Apologies, this post is a bit of a term-paper and many readers may already know all I talk about below. I can only plead that as a writer of science fiction, I’ve lately been uncertain about a certain question, and so I thought I should get it all clear in my mind. That question is …
What exactly is Science Fiction?
Once upon a time no one thought to ask this question, because no one thought of “science fiction” as a thing. While Aristotle did classify literature into three types: Epic, Tragedy and Comedy, before the 20th century, genre as we know it – a classification based on subject matter and style – did not exist. With the rise of pulp magazines, and then paperbacks, a need emerged to classify things for reading customers, as described in this paper. The genre system was an obvious commercial necessity.
There were many works published in the early 20th century we understand to be science fiction, like The Machine Stops (1909) by E. M. Forster, or Rossum’s Universal Robots (1920) by Karel Čapek – Wikipedia has a great article on the timeline of science fiction. But as good a starting point as any for the “birth” of SF as a genre is 1926, the year that Hugo Gernsback started Amazing Stories – Gernsback coined the term “science fiction”.
I daresay in Gernsback’s time there was zero question about what SF was – it was whatever Gernsback published. The attributes he most emphasized were these:
· Technological Optimism. This was an Edison-ian attitude that we would build better and better versions of things we had: cars would go faster, then fly; airplanes would go faster, then go to space.
· Adventure. SF stories had to have exciting problems and enemies, and personal danger. The hero was almost always a scientist or a gadget-savvy MacGyver-type.
· Colonialism. Of course, Gernsback didn’t see it this way, but in his conception aliens and their worlds were to be conquered or assimilated.
If all you know about Science Fiction is Star Wars, you could well think Gernsback’s thinking is still the definition of SF. But a lot of stuff has happened since 1926.
The eighty or so years before this age was truly a seminal period, not just for sci-fi, but for two important movements: modernity and romanticism. Frankenstein was published in 1818, setting the seed for the idea that man, not God, was the master of creation, if only he/she could figure it out. In 1830, Tennyson published The Kraken, 15 lines that amazingly capture the vibe that Verne would employ in 20,000 Leagues Beneath the Sea (1870). 19th century moderns like Comte and Marx, together with Romantics like Shelley and later the Victorian Tennyson created a point of view of the world both as an empirical system, but also as a sprawling epic – foundational traits of SF stories.
The Golden Age: 1940 – 1960
This is the age boomers like me think of when we think of SF. I was 14 when I read Asimov’s Foundation – borrowed from a classmate – and I was hooked. That was the late 60s and the “Big 3” – Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke – were considered the defining writers of the genre. I read all of Asimov, a lot of Clarke, and much of Heinlein. At this time, all SF was what today we would call “hard”, but there was also an even-more technical contingent typified by Hal Clement, and by the infamous story The Cold Equations (1954), where a stowaway girl must be put out the spaceship’s airlock because, you know, maths.
Writers of this age were all very different, but in my view a common quality in writing of this time is, the characters were not very interesting. Mostly they tend to be vehicles for the author’s argument. For example Salvor Hardin from The Foundation Trilogy is certainly an active character, making key decisions and actions in the early phases of the Foundation. But when I tried to re-read the book 5 years back, I got no sense that Hardin had any personal goals or independent will – he just fortuitously makes the moves Asimov wants.
New Wave: 1960 – 1980
Starting in the 60s, SF started exploring themes intended to do more than entertain, but to express big ideas and perspectives, generally not in line with the techno-optimism of the Golden Age. My cover-pick here is a favorite of mine, Lord of Light (1967) by Roger Zelazny; its a cool adventure to be sure, but it also takes on the idea of religion as a tool to dominate society; on top of that its characters are full of doubts and uncertainties, unlike the automatons of Asimov.
But pardon me for not leading with the recognized exemplar of New Wave SF, Dangerous Visions (1967), 32 stories edited by Harlan Ellison. I won’t try and summarize that for you – an excellent video on this work is here. Beware if you decide to read this … all of the stories are quirky to say the least, and to my mind many are now dated. But they are all clearly a break with what came before.
In my view, the most important New Wave SF authors are women: Ursula K. LeGuin, author of The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The Word for World is Forest (1972), and many others; Joanna Russ, who wrote the The Female Man, 1970; and James Tiptree, Jr., pseudonym of Alice Sheldon, her works include Up the Walls of the World (1978), the novelette The Women Men Don’t See (1973) and many more. I first read Tiptree in the early 80s, when her identity as a woman was just becoming widely known, and I was amazed – not that she was a woman, but how good her writing was compared to other stuff I had been reading. To me, her stories have an economy and directness that resonates.
