It’s Harder to Stab When You’re Being Punched in the Face
Posted on July 25, 2024 Posted by John Scalzi 52 Comments
Peruse, if you will, what I believe is one of the first press releases from the Harris campaign, released after a Fox News appearance by Donald Trump earlier today:
Two points to make here. The first is that not only are the gloves off, they were never on in the first place. The second is that one advantage that the GOP had in the last two election cycles — the presumption that the Democrats would always “go high” when they went low — is very clear no longer operable.
I don’t know if Trump and the GOP are actually prepared for the Harris campaign to treat them with the respect they deserve, which is to say, none whatsoever. This is different than saying that Trump and company aren’t prepared to go low; they’ve been in the gutter so long that it’s now their high ground. What I’m saying is that it’s harder to effectively stab your opponent when she’s busy punching you in the face, and wearing brass knuckles when she’s doing it.
Which is again a reminder: 2024 is not 2020 or 2016. I’m curious to see if the Trump campaign will be able to understand that.
— JS
Smudge, Leading His Best Life
Posted on July 25, 2024 Posted by John Scalzi 11 Comments
In all the hubbub of the last few days, thought you might appreciate a soothing picture of a cat. I know I sure do. And Smudge is a world leader in just following his bliss. We would all do well to follow his furry example.
— JS
The Big Idea: Will Ludwigsen
Posted on July 23, 2024 Posted by John Scalzi 10 Comments
Author Will Ludwigsen earns his “Explain Your Latest Work” badge with this Big Idea about A Scout is Brave. Come find out how scouting and chthonic horror join forces to… well, you’ll find out.
WILL LUDWIGSEN:
How (and more importantly why) does a person come to write a novella about a boy moving to Lovecraft’s Innsmouth in 1963 and starting a Scout troop with a very peculiar new friend?
Well, mostly because I, like Bud Castillo in the story, really had a thing for handbooks when I was young.
Even before my mercurial father gave me a copy of the 1963 Boy Scout one when I was nine, I was already in love with the idea that calm, stable, and reliable experts had written down exactly how to do things.
I read handbooks on making movies (though I didn’t have a camera), building soap box derby cars (though soap hadn’t been sold in wooden boxes for thirty years), running a model railroad (though we had no room), and surviving in majestic forests (though we’d moved to the palmetto swamps of Florida).
I was a kid in the Eighties learning skills from the Fifties.
When I was finally old enough to join the Boy Scouts, I was the living embodiment of the breathless, “gee whiz!” writing style of their handbook, ready to draw the sweet scent of the pines into my lungs and walk elderly ladies across the street.
Then I met actual Scouts.
Like Bud in A Scout is Brave, I discovered that no one – boy or adult – took the handbook as seriously as I did. They wanted to chop down trees and light things on fire and chase each other through the woods in the dark as though their handbook was Lord of the Flies. To them, I was a dork with a (well-whittled) stick up my ass, and they weren’t completely wrong.
I left the Scouts behind after three years, short a couple of merit badges and a service project from achieving Eagle. I had a disquieting feeling that they wanted me to be someone I wasn’t…and that they weren’t, either.
That’s the risk of handbooks: though they pretend otherwise, they’re just as fantastical as fiction. They imagine perfect commitment, ample resources, and cooperative circumstances that just aren’t common in the world.
Not long into my teens, I discovered a new set of handbooks by writers like Bradbury and Clarke and Ellison, not to mention Tolkien and King. You had to work a little harder to see them as handbooks, which was part of their virtue: a more active act of reconciliation between their reality and mine.
Though nominally imaginary, science fiction and fantasy always seemed like literature you were supposed to do something about in the real world. They still do.
A Scout is Brave isn’t really a handbook of anything, except maybe how to assemble your own with the help of people who share your values and have your back. I found those people in other readers and writers of science fiction and fantasy and horror, people as delusional as me about the intersection between books and so-called real life.
By “delusional,” I mean in the best possible way: unwilling to accept someone else’s reality on blind faith.
These are times that could use more people willing to test new realities in both the world that is and the world we can create. I’m not as forlorn about their rarity as I was as a kid. Maybe I’m just more confident that even those few can make a difference.
I wrote my novella to introduce you to some that would fit right into our troop.
A Scout is Brave: Amazon|Barnes and Noble|Powell’s
When Hugo Nonsense is Handled Right
Posted on July 22, 2024 Posted by John Scalzi 59 Comments
The short version of the video above: At least one absolute fucknuckle of a person was (stupidly, obviously) attempting to game the Hugo awards this year, and the fraud was caught and disallowed in the tabulation. And then, the Hugo team, via press release and the video above, immediately went public with the situation, because transparency of action is actually a thing. There are some things the administrators can’t legally divulge, and they note this as well, and that, too, is a welcome act of transparency.
Look, I am not unbiased here — I am a Hugo finalist this year, I’m on the program for the Worldcon, and heck, I’m even DJing a dance at the convention. For all that, and especially after the shitshow of last year’s Hugo administration, the determination of the Glasgow Worldcon to be as open as possible about the Hugo process as well as other things usually mostly behind the scenes (including this year’s WSFS business meeting) genuinely impresses me. In a perfect world, the Glasgow conrunners would not be called upon to restore faith in the integrity of the Hugo and WSFS processes. But this is not the world we live in. Glasgow is meeting the moment in this imperfect world, and I appreciate that they are doing so, calmly, factually and forthrightly.
Also, to the person or persons going out of their way to try to screw around with this year’s Hugo: You just threw a whole lot of money into the trash, pal. Please go lick a wall socket at your earliest convenience. Thanks.
— JS
Biden, Harris, Trump and 2024
Posted on July 22, 2024 Posted by John Scalzi 143 Comments
Slow news weekend, am I right?
Some thoughts on the current state of things, in no particular order.
