: One thing we’ve seen recently — it’s probably always been there, but certainly since the dawn of the current tech boom, over the last ten or fifteen years — is technologists using science fiction iconography in a way I’m not always one hundred percent comfortable with. I look at someone who names their company or product after a very iconic term from a classic work of science fiction or fantasy, and then I look at what that person is doing with their billions of dollars and their business — I’m not going to identify anyone in particular, and the fact is there’s more than one — and it’s hard not to say to yourself, “Maybe you drew the wrong lesson from those stories, because you seem to be behaving far more like a science fiction villain than a science fiction hero.” There’s probably not much we can do about that. You can name your company whatever you want and run it, within a pretty wide latitude, the way you want. But at least we can be aware of it. So I’m really impressed and excited by the theme you’ve chosen this year. It’s very timely — especially given the way science fiction is being used to drive agendas its authors might not have approved.

Phil Drake: Very much so — thank you. That was the idea: thinking about new social and political developments, some of which are quite old, too, and reminding ourselves that science fiction in particular provides a lot of tools for navigating these problems, imagining possible solutions, and putting things into context. Though it’s hard not to resort to dystopian thinking from time to time, for a lot of reasons.

Brian Pauls: I’ll be at the symposium, and I’m very much looking forward to it. I have a final question before we wrap up, but is there anything else you’d like to bring up about the symposium, or about science fiction in general?

Phil Drake: I’ll give one more pitch: the symposium is meant to be open not only to the KU community, but to the whole community in Lawrence and beyond, including people coming in from Kansas City and the rest of the region. If your audience has a way to get out here easily, it’s definitely worth the time — it’s quite an enjoyable event. There will be some well-established authors talking. If you’re a creative writer, it’s a great way to network and to learn a little more about the thought process of established, successful authors and how they put their work together. It’s also your chance to be exposed to new literature or exciting scholarship in the field, and it’s always fun to get a sense of what we’re doing.

I’m trying to think of other new developments. We do have a book club, which is always fun. If you’re interested in science fiction reading groups, go to our website, sfcenter.ku.edu, where there are all sorts of places to sign up. April is a bit of a slow month on the academic calendar, so last year we decided to celebrate cats in science fiction — April was Science Fiction Cat Month. We’ll probably do something like that again. So we have some goofier events, too, to celebrate and explore the funnier edges of science fiction.

Brian Pauls: Space cats have a long, long history in science fiction, championed most of all by Andre Norton, who had many cats herself.

So, my last question before we wrap up: out of your years of studying science fiction, is there a story — or maybe two or three — that you feel speaks to society in a way that makes it valuable beyond mere entertainment? Or stories you feel should have had a bigger impact than they did, but just aren’t widely known? This is a chance to share the stories you think listeners should know about.

Phil Drake: I’m going to choose one of the most famous novels and talk about it a little, mostly because it’s one of those novels I keep thinking will fade from attention, and it keeps reappearing. Neuromancer feels like a particularly useful text to think through right now. I came to it late — I think I first read it in 2003 or 2004, and at that point it seemed dated. Certainly there are problems of representation, and some clunkiness to the plot that felt a little cringey in spots, but it was still interesting. There’s a whole race, class, and gender dynamic that’s fraught in certain ways but provocative in others, and I think Gibson is pretty smart in what he’s doing.

What’s funny to me is that at the time it felt so out of date, and today it feels almost as if it were written now. Certainly there are cultural differences in technology since it was written in the mid-’80s. But thinking about the AI futures being presented to us, and their possibilities, the foresight Gibson had is pretty extraordinary. And going back to your earlier comment about the ways science fiction influences the people who are changing the world right now, you can clearly see a Neuromancer thread influencing a lot of people. For some reason it’s been in my head. I’m not sure I love that novel, but it’s sticky in my brain, so I keep going back to it.

Brian Pauls: That’s a good pick. I’d say yes, certainly AI — but also the dominance of international corporations, the apparent diminishment of governments, the split in wealth between the ultra-wealthy and a desperate underclass. These are things we’re seeing right now, and I’m not going to disagree with you at all. In fact, I’m on record as saying that of all the possible science fiction futures, the one we got is cyberpunk.

Phil Drake: Yeah.

Brian Pauls: I’m not super happy about it. I would have preferred rockets to Jupiter, but we are where we are.

Well, Phil, thank you so much for coming on. I second what you said: if you’re in the area, definitely come down and check out the Sturgeon Symposium, and if you can join some of the virtual sessions, I think it would be worthwhile. Thank you, and thanks to the Gunn Center, for keeping this tradition alive at the University of Kansas.

Phil Drake: Thank you.

Brian Pauls: All right — thanks, everyone, and I’ll talk to you next week on the Cosmic Codex!

Thoughts on my interview with Phil Drake? 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 B. L. Blanchard’s Sidewise Award-winning novel The Peace Keeper on Club Codex, where any Cosmic Codex subscriber can follow along, comment, or ask questions.

