What in the worlds is dark matter?

An interview with Grace Robinson, presenter at the 2026 Sturgeon Symposium on the University of Kansas campus in October, about Frank Herbert's "Dune" and Sharia water law.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/The following interview occurred November 6, 2026. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.Brian Pauls: Welcome, Grace, to the Cosmic Codex. Very glad to have you here.Grace Robinson: Thank you, I’m glad to be here.Brian: I would like to start out and find out from you, before we get into your paper and Dune: what was the impetus for your interest in speculative fiction in the first place?1Grace: I will have to blame my brother for this one. He was really, really, really into Star Wars growing up, and so every time it was, “What movie are we going to watch? What book are we going to read?” it was always Star Wars. Growing up with that, and especially with the Star Wars: The Clone Wars cartoon when we were kids—I remember Saturday mornings, we would get so excited because my mom would put it on the TV for us.I’ve always been a big reader, and I read Dune for the first time when I was probably 12 or 13. I didn’t really revisit it until I wrote this paper, and it was really cool to reread the book and see what I missed when I was 12. When you read it for the first time at that age, you don’t understand all of the different things that are moving around and the bigger powers at play. So I thought it was a really cool book to reread, but also to write a paper about.Brian: You mentioned you were a big reader. That is not as common as it once was, because there are so many distractions. You can spend your time on video games, you can spend your time on programming computers, you can spend your time watching YouTube videos—and that’s not to mention the distractions that have been around for years, like just television. So I’m wondering, what for you made you a reader, regardless of what type of genre or fiction or nonfiction you were reading?Grace: It was definitely my parents. From a very young age, they encouraged us to read. Growing up, I always remember getting upset with my parents—“My other friends are doing XYZ things”—and my parents were like, “No, we’re going to read, we’re going to enrich our minds and not worry about what the other people are doing.”I think it also helped to have them as role models. My dad doesn’t read books all the time necessarily, but he’ll sit and read the news for an hour every day. And my mom was a big reader growing up as well, so having her as a role model—“Okay, my mom reads all the time, so I’m going to read all the time.”My favorite gift that I ever got, I think, was actually my first Kindle, because then I had every book I could ever want at the press of a button. That was kind of a game changer for me. Now I have a Kindle as well, and I have a Kindle stand and page-turner buttons that I can use to read. So I think there are ways now that make it easier to read.But it is hard when there are a lot of distractions. I don’t think I read very much when I was in my undergraduate degree, just because it’s so busy and there’s so much going on. Probably my junior or senior year, I was like, “Wait a minute, I really miss reading,” and then I picked it back up—reading for fun.Brian: I think that’s natural. I’ve certainly gone through phases in my life when I have read less, even though I also started out as a voracious reader, and have kind of come back to it. It depends on what season of life you’re in. But kudos to your parents. I think it’s tremendously important, for not just intellectual development but development as a citizen, to be able to read, digest, and analyze complex information and make up your mind.Speaking of that, you have gone into a rather complex, language-oriented field. You are a graduate student in law, is that correct?Grace: Yes, I am.Brian: Tell us a little bit about what led you down that path.Grace: When I was in high school, I completed a mock trial program through my school, and it was one of the more fun things I had done in high school. I was a competitive swimmer, and when I blew out my shoulder, I needed to find something to do, so I ended up starting with mock trial. I wasn’t necessarily the best at it, but it was a lot of fun to be in a courtroom and present a case and try to win.Going into college, I knew that I wanted something that made me more relatable to people, because—no shade to a lot of the attorneys, but some of the most incredible attorneys I know are also not the best at speaking with people or interacting as much. So I majored in psychology and sociology to get a better understanding of how people interact and how people work, and then decided to go to law school.When I started law school, I wanted to do some sort of environmental law-type deal. At this point, I will be doing defense work for a few years and seeing where that leads me. I hope to someday write a book, but for now… yeah.Brian: Did you, by any chance, do debate in high school?Grace: No, most of my friends did. With the schedule of swimming, I wasn’t able to do it.Brian: Oh, totally get it. I did debate, but I did no sports of any sort. Hard to be two different places on the same Saturday.Grace: It is.Brian: Where are you at in your graduate program? Are you close to finishing?Grace: Yes, I’m so close. Law school is a three-year program. The first year, they scare you to death. Second year, they work you to death. Third year, they bore you to death. So unfortunately, I’m in that bore-you-to-death range.I made a joke to someone the other day. I was like, “You know, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, it’s going to be okay.” And they’re like, “No, girl, that’s the bar exam. That’s a train, and it’s about to hit you.” So right now it’s a different season, because I’m a little bit bored with some of the stuff, but I’m also not necessarily wanting to take the bar exam right now. I’m trying to just enjoy this season.Brian: Yep. And every career has fun things about doing it, and every career has not-fun things about it.Grace: Oh, absolutely.Brian: But I wish you good success when you do take the bar.Grace: Thank you, thank you.Brian: So, you have written a paper that I want you to tell us about, and it brings together two strands of your life: reading and your law education. Why don’t you tell us about that?Grace: Yes. At the beginning of my second year of law school, I got to take a class called Water Law with one of my favorite professors ever. As part of the class, you could either choose to take the final or write a paper. So I wrote the paper, and my professor gave us a lot of creative freedom as to how we wanted to write it. She said, “As long as it touches water law, I don’t care what you write about.”I came up with some thing about data centers that I was going to write, and then all of a sudden I was watching the newer Dune movies again, and I just had a moment where I’m like, “Wait, why don’t I write about that instead? That sounds way more interesting.” So I basically went through the Dune books and pulled what the Fremen said about water discipline, and related it to our modern-day water law, and how we can use those principles to better our own environments.Brian: You recently presented at the Sturgeon Symposium at KU, and I was there, and I was fascinated by what you had to say.2 One of the things that you tied together with all of this was the idea of the Muslim tradition of Sharia water law. Do I have that right?Grace: Yes, Sharia water law. It was really interesting to research and learn about. I come from Oklahoma, so it’s a very Christian area, and that wasn’t ever something that was talked about, especially in school. When I was looking at Frank Herbert and where he was pulling inspiration from, it was very clearly the Middle East. So I started looking into the Sharia water law principles, and I found a lot of them to be pretty beautiful. It’s something that we don’t necessarily see written out explicitly, at least, in the other major faiths.Brian: Certainly it was a revelation to me, because we hear a lot about Sharia, and almost none of it is flattering, and a lot of it is propaganda. But never had I heard that it had anything to do with resource distribution, in particular water. So can you explain some of that history for our listeners?Grace: Yes—and I’m not going to claim to be a 100% expert on Sharia law or anything, so if I get something wrong, please let us know.Brian: Sure.Grace: The Muslim faith has a lot of ritual purity and cleansing-type practices. And when you have a group of people that live in the desert, it takes a lot of grit to be able to live in that environment, and also a lot of respect for the natural environment, because when you’re crossing the desert like they did, there’s not a lot of water to be found. So they place a very high priority on water and on making sure that everyone is able to access it.The coolest thing I learned was that they have a hierarchy of who gets water if there’s only so much water in the well, and it’s always prioritizing humans. So if we’re at an oasis, and the oasis has gone dry, and there’s enough water for maybe a couple of things, it would first go to you and me. We would get water first because we, as humans, have the right to survival. After us would be our animals—if we have animals with us, they would then get to drink. And then, if there’s no water left, there’s no water left. But if there is, then it can go to agricultural or other endeavors, and then, very lastly, industrial-type stuff.3Brian: Wow, that is so pertinent today, with the discussion about data centers and water rights. And I think something that you mentioned in your presentation is that water rights in the American West are handled very differently, in that it’s looked at as personal property. Or, in some cases, if I remember correctly, it’s a common resource, but you can basically take ownership of that common resource if you start using it, and then you have prior precedence. Is that correct?Grace: Yes. If we go back in time a bit to, let’s say, the Gold Rush: you have all of these people that are moving out, and they’re hoping that by moving and doing these things, they’re going to make it and get really rich from the gold they’re finding in abundance. But in order to get the gold out, a lot of the rivers that were naturally there had to be diverted and moved into other areas so that they could mine for gold. And if that was the first person to move the water away, that’s where it goes now. That’s the prior appropriation system: the first to take it, the first to make it theirs—that’s where the water goes now.4So in the West, we see complete areas where the rivers have been diverted. The underground water table has also drained, because if there’s no river flowing naturally on top of it, we’re going to see a lack of groundwater underneath.5Basically, we have these civilizations that were built in the desert that were not necessarily built to be sustainable. Over time, we continuously see that we’re having more droughts, we’re going to start having water issues, and then you start to plant agriculture that is not meant to be in the desert, and it’s taking up more water. So we are starting to see a kind of collapse in what is sustainable for our water supply.Brian: Like building golf courses in the desert.Grace: Yes, that’s a really great example. And the newest thing to hit the news is definitely the data centers. Those take a lot of water.6 People are a little bit concerned about that, because a lot of times, from what we see on the news, some of these contracts are not necessarily specific as to, “Well, if the water is running low, who’s going to get the water?” In Sharia water law, the people get the water first. But the way these contracts are written—and kind of hidden behind maybe NDAs or whatever—we don’t know who’s going to get the priority if the water runs out.7Brian: So, is water law just one part of Sharia law? Or is it the whole thing?Grace: Sharia law has a lot of other aspects that I’m not nearly as familiar with, that are a lot more toward the religious side. For my paper, I really only studied the conservation side—how there’s dominion over the earth, and we’re supposed to be good stewards of the planet that we’ve been given.Brian: Okay, so that’s why you always say that phrase, “Sharia water law,” because that is what we’re specifically talking about.Explain, then—and I know where you’re coming from, but maybe for someone who hasn’t read Dune—how Sharia water law appears in the text and the narrative of Dune.Grace: We see the Fremen, who are a desert people. They are also very oppressed, and as a result they’re very hardy, very resilient, and they are really, really, really great fighters. And they have such a disciplined principle around water, down to the clothes that they wear and the way that they act—the currency being water counters. I give you a water counter, and this represents water that’s in the sietch back home.So they have a very high level of respect for water, and also for the fact that the natural environment around them doesn’t have any water. If they were to go out without their stillsuit, they would probably be dead very quickly, and that’s a water burden on their tribe. They also have this idea that your body is your own, but your water belongs to the tribe.Brian: It’s evident from Dune itself and from the books that follow that Herbert was modeling the Fremen society on Arab and, to a big extent, Muslim