1. I was not a fan of the idea of Joe Biden leaving the race, and I still have my suspicions that Biden was done dirty by the Democratic Party. I’m not happy about that. This is not because I am some extreme Biden partisan, just mostly because it looked and felt like panic and flailing around for weeks at a time over one bad debate. However, in the fullness of time and roughly 20 hours of hindsight, I’m beginning to wonder how much of the flailing about was actual panic, and how much of it was carefully choreographed messaging leading up to Biden choosing to step aside.
Let me be clear about one thing: If Biden had had a decent debate, we wouldn’t be having this conversation at all. I think his bad performance there was real, indicative of some substantive issues, and I think the initial freak out on the Democratic side was real, too. But I think it’s possible that at some point, once Biden himself decided he was a liability, the panic stopped being real and started being something managed. The goal: keeping GOP energies invested on the wrong target until such a time that the announcement of Biden’s departure from the race could be made with maximum impact. If it was indeed this, a strategic roll with a punch leading to an effective counterpunch, then I feel less bad about Biden leaving the race.
2. That’s a wonderful rationalization you have there, Scalzi, I hear you say. And you’re not wrong! It feels far-fetched as fuck. As a rebuttal, however, consider that the announcement was made on the Sunday after the Republican National Convention, and after the Sunday morning political talk shows were put to bed, i.e., after the GOP political capital was spent slagging Biden, and when professional spinners would be caught flat-footed by the announcement. Biden’s news was quickly followed by his endorsement of Kamala Harris, which in turn was followed by a flood of endorsements for Harris across the Democratic political firmament, effectively slamming the door on any serious challenge to Harris at the upcoming Democratic National Convention.
If you think something like that just happens spontaneously, well, one, bless your heart, and two, you’re wrong. This was a work, a rope-a-dope, and a strategy to energize the Democratic base and to toss what little momentum the GOP had coming out of their convention down a deep, dark hole. And it worked! Harris raised an huge amount of money for her campaign in its first day — $49 million at least, and I’ve heard up to $70 million — and the GOP messaging was in disarray, limited largely to Trump whining on Truth Social, Stephen Miller freaking out on Fox News, and Mike Johnson trying to suggest that the Democrats can’t do that, it isn’t fair. Which is just what the Democrats wanted out of this.
So, again: At what point did the panic stop being panic and start being a strategy? Because at some point, it did become a strategy. Hindsight suggests to me it was at some point before the Republican convention. But of course I don’t know, and I could be wrong on the timing. I just know it happened.
3. So let’s talk about Kamala Harris for a moment. To begin, I am 100% fine with her being the candidate presumptive. Long-time readers may recall that in the 2020 Democratic primary cycle, she was my first choice candidate. Here’s the link to the whole piece, but since I figure most of you won’t click through, here’s what I wrote at the time:
She’s hella smart, pretty savvy and I think her background and daily practice in politics shows she’s not scared of anyone, least of all the Republicans. I also suspect that she would put together a very fine cabinet of equally smart and savvy people and be the best chance to reverse the four years of stupidity and cupidity we’ve endured to this point. Is she perfect? Lol, no. But I don’t need perfect at this point, and additionally I think she’s smart enough to know where she’s not smart enough, and will collect people to her to compensate. Also, she’s not old as fuck, and her personal baggage seems dealable. Plus she’d shred Trump in the presidential debates like he was a chicken straight out of the crock pot. Yeah, I’d watch that.
Hey, you know what? Almost all of that still stands! Plus, now she’s gotten three and a half years of being Vice President under her belt, and it was an actually useful Vice Presidency; she did a lot of policy work and made a lot of tie-breaking votes in the Senate. She understands the presidency gig better than nearly anyone else the Democrats could have hauled up on short notice. Indeed, I have a very strong feeling that if there had been resistance in the Democratic camp to Harris sliding into the candidate role, Biden would not have stepped aside. He’s an institutionalist at heart, and a brokered Democratic convention would be chaos.
4. What are Harris’ disadvantages? Bluntly, she’s a black woman running for president in racist and sexist country where straight white men freaked out so hard at the Obama presidency, and the possibility of Hilary Clinton back in the White House, that the majority of them voted en masse for a felonious grifter in 2016, and then did it again in 2020. Do not kid yourself that the majority of them will do anything but in 2024, either. The question is how many of the straight white women they will take with them when they do.
(You may or may not think this is a reductive observation, but if you do, I suspect you may be a straight white person who decided not to vote for Clinton “because of her emails,” or because she was “unlikeable,” or whatever, i.e., you were looking for any reason not to vote for the candidate who was actually qualified for the job, in order to vote for the unfathomably shitty person the other side hauled up out of the incompetent depths, who had no platform besides his own cretinous id and still does not. It’s 2024, I’m done pretending that sexism and racism, implicit or explicit, aren’t huge fucking motivators for the white people vote here in the US. You can rationalize it however you like; I understand it’s important for one’s self-image to do that. I’m not inclined to buy into the rationalizations any more.)
The current iteration of the GOP has been mask-off racist and sexist for some time, and Donald Trump sets the tone for the party on this score. Be expecting the whole array of nonsense from them, from dog whistles to flat out racist and sexist shit, said out loud, and also all over the former Twitter by Trump’s pet fascists and/or Russian bots. I guarantee you it will be nothing Kamala Harris has not heard before, but you might see a couple of new ones. The GOP outsourced their policy making to The Heritage Foundation with its Project 2025, which is already deeply unpopular, probably because it’s terrible for anyone who is not already a billionaire cryptofascist with a cross fetish. The GOP can’t go after Harris on policy grounds, and Trump doesn’t do policy anyway. So expect endless variations of she’s an uppity black woman for the next several months.