The major contribution of women to New Wave makes sense, when you consider how previous ages did so much glorification of male power. The importance of the New Wave can’t be understated – I’ll get back to it towards the end.
Cyberpunk: 1980 – 2000
In 1982 I got an Apple //e personal computer and a CompuServe account. In 1992 Michael Crichton published Rising Sun, a murder mystery set in the intersection of American and Japanese high-tech industries. 1982’s film Blade Runner implicitly showed Japanese culture “winning” out over the west – that Japan was going to become the predominant world technological power was a prominent theme of the time. This is the era of Cyberpunk, an outgrowth of the New Wave that emphasized near-future dystopia and particularly the power and danger of information technology, mostly with gritty, noir-style characters and plots.
Gibson’sNeuromancer (1984) is the most-cited canonical cyberpunk work: a criminal hacker gets caught up in a plot to create a super AI and meets along the way spies, super-soldiers, space Rastafarians and more.
BTW, I have an autographed copy of Rising Sun – Crichton sent it to me as payment for using a computer program I wrote in 1989 called BatFiler and marketed as shareware, a pay-what-you-think-is-reasonable scheme. Here’s proof:
End of History: 1990-2000+
What this “age” means is that since the late 90s, sci-fi has gotten too diverse to say there’s a single defining theme. The cover I picked for this one, by Adrian Tchaikovsky is hard SF with a problem-solving core – its like a Golden Age book, but with better characters and craft. But I could have picked All Systems Red by Martha Wells, wherein a deadly android achieves free will and decides to spend its time watching soap-opera like space TV shows; Murderbot books vibe on anti-capitalism and the existential dread that many Gen Z people feel. Or I could have picked Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie, where an AI starship seeks revenge against an evil empire for causing the death of its captain – aside from the political aspects of the book, it is also an exploration of personhood. Finally I might have picked You Sexy Thing, by Cat Rambo, where an ensemble cast try to run a restaurant, flee from a malicious hyper-intelligence, rescue a space princess, and more – this is cozy sci-fi.
This is where SF is today, many sub-genres, from hard, to SF thriller, to mainstream (think Andy Weir) to SF mystery to cozy to space opera and more.
Wasn’t This Post About a Question?
I started this entry with the question, “What exactly is Science Fiction?” One reason fans and writers keep debating this is the dramatic evolution of the genre, over the ages as I’ve summarized. Ever since Sherlock Holmes, detective stories are detective stories – there’s a crime, a detective, and in the end the mystery is solved. Yes, mysteries of today differ in tone and style; there’s a lot less of Agatha Christie’s insufferably improbably murder methods and a lot more psychological tension for detectives. But no one obsesses about different “ages” of the mystery genre.
SF changing so much is a natural driver of questioning the genre itself. Just one facet of this debate was the so-called “Sad Puppies”, a right-wing campaign centered on the Hugo Awards that intended to drive the idea that the only valid definition of Science Fiction was that of the Gernsback Era. The Sad Puppies essentially argued, “SF is a thing that has these attributes – you guys write whatever you want but don’t call it SF.” While I completely oppose their politics, inasmuch as there is some nostalgia in the Puppies’ ravings, I get it. Early SF had implicit colonialism and sexism, but it also had praiseworthy ideas as well – I don’t want to see those works blithely cancelled.
At the same time, our whole culture has evolved. In the Western genre, compare stories like The Searchers with its disempowerment of indigenous peoples to today’s Dark Winds, a series featuring Navajo tribal policeman Joe Leaphorn. I don’t see any groups of westerns fans demanding a return to the racist good old days.
There’s also a constant flow of less-political debates happening, such as the evergreen “Is Star Wars Science Fiction or Fantasy?” debate, or the “Speculative Fiction vs. Science Fiction” debate. Again, this is because SF is so protean – it’s human nature to want categories to be easily identifiable, and as I’ve tried to show, SF ain’t that.