societies.8 So I take it from what you’re saying, it’s a logical leap to say he knew what he was doing, and he applied it in this situation, but it was based on something that happens in the real world, in that part of the Middle East, in the desert. This is how people live, and this is how they support their communities and make sure that this resource goes to where it’s most needed. Is that a fair summary of your point there?Grace: Yes.Brian: Okay. Something else that you mentioned in your presentation: when Dune was published in the ’60s, and then in the ’70s and ’80s as it continued to grow in popularity, spice was often seen as an analog for oil—which I think certainly was part of what Herbert was talking about.9 But as we move forward in time, and climate change begins to take more of a toll, you have a different interpretation, or at least a different perspective: there’s another way to apply this. You can look at it as spice, or you can look at what they already do with water. Can you talk to us about, from that perspective, what’s the most critical resource on Dune, how does that play out in the book, and what does it have to say to us in real life today?Grace: What’s important to the rest of the galaxies and all of these other people would be the spice, because without the spice, there’s no space travel, and without space travel, the Guild—the giant monopoly—is not able to make more money and travel through space. So for them, spice is going to be the most important resource.But when you think about humanity and survival, the most important resource is not spice. It’s going to be water. You can go three or so weeks without food, but you can only go a few days without water. So there’s this idea that, at the end of the day, what is more precious than spice? For humans and for all life, it’s water.Brian: Well, very good. Your paper sounds fascinating. Is it publicly available anywhere?Grace: Not yet. Fingers crossed it’ll get published, but I will keep you guys in the loop.Brian: Okay, yeah, definitely. If it ends up getting published, shoot me an email. I would love to be able to read it and to share that with interested readers.One question I like to ask before we go, of someone who is a reader and someone who reads speculative fiction: is there a short story or a novel or series—it doesn’t have to be strictly science fiction, but in the speculative fiction collection of genres—that you feel is maybe either not very well known, or maybe people have heard of it, but it’s not as widely read as you think it should be, and you’d just like to recommend it to the listeners?Grace: Sure. For context, I went from reading all the time to going to college and not reading as much, and then having a break where I wanted to get back into reading. But I was only reading serious stuff at school, so I needed something that was a little bit more—for me—romance. So I read Jennifer Armentrout’s Obsidian books. It’s about these aliens that end up on Earth, and then, of course, she falls in love with her neighbor. It’s really cute, but at the end of the day they end up in Area 51, and there’s a whole bunch of government involvement. I think that was probably one of my favorite books that I read at that time. She has other books now that are way more wildly popular, that are more in the fantasy genre, but I really enjoyed this series, at least at the time.Brian: And it’s called the Obsidian series?Grace: Yes, Jennifer Armentrout. [Obsidian is the first book in Jennifer L. Armentrout’s Lux series.]10Brian: Well, thank you very much. I appreciate the recommendation, and I’m sure some of our listeners and viewers and readers will as well.So Grace, this has been fantastic. I really appreciate you coming on. I can’t tell you how fascinating this is to me, both as someone who likes to read real-world news, and who also loves science fiction and thinks that Dune is one of the greatest series that has ever been published—and I don’t think I’m the only one who thinks that. The fact that you have put all of this together in a way that actually says something to us now about what is happening, I think is fascinating. Great job. I really appreciate you doing this and coming on to talk to me about it.Grace: Of course, of course. And are you going to see the new movie [Dune: Part Three] in a few months?Brian: I definitely plan to go see it, yeah. I have not been successful in convincing any other members of my immediate family that they should be into the Dune movies. I tried showing my wife and eldest daughter the first Villeneuve movie that came out a few years ago, and I think they were both asleep before the end of it, so I may go by myself.But I want to see it in part because I feel like Dune Messiah is an under-read book, and it’s a shame, because I feel like you can’t really understand what Herbert was saying in Dune until you read Dune Messiah.11 I’ll admit that when I was 12 or 13, whenever I first read the Dune books, I did not like Dune Messiah, because it’s so different from the first book. But then, as an adult, as I learned more about what Herbert was actually saying in the whole series, I went back and read it, and I’m like, “Oh, yeah—this is the essence of what he was trying to say in Dune.” But it’s so easy to walk away from Dune thinking he was saying something else, especially about Paul Atreides, the main character. But boy, he corrects that in Dune Messiah, and I think if somebody doesn’t read the second one, then they really haven’t read Dune.Grace: It’s going to be fascinating to see what people end up saying about this new movie. From the research that I did, when Messiah was released, Herbert got a lot of negative reviews and feedback and comments about the story.12 It’s going to be interesting to see how that plays out, because we have an entire new generation of people who have probably not read the books but are definitely obsessed with the movies, and I don’t know if they know what they’re walking into when they go to this next movie. I’m excited to see what creative choices they’ve made, especially with Chani’s character. That’ll be interesting. And I’m really excited to kind of wrap it up.Brian: Can we agree that Zendaya is just killing it as Chani?Grace: Oh, absolutely, yeah. I think it’ll be really interesting, though, because based on the teaser trailers, she has taken an antagonist role to Paul, and I think that’ll be a really cool lens to see this story through—especially since in the book, she’s just on board with it.13 For the people who haven’t read the books and don’t know what to expect, I think her perspective will at least guide them into being like, “Oh, he’s the bad guy.”Brian: Yeah, she has definitely taken a much stronger role in these movies than she did in the book or any previous movie. Well, I guess we will both find out when it hits. Isn’t it coming out in December?Grace: Yes. I have a final the next day, but I’m still going to the movie.Brian: Okay, excellent. Well, I hope you love it. And I hope that, if your paper gets published, maybe you can come back on and tell us about that journey, and maybe then we can talk a little bit about what we thought about the movie.Grace: Absolutely.Brian: All right, thanks, Grace. Appreciate it. Take care. 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

An interview with Alex T. Singer, winner of the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for the best science fiction short story published in 2025, for her novelette "We the Fleet."Do you or someone you know need professional tech guidance for your author, coaching, or independent publishing business? If so, check out our sponsor Cloudessy, providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services. Simplify your tech stack, prevent launch failures, and build systems that actually support growth.https://marketing.cloudessy.com/30-minute-tech-stack-update/Brian Pauls: Alex, welcome to The Cosmic Codex. I appreciate you taking the time to come and talk with us.Alex T. Singer: I appreciate being here. Thank you very much.Brian Pauls: Well, I would like to start with a question about your background with speculative fiction. How did you get started with an interest in speculative fiction, in particular science fiction?Alex T. Singer: Well, like a lot of people, I’ve been interested in speculative fiction my whole life. It was ingrained in me very early on by the books my parents read to me. My father actually read 2001: A Space Odyssey to me at a very formative age.1 Then he showed me the movie, and apparently Kubrick meant nothing to me, because I was just annoyed it wasn’t the book.Brian Pauls: I get that. I have the same attitude toward movies a lot of times. But exposing you to quality science fiction…Alex T. Singer: Oh, yes. My father was one of those people whose taste in novels went very, very highbrow. He was very interested in the high-concept stuff. He taught me to read using Moby-Dick, so there you go.2Brian Pauls: Oh, wow. The full text, not a slimmed-down kids’ version?Alex T. Singer: No, full text. He was explaining the themes to me as he was also explaining how to spell “whale.”Brian Pauls: Were you able to explain what ambergris was at a young age?Alex T. Singer: Yes. I think I confused a few of my first-grade teachers when I brought that one in as a book report.Brian Pauls: Well, I love Moby-Dick, so kudos to your dad. I’m guessing this turned you into a lifelong reader early on.Alex T. Singer: Yes, it did. I was also going to say that I’m very lucky my grandfather was also a writer. He was trained as an intelligence officer during World War II. The war ended before he was able to deploy, but he had all that intelligence training, so he wrote a lot of conspiracy thrillers.3Brian Pauls: Oh, wow. What an example.Alex T. Singer: Oh, sure. The biggest one he ever did was The Parallax View. It was well known enough that it even got a movie adaptation once upon a time. Warren Beatty was in it, so it was a very cool thing.4Brian Pauls: That gives me something to go track down. It’s hard to get my wife to watch science fiction movies, but I bet I could get her to watch that.Alex T. Singer: Oh yeah, especially because it ended up in the bones of so many conspiracy thrillers.Brian Pauls: My next question—I think you lit on it. It’s one thing to be interested in science fiction, but you became a writer. How did that happen?Alex T. Singer: Well, my grandfather, mostly. He was very encouraging. He would have me sit with him and show him the stories I’d write, and he’d give very gentle but firm feedback. He was very good at telling me, very gently, “You’re using a few too many adverbs, Alex.” He always made the time for me, and he was a very good mentor like that to a lot of young writers.Brian Pauls: Well, that is fantastic. And obviously, you have just won the Sturgeon Award.5 Tell us a little bit about the story that got you the award.Alex T. Singer: Certainly. “We, the Fleet” was my Sturgeon-winning story.6 It was a short story—”short” is relative; it was really more of a novelette—about a first contact from the point of view of the alien. She is basically a hive mind. I based them very heavily on ants and bees, using their social structure with a techno-organic aspect to make them completely unlike humans.Brian Pauls: Explain that for us. That’s a word I don’t know.Alex T. Singer: Oh, techno-organic?Brian Pauls: Techno-organic. Okay, sorry, I misunderstood. Got it.Alex T. Singer: Techno-organic is that fusion of the technological and the biological to make a new kind of creature that has some anatomical references while also being very machine-like in its aspects and mindset. So when she encounters a human for the first time, she has no context for what we are. It was a short story about connections—about de-othering the other, essentially. Because of that, I wanted to start with the point of view of a creature that would normally have been considered the villain in a lot of classic science fiction.Brian Pauls: I met you at the Sturgeon Symposium recently, where you read the story to us.7 One of the things I said to you afterward is that I found something touching about your story: you have a discussion in there about what family means. I’m paraphrasing, and I’m not going to do anywhere near as good a job as you did, but family starts with a genetic relationship, and as society and social relations evolve, it can grow beyond that. It’s kind of a question of how wide you draw that circle.I found that a meaningful resonance, because as a father—my eldest daughter is adopted—that means a lot to me. And my wife is a social worker, an adoption social worker. Now she’s a college professor, but she used to spend a lot of time explaining to prospective adoptive parents that this is a different relationship than you might have with a biological child, but it is nevertheless a family relationship. “Do you understand that complex dynamic?” That’s what she has to talk through. So I was touched that you included that in the novel. [Editor’s note: “We, the Fleet” is a novelette.]I also think I said to you that it was one of the few times I’ve found an author who has written a story where we encounter aliens, and there’s a conflict, and we actually have something to teach the aliens—other than the long history of “we taught them that we were just better at violence than they were.” Something else happens in your story, and I thought that was a really creative way to go about it. Could you talk to us a little bit about how you settled on not just the theme of connection, but that