Here’s my first comment in the discussion thread:

”In the first twenty pages or so, Blanchard introduces us to her alternate world. It’s the 21st century, but Europe never colonized North and South America. The European nations still exist, on their own continent, but a vibrant community of indigenous nations occupies the region surrounding the Great Lakes, while extant Aztec, Inca, and Maya empires appear to dominate in the south. Chibenashi, our protagonist, is a Peacekeeper in a small village, where he struggles through each day, trying to do his job while taking care of his adult sister, Ashwiyaa. Both have been traumatized by the murder of their mother at the hands of their father twenty years earlier. In such a tight-knit community, where everyone knows everyone else’s business, they’ve been unable to move past this defining event in their lives.”

Click below to participate:

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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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History remembers heroes. History forgets what heroes buried.

Get your copy of Star Fall by H. G. Ahedi!

On the planet Terranox, a lethal mining poison is killing Arydians one by one. Arya Weld, a young mechanic, has one mission: find the Starfall, the ship that vanished with her mother. To get closer, she risks everything to win a deadly race — only to discover she’s infected, and running out of time.

With the clock ticking, Arya joins hands with a resourceful broker and assembles a crew, launching the Remnant in the direction Starfall was last seen. Arya knows this is a one-way ticket. What she doesn’t know is that, by leaving the system, she’s awakening a threat that has waited centuries to return.

by Brian Scott Pauls

Children of Ruin is the strongest book in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s original Children of Time trilogy. Last month, I critiqued the first novel, in which he explores the development of jumping spiders into an intelligent species across thousands of years—and what happens when they encounter humanity. Children of Ruin keeps to the eight-appendage theme by tackling octopuses.

Tchaikovsky published Children of Ruin in May 2019, four years after Children of Time.1 It won the British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Novel of 2019.2 I’ll review the third volume, Children of Memory, next month.

Emulating its predecessor, Children of Ruin jumps (like a spider!) between two time frames.3 In the “past,” an Old Empire terraforming crew arrives at a distant system, finding a life-bearing world they name Nod. It possesses a biochemistry built on elements hazardous to humans and organic molecules evolution never produced on Earth.4 Mission commander Yusuf Baltiel stays to study Nod, but his eccentric colleague Disra Senkovi takes the terraforming equipment to the system’s ocean world, Damascus, along with a tank of octopuses and a supply of the same nanovirus that, light-years away, is busy uplifting the Portiids from Children of Time.5

Thousands of years later, in the “present,” we encounter an expedition of the spider-like Portiids, accompanied by “Humans” (as Tchaikovsky styles the humans modified to co-exist with them6). Aboard the Voyager—with the uploaded, much-altered Avrana Kern along as ship’s mind—the crew follows fragmentary radio signals to the same system, hoping to find lost cousins.7 What they find instead is a spacefaring octopus civilization in the middle of a catastrophe above a quarantined planet.

Like the spiders in Children of Time, Tchaikovsky’s portrayal of the octopuses benefits from his strong grasp of evolutionary biology.8 For insight into cephalopods, he credits Peter Godfrey-Smith’s 2016 book, Other Minds, in the acknowledgements as “an invaluable research aid.”9

Cephalopods are a good choice for this second book. Our last common ancestor with the octopus lived some 600 million years ago, and was probably a flattened worm a few millimeters long. From that point, cephalopods followed a completely separate evolutionary track to a surprising intelligence.10 Dispersed nervous systems, with more than half of their roughly 500 million neurons in their arms rather than their heads, provide octopuses with something closer to mental committees than our compact, unified brains.11

Tchaikovsky’s octopus characters exhibit a vocabulary describing this very different neurology. “The Crown sets strategy, but battlefield tactics are the province of the Reach, those sub-nodes that run the arms.”12 An octopus fights with its whole body, even aboard a spaceship: “her skin sings a furious hymn of battle and her arms calculate vectors and suggest firing solutions.”13

Tchaikovsky derives a psychology from these creatures’ physiology, and a society from that psychology. Octopuses communicate in color with their skin, and in posture with their arms and the rest of their body.14 Their discourse carries far more mood and subtext than hard information.15 And a creature with no fixed body plan has no fixed convictions: the octopuses “hold no certainties” and don’t “let themselves be ruled by tradition or history or even how they themselves felt yesterday.”16

The octopuses reflect real-life biology, but the life on Nod is brilliant speculation.

At first, Baltiel’s scientists don’t recognize what they’ve found. When a crew member falls ill, a colleague insists nothing native could be responsible; Earth life is too different from Nodan life, and “[p]arasites are the most specialized of specialists!”17 They evolve to thrive within very specific environments, which could in no way resemble the human body. She is right about Earth and catastrophically wrong about Nod. The terraformers have disturbed a colonial organism whose cells encode and share memory, “microscopic cells trading encoded understandings like Earth bacteria exchange immunity genes.”18 It learns whatever it absorbs, and it is very, very curious.