I’ll just get to my view on this question:
The best science fiction is that which emerged in the New Wave – stories that offer a point of view about how the world works. “World” includes humans, culture, economics, the whole shebang of life. Yes, it will have characters, hopefully interesting ones. And it will be about the future, because then the story can posit any sort of situation, unlimited by known history, to frame its thesis. And finally, it will have science in it, because science is what drives us to both continually question the world around us, and to react to the answers that science uncovers. SF is not about the human condition per se, or the irony of personal existence, or what is the best way to individually live – it is about the world we all live in, today – its laws, properties, dangers and rewards.
Dune is a story about an empire, an oppressed people, giant worms, interstellar travel and more. But what it is really doing is telling us a lesson about the world: charismatic leaders are dangerous. Neuromancer has super-computers, hackers, and pre-figured the ultra-connected world of today. But it is really about the danger of corporations and the wealthy wielding unchecked power. The Dispossessed tells a story about the pursuit of scientific truth, and a clash of different planets, but its message is, there is more than one good way to organize a society. And more recently, The Three Body Problem presents ultra-advanced science, militant aliens, and a battle for survival that spans centuries – but its message is a collectivist society is better than an individual-driven capitalist one. Like I said, these important books give a point of view about the world – that doesn’t mean each one is true.
I don’t discount SF-as-entertainment. Back in the day I really enjoyed Keith Laumer’s books about galactic diplomat Jame Retief; and my own most favorite SF author, Jack Vance, master of genre writing, is much more of the Golden Age than New Wave or later. Then there’s Hitchhiker’s Guide – yes, it has ironic observations (in the British style) about the absurdities of life, but c’mon … it’s funny.
But I can get plain old entertainment anywhere. With SF I increasingly find I want more – more when I read, and more when I write.
Consider the first paragraph of The Dispossessed, by LeGuin:
“There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall.”
From the first line, LeGuin hits us not with just a description, but with an idea – the wall is bigger, more important than it seems. That make me want to read more, to get to the bottom of this idea and see what it means and where it leads – to yet more ideas, I expect.
I created my account on Facebook in 2008. In those days I was working at IBM, on products that were part of its Social Business initiative. That year is when I also created a Twitter account – I wanted to have some connection to the emerging world of social media so I could at least converse about the subject.
It happened that social business went nowhere, though my Facebook and Twitter accounts remained. Twitter never clicked with me and when the “X” thing happened I deleted that account. But Facebook kind of just went on, with its occasional bits of news about old acquaintances, videos about golf and martial arts, interest groups like Damien Walter’s Science Fiction group, and community groups like my high school or my town everything-is-free board.
But no longer.
On July 8 at 9:32 am I received an email from “Meta for Business” telling me “Verify your payment method to continue running ads”. Years ago, I did run some Facebook ads, promotions for my books. They never drove any meaningful sales and I stopped doing it. It probably was the case that the card I had used was expired. But the link the email included did not function, just a blank screen.
Then at 9:42 the same day, I received a Facebook email saying “Fernando, you have 30 days to take action.” My account was suspended and I needed to appeal that decision. Again, the supplied “Appeal” link did not work – this one gave a screen saying my photo ID was in the midst of being processed. I never sent any ID to Facebook, certainly not for years.
At 7:44 pm that day, I received another FB email, saying:
Your Facebook account has been permanently disabled.
You requested a review of this decision, but we still found that your account, or activity on it, didn’t follow our Terms of Service. You can’t request another review.
I can still login using my account, but the only thing that is available is a link for me to download my information. Guess what? That link does not work.
So what the bleep happened?
What They Say
Here’s Facebook’s summary on the conditions for disabling an account:
We may disable or delete your account if after registration your account is not confirmed, your account is unused and remains inactive for an extended period of time, or if we detect someone may have used it without your permission and we are unable to confirm your ownership of the account. (Learn) about how we disable and delete accounts.
Where we take such action we’ll let you know and explain any options you have to request a review, unless doing so may expose us or others to legal liability; harm our community of users; compromise or interfere with the integrity or operation of any of our services, systems or Products; where we are restricted due to technical limitations; or where we are prohibited from doing so for legal reasons. You can (learn) about what you can do if your account has been disabled and how to contact us if you think we have disabled your account by mistake.
I don’t see how any of this could apply to my case. My account has been “confirmed” since forever. As for “unused”, I would say I was clicking FB posts 5-10 times a day, and posting 1-2 times per week.. More FB details explain that for “hacked” accounts, they disable it but allow you to recover. I’m doubtful anyone posted dangerous content using my ID – too many people would have seen it and contacted me.
I have a suspicion that the expired payment info triggered something that … was not handled well.
