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  • INTERVIEW: Science fiction writer Alex T. Singer

    INTERVIEW: Science fiction writer Alex T. Singer
    2026/11/06
    An interview with Alex T. Singer, winner of the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for the best science fiction short story published in 2025, for her novelette "We the Fleet."Do you or someone you know need professional tech guidance for your author, coaching, or independent publishing business? If so, check out our sponsor Cloudessy, providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services. Simplify your tech stack, prevent launch failures, and build systems that actually support growth.https://marketing.cloudessy.com/30-minute-tech-stack-update/Brian Pauls: Alex, welcome to The Cosmic Codex. I appreciate you taking the time to come and talk with us.Alex T. Singer: I appreciate being here. Thank you very much.Brian Pauls: Well, I would like to start with a question about your background with speculative fiction. How did you get started with an interest in speculative fiction, in particular science fiction?Alex T. Singer: Well, like a lot of people, I’ve been interested in speculative fiction my whole life. It was ingrained in me very early on by the books my parents read to me. My father actually read 2001: A Space Odyssey to me at a very formative age.1 Then he showed me the movie, and apparently Kubrick meant nothing to me, because I was just annoyed it wasn’t the book.Brian Pauls: I get that. I have the same attitude toward movies a lot of times. But exposing you to quality science fiction…Alex T. Singer: Oh, yes. My father was one of those people whose taste in novels went very, very highbrow. He was very interested in the high-concept stuff. He taught me to read using Moby-Dick, so there you go.2Brian Pauls: Oh, wow. The full text, not a slimmed-down kids’ version?Alex T. Singer: No, full text. He was explaining the themes to me as he was also explaining how to spell “whale.”Brian Pauls: Were you able to explain what ambergris was at a young age?Alex T. Singer: Yes. I think I confused a few of my first-grade teachers when I brought that one in as a book report.Brian Pauls: Well, I love Moby-Dick, so kudos to your dad. I’m guessing this turned you into a lifelong reader early on.Alex T. Singer: Yes, it did. I was also going to say that I’m very lucky my grandfather was also a writer. He was trained as an intelligence officer during World War II. The war ended before he was able to deploy, but he had all that intelligence training, so he wrote a lot of conspiracy thrillers.3Brian Pauls: Oh, wow. What an example.Alex T. Singer: Oh, sure. The biggest one he ever did was The Parallax View. It was well known enough that it even got a movie adaptation once upon a time. Warren Beatty was in it, so it was a very cool thing.4Brian Pauls: That gives me something to go track down. It’s hard to get my wife to watch science fiction movies, but I bet I could get her to watch that.Alex T. Singer: Oh yeah, especially because it ended up in the bones of so many conspiracy thrillers.Brian Pauls: My next question—I think you lit on it. It’s one thing to be interested in science fiction, but you became a writer. How did that happen?Alex T. Singer: Well, my grandfather, mostly. He was very encouraging. He would have me sit with him and show him the stories I’d write, and he’d give very gentle but firm feedback. He was very good at telling me, very gently, “You’re using a few too many adverbs, Alex.” He always made the time for me, and he was a very good mentor like that to a lot of young writers.Brian Pauls: Well, that is fantastic. And obviously, you have just won the Sturgeon Award.5 Tell us a little bit about the story that got you the award.Alex T. Singer: Certainly. “We, the Fleet” was my Sturgeon-winning story.6 It was a short story—”short” is relative; it was really more of a novelette—about a first contact from the point of view of the alien. She is basically a hive mind. I based them very heavily on ants and bees, using their social structure with a techno-organic aspect to make them completely unlike humans.Brian Pauls: Explain that for us. That’s a word I don’t know.Alex T. Singer: Oh, techno-organic?Brian Pauls: Techno-organic. Okay, sorry, I misunderstood. Got it.Alex T. Singer: Techno-organic is that fusion of the technological and the biological to make a new kind of creature that has some anatomical references while also being very machine-like in its aspects and mindset. So when she encounters a human for the first time, she has no context for what we are. It was a short story about connections—about de-othering the other, essentially. Because of that, I wanted to start with the point of view of a creature that would normally have been considered the villain in a lot of classic science fiction.Brian Pauls: I met you at the Sturgeon Symposium recently, where you read the story to us.7 One of the things I said to you afterward is that I found something touching about your story: you have a discussion in there about what family means. I’m paraphrasing, and...