particular approach to it?Alex T. Singer: Certainly. As you mentioned, adoption—forming new connections that, while not biological, are still very meaningful—taps into the best of what we are as humans. We see a lot of the worst of what we are as humans, especially in the news cycle, especially these days, when we’ve been polarized into hating each other based on arbitrary labels that have been selected for us. Humans weren’t made for a society this big and disconnected. I wanted to take a step back from the negative side of that to try to remind myself, as well as the reader, of what our better qualities as a species are. And a lot of that is how we can find connection with things that may not be recognizably us, or may not be our immediate genetic relations.We see that in a lot of ways with people. We see it in how we love our pets, and in how we’ll go out of our way to rescue an animal that’s trapped somewhere. We also see it in how we can take a person who we’ve been told is the other—”This is someone you should not relate to at all; don’t think of them as a person”—and if you learn even the slightest thing about them, your whole attitude toward them can and will change.I really wanted to show that changeover: at what point would my human character begin to recognize this completely alien species as someone they can connect with? Similarly, the alien learns from the human that she took in her niece as her daughter, which, from the alien’s perspective, is absolutely impossible based on how her social structure was ingrained into her. Learning that humans can make that very simple but meaningful connection outside the boundaries of their genetics is a huge moment for this non-human character. Like I said, it’s our ability to form social bonds even outside of a species, which we as people do almost every day of our lives.Brian Pauls: That is a great message, and executed in what I found to be an unusual way compared to what you normally see, even within a genre as interested in the different as science fiction. What was your biggest challenge as you wrote this story? Did you run into anything where you thought, “I really have to work through this in order to make this work”?Alex T. Singer: Yes. For me, it was actually figuring out where the conflict would be. This was a story I reworked several times before I was satisfied with it. The original version was a lot cozier. It was much shorter, and it was largely just a single conversation between a human and, essentially, an alien insect. I was really not satisfied with it. I felt like it didn’t say enough. I’m not going to say I wanted it to hinge on any form of violence, but it was almost too peaceful—like, “Let’s drink tea and talk about what we are.” I wanted to illustrate it a little better, and make what’s going on more physical and more visceral.Brian Pauls: Excellent. Well, you certainly accomplished that. So the first version was more of a philosophical dialogue?Alex T. Singer: Exactly. That was the original one. I had the opening, and I had the ending. It was the middle that I reworked several times to figure out how I wanted to tell the story.Brian Pauls: Talk to me a bit about the short story form in general. A hundred years ago, it was a major form of popular entertainment, and today that niche is filled by anything from novels to video games to movies to streaming television shows.8 Like anybody, a writer has a limited amount of time. When you sit down and say, “I’m going to write something,” you could work on a novel or you could work on a short story, and from a marketability standpoint, those are two different propositions. So what is it about a short story that makes you say, “I’m going to take some time, and I am going to write this”?Alex T. Singer: I love the short story format. It’s honestly one of my favorites for simply exploring an idea. A bolt of an idea is often where I start with a short story, and how big or how small it is is absolutely determined by where that idea takes me. I usually have the concept, and oftentimes I’ll have the ending in mind before I start the story itself.I love the novel form, I do. I have written a few novels, and I have one that just came out. But I find novels are more about multiple ideas you have to connect together, versus being able to circle around a single concept and tease out that idea and explore it—almost like a philosophical question. That’s often how I approach my short stories.Brian Pauls: In addition to writing relatively straightforward science fiction like this story, you also write cosmic horror, and the Euler circles there can overlap quite a bit. But as somebody who also enjoys cosmic horror, but also asks myself why I enjoy it, I’m wondering: have you wrestled with that question? What is it about cosmic horror as a genre that speaks to us? Because it’s not warm and fuzzy.Alex T. Singer: Not at all. I think with a lot of horror, but especially cosmic horror, it’s about how we as people deal with the idea of things that are just so much bigger than us—so much more vast, so far beyond our understanding. A lot of it is cathartic. A lot of it is us processing the idea of something so large and so frightening that it doesn’t even know us. Cosmic horror is ultimately about the unknowability of the universe.I also consider it a little transcendentalist. I see cosmic horror as something that goes hand in hand with the power of nature—like a storm that’s bearing down on you. The clouds are beautiful, but there’s absolutely nothing you can do about the damage it might wreak upon the world around you. For me, that’s the core.Brian Pauls: So it’s kind of a dark, poetic presentation of something that’s very real, which is that the universe is out there, we understand very little about it, and it doesn’t care about us.Alex T. Singer: It doesn’t care about us. It’s up to you to find what meaning matters to you.Brian Pauls: Okay, excellent. Thank you. There’s a question I like to ask most of my guests: Is there a speculative fiction story—a short story or novel—that you feel is underappreciated and that you’d like to share with the world? Like, “Hey, you may not have heard of this, or maybe you’ve heard of it but never actually taken the time to read it, but you should.”Alex T. Singer: Oh, that’s a very good question. I’ve read a few recently. I’m trying to think of a really, really good one. God, what was the title? There was one that ran in Clarkesworld a number of years ago. It got shortlisted for a bunch of things, but I feel like not enough people read it. It was an absolutely beautiful story about a starship that was created from two different starships. It was a fighter ship, and it was sentient, and it had the memories of both of those ships in it. It was about the ship grappling with those memories as it was on yet another horrible mission as part of the war machine it was created for. [Editor’s Note: “Damage,” by David D. Levine, Tor.com (now Reactor), 2015]9 It was such a good story. I’m so sorry, I’m blanking.Brian Pauls: No, no, that is a fascinating premise. If you can look it up when we’re done and send it to me, I will add it to the…Alex T. Singer: Absolutely. I can find it instantly. It was such a story.Brian Pauls: Now I want to know about it.Alex T. Singer: Yeah. It stuck with me.Brian Pauls: Well, that’s great, thank you very much, because I agree with you. I think science fiction short stories are worth reading in their own right, and they do something different than a novel does. They’re kind of a mental exercise in trying to get into a story that isn’t very long, and maybe even figure out what’s happening before the end. So I love when people bring up things I haven’t heard about before, and hopefully my listeners and readers will also find it interesting.Well, Alex, is there anything else you would like to share about your science fiction and speculative fiction journey, your writing journey, anything you’re working on or have coming up, before we wrap up?Alex T. Singer: Yeah. My debut novel, Angel Country, has just come out.10 As we’ve been discussing, it’s cosmic horror. It’s an alternate-universe 1904 United States that has become beset by biblically accurate angels.Yes, it’s a lot. It’s very much an experimental form, in that it’s written from the point of view of a scientist who was researching these angels and who is sort of falling apart as she’s telling the story.Brian Pauls: Well, that sounds fantastic. I’m a big believer that science fiction is a huge, huge genre. Every year I try to spread my reading across the different award winners, but one thing I always try to read is the Sidewise Award winner.11 I just finished B. L. Blanchard’s The Peacekeeper.12 It goes back to the original short story, “Sidewise in Time,” which I love.13 That was my first introduction to this whole idea of, “Whoa, we can have stories about alternate timelines and stuff.”So that sounds great. I’ll be looking forward to your novel coming out [Editor’s note: Angel Country was released October 20, 2026; see note 10.], and congratulations on your novel. And thank you so much. I really appreciate you joining us. This has been a fantastic conversation, and I wish you well in your future writing endeavors. Maybe you can come back on the podcast sometime and give us an update.Alex T. Singer: I’d be happy to. Thank you very much.Brian Pauls: All right, thanks, Alex. Take care.Alex T. Singer: You too. Take care. 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

Do you or someone you know need professional tech guidance for your author, coaching, or independent publishing business? If so, check out our sponsor Cloudessy, providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services. Simplify your tech stack, prevent launch failures, and build systems that actually support growth.https://marketing.cloudessy.com/30-minute-tech-stack-update/Club Codex, the official book club for The Cosmic Codex, offers a convenient way to discuss award-winning science fiction novels and collections. Each month, I’ll read a new selection and post my thoughts in the discussion thread. You’re welcome to participate, or just follow along—whatever works best for you!See below for our upcoming selections.November 2026In the Belly of the Whale by Michael FlynnWinner of the 2025 Prometheus Award for Best Novel of libertarian science fiction1Aboard a vast generation ship, the founders’ rigid rules for keeping humanity alive harden over the centuries into separate societies divided by class, belief, and identity. As those divisions deepen, talk of rebellion spreads through the crew, and the voyage becomes a test of how far people will go to win their freedom.2December 2026Time of the Cat by Tansy Rayner RobertsWinner of the 2023 Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel written by an Australian citizen or permanent resident3At Chronos College, humans and cats travel through time for a living, and the job is pure joy apart from the occasional lost traveler, or lost cat. A chance to rescue a missing legend sends the team to the 1960s, if they can persuade Professor Boswell, a famously cranky marmalade tabby, to come along.4January 2027Some Desperate Glory by Emily TeshWinner of the 2024 Hugo Award for Best Novel5Kyr has spent her life on Gaea Station among humanity’s last survivors, training to avenge Earth’s destruction. When her superiors send her brother to certain death and assign her to the nursery to bear sons, she breaks away with his rebellious friend and an imprisoned alien, and discovers a universe stranger and richer than anything she was taught.6February 2027Cassandra in Reverse by Holly SmaleWinner of the 2024 Audie Award for Science Fiction audiobook7Cassie remembers everything and understands almost nothing about other people. After one disastrous day costs her a relationship, a job, and her local café’s banana muffins, she discovers she can travel back in time and undo her mistakes. Unlimited do-overs, however, may not be enough to set things right.8March 2027The Artificial Man and Other Stories by Clare Winger HarrisClare Winger Harris, winner of the 2024 Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award for underread science fiction and fantasy authors9Ten pulp stories from a pioneering woman of early twentieth-century science fiction, selected and introduced by scholar Brad Ricca. Giant insects, Martians thirsty for Earth’s water, and a journey back to ancient Rome fill a collection that shows how much the young genre owed to a writer it largely forgot.10April 2027Cahokia Jazz by Francis SpuffordWinner of the 2023 Sidewise Award for Best Long-Form Alternate History11In an alternate 1922 where the great Indigenous city of Cahokia never fell, the Mississippi metropolis has become an industrial hub of many races and faiths, held together by a fragile peace. When two detectives find a body on a skyscraper roof one snowy night, a week of upheaval follows that may destroy that world or remake it.12May 2027A New Eden by Menilik Henry DyerWinner of the 2024 Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best Novel of New Zealand science fiction and fantasy13On a future Earth ruled by the Fermion Party, which preaches immortality through uploading into a simulated metaverse, four astronauts training on Mars become targets for assassination. Launched early in four ships guided by four AIs, they set out as uploaded minds to find habitable worlds, reunite across the stars, and survive first contact while the Fermions hunt them down.14June 2027Uncertain Sons and Other Stories by Thomas