Épisodes

  • “Probability Amplitudes”: Why am I writing this, anyway?

    “Probability Amplitudes”: Why am I writing this, anyway?
    Oct 17 2026
    Do you or someone you know need professional tech guidance for your author, coaching, or independent publishing business? If so, check out our sponsor Cloudessy, providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services. Simplify your tech stack, prevent launch failures, and build systems that actually support growth.https://marketing.cloudessy.com/30-minute-tech-stack-update/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 min
  • What in the universe is dark energy?

    What in the universe is dark energy?
    Oct 10 2026
    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 min
  • 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
    Oct 3 2026
    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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    39 min
  • A critique of Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Children of Ruin"

    A critique of Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Children of Ruin"
    Sep 28 2026
    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 min
  • “Probability Amplitudes”: Editing in 2026

    “Probability Amplitudes”: Editing in 2026
    Sep 20 2026
    Do you or someone you know need professional tech guidance for your author, coaching, or independent publishing business? If so, check out our sponsor Cloudessy, providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services. Simplify your tech stack, prevent launch failures, and build systems that actually support growth.https://marketing.cloudessy.com/30-minute-tech-stack-update/Register for the 2026 Sturgeon Symposium:https://sfcenter.ku.edu/2026-sturgeon-symposiumIn 2023, with regard to Probability Amplitudes (my first science fiction collection), I shared my “intention to produce the highest quality work possible.” But I didn’t discuss what this might look like, beyond “[r]ounds of editing (by an experienced editor, not by me)” following “alpha- and beta-reading.”In the intervening three years I’ve acquired numerous tools, both physical and virtual, to make this job easier and less expensive—while letting me get the most out of paid, professional editing.Of course, the larger the number of tools, the easier it becomes for the editing process to get out-of-hand. To avoid this, I recently used Claude to create an editing/publishing outline, indicating where each tool best fits (based on Claude’s training data, as this is a subject beyond my own expertise).At this time, the process includes 14 separate tools, ranging from a method for creating character attributes that don’t all conform to my own biases (using the Dungeons & Dragons character generation system from the Moldvay Basic rules) to multiple software editing tools (AutoCrit, Hemingway, and ProWritingAid) to three different card decks—one each for story-building, character motivation, and self-editing (Sefirot Fabula, intùiti, and Edito, respectively). While complex, the purpose of this process is to allow me to put my best work in front of both editors and readers.I’m sharing the tool list and resulting outline for those readers and fellow writers who might find it helpful. It’s unlikely a large number of authors will want to use exactly the same tools, in exactly the same way. But perhaps what I’m doing will prove instructive for those who might want to create something similar for themselves.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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    34 min
  • What in the worlds is dark matter?

    What in the worlds is dark matter?
    Sep 13 2026
    Do you or someone you know need professional tech guidance for your author, coaching, or independent publishing business? If so, check out our sponsor Cloudessy, providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services. Simplify your tech stack, prevent launch failures, and build systems that actually support growth.https://marketing.cloudessy.com/30-minute-tech-stack-update/Five-sixths of the matter in the universe is a mystery to us. Now, we might have taken a step closer to figuring out what it is. Maybe.On September 1, the team running the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment searching for dark matter reported a development at a conference in Tendo, Japan. Nearly a mile underground in an old South Dakota gold mine, the team watches a tank containing ten tons of ultra-pure liquid xenon. Going through 220 days of data collected in 2023 and 2024, they found a flash of light—the signature of a xenon nucleus recoiling with 248 kiloelectronvolts of energy it picked up from a source no known background phenomenon explains. They calculated the significance of the event at 2.6 sigma—meaning the background would throw off an event like this roughly once in two hundred tries. That isn't enough to call the detection a "discovery," which typically requires five sigma or higher. They didn’t claim to have seen direct evidence of dark matter. But they saw something interesting.1If LZ, or another experiment, repeats this finding, it could have major ramifications for astrophysics and cosmology. Dark matter out-masses all the rest of the matter in our universe at a ratio of about five to one,2 and yet we don’t know what it is.In 1933, Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky determined the galaxies in the Coma cluster were moving too fast for the cluster’s visible mass to hold them together. Something else—he called it dunkle Materie3—had to be supplying the necessary gravity. The astronomy community basically ignored his finding for 40 years.4 Then in 1970, Vera Rubin and Kent Ford measured how fast the outer regions of the Andromeda galaxy rotate and found the same problem—the edges were turning nearly as fast as the middle, which Newtonian gravity flatly forbids unless the galaxy’s mass is distributed in ways that don’t match what our instruments detect.5Fast-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.”6The 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.8The EROS-2 survey watched millions of stars in the Magellanic Clouds for 6.7 years. If the Milky Way’s halo were made of objects around four-tenths of a solar mass, roughly 39 lensing events should have shown up in the bright-star sample—only one did.9 The cosmic microwave background and Big Bang nucleosynthesis independently cap the total amount of ordinary matter far below what the galaxies' gravity demands—no matter how faint that matter might be.10Whatever holds the galaxies together, it isn’t made of the same stuff we are.Science fiction is on the case. Three novels in particular—Mike Brotherton’s Spider Star, John Gribbin’s The Alice Encounter, and Stephen Baxter’s Ring—each take a different approach to dramatizing the problem.WIMPs to the rescue?If dark matter isn’t just ordinary matter that’s hard to see, maybe it’s a particle no one has found yet.The favorite candidates for decades have been “weakly interacting massive particles” (WIMPs)—hypothesized to be heavy, stable particles produced in abundance in the early universe and left over when the cosmos thinned out.11 But we’ve hunted for a long time and nothing suitable has turned up.LZ published its low-mass results last December, based on 417 live days—the largest dataset any dark matter detector has ever assembled—and found nothing between three and nine ...
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    39 min
  • John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series wins the Hugo