What struck me about all this was not really the fact of my account being ash-canned – it was the sheer inconsistency and ineptitude of the Facebook software.
Why It Doesn’t Matter
The bottom-line is clear to me: Facebook does not care that their software doesn’t work. Now I get that software at scale can be complex. I spent 35+ years writing such software and leading projects to develop such software, including multi-billion messages-per-day marketing solutions. In all the interactions FB had with me over my account, not one thing they offered as an option actually worked. All their statements about appeals and so on were just hot air.
This has nothing to do with complexity. The explanation is in Cory Doctorow’s wonderful term: Enshittification. It’s worth quoting how Doctorow described it:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two-sided market”, where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
Essentially Meta has no interest in customer satisfaction or providing good experiences. Their view is, there is no alternative, take what we give or take off. Hundreds of millions of users clearly find that argument compelling, as they keep clicking and infinite scrolling.
What’s Next
In the week since my banishment, I frankly don’t feel like I’m missing anything. I know people on my friends-list have made posts I guess I would prefer to have seen, but I don’t think I need them. One thing that is not great, in the past I have had contacts announce major life-events, like illnesses, on Facebook. It will be a true loss to miss things of that sort, but doesn’t it say something about our culture when something like Facebook is the only way to make such intimate announcements?
I am spending time on Bluesky – my ID is @fjsalazar.bsky.social is you care – but so far my feelings are mixed. Bluesky is 99.9% political, there little to no interest group content to speak of. I’m just starting to look at Nextdoor, for the local town stuff.
Something I am definitely doing is just going direct to creators I like. I mentioned Damien Walter, Sci-Fi writer and critic – I also have a paid subscription to his Substack. A golf instructor I followed on Facebook is Russell Heritage – I just got a free membership to his site where I can see all the videos he also posts to Facebook. Finally on YouTube I subscribe to What’s Up, Beanie? just a super-cute animated cartoon channel. Here’s an example, with Beanie and Skyrim:
Going through some older writings, more than 20 years back, I came across this:
“The quest is shown and mine alone, though you may join me for a while. Your leg is lean, your vision keen, your doublet a suitable style.
These things seem well, one cannot tell what may annoy us hence a mile. So rouse, signor, we go to war – yet pray, divest that vapid smile.”
I had utterly forgotten these lines. I confess – I like them. There’s a good rhythm, and some humor, but the thing that most affected me was how these verses are a metaphor for many of life’s journeys, marriage not the least.
These verses are from THE DEMONS OF THYLARK, an epic fantasy I first began in the 1980’s. Word processors were in their infancy then, but over about 2 years I produced this:
This manuscript, THE WARRIOR FROM THE CRIMSON PLAIN, I typed on an Apple IIe and printed on a dot-matrix printer, to produce a bolus of 517 double-spaces pages and about 10 lbs. weight. An acquaintance of those days worked for a publisher and I submitted the MSS using her intro. The publisher passed (not sure I retain the rejection letter) but I recall the gist of their feedback … “Not enough clarity about the goal of (the hero) Dalin’s picaresque journeys.”
That was entirely fair. An old chestnut about writing, but with some truth, is “write what you know.” What did the 29-year-old me know? At that time of life, for me, things seemed as one unconnected adventure after another. Not that my life was action-packed in the fictional sense, but I was moving through a lot of things: a new marriage, the Society for Creative Anachronism, my studies of Aikido, learning how to program (including 6502 and 68000 assembler), and trying the whole writing thing.
Of course back then there was no internet with its copious examples of “how to be a writer” – I just did what seemed natural. What to me back then was the most important thing in writing was style, or “atmosphere”. My favorite author then (and now to large extent) was Jack Vance and I tried to emulate his ironic and often-erudite manner, as in this example from the story SMALL MAGIC:
Dalin was never without a sword, it was his occupation and single important possession. He took it from where it leaned against a wall and laid it across his lap; taking a sip of ale, he appraised the tightness of the sword-fittings as he listened to the discourse of his companion at table, Bashtir Yellow-eye.
” … comes down to money. Everything is money. Why, give me enough, and what a change in old Bashtir! Gone would be the skulking, the tricking, the waiting-in-dark-places-to-collect-payment for illegal goods and services. There would be a new Bashtir: noble, generous, a student of the arts. In short, everything I am not now: Good!”
“Here’s to that,” Dalin mumbled, raising his mug.