5. What about Joe Biden? Fun fact: He’s still president and will be through noon on January 20. He doesn’t have to worry about getting re-elected anymore, and the Supreme Court has rather stupidly decided that presidents are now kings and don’t have to be answerable to anyone for anything, as long as what they do is “official business.” So that will be interesting. I don’t think for a second that Biden would do anything with that remit close to what Trump would do with it — Trump would fucking have US citizens imprisoned and murdered because that’s what he always wanted anyway. Biden’s not that guy, and he wants Harris to win the election. But there are a lot of executive orders between now and then that he can manage that could help those who need help, and vex those who need vexing, and to draw comparisons between the parties and their positions. The Supreme Court’s stupid decision certainly could bolster that. Thanks, Supreme Court!
Also, Biden has manifestly changed the narrative around both himself and his presidency. I didn’t want him to stop running for re-election, but choosing to do so allows for a “country over self” positioning that’s a hugely effective contrast to Trump’s “I’m running to avoid prison and to get revenge” narrative. It also allows a fresh reframing of the Biden administration’s achievements and accomplishments, and positions Harris to say she will continue them. Biden can lean into the whole “Grandpa Joe” thing now, and have it seen as a positive rather than a negative.
And now, when he goes after Trump and the GOP in his “Dark Brandon” guise — and he will, oh, boy, will he — it will be a delight. Trump, who doesn’t have it in him not to punch back at Biden, will be wasting his time and energy fighting with the wrong person, and the GOP will have no choice but to follow him down that hole. Which is to say Biden has opened up a whole new front in the messaging wars, and it has the potential to be glorious.
6. Okay, let’s get to some short stuff:
Joe Manchin says he’s going to re-register as a Democrat to run for president! He can go fuck himself. Also, it’s already too late for that. I mean, he could do that, and he could go to the convention and see what he gets there. But as noted above, the whole of the Democratic firmament is already aligned with Harris. It was a done deal before it was even announced. By the way, “go to the convention, see what it gets you” is what I will be saying to any johnny-come-lately on this matter. Do it! Mount a challenge! Throw away your career in Democratic politics! I’m sure it will work out fine for you.
(Update, 12:11pm: Manchin did, indeed, go fuck himself.)
Mike Johnson says the GOP will contest Harris at the top of the ballot! He can go fuck himself too. It’s 100% certain that the GOP, having already abandoned the concept of democracy in its rush to crown its new King of Orange, will try all manner of complete fuckery so people can’t vote for the candidates of their choosing, of which this would be just one example. I do have some faith (now, maybe not before the last couple of days) that the Democrats made sure their “i”s were dotted and their “t”s crossed in a legal sense before they did this thing. Again: The GOP doesn’t do democracy anymore, so they will absolutely try to keep Harris off the ballot. Let’s see how that goes.
Who will be the Vice Presidential candidate? A white man from a swing(ish) state. Elsewhere I have already suggested Mark Kelly or Andy Beshear, and other people seem to like Josh Shapiro. I have no real personal preference, although the nerd in me likes the idea of an astronaut VP. But bluntly, this is a racist and sexist country, remember? Having a white dude from a swing(ish) state is probably worth just enough votes to make it useful.
7. Can Harris win? Yes, I think so. It’s not 2016 or 2020. Here in 2024, the Supreme Court, with six conservatives, three appointed by Trump, has already gutted people’s rights, and Project 2025 makes it clear that the plan is to gut even more, and to make living in these United States objectively worse for almost everyone. Donald Trump is 78, mentally declining, a convicted felon, a sexual assaulter, a seditionist, and a bellowing fountain of rage who sees everything in transactional terms. He literally cares nothing for anyone who isn’t him and surrounds himself with the worst possible people. His new Vice President pick JD Vance is a perfect example of this, a craven opportunist who spends most of his time being warm and cozy in billionaire Peter Thiel’s pocket.
Trump has never won an election by popular vote; he won his sole national victory in the edges of the electoral college. That’s the way it is, and a win is a win, but the point is that Trump has never been popular. He’s not any more popular now than he was in 2016 or 2020, and here in 2024 he has a hell of a lot more baggage.
Harris isn’t perfect, and she’s not the perfect candidate for a racist and sexist country. But there will be people who will want to vote against Trump, who will be happy to give her their vote. There will be people who will want to vote for her, independent of whoever the other candidate is or would have been. The Venn diagram of those two groups closely resembles a circle, but there’s enough on the margins for a victory.
To put it another way, after eight years, we know what the hard cap is on Trump’s support. We don’t know what the cap is yet for Harris’ support. History does suggest that cap is higher than Trump’s.
So yes, she can win. And she will have my vote.
— JS
New Books and ARCs, 7/19/24
Posted on July 19, 2024 Posted by John Scalzi 14 Comments
Thanks to travel and life and not a small bit of laziness, it’s been just a bit since we’ve had a stack of new books and ARCs for you, but we’re making up for some lost time with this very excellent collection of arrivals here at the Scalzi Compound. What here would you like to have for a summer read? Share in the comments!
— JS
New Cover: “Take On Me” + Why So Much Music From Me Recently
Posted on July 19, 2024 Posted by John Scalzi 15 Comments
First: Yes, the A-Ha song. No, I didn’t try to hit “the note.” I wouldn’t have hit it and none of you would have been happy with the result. I suppose I could have just pitch-corrected the note into the right place, but you would definitely notice. My falsetto was barely holding on as it was. Anyway, this version of the song is… a little strange. I put a trap beat to it, just to see what that would be like, and everything went kind of sideways from there. This is probably as close to ska as I’ve ever gotten? But if I called it actual ska, I think every member of The Selecter, past and present, would manifest at my house to kick the crap out of me. So: It’s just me being weird, y’all. Hope you like it.
Second: I think many of you have noticed I’m putting out a lot of music recently, both covers and original stuff. There are a bunch of reasons why I am doing that. One, I have all this damn musical equipment and I need to justify the expense. The guitars are neat decorations, but they really should be used. Same with the keyboards and the digital audio work stations and all the plugins and what have you. Two, and correlated, the only way to get better with all this stuff is to use it. I am technically an at best modestly adept musician, but I’m getting better and I like learning more about my musical instruments and programs. Which is a third thing: Fiddling about with music, especially in the DAW, gets my brain into a happy zone, where I dive in and tweak things for hours and get lost in the hobby for a bit.