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    32 分
  • SF COMMUNITY: Club Codex Selections (2026-2027)

    SF COMMUNITY: Club Codex Selections (2026-2027)
    2026/10/30
    Do you or someone you know need professional tech guidance for your author, coaching, or independent publishing business? If so, check out our sponsor Cloudessy, providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services. Simplify your tech stack, prevent launch failures, and build systems that actually support growth.https://marketing.cloudessy.com/30-minute-tech-stack-update/Club Codex, the official book club for The Cosmic Codex, offers a convenient way to discuss award-winning science fiction novels and collections. Each month, I’ll read a new selection and post my thoughts in the discussion thread. You’re welcome to participate, or just follow along—whatever works best for you!See below for our upcoming selections.November 2026In the Belly of the Whale by Michael FlynnWinner of the 2025 Prometheus Award for Best Novel of libertarian science fiction1Aboard a vast generation ship, the founders’ rigid rules for keeping humanity alive harden over the centuries into separate societies divided by class, belief, and identity. As those divisions deepen, talk of rebellion spreads through the crew, and the voyage becomes a test of how far people will go to win their freedom.2December 2026Time of the Cat by Tansy Rayner RobertsWinner of the 2023 Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel written by an Australian citizen or permanent resident3At Chronos College, humans and cats travel through time for a living, and the job is pure joy apart from the occasional lost traveler, or lost cat. A chance to rescue a missing legend sends the team to the 1960s, if they can persuade Professor Boswell, a famously cranky marmalade tabby, to come along.4January 2027Some Desperate Glory by Emily TeshWinner of the 2024 Hugo Award for Best Novel5Kyr has spent her life on Gaea Station among humanity’s last survivors, training to avenge Earth’s destruction. When her superiors send her brother to certain death and assign her to the nursery to bear sons, she breaks away with his rebellious friend and an imprisoned alien, and discovers a universe stranger and richer than anything she was taught.6February 2027Cassandra in Reverse by Holly SmaleWinner of the 2024 Audie Award for Science Fiction audiobook7Cassie remembers everything and understands almost nothing about other people. After one disastrous day costs her a relationship, a job, and her local café’s banana muffins, she discovers she can travel back in time and undo her mistakes. Unlimited do-overs, however, may not be enough to set things right.8March 2027The Artificial Man and Other Stories by Clare Winger HarrisClare Winger Harris, winner of the 2024 Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award for underread science fiction and fantasy authors9Ten pulp stories from a pioneering woman of early twentieth-century science fiction, selected and introduced by scholar Brad Ricca. Giant insects, Martians thirsty for Earth’s water, and a journey back to ancient Rome fill a collection that shows how much the young genre owed to a writer it largely forgot.10April 2027Cahokia Jazz by Francis SpuffordWinner of the 2023 Sidewise Award for Best Long-Form Alternate History11In an alternate 1922 where the great Indigenous city of Cahokia never fell, the Mississippi metropolis has become an industrial hub of many races and faiths, held together by a fragile peace. When two detectives find a body on a skyscraper roof one snowy night, a week of upheaval follows that may destroy that world or remake it.12May 2027A New Eden by Menilik Henry DyerWinner of the 2024 Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best Novel of New Zealand science fiction and fantasy13On a future Earth ruled by the Fermion Party, which preaches immortality through uploading into a simulated metaverse, four astronauts training on Mars become targets for assassination. Launched early in four ships guided by four AIs, they set out as uploaded minds to find habitable worlds, reunite across the stars, and survive first contact while the Fermions hunt them down.14June 2027Uncertain Sons and Other Stories by Thomas HaWinner of the 2026 Locus Award for Best Collection and the 2026 World Fantasy Award for Best Collection15Thomas Ha’s debut collection turns on familial love and trauma, set against societal and technological anxieties, questions of identity and class, and near futures slightly askew from our own. The title novelette won the 2026 Nebula Award.16July 2027Ancillary Justice by Ann LeckieWinner of the 2024 Hugo Award for Best Series, and of the 2014 Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke Awards17Breq was once the warship Justice of Toren, an AI commanding thousands of soldier bodies for the conquering empire of the Radch. After an act of treachery ripped that life away, she survives in a single human body, on a remote, icy world and closing in on the revenge she has pursued ever since.18August 2027Ancillary Sword by Ann LeckieWinner of the 2024 Hugo Award for Best Series19Now serving the Radch’s ruler and seeking atonement for...