The organism, as the book calls it, isn’t a villain in the classic sense. It’s a mind with a different evolutionary history, which can infect and hijack the nervous system of any potential host it encounters.19 Having never met anything it could not become, the organism has no concept of a boundary between itself and the rest of the universe. Every infection is, from its perspective, an act of friendship.20 Kern, the only character in the story with the experience to grasp the organism’s nature, sums up the challenge of trying to fight it: “I do not believe it would be possible to impose controls on it that it could not circumvent or subvert.”21

This ability to hijack human minds raises the question of what it means for the compromised individuals.22 As the Portiid scientist Fabian wonders regarding the hijacked human Lante: “Was there a Lante, at the end, and was she aware of what she had become?”23 Kern, who has herself been human, hybrid, program, and ant colony in turn,24 knows the uploaded Lante exists only when the organism consults her, then is “gone like a blown candle until the organism wants her again...”25

Still, amid these travails, Tchaikovsky weaves a thread of hope. Yes, he subtly insists, minds shaped by different evolutionary histories will find one another profoundly difficult to comprehend. But there will always remain a realm of experience common to all intelligent life. And while it may be narrow, this shared territory provides the foundation for mutual understanding and cooperation.

Tchaikovsky highlights the philosophical concepts at issue here. The Human and Portiid linguists confront Thomas Nagel’s problem directly, building tools “so that the anthropoid brain can grasp what it is like to be a spider,”26 and asking whether the two kinds of experience are “intrinsically incompatible.”27 Senkovi, uplifting his octopuses millennia earlier, encounters Wittgenstein’s conundrum: “If a lion could speak, as the man said, we could not understand it.”28 The Human Helena, negotiating with the Damascans while they hold her prisoner, catches herself relying on “anthropomorphism as a yardstick of what alien minds can conceive...”29

Tchaikovsky deftly orchestrates instances of contact between his various species. When the octopus Paul suddenly realizes Helena is grieving as he himself might, “It makes Paul think of the creature as a fellow living thing in a way he hadn’t before.”30 The Portiid scientist Viola, confronted with evidence of the organism’s consciousness, concludes: “‘Convergent evolution. Perhaps it is something that any life would attain, eventually.’”31 The novel proposes that happiness, sadness, and the feeling of home are each “another commonality between species.”32 In Children of Ruin, Tchaikovsky posits that if life developed consciousness on Earth, it can develop it elsewhere. And he believes that when we encounter it, we will be able to recognize it and find “siblinghood” with it, as unusual as it may be.33

The biggest weakness of Children of Ruin is its structure.

Children of Time asks us to follow two storylines across thousands of years and maintains continuity with the elegant trick of recurring Portiid names. Children of Ruin also presents a pair of storylines, but increases the size of the cast. The plotline set in the past gives us Baltiel, Senkovi, Lortisse, and Lante. The present has Helena, Portia, Meshner, Fabian, Viola, and Kern, plus a rotating slate of octopuses—Paul, Solomon, Lot, Noah, Ruth, Abigail, and Ahab. The octopuses’ recurring Biblical names, like the Portiids’ names before them, indicate each represents multiple individuals across generations.

In addition, the human characters are more numerous than in Children of Time, and spread across a longer period, making it harder for them to serve as the backbone of the overall plot.

Despite these flaws, Tchaikovsky’s deep exploration of the problem of other minds, from multiple directions, makes Children of Ruin a better novel than the already good Children of Time. The Damascan civilization stands beside the Portiids as one of the most convincing non-human societies in recent science fiction, and the Nodan organism is a notable creation of scientific speculation.

Recommended for: Readers of hard science fiction who want truly non-human aliens, and anyone who has read and enjoyed Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds.

Not recommended for: Readers who need one protagonist to follow through a story, or who didn’t appreciate the jumping back-and-forth between eras in Children of Time.

Thoughts about Children of Ruin? 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.

One of my favorite passages from the last quarter of the book:

“‘…real or unreal makes no difference, as either is of equal power in manufacturing the person you are.”

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 September and October: Free Sci-Fi, Fantasy, & Paranormal.

Over 60 books available at no cost!

Get your copy of The Exchange by Sean Mayes!

In a neon-lit future where memories have become currency, a hidden shop offers people an impossible opportunity: the chance to buy an experience they never had, sell a moment they can no longer bear, or trade part of themselves for something they desperately want.

Behind the counter stands the enigmatic Vendor who never pressures his customers and never lies about the price. Through five interconnected stories, ordinary people enter the Exchange carrying grief, ambition, guilt, curiosity, and regret. Each believes surrendering a memory might free them—or that purchasing one might finally fill what is missing.

But memories are more than records of the past. They shape identity, relationships, and truth. Once a memory is traded away, the consequences can reach far beyond the person who surrendered it.

The Exchange is a speculative-fiction anthology about temptation, loss, and the dangerous human desire to escape ourselves. It asks one unsettling question:

If everything inside you had a price, what would you be willing to trade?

by Brian Scott Pauls

In 2023, with regard to Probability Amplitudes (my first science fiction collection), I shared my “intention to produce the highest quality work possible.” But I didn’t discuss what this might look like, beyond “[r]ounds of editing (by an experienced editor, not by me)” following “alpha- and beta-reading.”