    John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series wins the Hugo
    Sep 3 2026
    Do you or someone you know need professional tech guidance for your author, coaching, or independent publishing business? If so, check out our sponsor Cloudessy, providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services. Simplify your tech stack, prevent launch failures, and build systems that actually support growth.https://marketing.cloudessy.com/30-minute-tech-stack-update/Greg Bear Birthday Humble Bundle:https://www.humblebundle.com/books/greg-bear-birthday-bundle-open-road-media-books?hmb_source=&hmb_medium=product_tile&hmb_campaign=mosaic_section_1_layout_index_3_layout_type_threes_tile_index_1_c_gregbearbirthdaybundleopenroadmedia_bookbundle&_gl=1*2thjm5*_up*MQ..*_gs*MQ..&gclid=CjwKCAjwwL_UBhAjEiwAEhuT5J6I3YtOIs2Ik9j35W4nlkDiNJBpz19T17oP3Hy94Vx6r4klmG_ZwhoCdIEQAvD_BwE&gbraid=0AAAAACzVokDVr7jJ6gZ2jgVi7LtdRGu3qby Brian Scott PaulsThis 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 2025.1Just 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.4Scalzi discovered the value of “shareware” marketing early on. In 1997 he wrote Agent to the Stars as an experiment, to see if he could handle writing at novel-length. In 1999 he posted it for free on his website, asking readers to mail him a dollar if they liked it. By 2004 he’d received about $4000 from satisfied fans.5Learning from this experience, Scalzi serialized Old Man’s War on the blog in 2002.6 Then he sent Tor editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden a link to an essay he’d written about the experiment. Two days later, Nielsen Hayden replied, “as the blurb cliché goes, I couldn’t put it down.” Tor published the book in 2005. The next year it received a Hugo nomination for Best Novel and won the John W. Campbell (now Astounding) Award for Best New Writer.7The 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.9Scalzi lives with his wife in Bradford, Ohio.10See below for the description of Old Man’s War, the first novel in the series, from the publisher’s website:"John Perry did two things on his 75th birthday. First he visited his wife’s grave. Then he joined the army.The good news is that humanity finally made it to the stars. The bad news is that, out there, planets fit to live on are scarce—and alien races willing to fight us for them are common. So: we fight. Far from Earth, the war has been going on for decades: brutal, bloody, unyielding.Responsible for protecting humanity, the Colonial Defense Force doesn’t want young people; they want people who carry the knowledge and skills of decades of living. You’ll be taken off Earth, never to return. You’ll serve two years in combat. And if you survive, you’ll be given a homestead of your own on a hard-won planet light-years from home.John Perry is taking that deal. He thinks he knows what to expect. But the actual fight is far, far harder than he can imagine—and what he will become is far stranger.11" This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thecosmiccodex.com
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    21 min
  • A critique of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Children of Time”