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    21 分
  • CRITIQUE: “Children of Memory” by Adrian Tchaikovsky

    CRITIQUE: “Children of Memory” by Adrian Tchaikovsky
    2026/10/25
    Do you or someone you know need professional tech guidance for your author, coaching, or independent publishing business? If so, check out our sponsor Cloudessy, providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services. Simplify your tech stack, prevent launch failures, and build systems that actually support growth.https://marketing.cloudessy.com/30-minute-tech-stack-update/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.3The ColonyThe 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.”7Generations 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.”9The 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.”12So 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 CorvidsJust 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.”20As 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.22What 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 ...
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    18 分
  • “Probability Amplitudes”: Why go to the trouble of writing a book?

    “Probability Amplitudes”: Why go to the trouble of writing a book?
    2026/10/17
    Do you or someone you know need professional tech guidance for your author, coaching, or independent publishing business? If so, check out our sponsor Cloudessy, providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services. Simplify your tech stack, prevent launch failures, and build systems that actually support growth.https://marketing.cloudessy.com/30-minute-tech-stack-update/Writing a book, I’ve learned, is a lot of work. But there’s a difference between knowing this from an intellectual standpoint and understanding it from experience as I watch the process extend through days, weeks, months, and years.“So,” you might ask, “why do it at all?”It’s a question each writer must answer to their own satisfaction. For me, the key lies in my personal relationship to science fiction.I first encountered written science fiction in third grade when my brother Steve, four years ahead of me, brought Stanley A. Widney’s “Elevator to the Moon” home from the McPherson Junior High library.1 The cover illustration portrayed two people in spacesuits, one of them beset on all sides by what appeared to be long strips of neon confetti.Something about the cover engaged my imagination in ways few books had managed previously. Nearly fifty years later, I still remember lying on my stomach in our shared bedroom, reading “Elevator to the Moon,” which I had “borrowed” from Steve—probably when he wasn’t around to object. While most details of the plot have long since slipped my mind, this blurb from Goodreads captures the essence:“Two men take what they think is an elevator which in reality is a well equipped spacecraft and end up on the moon and encounter ribbon like aliens and have other adventures.”2Maybe 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.3As 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.4Goodreads 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.”5Here, 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 ...
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    20 分
  • What is dark energy?

    What is dark energy?
    2026/10/10
    Banned Books Week Day of Action Suggestions:https://bannedbooksweek.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/ALA_DayofAction_OneSheet_Final.pdfDo you or someone you know need professional tech guidance for your author, coaching, or independent publishing business? If so, check out our sponsor Cloudessy, providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services. Simplify your tech stack, prevent launch failures, and build systems that actually support growth.https://marketing.cloudessy.com/30-minute-tech-stack-update/The expansion of the universe isn’t slowing down, but it should be.Every galaxy pulls on every other galaxy, so the expansion that began with the Big Bang ought to have been decelerating for thirteen billion years. In 1998, two rival teams of astronomers measured the deceleration using distant supernovae as standard candles1—and found the opposite. The supernovae were fainter than they should have been, which meant they were farther away than expected—so the expansion of the universe had been speeding up for the past five billion years or so.2 The discovery resulted in a Nobel Prize. It also introduced a name for the phenomenon: “dark energy.”3Regrettably, “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 FreezeIf 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.11Gregory 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 ...