In the intervening three years I’ve acquired numerous tools, both physical and virtual, to make this job easier and less expensive—while letting me get the most out of paid, professional editing.

Of course, the larger the number of tools, the easier it becomes for the editing process to get out-of-hand. To avoid this, I recently used Claude to create an editing/publishing outline, indicating where each tool best fits (based on Claude’s training data, as this is a subject beyond my own expertise).

At this time, the process includes 14 separate tools, ranging from a method for creating character attributes that don’t all conform to my own biases (using the Dungeons & Dragons character generation system from the Moldvay Basic rules) to multiple software editing tools (AutoCrit, Hemingway, and ProWritingAid) to three different card decks—one each for story-building, character motivation, and self-editing (Sefirot Fabula, intùiti, and Edito, respectively). While complex, the purpose of this process is to allow me to put my best work in front of both editors and readers.

I’m sharing the tool list and resulting outline for those readers and fellow writers who might find it helpful. It’s unlikely a large number of authors will want to use exactly the same tools, in exactly the same way. But perhaps what I’m doing will prove instructive for those who might want to create something similar for themselves.

Tools

Below are the tools I’ve chosen to incorporate into my process. Each is listed by name, the part of the process it addresses, and the format (website, software, card deck, etc.).

AutoCrit: Dialogue ratio, adverb frequency, and pacing markers, compared with published work in the genre (website)
Claude: Text indexing and search, streamlining work with Sefirot Edito (q.v.; artificial intelligence)
CritiqueMatch: Critique partners and beta readers (website)
Critters: Critique community (website)
D&D Moldvay Basic: Characteristic generation, randomized to provide a variety of character types (ebook)
Dialogue Doctor: Dialogue-based character design and growth (worksheet and ebook)
Hemingway: Sentence length, adverbs, passive voice, and readability (website/software)
Mind Prober: Personality profiling (software)1
ProWritingAid: Line editing, grammar, and consistency (software)
Scrivener: Word processor with character sketch templates (software)
Sefirot Edito: Self-editing (card deck)
Sefirot Fabula: Story-building (card deck)
Sefirot intùiti: Character motivation (card deck)
SFF Online Writing Workshop: Critique partners and possible professional review (website)

Editing Process: Mixed-Length Collection (Self-Published)

Flash fiction through short novel, with interstitial notes

Legend: 🔴 Required · 🟡 Preferred · ⚪ Self-directed

THE CHARACTER CHAIN

Six steps, each feeding into the next.

CC1. Character Generation (D&D: Moldvay Basic) — generate physical and mental baselines. Unexpected outcomes can produce opportunities (e.g., a high-Charisma, low-Wisdom result creates an interesting dynamic). Remember that six numbers describe a character’s capability, not who they are as a person.

CC2. Personality Profile (Mind Prober) — build the character’s personality and psychology on top of CC1.

CC3. Neuro-Variance — for each important character, pick a mental health category where they sit outside the expected range. Don’t treat this as a diagnosis. Use it to push the character in surprising directions. Guard against stereotyping; clinical categories make it tempting. Give the character a tendency that creates an obstacle to something they want.

CC4. Sefirot intùiti — derive drives, motivations, and hang-ups from CC1–CC3.

CC5. Scrivener Character Sketch — consolidate. Come back to this document while drafting.

CC6. Character Voice/Growth Worksheet (Dialogue Doctor) — Five voice components, the character’s growth arc, and a list of important scenes based on these elements.

Dialogue Doctor vs. Sefirot Fabula — CC6’s scene list and Fabula’s HERO’S DEVELOPMENT cards answer the same questions. Run CC6 first, then import its scenes into Fabula. Reversing this can cause Fabula’s archetypes to pull the character toward generic qualities instead of letting Dialogue Doctor differentiate them.

Sefirot Edito vs. AutoCrit — Edito prompts while AutoCrit measures. Edito’s cards ask whether a scene belongs in the story; AutoCrit counts dialogue ratio, adverb frequency, and pacing markers, then compares them against published work in the genre to supply outside perspective. Where the two overlap regarding pacing, follow Edito’s process, referring to the AutoCrit report for clarification when a pacing problem is suspected but not obvious.

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PART ONE — PER-PIECE LOOPS

TRACK A — Flash (under ~1,500 words)

A1. ⚪ Premise — use Fabula: ASSETS if it helps.
A2. ⚪ Character check — skip the character chain. Run CC6’s five voice components alone as a one-minute distinctness test.
A3. ⚪ First Draft — draft in one sitting where possible.
A4. ⚪ Drawer time — leave it a day or two.
A5. ⚪ Revise and read aloud — at this length, merge these two steps. Run ProWritingAid Chapter Critique.
A6. 🔴 Critique reader — or SFF Online Writing Workshop (OWW)/CritiqueMatch/Critters.
A7. ⚪ Final pass — run ProWritingAid and Hemingway.