The fourth thing is, hey, the world’s on fire and I find myself less inclined to write about it here — as I’ve said many times before, there’s only so many variations of “don’t fucking vote for fascists” I can say before I bore myself, much less you — and while I’m not shying away from the messed up reality we all exist in, because I do actually live in the world, I don’t find it energizing to write about it at the moment, like I did before. Nevertheless I also know that if I don’t do creative stuff regularly that’s not “job,” I tend to get psychically constipated. I need to do something with my brain to be happy. For the moment, music is scratching that itch, so I’m doing a lot of it, and posting the results here. Is this a permanent thing? We’ll see! My personal suspicion is eventually my brain will come back around to writing. But in the meantime, here’s me covering 80s tunes in goofy ways.
A fifth thing, tangentially related, is that behind the scenes, Athena and I talking a bit about what we want to do with Whatever in the future. It’s been a shared site for a while now with both of us writing and working on it, and in a larger sense we’re looking into how it will best fit into other projects we are doing jointly and individually. There will be more on that later (I’m not trying to be mysterious, we’re just still working on things). I will say Whatever isn’t going anywhere; if anything, and if all goes in the direction of what we’re hoping, the site will be hopping with cool stuff.
While we’re working on that: Here, have some tunes.
— JS
My Site Still Up In the Crowdstrike Shutdown
Posted on July 19, 2024 Posted by John Scalzi 13 Comments
And to celebrate, here is a picture of a cat on a car roof.
My sympathies to you today if you were planning to travel by air, or withdraw large sums of money from your bank account. It’s kind of a mess out there at the moment. I’m going to stay home, but then, that was my plan anyway.
— JS
The Big Idea: Jean Marie Ward
Posted on July 18, 2024 Posted by John Scalzi 2 Comments
With a title like Dragons, Cats, & Formidable Femmes, you can probably take a guess at what two creatures will be showing up in this anthology. But as author Jean Marie Ward tells us in this Big Idea, those animals are only the beginning of the fantastical fun.
JEAN MARIE WARD:
The obvious Big Idea for any writer’s collection of short fiction would be a lot of little ideas. The shape-shifting foodie dragon trying to satisfy his appetites in Imperial China. The calico cat who imprinted on Nineties’ reruns and turns every chance occurrence into a paranormal investigation. The jilted housewife who discovers an unexpected benefit to Pyrex cookware. That one con guest of honor who’s even stranger than her fiction. I called the book Dragons, Cats, & Formidable Femmes, because it delivers exactly what it says on the box.
Like most writers, I write what I want to read, magical adventures with a lot of humor. Women with grit, smarts, and agency are a given. I want to see people like me on the page, I also want to see people I’d like to be, heroes and villains.
The surprise came when I assembled the stories. It was practically a bestiary. Dragons and cats formed the bulk, but there were falcons haunting skyscrapers and mystically minded flies, foxes and dogs, cute rodents, and magical fish. Their absence from the page generally signified a profound lack in the characters or their lives. I didn’t plan it. I certainly never intended to use the presence of animals as some kind of literary Rorschach test. But reading all the stories in succession, the subtext was unavoidable.
It wasn’t just the presence of animals, either. It was the way the characters interacted with them. How do they treat these inhuman beings sharing our world? Are they kind or cruel? Is there a sense of respect, even when the species are in opposition? After all, no one wants Beelzebub’s legions infesting a house you really need to sell.
It’s the opposite of a new Big Idea. People have been telling stories featuring animals since they’ve had mouths to speak and hands to draw. It takes no great imagination to read the 15,000-year-old paintings in the Caves of Lascaux as the first graphic novel. From Reynard to Redwall and beyond, animals stand in for us and for people who are not us. They are myths and metaphors and occasionally, just themselves in all their familiar, unexamined glory.
But even if it isn’t new, I think it bears repeating. Animal stories are a gateway drug to empathy. If we can sympathize with a bug on the page, admire a vampire, and love a kitten who’s a real demon, maybe we can learn to do the same for each other.
Dragons, Cats, & Formidable Femmes: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Kobo|Apple Books
New Podcast Appearance: “Re-Creative, Episode 45”
Posted on July 17, 2024 Posted by John Scalzi 3 Comments
Here’s the link. On the podcast I talk about several things, including writing, my very first Worldcon, and why I do noodle-y electronic music music for fun, if not for profit. The podcast runs about 71 minutes, and I first show up a couple of minutes in. Fun fact, Joe Mahoney, one of the podcast’s cohosts, was the very first person ever to interview me in my guise as a science fiction writer, at Torcon (that year’s Worldcon) in 2003. That was before Old Man’s War came out. It was a long while ago. And yet, here we both are. Time is a funny thing.
— JS
The Big Idea: J. Alexander Cohen
Posted on July 17, 2024 Posted by Athena Scalzi 1 Comment
Sometimes, you have to fight fire with fire. Or in author J. Alexander Cohen’s case, you have to fight fire with legality. Follow along as he takes you through the Big Idea for his newest novel, Talio’s Codex.
J. ALEXANDER COHEN:
“A society’s culture comes from its laws. The things that tell us what we can and cannot do. What we should do.”
In this scene from my fantasy legal thriller, Talio’s Codex, advocate Talio Rossa is explaining to a skeptical friend why the law is so important. Talio’s spent much of his adult life as an advocate and magistrate, upholding the laws of the land.
But Talio’s not above using whatever tricks he finds necessary to win a case or turn it to his advantage. Effectively, he’s happy to bypass the way the legal system works in favor of how it should work.
This irreconcilable crack in his ethics starts to grow once he encounters the Incarnites. The culture of the country of Merin is based on water: worship of a water goddess, cities of canals, religious practices involving washing of hands. Even court cases open with references to the bounty of waters, lakes, oceans.