HaWinner of the 2026 Locus Award for Best Collection and the 2026 World Fantasy Award for Best Collection15Thomas Ha’s debut collection turns on familial love and trauma, set against societal and technological anxieties, questions of identity and class, and near futures slightly askew from our own. The title novelette won the 2026 Nebula Award.16July 2027Ancillary Justice by Ann LeckieWinner of the 2024 Hugo Award for Best Series, and of the 2014 Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke Awards17Breq was once the warship Justice of Toren, an AI commanding thousands of soldier bodies for the conquering empire of the Radch. After an act of treachery ripped that life away, she survives in a single human body, on a remote, icy world and closing in on the revenge she has pursued ever since.18August 2027Ancillary Sword by Ann LeckieWinner of the 2024 Hugo Award for Best Series19Now serving the Radch’s ruler and seeking atonement for past crimes, Breq takes command of a new ship and an uneasy crew and is sent to Athoek Station, charged with protecting the family of a lieutenant she once killed.20September 2027Ancillary Mercy by Ann LeckieWinner of the 2024 Hugo Award for Best Series21Just as Breq gains a measure of control at Athoek, a search of the station’s slums turns up someone who shouldn’t exist, an envoy arrives from the alien Presger, and the empire’s fractured ruler, Anaander Mianaai, comes calling. Breq refuses to abandon the station’s people, whatever the odds.22October 2027Intergalactic Exterminators, Inc. by Ash BishopWinner of the 2023 Audie Award for Science Fiction audiobook23Russ Wesley unearths a strange artifact in his grandfather’s collection of antiquities and promptly attracts a vicious alien. The squad of reckless intergalactic exterminators sent to deal with it is so impressed by his marksmanship that they recruit him, whether he likes it or not.24November 2027These Burning Stars by Bethany JacobsWinner of the 2024 Philip K. Dick Award for distinguished science fiction published in paperback original form in the United States25Small-time thief Jun Ironway has stolen a secret big enough to topple the Kindom, the galaxy-spanning power built on the bones of a genocide. Two of its most brutal clerics, the stoic Chono and the hotheaded Esek, are sent to hunt her down, while a figure from their shared past, known only as Six, follows all three.26December 2027In Ascension by Martin MacInnesWinner of the 2024 Arthur C. Clarke Award for the best science fiction novel first published in the United Kingdom during the previous year27Microbiologist Leigh grew up in Rotterdam, finding refuge from an unhappy home at the water’s edge. When she joins an expedition to a newly discovered trench in the Atlantic, what she finds there unsettles everything known about life’s origins, and leads her to a new space agency in the Mojave and an impossible choice between her family and a journey across the cosmos.28Club Codex FAQWhat is Club Codex?A book club organized by The Cosmic Codex newsletter.What type of books do you read?We read and discuss one award-winning science fiction book each month. Most selections are recent winners, with a few older favorites and two short-story collections mixed in.Do I have to read all the books?Nope. Read as few or as many as you prefer.What if I take longer than a month to read a book?This season runs fourteen months, from November 2026 through December 2027, and every selection is announced in advance. Pick a book on the schedule that’s two, three, or more months down the road. Start reading it as early as you like!How does the discussion work?All discussion is online, chat-based, and asynchronous. Only have time to post your thoughts on your lunch break, late at night, or early Saturday morning? No problem! The Internet is always here. Your posts will be waiting for the rest of us when we check in later.What does it cost?Nothing! A free subscription to The Cosmic Codex is all you need.How do I get started?You can join Club Codex in three easy steps:If you haven’t already, subscribe to The Cosmic Codex:If you have time, introduce yourself in our welcome thread:Join the discussion thread for each book you want to read when I post it at the beginning of the appropriate month. Leave a comment, like “Join,” so you will receive alerts on your Substack account.That’s it. You’re now a member of Club Codex. Talk to you in November! 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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Simplify your tech stack, prevent launch failures, and build systems that actually support growth.https://marketing.cloudessy.com/30-minute-tech-stack-update/Children of Memory is the weakest entry in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s original Children of Time trilogy.1 Tor published this third volume in the U.K. in 2022 and Orbit did so in the United States the next year.2 The trilogy won the Hugo Award for Best Series in 2023—a win Tchaikovsky has declined to claim because of irregularities in the administration of Hugo nominations that year.3The ColonyThe book’s premise resembles certain elements found in Children of Time.4 The ark ship Enkidu, under Captain Heorest Holt, carries its sleeping cargo to a terraformed world.5 In the first book, the terraforming project went wrong, producing a civilization of spiders. Here it goes wrong, producing a world that can support human life, but just barely. The planet Imir is marginal from the start, with soil chemistry not quite lethal to Earth life, but “wrong enough to have all sorts of long-term impacts.”6 The ocean provides no recourse: “There was also a too-big moon, which had its own moon, making the tides a wild riot. This meant settling anywhere near the sea would be a fatal mistake; so much for maritime aquaculture.”7Generations later, Holt’s descendants live in the farming town of Landfall, where equipment is failing and harvests are getting worse.8 A militia keeps order on behalf of “the older Landfall families,” resulting in a community ruled by status and force: “The punching around here only goes one way, and that’s down.”9The fragile ecology the terraformers created is the root of the colony’s decline: “A collapse of the resource web leads to a collapse of infrastructure which leads to the collapse of everything else.”10 Here, “everything else” includes civil society. Landfall’s ruling class needs enemies to maintain order, and when it can’t find real enemies, it invents them. Tchaikovsky captures this stark reality with phrases such as “You defined us by not being them”11 and “…find someone more them than you are, and put the boot in.”12So far, so good. But Landfall is a dull world filled with dull characters, and while Tchaikovsky is skillful enough to convey that dullness convincingly, he’s unsuccessful in writing an interesting story about an uninteresting place.Holt is a decent man worn to a nub, the parts of him “that wanted to scream and beat at the walls … locked away for now.”13 Liff, the main character for much of the story,14 is a clever girl15 who doesn’t receive enough opportunities to make her cleverness count. The townsfolk are a mob in waiting, and little else. The novel forces readers to spend far too much time in their company, waiting for an unsatisfying payoff.It’s not helpful that Tchaikovsky resorts to a plot device that may still make headlines, but which creators have overused in the past quarter-century. Long-time science fiction readers are likely to see it coming, and a twist that the reader anticipates is no longer a twist.The CorvidsJust as the strongest elements of Tchaikovsky’s excellent Children of Ruin were the octopuses and the Nodan organism,16 here they’re the Corvids and the Interlocutor.The Corvids are Gethli and Gothi, a pair of crow-like birds traveling with the strangers,17 and they are the most humorous and most unsettling characters in the book. Each Corvid on its own is a clever animal. Together they’re…more. Their species works in bonded pairs, one partner storing and recalling information while the other analyzes and invents.18 Tchaikovsky depicts this partnership as a single mind emerging from the interaction of two entities. The birds trade “a quickfire rattle of ratchety consonants that serve as thoughts from one side of their shared brain to the other”19—as Tchaikovsky puts it, “In the space between each pair, a mind.”20As with the spiders and octopuses, he knows what he’s talking about. Real corvids have become a major subject of research on animal intelligence, and researchers have documented tool manufacture, caching strategies that take account of which other birds were watching, and apparent planning for the future—abilities that developed independently of the great apes’ and amount to a case of convergent evolution.21 Like many real corvids, those in Children of Memory pair for life. Tchaikovsky turns the pair bond into the species’ seat of cognition.22What makes the Corvids memorable, though, is how they characterize their own cognition. They insist, cheerfully and at length, that they are not conscious. “We’re a mistake, basically,” one of them explains; “…what we really are is a problem-solving engine.”23 Regarding those who credit them with inner lives, they remark: “They are very keen to convince themselves that we’re aware, but the evidence suggests otherwise.” They also share a disturbing observation: “Don’t tell the Humans, but it’s just the same for them.”24This is John Searle’s Chinese Room—a system producing outward signs of understanding, while its structure would seem to make this doubtful.25 This doesn’t bother the Corvids. They find the whole question beside the point: “Neither of us need to understand anything. The understanding sits between us.”26 Real neuroscience may indicate otherwise. In 2020, researchers at the University of Tübingen recorded neurons in crows, the activity of which tracked whether a bird reported seeing a faint stimulus—a candidate neural signature of sensory consciousness in a bird.27 This might impress readers, but perhaps not the Corvids.The InterlocutorThe second strength is Miranda, part of a scout ship crew sent to investigate a signal from Imir. She’s the expedition’s Interlocutor—a Nodan organism, the memory-absorbing parasite from Children of Ruin, now inhabiting a laboratory-grown human body.28Miranda’s scenes in Landfall carry empathy the colonists lack for one another.29 In a fascinating reversal, the inhuman “monster” from the second novel has become the most humane character in the third.SentienceWhile Tchaikovsky’s major theme in Children of Ruin was intelligence, here it’s sentience, but in a loose sense. As often occurs in science fiction, he conflates sentience (the ability to feel sensations such as pleasure and pain), sapience (the ability to solve complex intellectual problems), and consciousness (subjective experience—the sense of being oneself).30 The second novel asked whether minds with different evolutionary histories could understand one another. Children of Memory asks how anyone—spider, octopus, crow, human, or organism—can know that there is someone home at all.Tchaikovsky presents this mystery through the Corvids’ bargain-basement philosophy of mind. It’s clear and entertaining, better than most textbook accounts. Gethli tells Gothi that “…we can’t ever really know if we understand or not. It feels as though we do, up until the point that we’re challenged…”31While the Corvids explain sentience (or its lack), Miranda and her other crewmates explore it. They assume that the signal they came to investigate on Imir is a sign of sentient activity, but later find reason to doubt such an assumption.32Miranda’s very nature provides an intriguing perspective. A creature that exists as a copy of another creature and remembers being many things cannot take its own continuity for granted. What frightens Miranda is not that she feels diminished, but that she feels entirely herself. This scares her “[b]ecause it means her sense of self is fallible.”33Using stricter definitions of “sentience,” “sapience,” and “consciousness,” the Corvids as individuals are sentient. In bonded pairs, they’re sapient, but they may not be conscious at all. The Nodan organism is both conscious and sapient, but may not be sentient outside of a host. And humans, as the creators of the terms used to describe our own mental experience, are all three.The plot device discussed earlier is essential to the climax of the book. Tchaikovsky uses it to examine, on a larger canvas, the same doubts the Corvids have expressed about their own “sentience” (really, consciousness). But to reach this payoff, such as it is, the reader spends most of the novel in a tedious place populated by many tedious people.VerdictChildren of Memory is a serious novel with fascinating questions about sentience. It deserves a better story and, with a few notable exceptions, better characters.Recommended for: Readers who finished Children of Ruin wanting more; anyone interested in the philosophy of mind, or in the intelligence of crows.Not recommended for: Anyone who wants the plot to move as fast as the ideas. 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