“But it’s a matter of money. We all need it to live. If I am to continue my life, I must earn a wage, and there’s only one way I know how to do that.”
“Robbery.”
“Not to put too fine a point on it, yes. A trivial minded person might argue that my specialties, extortion and deception, were not exactly robbery, but that is over-fastidious. They all represent non-beneficent transfer of wealth; therefore, they are all robbery. Alas, if only I could free myself from the vicious cycle that enjoins me to unlawful behavior!”
In truth, I still use this style, but very, very sparingly, for example in a short passage in order to set-off a particular character or event. In my early writing, what you see above was non-stop, all 500+ pages.
In the 90s my pace of writing dropped significantly. I did little bits of story about my fantasy hero Dalin, and made a start at an SF story where the hero, Kenneth Iborgan Teele, was a medically rejuvenated back-from-the-dead person. Teele’s story was to have been INTO THE OUT, where Teele is hired to find the runaway daughter of a wealthy family. The “Out” of the title refers to the area of space beyond the control of laws and normal order. In the story, Teele would of course find the girl, who was disinclined to return. Then they discover a threat to human civilization in the form of a human colony who’s members had mutated into a new species – this new type of human has an altered brain structure that changes their processing of ethics and morality.
Alas, it was not to be. 1990’s Fernando both had a lot going on, and lacked the writer’s discipline to understand and structure a story. Back then I just started writing and when the story started flailing about, I had no idea what to do about it.
But Teele did return, in INTRAFLECTION TO A KILL, where he investigates a terrorist who is killing intelligence agents. There’s a lot going on in that story: a killer inspired by the Finnish epic Kalavela, a brain-controlled artistic medium, and a group of suspects who are all attendees in a seminar about the brain-medium thing. When I wrote the story, I was in the midst of attending a real-world writing workshop, the Ultimate Science Fiction Workshop, led by Jeffrey Carver (who sadly this year passed away) and Craig Shaw Gardner.
But back to THE DEMONS OF THYLARK. I’m just at the 2/3rds point in my current work-in-progress THE HUNGRY JUDGES, and lately I’ve been casting about as to what to do after that draft is done. I’ll certainly do work on the third book of the Irá and Judd trilogy, but I expect as a side-project I’ll be going through the body of stuff from DEMONS and CRIMSON PLAIN – all told those are about 250,000 words, so there’s a lot to work with. Not exactly sure yet what I would do with any revised form of those things, but for now I do enjoy looking at the thoughts of my younger self.
I’ll leave you with another bit from the story SMALL MAGIC. In this part, Dalin is questioning a wizard, Mivviffer the Mystologue, on the nature of magic. Mivviffer answers through an animated manikin:
“The first principle a mystologue apprehends is the coaecervate structure of the universe. All of creation is bound by insensible wefts, so that the slightest stress at one point is instantly transmitted throughout. This simplifies the creation of grandiose effects; consider how a devastating avalanche may be created by jostling a single pebble; also consider how the jostler is inevitably pulverized to minute fragments.
“The universe, however, also admits to a sense of equilibrium. Its connecting wefts are easily disturbed, but soon right themselves; and most often in a pattern that excludes the disturbing influence. Imagine the avalanche vaulting uphill, but the plucker of the pebble still pulverized. At this very instant, the universe may be repairing the efforts of an inept mystologue; the rain of frogs falls, next instant all is destroyed, then re-ordered in a pattern where the rain never occurred, but without the rash mystologue who attempted so much.”
Dalin looked around the room, suddenly uneasy. The mannikin continued.
“Among themselves the mystologues use the term ‘small-magic’. It includes such marvels as Mivviffer presented tonight; these are properly understood as the acme of the mystologue’s art. It means to create a magic potent enough to be perceived, yet subtle enough not to upset the wefts of the universe. Only in the demonstration of this ‘small-magic’ does a mystologue show mastery of his art.
“Understand too that this concept possesses a wide applicability. But now, I speak no more.”
It could be that Hamlet, among other things, was a writer, when he reminded Polonius that books are just “Words, words, words.” Whatever else a book might be — a dream, a terror, a mystery – in the end the existence of the book is in the words the author put together.
In my view, almost all the time it’s best your words go unnoticed. Readers want the events of the story, the feelings and ideas of the characters and that should happen in a direct way. Certainly, there’s some taste involved. I am very often dismayed at how often books that are well-reviewed and big sellers seem to me to be wildly over-written – too much metaphor and description and not enough fact.