Not the Incarnites. They follow the fire god Sif. They cover themselves from head to foot. And they refuse to participate in much of Talio’s society. As you can imagine, this does not go well for them.
Talio is struggling to regain his legal career after a disgrace as a magistrate. His first success is in defending an Incarnite in an impossible murder case (using a trick, of course). Seeing him as a sympathetic figure, the Incarnites soon start seeking his help on everyday legal matters. Finally, Talio is swept up in larger Incarnite cases on identity and self-determination.
It’s not an easy road for Talio to work with the Incarnites. At first he sees them as something alien, something other. He develops a working partnership with Pazli Mecomb, the man he defended in the murder trial. Even then, he still subconsciously sees Pazli as his inferior. When they play a board game, Talio thinks that Pazli’s strategy is excellent – “for an Incarnite.”
As their partnership deepens into friendship, affection and ultimately an intense relationship, Talio’s able to see that fairness and equality in Merin is not a matter of finding tricks and other ways around unjust laws, but to challenge those laws and question the very foundation of their legal system.
Merin’s laws have heavily influenced its culture. A focus on authentication and identity have led to bureaucracy and fear. And everything is canted against the Incarnites, who refuse to identify themselves and demand a place in society.
Talio is able to take that critical step outwards in perception. Like the goldfish who’s finally able to see the water around them, he can perceive the need for the laws to change. To modernize, to accommodate and to grow.
Talio can’t make that final step towards seeing the need for systemic reform in Merin until he’s gone through the internal changes necessary. First, seeing the Incarnites as worthy of defending, worthy of rights. Second, seeing them as equals. And third, seeing them as having and deserving agency – that he can help them fight their battles, but they are not his battles to fight.
The Incarnites have no direct analog to any group in our world. They are orthogonal to us. A minority. A thought experiment. And yet…as Talio muses near the very end of the novel:
[The] laws were far from perfect. And those who resisted progress would always have excuses. As long as the doors to Merin were closed to the Incarnites, [the] system could never deliver true justice.
Like Talio, it is very hard for us to discern the waters we swim in, how they can benefit some of us and not others. It’s worth the struggle to try to poke our heads above the surface of the water to see the sun at last. To see everything else there is in the world. And to see how far there is left to go.
Talio’s Codex: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s
New Cover: “Under the Milky Way”
Posted on July 16, 2024 Posted by John Scalzi 11 Comments
I got a new guitar and wanted to justify its expense by putting it into a track, so here you go: A cover of “Under the Milky Way” by The Church for way back in 1988. My version is a little more chunky and, dare I say it, slightly more emo than the somewhat more ethereal original, but I hope you enjoy it nevertheless. Also, if you wish to compare and contrast it to the original, here it is via YouTube. Enjoy.
— JS
The Big Idea: R. B. Lemberg
Posted on July 16, 2024 Posted by Athena Scalzi 1 Comment
Don’t let today’s Big Idea fly by you. Dive into author R. B. Lemberg’s Big Idea as they walk you through the construction of their newest novel, Yoke of Stars.
R. B. LEMBERG:
Two years ago, in a Big Idea essay for my Birdverse novel The Unbalancing, I talked about canceling parts of speech. I got to do just that in my newest Birdverse novella Yoke of Stars. I cancelled verbs.
The idea first occurred to me as a graduate student at UC Berkeley, studying cognitive linguistics with my mentor Dr. Eve Sweetser. I also met and was influenced by Dr. Dan Slobin, a famous Berkeley psycholinguist who dedicated his life to the study of motion verbs. Motion is a cognitive category which is fundamental to how humans experience the world. We dream about movement even when we ourselves cannot walk or run. We use motion metaphors when we say that a joke flew over our heads, or a zoom meeting ran over. An egg can be runny without any ability to move unassisted. As humans, we love motion so much, we keep adding cartoon legs to things which do not have them. (We love perception just as much: drawing eyes on things is an ancient impulse.) Motion is a basic cognitive category, and the world’s languages tend to express it through verbs.
So what about a language with no verbs? What kind of cognitive reality would it describe, what kind of culture would it produce, and most importantly, how could I describe such a thing using one of my own languages, all of them rich in verbal expressions even if they all describe motion differently?
This was the big idea behind the first-ever story I wrote, set in a kind of proto-Birdverse. It never saw the light of day, and I’m happy about that, because I had no idea, in those early days, how to do justice to something like that. Yoke of Stars is that book. I am a kind of neurodivergent writer who loves to think about the same thing over and over for a very long time until it coheres.
Much later, I discovered that there is a constructed language, Kelēn, which is verbless by design. I do not know anything else about it. I wanted to continue working on my own ideas, so I did not look into it beyond the fact of its existence.
In Yoke of Stars, a linguist and an assassin-trainee sit down to negotiate an assassination. It turned out that the way I wanted to tackle my verbless language idea was by writing about exile, bilingualism, translation, and diaspora. Through the act of translation and storytelling, we can begin to understand a reality of a protagonist who left their culture and even their language behind – who suffers this loss and yet cannot go back. Yoke of Stars was a technically odd story to write, as there is a lot of motion in it, a lot is happening, and yet at the same time there’s almost no motion. I am glad I could write this book now, when I have the tools to do such things.
I’m a multilingual queer migrant who became a linguist because I wanted to figure out how my own mind worked just as my mind kept changing; I migrated from place to place, learning and losing languages and people, finding some of them again. I became a writer so I could spin something out of these difficult stories which are larger than an idea of a verbless language. They are about translation and loss, trauma and camaraderie. They are about fleeing an oppressive regime only to find that other places are not much better. Finding meaning and hope despite the yokes that bind and suppress us. Building a space with each other, through acts of translation that do something fundamental and transformative which cannot be accomplished through assassination. Oh, and of course, there’s fish communism.