TRACK B — Short story (~1,500–7,500 words)

B1. ⚪ Premise — use Fabula: ASSETS selectively.
B2. ⚪ Character chain — run full CC1–CC6 for the lead. Run CC1, CC2, CC5 for anyone else who matters. Keep the arc section light — many short stories turn on a change of understanding, not behavior.
B3. ⚪ Minimal planning — build the CC6 scene list, then import into Fabula: CHARACTERS and EDITING cards if non-linear.
B4. ⚪ First Draft
B5. ⚪ Drawer time — leave it days to two weeks.
B6. ⚪ Self-revision — run Edito: First revision. Read the whole story in one sitting. Run AutoCrit structural reports: pacing, dialogue ratio, show-vs-tell. Run ProWritingAid Chapter Critique.
B7. 🔴 Critique group — choose OWW for turnaround time and the Editors’ Choice opportunity; choose Critters for a high volume of stories to be critiqued.
B8. ⚪ Revision pass
B9. 🟡 Line edit — spend the most revision effort here. Run Edito: Third revision, ProWritingAid, Hemingway, AutoCrit line-level reports. Check against the CC6 voice components.
B10. ⚪ Read-aloud pass
B11. ⚪ Self copy-edit pre-pass — run ProWritingAid.

TRACK C — Novelette / Novella (~7,500–40,000 words)

C1. ⚪ Premise and research — use Fabula: ASSETS.
C2. ⚪ Character chain — run full CC1–CC6 for protagonist and one antagonist or foil. Run CC1, CC2, CC5 for the rest.
C3. ⚪ Outlining — import CC6 scenes into Fabula: full HERO’S DEVELOPMENT. Use EDITING cards for sequencing.
C4. ⚪ First Draft
C5. ⚪ Drawer time — leave it weeks to months.
C6. ⚪ Self-revision — run Edito: First revision. Address plot, character arc, structure, setting. Run AutoCrit structural reports. Run ProWritingAid Manuscript Analysis.
C7. ⚪ Revision pass — run Edito: To Do / Thoughts / Done.
C8. 🟡 Content pass — run Edito: Second revision. Read aloud chapter by chapter for pacing.
C9. ⚪ Revision pass
C10. 🔴 Beta readers — recruit readers who will read the full piece and provide feedback. Treat OWW and Critters as supplementary at best; they cap at 7,500 words. Run ProWritingAid Virtual Beta Reader first to catch obvious problems before presenting to beta readers.
C11. ⚪ Beta follow-up revision — re-run AutoCrit structural reports against the beta feedback. When readers report a pacing problem, the reports can help identify the cause in the text.
C12. 🟡 Line edit — run Edito: Third revision, ProWritingAid, Hemingway, AutoCrit line-level reports. Check the CC6 voice components.
C13. ⚪ Read-aloud pass
C14. ⚪ Self copy-edit pre-pass

TRACK D — Short novel (~40,000+ words)

Run the full novel pipeline. This is where the character chain really shines.

D1. ⚪ Premise development and research — use Fabula: ASSETS.
D2. ⚪ Character chain — run full CC1–CC6 for the protagonist and two other arc-bearing characters; that maps onto Fabula’s three CHARACTERS cards. Run CC1, CC2, CC5 for supporting cast. Refer to the CC5 sketches throughout the drafting process.
D3. ⚪ Outlining — build the CC6 scene lists first. Then import them into Fabula: all 18 HERO’S DEVELOPMENT cards, three CHARACTERS cards tracking parallel arcs, EDITING cards for narrative order.
D4. ⚪ First Draft
D5. ⚪ Drawer time — leave it months.
D6. ⚪ Self-revision / second draft — run Edito: Pre-editing, then First revision. Run AutoCrit structural reports for a baseline. Run ProWritingAid Manuscript Analysis.
D7. 🟡 Alpha readers or critique partners
D8. ⚪ Revision pass — run Edito: To Do / Thoughts / Done.
D9. 🟡 Manuscript assessment — get an editorial letter only. Fund this before any other paid stage on this piece.
D10. 🟡 Developmental pass — run Edito: First revision. Assess against Fabula as a diagnostic. Check the CC6 arcs against the text of the draft. Run AutoCrit structural reports and genre comparison. Run ProWritingAid Manuscript Analysis.
D11. ⚪ Revision pass
D12. 🟡 Content pass — run Edito: Second revision. Use Fabula EDITING cards if event order is a problem. Use AutoCrit pacing reports to locate problems Edito reveals.
D13. ⚪ Revision pass — use Edito: mistakes-analysis.
D14. 🔴 Beta readers — recruit novel readers for the full length. Run ProWritingAid Virtual Beta Reader first to catch obvious problems before presenting to beta readers.
D15. ⚪ Beta follow-up revision — re-run AutoCrit structural reports against the beta feedback.
D16. 🟡 Line edit — run Edito: Third revision, ProWritingAid, Hemingway, AutoCrit line-level reports. Check CC6 across all three arcs.
D17. ⚪ Revision pass
D18. ⚪ Read-aloud pass
D19. ⚪ Self copy-edit pre-pass — run ProWritingAid.

All Tracks: Capture real-time origin notes for each story to use later for interstitial material. For a free professional pass, pursue magazine publication for anything in A through C.