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    21 分
  • INTERVIEW: Phil Drake, Director of the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction

    INTERVIEW: Phil Drake, Director of the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction
    2026/10/03
    Register for the 2026 Sturgeon Symposium:https://sfcenter.ku.edu/2026-sturgeon-symposiumDo you or someone you know need professional tech guidance for your author, coaching, or independent publishing business? If so, check out our sponsor Cloudessy, providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services. Simplify your tech stack, prevent launch failures, and build systems that actually support growth.https://marketing.cloudessy.com/30-minute-tech-stack-update/The following interview occurred September 21, 2026. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length.Editor’s note: The fifth annual Sturgeon Symposium takes place Thursday and Friday, October 15–16, 2026, at the University of Kansas Hall Center for the Humanities, 900 Sunnyside Avenue, Lawrence, Kansas. Since this interview was recorded, the Gunn Center has announced the winner of the 2026 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award: Alex T. Singer, for “We, the Fleet,” published in Clarkesworld in May 2025. Singer will receive the award and read from the story at the ceremony on Thursday, October 15, at 3:30 p.m. Registration and details are at sfcenter.ku.edu.Brian Pauls: Hello, everyone. I’m happy to have with me today Phil Drake, the director of the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas. Welcome, Phil.Phil Drake: Hello!Brian Pauls: I really appreciate you taking the time to come on the Cosmic Codex and talk with us a little about science fiction and about the upcoming Sturgeon Symposium. My first question: what is your own background with science fiction, and what inspired you to turn it into not just an interest, but an academic discipline?Phil Drake: Thanks for inviting me, Brian. That’s a great question, and I took a somewhat unconventional path to science fiction as a scholarly interest. When I was a graduate student, a long time ago, I was very interested in science and technology studies, particularly as they related to environmental issues. As I progressed through my PhD program, I kept returning to science fiction as a way to interrogate, through novel lenses, the practical social, technological, and scientific issues that kept emerging in my applied research. Over time I became increasingly interested in science fiction as a critical lens in its own right.I happened to be working at the time under John Rieder, a professor at the University of Hawaii who has written several great books on the study of science fiction — particularly its relationship to colonialism, and genre theory — which also animated my interest. So it was a roundabout way in, but science fiction has stayed in my life ever since. At times, professional appointments have pulled me away from it and from being able to teach it, but I’m very fortunate now to be at the University of Kansas, with an opportunity to explore it further.Brian Pauls: What path brought you to your current position as director of the Gunn Center? And maybe even before that — what is the Gunn Center?Phil Drake: The Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction was started by James Gunn, whom most of your audience probably knows. He was a faculty member at KU for a very long time, and he and his family set up the center to provide substantial support for the study of science fiction, from both a scholarly and a creative standpoint. It has evolved over the years. It has always been housed in the English department and supported by the Gunn family, and its current iteration is focused on programming and on giving undergraduate and graduate students opportunities to develop their interests, whatever they might be, in speculative fiction — science fiction and fantasy, and we’ll even include horror and some other interesting genre fiction in there.Brian Pauls: Very good. And how did you become the director?Phil Drake: Some of it stems from my publishing background. I’ve published a couple of articles in Extrapolation, and I’ve worked with the editors of Science Fiction Studies for a long time. But when I came to KU, I never really expected to reignite my scholarly interest in science fiction studies, so it was a real delight to find a very robust community here doing that work.The way faculty appointments go, openings sometimes appear quite auspiciously. The former director was appointed to a leadership role elsewhere on campus, I was coming out of a leadership role within the department, and our interests aligned. I also had a lot of connections to graduate students, particularly through finding financial support for their research. So it worked out well. The center was already a really nice institution that had been functioning well for several years; my job has been to expand its reach, get more students involved, and maybe develop some more community networking as well.Brian Pauls: I should take a moment to point out, for some of our younger listeners, that the James Gunn for whom the Gunn Center is named is not the director of the ...
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    39 分
  • A critique of Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Children of Ruin"

    A critique of Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Children of Ruin"
    2026/09/28
    Register for the 2026 Sturgeon Symposium:https://sfcenter.ku.edu/2026-sturgeon-symposiumDo you or someone you know need professional tech guidance for your author, coaching, or independent publishing business? If so, check out our sponsor Cloudessy, providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services. Simplify your tech stack, prevent launch failures, and build systems that actually support growth.https://marketing.cloudessy.com/30-minute-tech-stack-update/Children of Ruin is the strongest book in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s original Children of Time trilogy. Last month, I critiqued the first novel, in which he explores the development of jumping spiders into an intelligent species across thousands of years—and what happens when they encounter humanity. Children of Ruin keeps to the eight-appendage theme by tackling octopuses.Tchaikovsky published Children of Ruin in May 2019, four years after Children of Time.1 It won the British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Novel of 2019.2 I’ll review the third volume, Children of Memory, next month.Cloudessy, my consulting business providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services, is a sponsor of this newsletter. If you or someone you know needs professional tech guidance for their author, coaching, or independent publishing business, check out the ad at the end of this post. Thank you!Emulating its predecessor, Children of Ruin jumps (like a spider!) between two time frames.3 In the “past,” an Old Empire terraforming crew arrives at a distant system, finding a life-bearing world they name Nod. It possesses a biochemistry built on elements hazardous to humans and organic molecules evolution never produced on Earth.4 Mission commander Yusuf Baltiel stays to study Nod, but his eccentric colleague Disra Senkovi takes the terraforming equipment to the system’s ocean world, Damascus, along with a tank of octopuses and a supply of the same nanovirus that, light-years away, is busy uplifting the Portiids from Children of Time.5Thousands of years later, in the “present,” we encounter an expedition of the spider-like Portiids, accompanied by “Humans” (as Tchaikxovsky styles the humans modified to co-exist with them6). Aboard the Voyager—with the uploaded, much-altered Avrana Kern along as ship’s mind—the crew follows fragmentary radio signals to the same system, hoping to find lost cousins.7 What they find instead is a spacefaring octopus civilization in the middle of a catastrophe above a quarantined planet.Like the spiders in Children of Time, Tchaikovsky’s portrayal of the octopuses benefits from his strong grasp of evolutionary biology.8 For insight into cephalopods, he credits Peter Godfrey-Smith’s 2016 book, Other Minds, in the acknowledgements as “an invaluable research aid.”9 Cephalopods are a good choice for this second book. Our last common ancestor with the octopus lived some 600 million years ago, and was probably a flattened worm a few millimeters long. From that point, cephalopods followed a completely separate evolutionary track to a surprising intelligence.10 Dispersed nervous systems, with more than half of their roughly 500 million neurons in their arms rather than their heads, provide octopuses with something closer to mental committees than our compact, unified brains.11Tchaikovsky’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.”13Tchaikovsky 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.”16The 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 ...