I hope this inspires you to read Yoke of Stars. For more academic research on cognition and motion, I recommend the work of Steven Levinson and Dan Slobin to start with. Each language encodes motion differently, and some have very few verbs. For some languages, the very notion of what is a verb gets very complicated. It’s fascinating stuff, and there’s a lot of it.
Yoke of Stars: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s
Flower and Sunset, 7/15/24
Posted on July 15, 2024 Posted by John Scalzi 2 Comments
Two of the nicer things out of Ohio today, I’d say.
— JS
Redshirts on Esquire’s “75 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time” List
Posted on July 12, 2024 Posted by John Scalzi 32 Comments
Here’s the article. Redshirts clocks in at number 73, which is low for the list, but high in terms of the total number of all science fiction books ever written in the history of the world. It’s kind of like being #380 on the Forbes list of the 400 richest people in the world: you’re still a multi-billionaire, so, yeah, you’re fine.
There’s lots to argue about with this list, as with any list like this, so it’s always good to remember that lists like this should be used to spur conversation rather than rage. I like, for example, that the list features lots of work from the 21st century rather than defaulting to “golden age” classics, in no small part because I think a lot of recent science fiction really does rank with the best the genre has ever offered (and because I like seeing so many of my pals on this list). But I admit to bias. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.
— JS
View From a Hotel Window 7/12/24: Columbus
Posted on July 12, 2024 Posted by John Scalzi 4 Comments
Another weekend, another event: This time it’s the Columbus Book Festival, where I am appearing on two panels, one on Saturday and one on Sunday, and then signing after each panel. And when I’m not doing something in particular there will be lots of other very cool authors and events, so you should totally come and hang out, if you’re in the Columbus area or are willing to travel.
After this I get to be home on the weekend for two whole weeks! I hardly know what I’m going to do with myself.
— JS
The Big Idea: P.H. Low
Posted on July 11, 2024 Posted by John Scalzi 2 Comments
There is the myth of being forever young — but what about the forever that comes after that? P.H. Low has given this some thought in These Deathless Shores, and in this Big Idea, is here to speculate about what comes after, and what it means for those who live it.
P.H. LOW:
Our culture is obsessed with childhood. The romantic ideal of it, anyway—as this innocent, pure, magical state that’s a tragedy to lose. You hear it in the wails of book banners (think of the children!); see it in intense skincare routines and workout regimens and TikTok wars where millennials are burned for looking (gasp!) older than twenty.
And it’s everywhere in fiction — at least the books I read growing up, which pitted downtrodden but plucky kids and teens against adults who were, if not dead parents or outright villains, then dull bureaucrats, cruel teachers, or neglectful guardians, too cowardly or stodgy or just disappointing to be heroes — or even fully people. As J. M. Barrie, the original creator of Peter Pan, learned when his older brother David died in a skating accident at age thirteen — when little James dressed in David’s clothes to comfort their depressed mother, despite his own inevitable growing-up, year by year — to die as a child is to stay perfect forever. To become an adult is to stop deserving love.
But what happens when your childhood falls short of the ideal — especially, as Cathy Park Hong writes about in Minor Feelings, if you’re queer and/or BIPOC and/or have a disability,* and your youth is refracted through the lens of an idyll you’re told you should have but never receive? What happens when you age straight from victimhood into villainy?
Do you deserve magic at all? Do you even deserve your own narrative?**
These Deathless Shores, my genderbent Captain Hook origin story,raises the stakes of these questions to the level of lethality. Here, when the Lost Boys grow up, Peter “thins them out” (a real quote from the original); the Boys are thus terrified of crossing that fateful line, lest they get their throats sliced — or worse, are exiled and forced to go to school in the real world.
These Deathless Shores opens on two of these Boys having aged into unfortunate adulthood: Jordan runs drugs and fights in an underground ring to appease a landlord-cum-handler who might turn on her at any time; Baron— nearly crushed by the pressure to get through college, find a job, and make enough to, at the end of sixty years, “at least afford a hospital bed to die on” (dress to depress, as they say) — walks the edge of suicidal ideation.
It was important to me that I could write this book for adults, as well as kids who’ve been forced to take on similar burdens. To evoke that visceral urgency of scrounging for rent and healthcare; of the free fall that gapes behind you if you miss a step. My background is in YA, which also often treats survival and self-sufficiency as a primary concern. But for this book, I found myself shaping my plot and characterization around a fundamental loneliness I experienced more acutely after I hit eighteen: that I can no longer fall asleep in the backseat as someone I trust drives us to our destination; that if there’s nothing in my fridge but a half-loaf of bread, no one will remind me, no one will ask.
I also grappled with how my characters might struggle against the idea of growing up without the significant presence of parents to push against in-scene. Fortunately, at least for my plot, the grown-up world already permeates so many aspects of Peter’s supposedly child-centric idyll: Peter pretending to be a father, for example, or the way girls are (so Innocently! Naively!) treated as mothers — as passive things to be protected, and mindless doers of chores.
Another challenge for me was writing toward resolution — an ending that looked forward instead of just nailing the coffin shut; that pointed toward what things could be instead of only what they are.*** Because the worship of childhood — again, the cherub-faced ideal rather than the messy, screaming, political reality — is so deeply ingrained in the fabric of our stories, both the ones we consume and the ones we tell ourselves. Because when I was six or seven, accidentally unfolding my mother’s shorts in the closet instead of mine, I was already so imbued with the poison that I dreaded the day I would fit into them.
Because amid the slow exhausting scrabble for car insurance and rent money, the question pressed in: do I deserve a story, if the only thing I am is fighting to survive? What ending could I write for Jordan and Baron that felt both satisfying and true, when I’d dropped them in a pit I hadn’t crawled out of myself? To slightly misquote Sofia Samatar’s The Winged Histories, how can our stories remember without leaving a scar — how can they forget without “destruction, burial, loss” ?