    A critique of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Children of Time”
    Aug 27 2026
    Do you or someone you know need professional tech guidance for your author, coaching, or independent publishing business? If so, check out our sponsor Cloudessy, providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services. Simplify your tech stack, prevent launch failures, and build systems that actually support growth.https://marketing.cloudessy.com/30-minute-tech-stack-update/Stream the Hugo Awards Ceremony 2026:https://www.youtube.com/@lacon-onlineGreg Bear Birthday Humble Bundle:https://www.humblebundle.com/books/greg-bear-birthday-bundle-open-road-media-books?hmb_source=&hmb_medium=product_tile&hmb_campaign=mosaic_section_1_layout_index_3_layout_type_threes_tile_index_1_c_gregbearbirthdaybundleopenroadmedia_bookbundle&_gl=1*2thjm5*_up*MQ..*_gs*MQ..&gclid=CjwKCAjwwL_UBhAjEiwAEhuT5J6I3YtOIs2Ik9j35W4nlkDiNJBpz19T17oP3Hy94Vx6r4klmG_ZwhoCdIEQAvD_BwE&gbraid=0AAAAACzVokDVr7jJ6gZ2jgVi7LtdRGu3qby Brian Scott PaulsIf you put Andre Norton’s “The Stars Are Ours,” Robert A. Heinlein’s “Orphans of the Sky,” Frank Herbert’s “Dune,” David Brin’s “The Uplift War,” and Vernor Vinge’s “A Deepness In the Sky” in a blender on ‘high,’ you might get something like Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Children of Time.” This is a description, not a criticism.“Immature poets imitate;” Eliot tells us, “mature poets steal...” Refugees from a ruined Earth escaping to the stars, a generation ship fallen into savagery, an epic sweep of future history, terrestrial species uplifted to sentience, even a culture of intelligent, spider-like “aliens”—none of this is new. After more than a century of genre science fiction, new ideas are rare. But Eliot also said “…bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” Tchaikovsky isn’t necessarily better than Norton, Heinlein, Herbert, Brin, and Vinge, but without a doubt he gives us a unique and memorable combination of these elements.In 2023, Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time series won the Hugo Award for Best Series, and this first book won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2016. I’ll review the following volumes, Children of Ruin and Children of Memory, over the next two months.Also, please remember Cloudessy, my consulting business providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services, is now a sponsor of this newsletter. If you or someone you know needs professional tech guidance for their author, coaching, or independent publishing business, check out the ad at the end of this post. Thank you!Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.Children of Time begins with Dr. Avrana Kern’s plan to seed a terraformed world with monkeys, along with a nanovirus meant to accelerate their evolution. When a sabotage attack kills the monkeys, the nanovirus escapes and infects other species already on the planet, including a population of Portia labiata (“jumping spiders”.) Kern survives in suspended animation emerging at long intervals to watch over the world below.Thousands of years later, the ark ship Gilgamesh approaches the planet after fleeing a ruined Earth. This results in a confrontation with Kern, now psychologically unstable after long isolation, who is unwilling to share “her” world with the unexpected and unwelcome refugees.Tchaikovsky structures Children of Time in a back-and-forth narrative which compares and contrasts the gradual development of the “Portiid’s” spider civilization with the technological and cultural decline of the humans on their decaying starship. Of the two, the Portiids are the most fascinating.Trained in psychology and zoology, Tchaikovsky is at his scientific strongest when depicting how arthropod-type species think and behave. The real life Portia labiata ranks among the most cognitively studied arthropods. Experiments have documented specimens selecting routes before moving, executing detours that carry them out of sight of their prey, and adjusting their tactics against spitting spiders of the genus Scytodes. From this framework, Tchaikovsky constructs a believable, and (which is more important here) a believably non-human society that nevertheless piques our curiosity and sympathy.The Portiids even develop biotechnology allowing them to build computers out of ants:Each colony has been carefully trained, by subtle manipulation of punishment, reward and chemical stimulus, to perform a specific service, giving the great minds of the spiders access to a curious kind of analytical engine, using the cascading decision trees of the colony’s own governance as gearing. Each colony is good for a very limited set of related calculations—a vastly skilled yet vastly specialized idiot savant—and retraining a community of ants is a long and painstaking task.Tchaikovsky goes to great lengths constructing a new species we’ll accept as “real.” And when the Portiids reach orbit, he drops an ...
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    31 min