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 size of this event impressed me. A rectangle of long tables around the perimeter of the gym held stack after stack of books, fiction and nonfiction. I most likely acquired my paperback edition of “Foundation” from one of these stacks.8This started me on what I’ll call my “Asimov Period,” when I read as much of his science fiction as I could find, including “The Stars, Like Dust,” the first book I ever bought for myself (and the second book in what would come to be known as his Galactic Empire series.)9 It also introduced me to Asimov’s famous robot stories. “I, Robot” may be the first collection of short fiction I thoroughly enjoyed.10 I also appreciated how, as a trained scientist, he strove to make his stories scientifically plausible.11During this same period, my brother built up a small library of his own, largely consisting of books acquired at the same used book sale. This library contained several works of science fiction, one of these being “Rocket Ship Galileo” by Robert A. Heinlein. I have since learned that this represents Heinlein’s earliest juvenile work and that many regard it as his worst.12 That may be, but I considered it gripping then, and still do today. As a ten- or eleven-year-old boy, I found the story about teenagers building their own atomic rocket ship (granted, with the help of an indispensable, skilled, and well-connected adult) grand entertainment. While not a scientist, Heinlein trained in engineering at the U.S. Naval Academy.13 His writing reflects this field’s rigor for accuracy, complementing Asimov’s, and giving the story an air of verisimilitude. And it’s a testament to his skill as a writer that even in one of his weaker novels, he still establishes the trope of “Escaped Nazis on the Moon” for future writers to explore.14This began my “Heinlein Period.” While it may have overlapped with my “Asimov Period,” it lasted longer—basically until I ran out of Heinlein to read. I found his Future History collection “The Past Through Tomorrow” quite inspirational. It includes many short stories and even a short novel.15 I’m using its structure as a model for “Probability Amplitudes.”All these sources contributed to my love of science fiction, and as a result, my drive to write a science fiction book of my own. Widney provided the initial spark. Norton introduced me to the joy of planetary and interstellar adventure. Asimov and Heinlein taught me to value short fiction and scientific accuracy. But my growing awareness of the science fiction community may have been an even stronger motivation. As I learned about various authors, their books, and the connections they created between many of their stories, I realized that in the background lay a web of connections between writers who were also often the editors and publishers of one another’s work. I longed to be part of that community. Even as I imagined becoming an astronaut, as many kids do, I also harbored the ambition of becoming a science fiction writer.I didn’t pursue this dream for many years. I used the excuse that I needed a well-paying job before I could take time to write. Or that I needed to acquire age and experience before I would have anything important to say. Or that the chances of getting published were too slim.All these excuses had the same source—fear. On some level, I knew I’d suffered my whole life from a crippling fear of rejection. But I didn’t know why.In time, I became a technician in the science-fiction-adjacent computer industry, then the owner of a computer support company. While this kept me busy and fed my interest in computers, it never fully satisfied me. I still had a hidden problem, an obstacle that prevented me from even trying to pursue my dreams.It took a marriage to a loving and highly skilled social worker, building a family, a lot of desperation, and honest self-assessment before I recognized, confronted, and addressed what was really wrong. I don’t have the space here to tell the full story. And some of it may be too personal for me to share with the public. But I can share the problem itself. Doing so will be helpful to me, and perhaps to others.My chronic fear would often manifest as hypochondria. I spent a year or more of college in crippling fear that I’d contracted HIV, even though I didn’t fall into a high-risk group and largely avoided even lower-risk behaviors associated with infection. But this single health condition didn’t comprise the limit of my fears. Any lump, any place on my body, might be a sign of cancer. I tried to laugh this off with comments to others like, “Maybe I have foot cancer.” But this was bravado. In truth, I needed to say something instead of keeping the fear inside, where it would eat away at me. After marrying my wife, she gave me the wise suggestion that, not being a doctor or a scientist, I stop scouring full medical studies online. This turned out to be a relief as the practice exacerbated my concern rather than alleviating it.But my fears extended beyond hypochondria, to social anxiety (especially regarding interaction with women) fear of getting fired (and I got fired a lot before starting my computer business) and fear of going to hell (a contribution from certain childhood evangelical Sunday School teachers in my largely quite wholesome Mennonite tradition.)Still, hypochondria led me to an answer. One night, I found myself awake in bed, far too late into the night, worrying about an unlikely medical concern I can’t even remember. I knew it to be unlikely and told myself so. Then, the question occurred to me—could I have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder? Of course, I grabbed my phone from my nightstand and Googled OCD. I remember thinking, “This is what Nikki told me not to do.” But I felt I was on to something.I didn’t find a medical study, but a description of OCD, so close to my experience, it couldn’t be coincidence.Soon after, I sat in my doctor’s office, explaining 35 years of struggle. When I’d finished, he said,“Well, I’m no psychologist, but based on your symptoms, I don’t have a problem diagnosing you with a pretty severe case of OCD.” I walked out with an SSRI prescription, which has made my symptoms manageable for the past six years.If you’re wondering what all this has to do with my book, the first activity I took up after getting my OCD under control was writing science fiction. I wrote my first short story in years. Then, I wrote another, for a competition on Wattpad—and won. A few stories later, I thought maybe I could sell my writing. I began listening to self-publishing podcasts, and within a few years, I started this newsletter.So why go to all this trouble? Because I’ve wanted to be a science fiction writer since I was a kid. Widney, Norton, Asimov, and Heinlein instilled this desire in me at an early age. I allowed a mental health condition to stop me for a long, long time. But that condition is under control at last. This is my opportunity to surpass the limitations that hemmed me in all those years. I’m going to take it. 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

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 periods”—and run into Krauss and Starkman’s wall: “A finite system may be capable of infinite computation, but it can only store a finite number of memories.” Even the creators are bound by their own rules.But Benford gives his story the “wrong” ending. His universe finishes in a rip, with protons “popping crimson in the sky,” which a plain cosmological constant would not produce. For that, we need something more.The Big RipPhysicists characterize dark energy by a single number, w, the ratio of its pressure to its energy density. A cosmological constant has w exactly equal to −1. Current measurements put w near −1.03, with an uncertainty of about 0.03—so it’s consistent with Einstein’s constant, but not proof of it.13 And the number could, in principle, sit on the far side of −1. Dark energy with w less than −1, which Robert Caldwell named “phantom energy” in 2002, has a property nothing else in physics shares: its density increases as space expands.14Caldwell, Marc Kamionkowski, and Nevin N. Weinberg worked out the consequences in a 2003 paper, “Phantom Energy and Cosmic Doomsday.”15 If w were −1.5, the repulsion would strengthen without limit and reach infinity in finite time—about 22 billion years from now. Sixty million years before the end, the stars of the Milky Way would fly apart from one another. Three months before, the planets would drift from the sun. Thirty minutes before, Earth would disintegrate. In the last 10⁻¹⁹ of a second, atoms would dissolve. Caldwell and his colleagues called it the Big Rip. Few cosmologists expect this. A field with w below −1 is unstable, but at this time theorists can’t exclude it based on the data.16 Stephen Baxter’s “Last Contact,” a 2008 Hugo nominee, is the Big Rip told from a garden in England.17 Baxter compresses the timeline mercilessly—his astronomers get seven months’ warning, not twenty billion years—but he follows the physics of the paper in order: superclusters first, then galaxies, then the sun, then the ground underfoot. The story belongs to Maureen, a widow tending her vegetables, and her daughter Caitlin, the astrophysicist who has to tell the world that “dark energy is pulling the universe apart.” Around them, the radio telescopes pick up a flood of signals from civilizations that have never spoken before. As the sky goes dark, Maureen understands why: “They were just saying good-bye.” It’s an unusual apocalypse story—no villain and no escape. Its only lesson is that people plant tomatoes anyway.The Big AmbiguityThe Big Freeze and the Big Rip assume w remains constant. But what if this isn’t the case?If dark energy is a field rather than a constant—a scalar field slowly rolling down a potential, in the models physicists call quintessence—then its strength can change over cosmic time, and so can w.18 In 2021, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) began mapping millions of galaxies to measure how the expansion rate has changed over eleven billion years.19In March 2025, DESI reported that its map of more than 14 million galaxies and quasars fit a weakening dark energy better than a constant one. Combined with the cosmic microwave background, evolving dark energy was preferred over the standard model at 3.1 sigma; adding supernova data pushed the preference to between 2.8 and 4.2 sigma, depending on which supernova catalog was used—suggestive, but short of the 5-sigma standard for discovery.20 Then, this July, a separate DESI analysis using absorption lines from hydrogen gas along quasar sightlines came back in agreement with the plain cosmological constant, a result the collaboration acknowledged “could indicate that the current hints of evolving dark energy may fade away.”21 DESI has finished its planned five-year survey ahead of schedule, with 47 million galaxies and quasars; the full analysis is expected in 2027.22 Euclid, the European Space Agency’s dark-universe telescope, expects its first cosmology results the same year, and NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched on August 30 to join them.23 Within a few years, we should know with greater confidence whether w is changing.This is important because different models of quintessence predict different futures for the universe. In some models, dark energy doesn’t merely weaken; it turns negative, with expansion giving way to contraction. A 2022 analysis by Cosmin Andrei, Anna Ijjas, and Paul Steinhardt found that under current constraints, the acceleration could end in less time than has passed since the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, with contraction following within roughly 100 million years.24 Cosmologically speaking, that’s just around the corner.Stories Waiting to Be WrittenOf the three possibilities discussed above, the Big Ambiguity alone seems to have no representation in science fiction. This makes it fertile ground for new stories:The Draw-Down. In a nod to Larry Niven’s “The Missing Mass,” astronomical surveys confirm dark energy is weakening, just not uniformly.25 It is weakest in one direction, toward a supervoid a billion light-years across. A cosmologist realizes something is consuming the vacuum at an accelerating rate. What will this mean for the universe, and whom, if anyone, should she tell?Turnaround. Steinhardt’s model was right. The expansion has already stopped—we just don’t know it yet. A far-future civilization, built on the expectation of a Big Freeze, detects blueshifted light from a distant galaxy, forcing them to reimagine their entire civilization. A society built on patience, and designed for indefinite time, now faces a deadline.31 Candles. A graduate student on an overnight shift at Rubin Observatory detects a Type Ia supernova over six billion light-years away, and it’s dimmer than it should be—as if w has moved. This is the first evidence since DESI’s hints faded that dark energy isn’t constant after all. It will take thirty more supernovae and four years to be sure. If confirmed, it’s not the end of the world, it’s the beginning of not knowing when it ends.We may learn in 2027 whether Einstein’s constant is really constant. Or the answer may wait for Roman’s five-year survey, or for physics we haven’t imagined.26 No matter which way we find out, it is likely to change our understanding of the universe in significant ways.N.B. The claim that no published story yet centers on evolving dark energy is a conclusion from a survey of the Fraknoi index, the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, and related searches. 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