PART TWO — ASSEMBLY

1. ⚪ Selection — cut the weak pieces to improve the overall quality of the book.

2. ⚪ Format decision — the novel comprises 25% of the book. Choose between “[Novel Title]: A Novel, with Stories” and a titled collection that contains it. Title choice drives choice of cover, metadata, and categories, as well as how the readers will see the collection as a whole.

3. ⚪ Sequencing — the most important decision of the project. Opening with the novel demands a lot of commitment from readers at the beginning. Closing with it turns everything before it into a long approach. Placing it in the middle splits the book into three parts. Sequence for reading rhythm, not theme. Use Fabula: EDITING cards.

4. ⚪ Thematic coherence — ask what the collection is trying to say, and whether the novel strengthens that case.

5. ⚪ Interstitial strategy — address five concerns before drafting:

   • Position — headnotes, afterwords, or both?

   • Register — the author, or a persona? Anecdotal, critical, or minimal?

   • Scaling — based on story length. A 300-word note is fine before a short story, and absurd before 400 words of flash. Use a brief tag for flash, a standard note for a short story, and a fuller treatment for a novella or the novel.

   • Function — origin, framing, context, or connective tissue?

   • Coverage — interstitials for every piece, or only some of them? Skipping flash entirely is legitimate.

6. ⚪ Front and back matter — assemble acknowledgments, prior-publication credits, author note, copyright page. Consider a table of contents with reading times; unusual, but useful with pieces that vary so widely in length.

7. ⚪ Revision pass on selection and order.

PART THREE — INTERSTITIAL DRAFTING

Treat this as nonfiction inside a fiction book. Give it its own loop.

8. ⚪ Draft them all in a tight cluster — written together they cohere. Written piecemeal over months, the voice drifts.

9. ⚪ Drawer time — leave it days.

10. ⚪ Self-revision — check each against the decisions made in step 5. Right tier, right register, is each note doing its job?

11. 🟡 Read-through in book order — read the stories and the notes interleaved, the way a reader would. Expect to discover issues, including whether the differing lengths of various pieces come across as intentional, or just inconsistent.

12. ⚪ Revision pass — watch for two common problems: notes that spoil the piece they introduce, and notes that repeat the point the story already makes.

Use an essayist voice here, distinct from the specific voices of the stories themselves.

PART FOUR — MANUSCRIPT-WIDE EDITING

13. 🔴 Sensitivity / authenticity read — commission one if any piece warrants it. Trigger it specifically when CC3 produced a character who may come across as a caricature of mental illness rather than as a set of interesting traits.

14. ⚪ Revision pass

15. 🟡 Collection-level developmental read — find someone to read all of it at once and provide feedback. Ask whether the novel’s placement works, whether the length variance reads as designed, and whether the interstitial notes help or intrude.

16. ⚪ Revision pass — send a piece back to its track or a note back to step 10 as needed.

17. 🟡 Collection line-edit pass — check voice consistency across pieces written years apart, and the deliberate fiction/interstitial boundary. Compare all the CC5 character sketches with one another — a dozen protagonists run through the same character chain may have converged on similar qualities.

18. 🔴 Copy Edit — hire a professional editor for this before paying for anything else. Build a style sheet across the whole manuscript. Expect the editor to check the novel for continuity and to examine all the stories for consistency across pieces. The interstitials will add potential mistakes of their own: italicized titles, magazine names, dates, publication credits, quoted material. Brief the editor that the book has two registers (the fiction and the interstitials) and four different story lengths (flash, short story, novelette/novella, novel), all intentional.

19. ⚪ Query resolution for the copy edit

20. ⚪ Final Manuscript

PART FIVE — PRODUCTION

21. ⚪ Cover design — 🟡 professional look and feel. It’s the primary sales asset.

22. ⚪ Interior typesetting — handle four structurally different content types: novel chapters, novella chapters, story breaks, and flash pieces. Give the novel a part-title page. Give interstitials their own treatment — distinct, consistent, unambiguous about where each note ends and the relevant piece begins. Specify these details before proceeding with the layout.

23. 🔴 Proofread — proof typeset pages, print and ebook both. Expect a substantial job at this page count. Watch for notes orphaned across breaks, treatment applied inconsistently across tiers, ebook reflow collapsing the distinction, and novel chapter breaks behaving differently from story breaks.

24. ⚪ Final corrections

25. ⚪ Metadata, categories, keywords, blurb — specify the format (short stories and novel), the range (flash fiction to short novel), and the use of interstitials. All three set expectations.

26. ⚪ ARC readers

27. ⚪ Publication

Funding: Copy edit, cover, proofread, collection-level read, then a manuscript assessment on the novel, in that order. The first three separate a self-published book from an obviously self-published one.

Reuse the character chain in multiple steps. During the line edit for each piece, use it as a voice checklist. During the developmental pass of the short novel, check it against the text of the first draft. During the collection line-edit pass, use it to catch too much convergence between characters across different stories.

Thoughts on editing in 2026? 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.