I don’t think These Deathless Shores provides a perfect answer — in fact, I hope it doesn’t, because an ending too neatly wrapped in a bow would feel untrue — but there might be a seed of one in the relationships that form over the course of the story. Jordan and Baron, Chay and Tier — romantic and platonic bonds, chosen slapdash out of convenience or forged over long, hard years. It’s in the ways they come to see and save each other; to say, in the end, that even if you’ve grown old — even if childhood is a locked door you can never reopen — maybe there’s still a story you can belong to; maybe there’s a chance you still deserve to be loved.
*My addition.
**Given the recent discourse on the aging up of YA, I would like to add that it’s urgent and necessary to have novels centering children and teens, stories that help them name the ways adults have failed them, and the shapes of their own desires. But for that to be the only narrative—for eighteen to be framed as the end—seems like its own kind of tragedy.
***Shoutout to Hadestown — love us some myth-rooted capitalism commentary.
These Deathless Shores: Amazon (US)|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop| Powell’s|Blackwells|Waterstones
A Reminder About Things Allegedly in Development
Posted on July 10, 2024 Posted by John Scalzi 13 Comments
Occasionally, things of mine are optioned for film or television, and they are either announced in the trades or information about them is posted on IMDb or IMDb Pro. This will occasionally prompt people to ping me about the possibility of getting hired onto the things presumably in development. So this is a good time to remind people of a couple of things:
1. The information on IMDb or IMDb Pro about things in development is sometimes substantially off (for example, the current IMDb Pro listing for Old Man’s War features a screenwriter who has not been associated with the project for more than a decade), so you should take that information with a grain of salt. Moreover, “development” is not “production,” and most of the general casting/staffing decisions are not going to be made in the development stage of things.
2. Even if the IMDb information were correct, I am never the person to send head shots/show reels/sample scripts to, since I am not going to be the person who is going to make the casting or staffing decisions. I am out here in Ohio writing novels, not in LA. I am indeed often some flavor of producer on these projects (usually an executive producer, sometimes a different kind), but that still doesn’t mean I am making casting/staffing decisions.
3. Furthermore, even if I were substantively involved in casting/staffing, there’s a process through which all casting/staffing happens, which does not involve some variation of cold calling me. There are actual departments those run through, and showrunners (which I am not) who make the call about whom to hire. Hitting me up is a waste of time, as I am not going to respond or do anything with the information you’ve sent, except delete it. Please wait for casting/staffing announcements and then apply that way.
4. Finally, even if I were the person who made the final call on casting/staffing, i.e., the showrunner, I would still run it through the traditional channels of casting and staffing, because those are designed to get the most options on the table in the most efficient manner. So again, going through the known channels is the best way to do things.
I realize this is not what people want to hear, but look: I don’t want you to waste your time, sending information to someone who can’t and won’t do anything with it, i.e., me. You deserve better!
— JS
Michael and Lynne Thomas on Uncanny Magazine’s Year 11 Kickstarter
Posted on July 10, 2024 Posted by John Scalzi 4 Comments
As many of you know, for the last year I’ve been writing a column on SF/F film for Uncanny Magazine, and it’s been a fabulous experience (for me, anyway). Now Uncanny is running a Kickstarter to fund their eleventh year of publication, with new writers and stories and essays (and art!), and I’ve invited editors Michael and Lynne Thomas to come chat about their goals for the year with the magazine, and why they hope you’ll consider contributing to the Kickstarter.
Michael and Lynne Thomas:
First, the happy news: Uncanny Magazine just launched its new Kickstarter, Uncanny Magazine Year 11: This One Goes to ELEVEN! We’re working on funding our 11th year!
Now, the less happy news.
A decade ago, Publishers/Editors-in-Chief Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas launched Uncanny Magazine, an online science fiction and fantasy magazine that features passionate SF/F fiction and poetry, gorgeous prose, provocative nonfiction, and a deep investment in diverse and inclusive SF/F culture—a magazine that believes there’s still plenty of room in the genre for tales that make you feel.
The year 2014 was in the middle of a beautiful era filled with vast, promising internet resources that made launching such a magazine possible. Magazine eBooks were rising in popularity, mostly thanks to a Large Online Retailer selling popular eReaders and providing easy-to-use periodical eBook subscriptions. (Many magazines built their business models around this funding source.) New community funding models like Kickstarter and Patreon appeared, making it possible to directly fund magazines like ours and keep the content free on our website. Crowdfunding dreams blossomed as robust social networks like Twitter and Facebook informed readers about awesome content and ways to make things happen financially.
The internet was people, talking to one another!
Ten years later, everything is crashing down around us. We went from an internet of abundance to one of scarcity; from hanging out in Avatar’s Pandora to something that feels much more like we’re starring in a Mad Max film. As Cory Doctorow put it, enshittification took hold.
Platforms and communication options went from gathering as people to their well-maintained platforms to extracting gobs of money from those folks—locking them into poorly working, difficult-to-escape platform ecosystems. They tweaked and automated algorithms to force paid-for visibility over everything, decimating the naturally popular organic messaging. The Large Online Retailer turned on its content creators. And finally, many tech companies unleashed the boondoggle of “Artificial Intelligence.”
The Enshittification Robots started taking over.
Uncanny is locked in battles with the following Enshittification Robots:
- The Breakdown-of-Social-Media Robot
Let’s be honest, Uncanny wouldn’t exist without Twitter’s existence a decade ago. Twitter’s reach and ease of use meant promotion there worked. Awesome stories, essays, interviews, and podcasts could reach outside the initial SF/F bubble, finding more readersin widespread communities. Librarians, writers, fans, and casual readers talked to one another about stuff that interested them! And those folks went to other platforms like Facebook or Instagram or Reddit and shared things they found and enjoyed on Twitter. Or it flowed the other way! A wonderfully organic ecosystem. People functioned as though there was plenty of story hangout space on the internet to go around. We shared. And shared. And shared. (Though we must acknowledge toxicity was always an issue.)