Register for the 2026 Sturgeon Symposium:https://sfcenter.ku.edu/2026-sturgeon-symposiumDo you or someone you know need professional tech guidance for your author, coaching, or independent publishing business? If so, check out our sponsor Cloudessy, providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services. Simplify your tech stack, prevent launch failures, and build systems that actually support growth.https://marketing.cloudessy.com/30-minute-tech-stack-update/The following interview occurred September 21, 2026. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length.Editor’s note: The fifth annual Sturgeon Symposium takes place Thursday and Friday, October 15–16, 2026, at the University of Kansas Hall Center for the Humanities, 900 Sunnyside Avenue, Lawrence, Kansas. Since this interview was recorded, the Gunn Center has announced the winner of the 2026 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award: Alex T. Singer, for “We, the Fleet,” published in Clarkesworld in May 2025. Singer will receive the award and read from the story at the ceremony on Thursday, October 15, at 3:30 p.m. Registration and details are at sfcenter.ku.edu.Brian Pauls: Hello, everyone. I’m happy to have with me today Phil Drake, the director of the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas. Welcome, Phil.Phil Drake: Hello!Brian Pauls: I really appreciate you taking the time to come on the Cosmic Codex and talk with us a little about science fiction and about the upcoming Sturgeon Symposium. My first question: what is your own background with science fiction, and what inspired you to turn it into not just an interest, but an academic discipline?Phil Drake: Thanks for inviting me, Brian. That’s a great question, and I took a somewhat unconventional path to science fiction as a scholarly interest. When I was a graduate student, a long time ago, I was very interested in science and technology studies, particularly as they related to environmental issues. As I progressed through my PhD program, I kept returning to science fiction as a way to interrogate, through novel lenses, the practical social, technological, and scientific issues that kept emerging in my applied research. Over time I became increasingly interested in science fiction as a critical lens in its own right.I happened to be working at the time under John Rieder, a professor at the University of Hawaii who has written several great books on the study of science fiction — particularly its relationship to colonialism, and genre theory — which also animated my interest. So it was a roundabout way in, but science fiction has stayed in my life ever since. At times, professional appointments have pulled me away from it and from being able to teach it, but I’m very fortunate now to be at the University of Kansas, with an opportunity to explore it further.Brian Pauls: What path brought you to your current position as director of the Gunn Center? And maybe even before that — what is the Gunn Center?Phil Drake: The Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction was started by James Gunn, whom most of your audience probably knows. He was a faculty member at KU for a very long time, and he and his family set up the center to provide substantial support for the study of science fiction, from both a scholarly and a creative standpoint. It has evolved over the years. It has always been housed in the English department and supported by the Gunn family, and its current iteration is focused on programming and on giving undergraduate and graduate students opportunities to develop their interests, whatever they might be, in speculative fiction — science fiction and fantasy, and we’ll even include horror and some other interesting genre fiction in there.Brian Pauls: Very good. And how did you become the director?Phil Drake: Some of it stems from my publishing background. I’ve published a couple of articles in Extrapolation, and I’ve worked with the editors of Science Fiction Studies for a long time. But when I came to KU, I never really expected to reignite my scholarly interest in science fiction studies, so it was a real delight to find a very robust community here doing that work.The way faculty appointments go, openings sometimes appear quite auspiciously. The former director was appointed to a leadership role elsewhere on campus, I was coming out of a leadership role within the department, and our interests aligned. I also had a lot of connections to graduate students, particularly through finding financial support for their research. So it worked out well. The center was already a really nice institution that had been functioning well for several years; my job has been to expand its reach, get more students involved, and maybe develop some more community networking as well.Brian Pauls: I should take a moment to point out, for some of our younger listeners, that the James Gunn for whom the Gunn Center is named is not the director of the three Guardians of the Galaxy films and other Marvel and DC superhero movies. This James Gunn was a contemporary of the writers of science fiction’s Golden Age — Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Judith Merril, Ray Bradbury — and he used those connections in building the Gunn Center. He wrote science fiction himself, too. I never used to have to make that clarification, but today I feel like I need to.Phil Drake: He really did a nice job of setting us up with a library where students can come and conduct research. KU’s Spencer Research Library holds some of his really nice things, and I encourage anyone interested to come and visit. You mentioned Bradbury — Gunn’s letters to various famous authors are there, along with work by his students and some of his own drafts. It’s a real treasure trove. I barely know all that’s in there, but we have wonderful librarians who make it accessible.Brian Pauls: That’s great. I attended one or two of the Campbell Conferences, the predecessor to the Sturgeon Symposium, and it was always fascinating to be there with James leading the discussion. He would suddenly insert an observation from personal experience. One example I’ll always remember: Ted Sturgeon is famous for his maxim, Sturgeon’s Law — “Ninety percent of everything is crap.” Somebody brought that up at a Campbell Conference, and Jim said, “Well, actually, it was ‘ninety percent of everything is crud.’” Then he went on to explain how he’d talked with Ted about it. That happened over and over: these were people he knew personally. I think his biography is called A Life in Science Fiction, and that title is one hundred percent true. [Editor’s note: Gunn’s autobiography is Star-Begotten: A Life Lived in Science Fiction (McFarland, 2017).] It was fascinating to hear those stories secondhand.But speaking of Ted Sturgeon: one of the events you host is the Sturgeon Symposium, which I think is now in its fifth year. Can you tell us a little about who Ted Sturgeon was, why there’s a symposium named after him, and what its purpose is?Phil Drake: Ted Sturgeon was a New Age science fiction writer — I’m thinking of him coming out of the ‘60s and ‘70s — who produced an enormous amount of work over the years, in a variety of venues and formats: novels, short stories, TV episodes. He wrote a few episodes of Star Trek. He’s a really interesting writer, and I’ve always viewed him as having a rebellious, critical eye. When I read his work, I always feel there’s an oddness, or a social critique, that’s often very subtle — which is one of the reasons I’ve always been drawn to it. His stories are never straightforward celebrations of technological progress, for instance. There’s a dimensionality to his work that I find really compelling, and his prose is often extremely beautiful. As someone with a literary studies background, I find him an elevated version of science fiction that I can keep going back to. [Editor’s note: Sturgeon’s career began well before the ‘60s. His first science fiction story, “Ether Breather,” appeared in Astounding in September 1939, and he was a central contributor to editor John W. Campbell Jr.’s Golden Age of science fiction. Most of the work for which he is remembered appeared between 1946 and the early 1960s.]1Every year for the last five years, the Gunn Center has hosted the Sturgeon Symposium: a two-day event of creative readings, scholarly panels, and creative panels on craft — basically, discussing all things science fiction. The symposium is built around the announcement, ceremony, and reception for the Sturgeon Award, which honors the best science fiction short story of the previous year. The winner will be announced very shortly, and they’ll come out to Lawrence, Kansas, to read from their work, receive the award, and hopefully enjoy some of the presentations.Every year so far, we’ve had a theme. This year’s theme is “Changing Words, Changing Worlds,” inspired by Sturgeon’s short story “Mr. Costello, Hero.” I’m not sure how many of your audience members will know that story, but it’s a kind of how-to guide to building a fascist state. It’s in the line of Fahrenheit 451 or 1984 — great works in which language, and the manipulation of language, results in dramatic seizures of power and control over minds and knowledge. We were inspired by events in the world, and by connecting them to the historical precedents in which these issues have been discussed, although most of the science fiction we’ll be discussing will probably be from the last twenty years or so.Brian Pauls: The symposium has multiple sessions. If folks are interested in attending, what would be in store for them, and what could they choose from?Phil Drake: It varies from year to year, but typically the first day includes a couple of virtual sessions, with panelists — often from all over the world — presenting mostly scholarly work on whatever speculative fiction interests them. We try to group them by theme. If you show up in person at the University of Kansas, at the Hall Center for the Humanities, where it’s being held this year, there will be a good range: probably half scholarly panels and half panels dedicated to creative writing and the craft of writing.We’re not doing this year, but in previous years we’ve had panels on teaching science fiction. Those are always an interesting way to see how faculty in different disciplines — from the hard sciences, to the humanities where I come from, to the social sciences — use science fiction to engage with topics in their own fields. It’s funny: science fiction seems to excite everyone across disciplines, so it tends to be a very vibrant discussion.In addition to all of that, there’s the awards ceremony on Thursday afternoon. Lunch is served both days, and that can be a fun opportunity to interact with other writers, scholars, and fans of science fiction. It’s open to the community, and registration is about $20, so it’s very cheap. With registration you get a T-shirt, the lunches, and free parking, and it’s usually pretty relaxed. If you’re a student in any program, you can check the student box and attend for free.This year, on Thursday night, we’ll also have a reading by graduate students of excerpts from their creative science fiction. That will be in downtown Lawrence, and it’s open to the public as well.Brian Pauls: When you talked about the theme, you touched on the way words — and, by extension, stories — can be used as a means of control, and conversely, I suppose, as a means of liberation. That’s a relevant theme right now. A couple of days ago I was commenting online, because I’d just finished a book by Ray Nayler — he won the Hugo Award a couple of years ago for The Mountain and the Sea. [Editor’s note: Nayler’s debut novel, The Mountain in the Sea (2022), won the 2023 Locus Award for Best First Novel and was a Nebula finalist. His Hugo Award came in 2025, for the novella The Tusks of Extinction.] His new novel, Where the Axe Is Buried, is set in a future world struggling with authoritarian states — very relevant — and it’s also a discussion of how AI might play into that. I was responding to somebody, and it occurred to me to say something to the effect that I wish we lived in a world where science fiction could just be escapism — where we didn’t have reasons for it to be anything else. But it has always served this more important role, going back to the very beginning, and certainly during World War II. It has also been misused from the other side. I wonder whether you have any observations to share, ahead of the symposium, about the role science fiction plays in our world.Phil Drake: I’m of the belief that all cultural expression provides a kind of trace, or reveals a symptom of broader social conditions. In literary studies that’s a fairly conventional approach, and that’s my background. But I feel that science fiction brings a level of intensity and accessibility to examining those issues.Take Faulkner, for instance. Faulkner’s lovely — beautiful, literary — but people who aren’t familiar with him, who just pick up a book and don’t have a lot of time to get used to that prose, may struggle. Science fiction typically hooks an audience much more quickly. Often there’s adventure and excitement; often there are very problematic scenes, settings, and themes as well. But it throws social critique in front of a reader — or a viewer, if we’re talking about film — in a way that makes us consider these questions whether we want to or not, and it does so in a delightful way. Thinking about societal change, about how structures and relationships and power operate — these big questions — doesn’t have to feel so elitist and alienating. We can think in practical ways about how science fiction might comment on our lived worlds. As you say, it touches almost everything, so it