One of my favorite passages from the third quarter of the book:

“’People who feel like they’ve lived long, full lives, do so because they look back on a range of experiences. Exciting, new, different, rich memories that fill up a life. People stuck in an office job, on the other hand, think back and can’t distinguish one day from the next, one year from the next. It all merges into each other. All a blur. The truth is, time flies when you’re bored, doing the same shit, day in day out.’”

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 September: Spectacular Fiction.

Eighty books available at no cost!

They lost the war once. They’re not letting it happen again.

Get your copy of Restarting the Apocalypse: Book 1 by Michael Chatfield!

The end of the world wasn’t fire and brimstone—it was guild wars, mutated monsters, collapsing kingdoms, and rifts to realms that should never have been opened. Len and Rick fought through all of it. They watched Harmonia fall. They buried their friends.

Now, they’ve been sent back—130 years before the collapse.

No stats. No skills. No allies.

Just two combat vets with tactical minds, brutal experience, and the complete knowledge of how the world ends.

Mana is only just starting to spread. Nations are still whole. The system is initializing.

Now is the time to prepare for what lays ahead, to build a foundation.

They aren’t here to survive. They’re here to win.

It’s time to Restart the Apocalypse

Restarting the Apocalypse is a gritty, high-stakes Regressor, LitRPG progression fantasy from international bestseller Michael Chatfield.

Expect deep crafting, tactical combat, earned power, and a system that punishes weakness. No cheats. No plot armor. Just two men fighting to rewrite the end of the world.

by Brian Scott Pauls

Five-sixths of the matter in the universe is a mystery to us. Now, we might have taken a step closer to figuring out what it is. Maybe.

On September 1, the team running the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment searching for dark matter reported a development at a conference in Tendo, Japan. Nearly a mile underground in an old South Dakota gold mine, the team watches a tank containing ten tons of ultra-pure liquid xenon. Going through 220 days of data collected in 2023 and 2024, they found a flash of light—the signature of a xenon nucleus recoiling with 248 kiloelectronvolts of energy it picked up from a source no known background phenomenon explains. They calculated the significance of the event at 2.6 sigma—meaning the background would throw off an event like this roughly once in two hundred tries. That isn't enough to call the detection a "discovery," which typically requires five sigma or higher. They didn’t claim to have seen direct evidence of dark matter. But they saw something interesting.1

If LZ, or another experiment, repeats this finding, it could have major ramifications for astrophysics and cosmology. Dark matter out-masses all the rest of the matter in our universe at a ratio of about five to one,2 and yet we don’t know what it is.

In 1933, Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky determined the galaxies in the Coma cluster were moving too fast for the cluster’s visible mass to hold them together. Something else—he called it dunkle Materie3—had to be supplying the necessary gravity. The astronomy community basically ignored his finding for 40 years.4 Then in 1970, Vera Rubin and Kent Ford measured how fast the outer regions of the Andromeda galaxy rotate and found the same problem—the edges were turning nearly as fast as the middle, which Newtonian gravity flatly forbids unless the galaxy’s mass is distributed in ways that don’t match what our instruments detect.5

Fast-forward to 2006, when a team led by Douglas Clowe mapped a pair of galaxy clusters caught mid-collision. The gas in the clusters—which is where nearly all the ordinary matter lives—had piled up in the middle, slowed by the impact. But gravitational lensing showed the center-of-mass to be separated from the center of the gas by a significance of eight sigma. They called their paper: “A Direct Empirical Proof of the Existence of Dark Matter.”6

The cosmic microwave background provides additional confirmation. The Planck satellite’s measurements fix cold dark matter at roughly five times the density of ordinary matter. Everything we can identify—gas, planets, nebulae, stars, galaxies, quasars, etc.—amounts to about a sixth of the material universe.7 Everything else is invisible and intangible, detectable to us only by its gravity.

So, what is it?

Maybe it’s not invisible, just really hard to see…

Before we dive into speculative explanations, let’s address the simplest possibility. Perhaps dark matter isn’t really exotic; it’s just faint—burnt-out stars, drifting planets, stray black holes. These are often called massive compact halo objects (MACHOs). Anything dense enough passing in front of a background star will briefly brighten it by gravitational lensing, so the idea is directly testable.8

The EROS-2 survey watched millions of stars in the Magellanic Clouds for 6.7 years. If the Milky Way’s halo were made of objects around four-tenths of a solar mass, roughly 39 lensing events should have shown up in the bright-star sample—only one did.9 The cosmic microwave background and Big Bang nucleosynthesis independently cap the total amount of ordinary matter far below what the galaxies' gravity demands—no matter how faint that matter might be.10

Whatever holds the galaxies together, it isn’t made of the same stuff we are.

Science fiction is on the case. Three novels in particular—Mike Brotherton’s Spider Star, John Gribbin’s The Alice Encounter, and Stephen Baxter’s Ring—each take a different approach to dramatizing the problem.

WIMPs to the rescue?

If dark matter isn’t just ordinary matter that’s hard to see, maybe it’s a particle no one has found yet.