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    30 分
  • “Probability Amplitudes”: Editing in 2026

    “Probability Amplitudes”: Editing in 2026
    2026/09/20
    Do you or someone you know need professional tech guidance for your author, coaching, or independent publishing business? If so, check out our sponsor Cloudessy, providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services. Simplify your tech stack, prevent launch failures, and build systems that actually support growth.https://marketing.cloudessy.com/30-minute-tech-stack-update/Register for the 2026 Sturgeon Symposium:https://sfcenter.ku.edu/2026-sturgeon-symposiumIn 2023, with regard to Probability Amplitudes (my first science fiction collection), I shared my “intention to produce the highest quality work possible.” But I didn’t discuss what this might look like, beyond “[r]ounds of editing (by an experienced editor, not by me)” following “alpha- and beta-reading.”In the intervening three years I’ve acquired numerous tools, both physical and virtual, to make this job easier and less expensive—while letting me get the most out of paid, professional editing.Of course, the larger the number of tools, the easier it becomes for the editing process to get out-of-hand. To avoid this, I recently used Claude to create an editing/publishing outline, indicating where each tool best fits (based on Claude’s training data, as this is a subject beyond my own expertise).At this time, the process includes 14 separate tools, ranging from a method for creating character attributes that don’t all conform to my own biases (using the Dungeons & Dragons character generation system from the Moldvay Basic rules) to multiple software editing tools (AutoCrit, Hemingway, and ProWritingAid) to three different card decks—one each for story-building, character motivation, and self-editing (Sefirot Fabula, intùiti, and Edito, respectively). While complex, the purpose of this process is to allow me to put my best work in front of both editors and readers.I’m sharing the tool list and resulting outline for those readers and fellow writers who might find it helpful. It’s unlikely a large number of authors will want to use exactly the same tools, in exactly the same way. But perhaps what I’m doing will prove instructive for those who might want to create something similar for themselves.ToolsBelow are the tools I’ve chosen to incorporate into my process. Each is listed by name, the part of the process it addresses, and the format (website, software, card deck, etc.).AutoCrit: Dialogue ratio, adverb frequency, and pacing markers, compared with published work in the genre (website)Claude: Text indexing and search, streamlining work with Sefirot Edito (q.v.; artificial intelligence)CritiqueMatch: Critique partners and beta readers (website)Critters: Critique community (website)D&D Moldvay Basic: Characteristic generation, randomized to provide a variety of character types (ebook)Dialogue Doctor: Dialogue-based character design and growth (worksheet and ebook)Hemingway: Sentence length, adverbs, passive voice, and readability (website/software)Mind Prober: Personality profiling (software)1ProWritingAid: Line editing, grammar, and consistency (software)Scrivener: Word processor with character sketch templates (software)Sefirot Edito: Self-editing (card deck)Sefirot Fabula: Story-building (card deck)Sefirot intùiti: Character motivation (card deck)SFF Online Writing Workshop: Critique partners and possible professional review (website)Editing Process: Mixed-Length Collection (Self-Published)Flash fiction through short novel, with interstitial notesLegend: 🔴 Required · 🟡 Preferred · ⚪ Self-directedTHE CHARACTER CHAINSix 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 ...
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