But today I want to talk about a kind of word structure in fiction, the catchphrase, something that becomes iconic for the work, and may even enter common parlance. Examples:
“I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse”
“So it goes.”
“Who is John Galt?”
“Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”
“Not all those who wander are lost.”
“TANSTAAFL”
I daresay no author sets out to write a phrase that will live outside the work where it appears, but as I think the examples above illustrate, it does happen.
For my part I don’t think I’ve ever written anything that has this break-out potential, but … I have an advantage other writers do not have, namely the needle and wit of my wife Kim, who posts on String-Or-Nothing. Of course a classic embroidery form is the sampler, a piece that showcases a particular technique, often including text. The text may be just an alphabet, or it may be an expression that was important to the needleworker.
For some years Kim has been illustrating things from my books. Here’s the oldest:
This is from a work I started a long, long time ago. In it, the mentor of the young hero carries with him an embroidery like this. Who made it and why he has it is part of the mystery of the story.
I self published Treyavir in 2018. In it, Falcon-Knight Reignal Maigntar quests to the counter-Earth of Treyavir, where time is different and the land is ruled by a seemingly unkillable wizard. This is the piece made for that work:
Reignal learns this phrase, Ant-aransa, when he meets the titular Treyavir character. Like Reignal, Treyavir has an oath of chivalry, described like so:
Bore me,” Reignal insisted. “One minute will make no difference.”
“There are many formalities,” Treyavir said, “but one important principle: Ant-aransa.”
Treyavir seemed loath to continue. “Which means … ?” Reignal prompted him on.
Treyavir thought a moment before answering. “I suppose you would say, ‘Do what’s right.’”
Fractured Symmetry is five novellas, featuring SF detective Blair MacAlister and her boss, Terendurr the Black Stone. In the concluding story, Nature Is as Nature Does, Blair travels to a pre-technical settlement to investigate the death of the settlement’s charismatic leader. This leader is based on Elbert Hubbard, who founded the Roycroft Community in the late 19th century. Hubbard was fond of referring to head, hand and heart as the keys to the Roycrofters’ work. Fethan, Fuur and Fustov is an alien version of that – it means Mind, Fist and Blood.
Note the large, upright beasties at the bottom of the piece. They represent the patron creature of the settlement, one of which – not without reason – killed the leader character.
Now we are getting into more recent, and unpublished, territory. In Bandal the Only, Blair and Terendurr go up against alien super-villain Bandal, known as “the Only”. In it, Blair is aided by The Entertainers, a band of alien actor-assassins led by Hwohhrin. From him, Blair learns the motto of the Entertainers:
Lucus Orthai Ta translates to “Life’ll Kill You”, which incidentally is the title of a song by Warren Zevon … Hwohhrin is much inspired by Zevon.
In 2024 I wrote Stone by Stone, a new story set in the CivSpace universe of Blair and Terendurr:
I like the monumental style of the letters, which reinforces the solidity of the title. And the pattern of swords echoes the swordplay that happens in the story: The protagonist, Finn, is a kind of enforcer for a half-criminal, half-technical enterprise, on a planet where advanced weapons are prohibited.
Now we come to the present day. My 2025 book was Forlorn Toys, where alien-technology hunter Irá Norlander, a 70-year-old woman regenerated into the body of a 10-year-old, starts a mission of vengeance, only to stumble on a cosmic danger that threatens all humanity. In a pocket-universe, Irá meets the alien, Keya. Keya flies into a rage when Irá remarks, “Knowledge is power.” Later when Keya calms down, he reveals to her the guiding principle of his species:
Knowledge is Joy – short, and with a childlike simplicity, this is my favorite of all my quotes, because (as I like to believe) it means something.
I suppose the 2026 work, from the still in-progress The Hungry Judges, also means something, though maybe a thing less uplifting:
Here’s the context: Irá Norlander’s companion and protector is space captain Judd Maddox. Judd’s ship is named The Perpetually Unimpressed Bystander, often “Perp” for short. In the story, Perp’s FTL engine is upgraded to be substantially more powerful. But the new setup must be tested. Judd insists on being aboard for the first live flight:
“What?” The engineer yanked on their tether to propel them to the sled; then they spun in space. “You can’t do that old man! Do you know how many safeguards we’ve ignored, making this change so fast? There should be weeks of automated testing. Anything could happen!”