seems very organic to me to draw on it. In pretty much any class I teach — even when I wasn’t thinking about science fiction as a scholarly field — I’ve always included science fiction texts, just because they’re so vibrant.Brian Pauls: One thing we’ve seen recently — it’s probably always been there, but certainly since the dawn of the current tech boom, over the last ten or fifteen years — is technologists using science fiction iconography in a way I’m not always one hundred percent comfortable with. I look at someone who names their company or product after a very iconic term from a classic work of science fiction or fantasy, and then I look at what that person is doing with their billions of dollars and their business — I’m not going to identify anyone in particular, and the fact is there’s more than one — and it’s hard not to say to yourself, “Maybe you drew the wrong lesson from those stories, because you seem to be behaving far more like a science fiction villain than a science fiction hero.” There’s probably not much we can do about that. You can name your company whatever you want and run it, within a pretty wide latitude, the way you want. But at least we can be aware of it. So I’m really impressed and excited by the theme you’ve chosen this year. It’s very timely — especially given the way science fiction is being used to drive agendas its authors might not have approved.Phil Drake: Very much so — thank you. That was the idea: thinking about new social and political developments, some of which are quite old, too, and reminding ourselves that science fiction in particular provides a lot of tools for navigating these problems, imagining possible solutions, and putting things into context. Though it’s hard not to resort to dystopian thinking from time to time, for a lot of reasons.Brian Pauls: I’ll be at the symposium, and I’m very much looking forward to it. I have a final question before we wrap up, but is there anything else you’d like to bring up about the symposium, or about science fiction in general?Phil Drake: I’ll give one more pitch: the symposium is meant to be open not only to the KU community, but to the whole community in Lawrence and beyond, including people coming in from Kansas City and the rest of the region. If your audience has a way to get out here easily, it’s definitely worth the time — it’s quite an enjoyable event. There will be some well-established authors talking. If you’re a creative writer, it’s a great way to network and to learn a little more about the thought process of established, successful authors and how they put their work together. It’s also your chance to be exposed to new literature or exciting scholarship in the field, and it’s always fun to get a sense of what we’re doing.I’m trying to think of other new developments. We do have a book club, which is always fun. If you’re interested in science fiction reading groups, go to our website, sfcenter.ku.edu, where there are all sorts of places to sign up. April is a bit of a slow month on the academic calendar, so last year we decided to celebrate cats in science fiction — April was Science Fiction Cat Month. We’ll probably do something like that again. So we have some goofier events, too, to celebrate and explore the funnier edges of science fiction.Brian Pauls: Space cats have a long, long history in science fiction, championed most of all by Andre Norton, who had many cats herself.So, my last question before we wrap up: out of your years of studying science fiction, is there a story — or maybe two or three — that you feel speaks to society in a way that makes it valuable beyond mere entertainment? Or stories you feel should have had a bigger impact than they did, but just aren’t widely known? This is a chance to share the stories you think listeners should know about.Phil Drake: I’m going to choose one of the most famous novels and talk about it a little, mostly because it’s one of those novels I keep thinking will fade from attention, and it keeps reappearing. Neuromancer feels like a particularly useful text to think through right now. I came to it late — I think I first read it in 2003 or 2004, and at that point it seemed dated. Certainly there are problems of representation, and some clunkiness to the plot that felt a little cringey in spots, but it was still interesting. There’s a whole race, class, and gender dynamic that’s fraught in certain ways but provocative in others, and I think Gibson is pretty smart in what he’s doing.What’s funny to me is that at the time it felt so out of date, and today it feels almost as if it were written now. Certainly there are cultural differences in technology since it was written in the mid-’80s. But thinking about the AI futures being presented to us, and their possibilities, the foresight Gibson had is pretty extraordinary. And going back to your earlier comment about the ways science fiction influences the people who are changing the world right now, you can clearly see a Neuromancer thread influencing a lot of people. For some reason it’s been in my head. I’m not sure I love that novel, but it’s sticky in my brain, so I keep going back to it.Brian Pauls: That’s a good pick. I’d say yes, certainly AI — but also the dominance of international corporations, the apparent diminishment of governments, the split in wealth between the ultra-wealthy and a desperate underclass. These are things we’re seeing right now, and I’m not going to disagree with you at all. In fact, I’m on record as saying that of all the possible science fiction futures, the one we got is cyberpunk.Phil Drake: Yeah.Brian Pauls: I’m not super happy about it. I would have preferred rockets to Jupiter, but we are where we are.Well, Phil, thank you so much for coming on. I second what you said: if you’re in the area, definitely come down and check out the Sturgeon Symposium, and if you can join some of the virtual sessions, I think it would be worthwhile. Thank you, and thanks to the Gunn Center, for keeping this tradition alive at the University of Kansas.Phil Drake: Thank you.Brian Pauls: All right — thanks, everyone, and I’ll talk to you next week on the Cosmic Codex! 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

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 curious.The organism, as the book calls it, isn’t a villain in the classic sense. It’s a mind with a different evolutionary history, which can infect and hijack the nervous system of any potential host it encounters.19 Having never met anything it could not become, the organism has no concept of a boundary between itself and the rest of the universe. Every infection is, from its perspective, an act of friendship.20 Kern, the only character in the story with the experience to grasp the organism’s nature, sums up the challenge of trying to fight it: “I do not believe it would be possible to impose controls on it that it could not circumvent or subvert.”21This ability to hijack human minds raises the question of what it means for the compromised individuals.22 As the Portiid scientist Fabian wonders regarding the hijacked human Lante: “Was there a Lante, at the end, and was she aware of what she had become?”23 Kern, who has herself been human, hybrid, program, and ant colony in turn,24 knows the uploaded Lante exists only when the organism consults her, then is “gone like a blown candle until the organism wants her again...”25Still, amid these travails, Tchaikovsky weaves a thread of hope. Yes, he subtly insists, minds shaped by different evolutionary histories will find one another profoundly difficult to comprehend. But there will always remain a realm of experience common to all intelligent life. And while it may be narrow, this shared territory provides the foundation for mutual understanding and cooperation.Tchaikovsky highlights the philosophical concepts at issue here. The Human and Portiid linguists confront Thomas Nagel’s problem directly, building tools “so that the anthropoid brain can grasp what it is like to be a spider,”26 and asking whether the two kinds of experience are “intrinsically incompatible.”27 Senkovi, uplifting his octopuses millennia earlier, encounters Wittgenstein’s conundrum: “If a lion could speak, as the man said, we could not understand it.”28 The Human Helena, negotiating with the Damascans while they hold her prisoner, catches herself relying on “anthropomorphism as a yardstick of what alien minds can conceive...”29Tchaikovsky deftly orchestrates instances of contact between his various species. When the octopus Paul suddenly realizes Helena is grieving as he himself might, “It makes Paul think of the creature as a fellow living thing in a way he hadn’t before.”30 The Portiid scientist Viola, confronted with evidence of the organism’s consciousness, concludes: “‘Convergent evolution. Perhaps it is something that any life would attain, eventually.’”31 The novel proposes that happiness, sadness, and the feeling of home are each “another commonality between species.”32 In Children of Ruin, Tchaikovsky posits that if life developed consciousness on Earth, it can develop it elsewhere. And he believes that when we encounter it, we will be able to recognize it and find “siblinghood” with it, as unusual as it may be.33The biggest weakness of Children of Ruin is its structure.Children of Time asks us to follow two storylines across thousands of years and maintains continuity with the elegant trick of recurring Portiid names. Children of Ruin also presents a pair of storylines, but increases the size of the cast. The plotline set in the past gives us Baltiel, Senkovi, Lortisse, and Lante. The present has Helena, Portia, Meshner, Fabian, Viola, and Kern, plus a rotating slate of octopuses—Paul, Solomon, Lot, Noah, Ruth, Abigail, and Ahab. The octopuses’ recurring Biblical names, like the Portiids’ names before them, indicate each represents multiple individuals across generations.In addition, the human characters are more numerous than in Children of Time, and spread across a longer period, making it harder for them to serve as the backbone of the overall plot.Despite these flaws, Tchaikovsky’s deep exploration of the problem of other minds, from multiple directions, makes Children of Ruin a better novel than the already good Children of Time. The Damascan civilization stands beside the Portiids as one of the most convincing non-human societies in recent science fiction, and the Nodan organism is a notable creation of scientific speculation.Recommended for: Readers of hard science fiction who want truly non-human aliens, and anyone who has read and enjoyed Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds.Not recommended for: Readers who need one protagonist to follow through a story, or who didn’t appreciate the jumping back-and-forth between eras in Children of Time. 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

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 qualities instead of letting Dialogue Doctor differentiate them.Sefirot Edito vs. AutoCrit — Edito prompts while AutoCrit measures. Edito’s cards ask whether a scene belongs in the story; AutoCrit counts dialogue ratio, adverb frequency, and pacing markers, then compares them against published work in the genre to supply outside perspective. Where the two overlap regarding pacing, follow Edito’s process, referring to the AutoCrit report for clarification when a pacing problem is suspected but not obvious.PART ONE — PER-PIECE LOOPSTRACK A — Flash (under ~1,500 words)A1. ⚪ Premise — use Fabula: ASSETS if it helps.A2. ⚪ Character check — skip the character chain. Run CC6’s five voice components alone as a one-minute distinctness test.A3. ⚪ First Draft — draft in one sitting where possible.A4. ⚪ Drawer time — leave it a day or two.A5. ⚪ Revise and read aloud — at this length, merge these two steps. Run ProWritingAid Chapter Critique.A6. 🔴 Critique reader — or SFF Online Writing Workshop (OWW)/CritiqueMatch/Critters.A7. ⚪ Final pass — run ProWritingAid and Hemingway.TRACK B — Short story (~1,500–7,500 words)B1. ⚪ Premise — use Fabula: ASSETS selectively.B2. ⚪ Character chain — run full CC1–CC6 for the lead. Run CC1, CC2, CC5 for anyone else who matters. Keep the arc section light — many short stories turn on a change of understanding, not behavior.B3. ⚪ Minimal planning — build the CC6 scene list, then import into Fabula: CHARACTERS and EDITING cards if non-linear.B4. ⚪ First DraftB5. ⚪ Drawer time — leave it days to two weeks.B6. ⚪ Self-revision — run Edito: First revision. Read the whole story in one sitting. Run AutoCrit structural reports: pacing, dialogue ratio, show-vs-tell. Run ProWritingAid Chapter Critique.B7. 🔴 Critique group — choose OWW for turnaround time and the Editors’ Choice opportunity; choose Critters for a high volume of stories to be critiqued.B8. ⚪ Revision passB9. 🟡 Line edit — spend the most revision effort here. Run Edito: Third revision, ProWritingAid, Hemingway, AutoCrit line-level reports. Check against the CC6 voice components.B10. ⚪ Read-aloud passB11. ⚪ Self copy-edit pre-pass — run ProWritingAid.TRACK C — Novelette / Novella (~7,500–40,000 words)C1. ⚪ Premise and research — use Fabula: ASSETS.C2. ⚪ Character chain — run full CC1–CC6 for protagonist and one antagonist or foil. Run CC1, CC2, CC5 for the rest.C3. ⚪ Outlining — import CC6 scenes into Fabula: full HERO’S DEVELOPMENT. Use EDITING cards for sequencing.C4. ⚪ First DraftC5. ⚪ Drawer time — leave it weeks to months.C6. ⚪ Self-revision — run Edito: First revision. Address plot, character arc, structure, setting. Run AutoCrit structural reports. Run ProWritingAid Manuscript Analysis.C7. ⚪ Revision pass — run Edito: To Do / Thoughts / Done.C8. 