Riding the wave of that enthusiasm, the magazines using social media encouraged folks to pay for that content via crowdfunding or subscriptions. Another healthy ecosystem developed, and science fiction short fiction and nonfiction could spread across the globe unlike any other time in history, and folks knew how to financially support it.
Then sites began to compete harder for eyeballs (which drive ad revenue), locking out their competition wherever possible, and cross-platform sharing and promotion got more and more difficult. Even if you post everything everywhere in the most time-consuming ways, your content is less likely to be seen unless you’re willing to pay for promotional space (that is, formally advertise). For businesses the size of SF/F magazines, that just isn’t economically feasible.
Then, a total asshat bought Twitter, making it worse and worse as a user experience. Please imagine us headdesking using the GIF of your choice. So many new social media platforms launched as Twitter/X alternatives, but none of them have become a true replacement with Twitter’s former numbers and reach.
Promoting the work Uncanny published got a lot more difficult in every way. We often joke about promotion being an act of screaming into the void. Now we find ourselves trying to scream into multiple voids that refuse to talk to one another, run (in many cases) by promotional robots (aka algorithms) that don’t want you to see the cool shit we’re doing unless we pay for the privilege. This is especially disastrous when you’re also trying to point everybody toward important ways to fund the work and make sure everybody gets paid.
- The Changing-Terms-for-eBook-Sales-and-Distribution Robot
One trend over the past decade was the consolidation of eBook sales for individual issues and subscriptions, with the vast majority of them—particularly for buyers who didn’t have direct contact with creators over the internet—coming through one website. You know the one. It’s named for a big river in South America. They captured the vast majority (depending on the analysis you look at, from 67 to 83%) of the global eBook market. They made sales and distribution super easy for both the buyers and the sellers.
The problem is, they aren’t particularly interested in sharing their capitalist wins with anyone who isn’t them, including the writers and publishers that create the eBooks. Having that much of the market means they can unilaterally change their terms, and that’s exactly what they did to all of us.
They closed their magazine subscription service that made them and us decent money, and forced the magazines onto their “streaming for books” service instead. Suddenly, magazines had no choice but to leave this website or accept a whole different payment structure that’s heavily balanced in the retailer’s favor. That change cost us over half of our subscription revenue from that retailer, without any way to directly contact the folks who subscribed in the old system. We couldn’t explain the changes and let them know better ways to support us. The money-making robots are taking a much bigger cut of the pie for just allowing us to exist. Except the way they’re running things, we won’t exist much longer without rapidly finding a different solution.
- The AI-and-its-Discontents Robot
And then, as the shit candle on the garbage cake, “AI” happened. On the word end of the AI landscape, large language models scraped a whole lot of (often copyrighted) words across the internet (without permission or payment), and vomited them back out with great force but very little sense, usefulness, or accuracy. We enjoy stories about artificial intelligences, but those stories are fiction. What we have now calling itself “AI” is nowhere near as sophisticated as what we see in fiction. Instead, we got a robot-driven nonsense factory of crap.
Nonsense AI submissions now flood Uncanny when we’re open to submissions. This costs us an extremely valuable resource: time. We, of course, reject those terrible AI-written stories. We pay the human writers we publish for the actual words they thought of with their own brains. Nonsense that comes from human brains is intentional and way, way less boring than whatever a large language model spits out in response to a prompt.
And that’s not even taking into account the fact that “AI” is really bad for the environment. Supporting human short fiction, poetry, and essay writers by funding the markets that publish them is much more eco-friendly!
#
Uncanny Magazine is a mom-and-pop business, run at our kitchen table with enthusiasm, a laptop, and a very small paid part-time staff. After a decade, we’re feeling kinda outnumbered by these three groups of robots that don’t worry overly much about our collective welfare.
WELL, THAT JUST WON’T DO. WE ARE NOT ABOUT TO LET THE ROBOTS WIN, SPACE UNICORNS!
That is where you come in, you fabulous Space Unicorns! We’re ready to battle the robots for another year, and we need your help!
We got here by building a community of people who love the work we put into the world. This spectacular group of discerning readers is called the Space Unicorn Ranger Corps. With their support, we’ve published stories of community. Stories of friendship and love. Stories of dissent and resistance. Stories that give needed and welcomed hugs. Stories that constantly challenge expectations. We’ve published numerous award-winning stories over the last few years including Naomi Kritzer’s “The Year Without Sunshine,” P. Djèlí Clark’s “How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub,” John Chu’s “If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You,” R.S.A. Garcia’s “Tantie Merle and the Farmhand 4200,” Samantha Mills’s “Rabbit Test,” and Sarah Pinsker’s “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather.” These stories reached the folks who needed them because of your support, Space Unicorns.
Please consider joining the Space Unicorn Ranger Corps by backing Uncanny Magazine Year 11: This One Goes to ELEVEN! Kickstarter!
Space Unicorns always deserve treats and joy, and we have lots and lots of goodies to add to that warm fuzzy feeling of banding together to fight evil robots. We offer all six Year 11 issues, delivered directly to you before they’re available on our website and at retailers. We have sixty autographed books! SIXTY! We have plushies of unicorns and Hugo the Uncanny Cat! We have opportunities to hang out with authors online, play games with them, and even have them critique your own stories! It’s a Space Unicorn party and you’re all invited!
It’s up to you, Space Unicorns. Let’s shine on together, and take this next year of Uncanny Magazine to ELEVEN.
Every Image a Goth Album Cover
Posted on July 10, 2024 Posted by John Scalzi 10 Comments
Went on a walk yesterday at the local nature reserve with Krissy and Charlie, and it was a lovely sunny day and the nature reserve was full of color and light. So of course I had to make a series of moody black and white photos about it. I ended up with a bunch of 4AD album covers, and if you understand that reference you are old and/or a goth. Congratulations!
— JS
Whatever Everyone Else is Saying