The favorite candidates for decades have been “weakly interacting massive particles” (WIMPs)—hypothesized to be heavy, stable particles produced in abundance in the early universe and left over when the cosmos thinned out.11 But we’ve hunted for a long time and nothing suitable has turned up.

LZ published its low-mass results last December, based on 417 live days—the largest dataset any dark matter detector has ever assembled—and found nothing between three and nine proton masses.12 Meanwhile ADMX is searching for another, much lighter, proposed particle called the “axion”, with no success to-date.13

Mike Brotherton is a working astronomer, as well as a science fiction writer, and knows his physics. His novel Spider Star, a WIMP story, includes a planet made of weakly interacting matter, and a starship drive that scoops and pushes WIMPs as fuel14—a fascinating premise, and possibly even realistic, but as of now, still hypothetical.

Maybe it’s a whole second world

We have no good reason to conclude only one type of particle comprises dark matter. Ordinary matter has a dozen fundamental particles, multiple forces, and a periodic table. Dark matter could have the same—dark electrons, dark electromagnetism, dark chemistry—coupled to us by gravity and almost nothing else.

The most elegant version is mirror matter, in which dark matter adheres to an exact copy of the Standard Model, with every particle getting a mirror twin.15 Earlier this year, theorists published predictions for electromagnetic signatures of mirror stars which have captured ordinary atoms.16

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Mirror matter is the driving conceit behind John Gribbin’s The Alice Encounter. Gribbin, an astrophysicist by training and a popularizer by trade, builds his novel on “Alice matter.” This is "looking glass" stuff, much more plentiful than normal matter, arranged in a roughly spherical distribution around the flat disk of our galaxy. Beings composed of Alice matter, and more advanced than we are, have noticed the “contamination” of normal matter in the universe and have decided to investigate.17

Inside the Sun?

Whatever dark matter turns out to be, if it interacts with ordinary matter at all, some of it should end up in the cores of stars. Stars like our sun sweep up dark matter as they move through space, and a particle that scatters off a nucleus of normal matter along the way can lose enough speed to be stranded. Gravity does the rest, settling the captured particles into the core.18

In Stephen Baxter’s Ring, the fourth novel in his Xeelee series, the downloaded mind of a woman named Lieserl is lowered into the Sun and abandoned there for five million years. She finds the star inhabited by “photino birds.” These are dark matter creatures that colonize stellar cores, drain the energy that drives fusion, and age the stars prematurely into white dwarfs incapable of killing the photino birds in supernovae.19

The “photino” is the proposed supersymmetric partner of the photon, and in the 1980s it was among the leading candidates for cold dark matter.20

Maybe there is nothing there at all

The unfashionable possibility is that the discrepancy is real and the interpretation is wrong. Perhaps gravity behaves differently at very low accelerations, and no missing substance is required. Mordehai Milgrom’s Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND), proposed in 1983, fits galactic rotation curves with a single new constant.21 MOND detractors point to the work on colliding galaxy clusters by Douglas Clowe and his colleagues mentioned above, but MOND’s advocates were still publishing rebuttals earlier this year.22

Stories waiting to be written…

Cold Company. If dark matter can lose energy, some of it may have settled into a thin disk lying in the plane of the galaxy, which the Sun crosses roughly every thirty million years.23 A geologist and a physicist argue for decades about whether the impact record is a coincidence or a timetable—and about which of them will have to be wrong in public.

The Long Fog. Due to something called the “neutrino fog,”24 dark matter detectors hit a wall no practical modifications can bypass. The answer lies permanently below the noise. A story about the last generation of experimentalists, what a scientific culture does when it proves a question unanswerable, and those who refuse to accept this limitation.

Alice’s Argument. An homage to Isaac Asimov’s The Gods Themselves,25 further exploring one of that book’s most provocative premises. A laboratory converts a gram of ordinary matter into mirror matter, then converts it back. But it returns changed—edited. Someone made of mirror matter is sending us a message. First contact must be conducted a gram at a time, in a medium where no one can verify anything, and the negotiators on our side cannot agree on whether the other party is a government, a machine, or a child.

What comes next

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory began its ten-year survey of the southern sky this summer, and will map dark matter, in part, by the way it bends light across the visible universe.26 The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched on August 30 and is less than three months from its post at L2, where it will pursue a similar objective.s Underground, the LZ team keeps working, waiting to learn whether their recent detection is repeatable.

Maybe one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of science won’t remain unsolved for long.

Thoughts on the nature of dark matter? 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.

One of the more powerful passages in the first half of the book:

”We’re not meant to live easy. It runs against our nature. If peril doesn’t fall on us from without, then we find a way to bring it from within.”

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 September: Spectacular Fiction.

Eighty books available at no cost!

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

Get your FREE copy of Patriot Star by M.D. House

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.

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!

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!

Leave a comment

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.

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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.

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.”

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.

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

Get your FREE copy of Cretaceous Safari: Genesis by K. Sanon!

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.

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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.’”

Click below to participate:

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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Science Fiction Space Opera

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

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

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!

Get your FREE copy of Showdown at Jupiter's Edge: A Maxo Magnaveer Adventure by Daniel P. Douglas.

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.”