🟡 Content pass — run Edito: Second revision. Read aloud chapter by chapter for pacing.C9. ⚪ Revision passC10. 🔴 Beta readers — recruit readers who will read the full piece and provide feedback. Treat OWW and Critters as supplementary at best; they cap at 7,500 words. Run ProWritingAid Virtual Beta Reader first to catch obvious problems before presenting to beta readers.C11. ⚪ Beta follow-up revision — re-run AutoCrit structural reports against the beta feedback. When readers report a pacing problem, the reports can help identify the cause in the text.C12. 🟡 Line edit — run Edito: Third revision, ProWritingAid, Hemingway, AutoCrit line-level reports. Check the CC6 voice components.C13. ⚪ Read-aloud passC14. ⚪ Self copy-edit pre-passTRACK D — Short novel (~40,000+ words)Run the full novel pipeline. This is where the character chain really shines.D1. ⚪ Premise development and research — use Fabula: ASSETS.D2. ⚪ Character chain — run full CC1–CC6 for the protagonist and two other arc-bearing characters; that maps onto Fabula’s three CHARACTERS cards. Run CC1, CC2, CC5 for supporting cast. Refer to the CC5 sketches throughout the drafting process.D3. ⚪ Outlining — build the CC6 scene lists first. Then import them into Fabula: all 18 HERO’S DEVELOPMENT cards, three CHARACTERS cards tracking parallel arcs, EDITING cards for narrative order.D4. ⚪ First DraftD5. ⚪ Drawer time — leave it months.D6. ⚪ Self-revision / second draft — run Edito: Pre-editing, then First revision. Run AutoCrit structural reports for a baseline. Run ProWritingAid Manuscript Analysis.D7. 🟡 Alpha readers or critique partnersD8. ⚪ Revision pass — run Edito: To Do / Thoughts / Done.D9. 🟡 Manuscript assessment — get an editorial letter only. Fund this before any other paid stage on this piece.D10. 🟡 Developmental pass — run Edito: First revision. Assess against Fabula as a diagnostic. Check the CC6 arcs against the text of the draft. Run AutoCrit structural reports and genre comparison. Run ProWritingAid Manuscript Analysis.D11. ⚪ Revision passD12. 🟡 Content pass — run Edito: Second revision. Use Fabula EDITING cards if event order is a problem. Use AutoCrit pacing reports to locate problems Edito reveals.D13. ⚪ Revision pass — use Edito: mistakes-analysis.D14. 🔴 Beta readers — recruit novel readers for the full length. Run ProWritingAid Virtual Beta Reader first to catch obvious problems before presenting to beta readers.D15. ⚪ Beta follow-up revision — re-run AutoCrit structural reports against the beta feedback.D16. 🟡 Line edit — run Edito: Third revision, ProWritingAid, Hemingway, AutoCrit line-level reports. Check CC6 across all three arcs.D17. ⚪ Revision passD18. ⚪ Read-aloud passD19. ⚪ Self copy-edit pre-pass — run ProWritingAid.All Tracks: Capture real-time origin notes for each story to use later for interstitial material. For a free professional pass, pursue magazine publication for anything in A through C.PART TWO — ASSEMBLY⚪ Selection — cut the weak pieces to improve the overall quality of the book.⚪ Format decision — the novel comprises 25% of the book. Choose between “[Novel Title]: A Novel, with Stories” and a titled collection that contains it. Title choice drives choice of cover, metadata, and categories, as well as how the readers will see the collection as a whole.⚪ Sequencing — the most important decision of the project. Opening with the novel demands a lot of commitment from readers at the beginning. Closing with it turns everything before it into a long approach. Placing it in the middle splits the book into three parts. Sequence for reading rhythm, not theme. Use Fabula: EDITING cards.⚪ Thematic coherence — ask what the collection is trying to say, and whether the novel strengthens that case.⚪ Interstitial strategy — address five concerns before drafting:Position — headnotes, afterwords, or both?Register — the author, or a persona? Anecdotal, critical, or minimal?Scaling — based on story length. A 300-word note is fine before a short story, and absurd before 400 words of flash. Use a brief tag for flash, a standard note for a short story, and a fuller treatment for a novella or the novel.Function — origin, framing, context, or connective tissue?Coverage — interstitials for every piece, or only some of them? Skipping flash entirely is legitimate.⚪ Front and back matter — assemble acknowledgments, prior-publication credits, author note, copyright page. Consider a table of contents with reading times; unusual, but useful with pieces that vary so widely in length.⚪ Revision pass on selection and order.PART THREE — INTERSTITIAL DRAFTINGTreat this as nonfiction inside a fiction book. Give it its own loop.⚪ Draft them all in a tight cluster — written together they cohere. Written piecemeal over months, the voice drifts.⚪ Drawer time — leave it days.⚪ Self-revision — check each against the decisions made in step 5. Right tier, right register, is each note doing its job?🟡 Read-through in book order — read the stories and the notes interleaved, the way a reader would. Expect to discover issues, including whether the differing lengths of various pieces come across as intentional, or just inconsistent.⚪ Revision pass — watch for two common problems: notes that spoil the piece they introduce, and notes that repeat the point the story already makes.Use an essayist voice here, distinct from the specific voices of the stories themselves.PART FOUR — MANUSCRIPT-WIDE EDITING🔴 Sensitivity / authenticity read — commission one if any piece warrants it. Trigger it specifically when CC3 produced a character who may come across as a caricature of mental illness rather than as a set of interesting traits.⚪ Revision pass🟡 Collection-level developmental read — find someone to read all of it at once and provide feedback. Ask whether the novel’s placement works, whether the length variance reads as designed, and whether the interstitial notes help or intrude.⚪ Revision pass — send a piece back to its track or a note back to step 10 as needed.🟡 Collection line-edit pass — check voice consistency across pieces written years apart, and the deliberate fiction/interstitial boundary. Compare all the CC5 character sketches with one another — a dozen protagonists run through the same character chain may have converged on similar qualities.🔴 Copy Edit — hire a professional editor for this before paying for anything else. Build a style sheet across the whole manuscript. Expect the editor to check the novel for continuity and to examine all the stories for consistency across pieces. The interstitials will add potential mistakes of their own: italicized titles, magazine names, dates, publication credits, quoted material. Brief the editor that the book has two registers (the fiction and the interstitials) and four different story lengths (flash, short story, novelette/novella, novel), all intentional.⚪ Query resolution for the copy edit⚪ Final ManuscriptPART FIVE — PRODUCTION⚪ Cover design — 🟡 professional look and feel. It’s the primary sales asset.⚪ Interior typesetting — handle four structurally different content types: novel chapters, novella chapters, story breaks, and flash pieces. Give the novel a part-title page. Give interstitials their own treatment — distinct, consistent, unambiguous about where each note ends and the relevant piece begins. Specify these details before proceeding with the layout.🔴 Proofread — proof typeset pages, print and ebook both. Expect a substantial job at this page count. Watch for notes orphaned across breaks, treatment applied inconsistently across tiers, ebook reflow collapsing the distinction, and novel chapter breaks behaving differently from story breaks.⚪ Final corrections⚪ Metadata, categories, keywords, blurb — specify the format (short stories and novel), the range (flash fiction to short novel), and the use of interstitials. All three set expectations.⚪ ARC readers⚪ PublicationFunding: Copy edit, cover, proofread, collection-level read, then a manuscript assessment on the novel, in that order. The first three separate a self-published book from an obviously self-published one.Reuse the character chain in multiple steps. During the line edit for each piece, use it as a voice checklist. During the developmental pass of the short novel, check it against the text of the first draft. During the collection line-edit pass, use it to catch too much convergence between characters across different stories. 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

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 proton masses.12 Meanwhile ADMX is searching for another, much lighter, proposed particle called the “axion”, with no success to-date.13Mike Brotherton is a working astronomer, as well as a science fiction writer, and knows his physics. His novel Spider Star, a WIMP story, includes a planet made of weakly interacting matter, and a starship drive that scoops and pushes WIMPs as fuel14—a fascinating premise, and possibly even realistic, but as of now, still hypothetical.Maybe it’s a whole second worldWe have no good reason to conclude only one type of particle comprises dark matter. Ordinary matter has a dozen fundamental particles, multiple forces, and a periodic table. Dark matter could have the same—dark electrons, dark electromagnetism, dark chemistry—coupled to us by gravity and almost nothing else.The most elegant version is mirror matter, in which dark matter adheres to an exact copy of the Standard Model, with every particle getting a mirror twin.15 Earlier this year, theorists published predictions for electromagnetic signatures of mirror stars which have captured ordinary atoms.16Mirror matter is the driving conceit behind John Gribbin’s The Alice Encounter. Gribbin, an astrophysicist by training and a popularizer by trade, builds his novel on “Alice matter.” This is "looking glass" stuff, much more plentiful than normal matter, arranged in a roughly spherical distribution around the flat disk of our galaxy. Beings composed of Alice matter, and more advanced than we are, have noticed the “contamination” of normal matter in the universe and have decided to investigate.17Inside the Sun?Whatever dark matter turns out to be, if it interacts with ordinary matter at all, some of it should end up in the cores of stars. Stars like our sun sweep up dark matter as they move through space, and a particle that scatters off a nucleus of normal matter along the way can lose enough speed to be stranded. Gravity does the rest, settling the captured particles into the core.18In Stephen Baxter’s Ring, the fourth novel in his Xeelee series, the downloaded mind of a woman named Lieserl is lowered into the Sun and abandoned there for five million years. She finds the star inhabited by “photino birds.” These are dark matter creatures that colonize stellar cores, drain the energy that drives fusion, and age the stars prematurely into white dwarfs incapable of killing the photino birds in supernovae.19The “photino” is the proposed supersymmetric partner of the photon, and in the 1980s it was among the leading candidates for cold dark matter.20Maybe there is nothing there at allThe unfashionable possibility is that the discrepancy is real and the interpretation is wrong. Perhaps gravity behaves differently at very low accelerations, and no missing substance is required. Mordehai Milgrom’s Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND), proposed in 1983, fits galactic rotation curves with a single new constant.21 MOND detractors point to the work on colliding galaxy clusters by Douglas Clowe and his colleagues mentioned above, but MOND’s advocates were still publishing rebuttals earlier this year.22Stories waiting to be written…Cold Company. If dark matter can lose energy, some of it may have settled into a thin disk lying in the plane of the galaxy, which the Sun crosses roughly every thirty million years.23 A geologist and a physicist argue for decades about whether the impact record is a coincidence or a timetable—and about which of them will have to be wrong in public.The Long Fog. Due to something called the “neutrino fog,”24 dark matter detectors hit a wall no practical modifications can bypass. The answer lies permanently below the noise. A story about the last generation of experimentalists, what a scientific culture does when it proves a question unanswerable, and those who refuse to accept this limitation.Alice’s Argument. An homage to Isaac Asimov’s The Gods Themselves,25 further exploring one of that book’s most provocative premises. A laboratory converts a gram of ordinary matter into mirror matter, then converts it back. But it returns changed—edited. Someone made of mirror matter is sending us a message. First contact must be conducted a gram at a time, in a medium where no one can verify anything, and the negotiators on our side cannot agree on whether the other party is a government, a machine, or a child.What comes nextThe Vera C. Rubin Observatory began its ten-year survey of the southern sky this summer, and will map dark matter, in part, by the way it bends light across the visible universe.26 The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched on August 30 and is less than three months from its post at L2, where it will pursue a similar objective.s Underground, the LZ team keeps working, waiting to learn whether their recent detection is repeatable.Maybe one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of science won’t remain unsolved for long. 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