“Anything often does.” Judd locked his boots onto the hull plates and hit the remote release on his tether. “I’m going inside. Do your tests, but when it comes time to set a vector, I intend to be on the bridge.”
I will say, right now more than our share of “anythings” seem to be happening to Kim and myself. But, to show the universal applicability of one of the catchphrases I listed up above … So it goes.
As a sci-fi writer I have neither intent nor interest in predicting the future. I’m in Ursula K. Le Guin’s camp, when she said “Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive” – sci-fi in its best forms tells us something about the world today, not about what the world could be a 100, or a 1,000 years hence. The science in science fiction is there to engage the reader, and help suspend disbelief over faster-than-light travel, radical bio-engineering, or sentient AIs – the impossible marvels that enable sci-fi plots. Good sci-fi deploys a narrative of science in support of an entertaining and interesting story – great sci-fi uses that science narrative, like Shakespeare said, as a mirror held up to nature, that let’s us see ourselves in a new light.
Still, if this was just about readers with over-optimistic hopes for the future, I would hardly be concerned. Optimism is a good thing, right? But as a recent book describes, this projection of sci-fi impossibilities into the near future is a scam that many of the most wealthy people on Earth are riding to ever greater riches and power.
M-E-F is a hard book to describe. It takes as jumping-off points three major frontiers in science, technology and society: Artificial Intelligence, Extended Life and Immortality, and the Colonization of Space. Becker looks at these “big ideas” from two sides. First is that of the bombastic “visionaries” and billionaires, and their outlandish predictions, like:
“2029 is the consistent date I have predicted for when an AI will pass a valid Turing test and therefore achieve human levels of intelligence. I have set the date 2045 for the ‘Singularity’ which is when we will multiply our effective intelligence a billion fold by merging with the intelligence we have created …Ultimately, it will affect everything, We’re going to be able to meet the physical needs of all humans.” Ray Kurzweil
“I would love to see a trillion humans living in the solar system. If we had a trillion humans, we would have, at any given time, 1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins.” Jeff Bezos
“The true battle is: Extinctionists who want a holocaust for all of humanity. — Versus — Expansionists who want to reach the stars and Understand the Universe.” Elon Musk
Ok, pretty out there statements, but isn’t articulating pie-in-the-sky BHAGs what innovators do? Becker looks deeper into the world of these latter-day Nostradamii and finds important context, like in Effective Altruism. Hmm, earning more in order to give more, sounds great, almost virtuous, right? Of course the most famous – and notorious – exponent of EA was Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the FTX crypto exchange and multi-billion-dollar swindler. Yes, Bankman-Fried and FTX did donate some millions of dollars to actual charities, like $3.7 million to Deworm the World. But his bigger play was in organizations like the FTX Future Fund. This group advocated longtermism, the notion that philanthropy should be evaluated based on effects over very long periods of time. Again seems common-sense, but advocates for this pose cases like so:
What if a 1,000 years from now humanity goes extinct?
And what if I invest my $10 million right now in something that, over time, will prevent that?
Isn’t the benefit of my $10 million therefore infinite, since avoiding extinction allows all of humanity, in uncounted future billions, to continue to live?
What is going on here is that longtermism is glib rationalization that allows Silicon Valley types to invest in whatever they want, and say it is helping humanity in the future. It’s just a scam.
Scams on science are as old as, well, science. Perpetual motion scams flourished in the 19th century, while modern versions offer things like cars running on water that splits itself into hydrogen and oxygen, burns those to create power, then captures the resulting water to keep the perpetual cycle going. And there’s Elizabeth Holmes, who obtained millions in funding for a magic but non-existent blood testing device.
These scams work because people want to believe. For an example, look at the 1-star reviews of A City on Mars, an objective analysis of how feasible it is for Humanity to live on that planet. Spoiler: it ain’t feasible at all, some of the reasons being: the radiation will be quickly fatal; there’s no water; and perchlorates in the soil would poison you and make agriculture impossible. Yet negative reviewers say things like this:
History shows that humans constantly solve problems and create new tools. Judging space exploration based only on what we can do today ignores the fact that science and technology are always moving forward. What seems impossible now might be normal in the future.
Newsflash: There’s never going to be a Star Trek personal force field that blocks radiation – either you need to go about sheathed in lead, or live 100 meters underground.
Alright, this post is getting long. One last thing: The billionaire Illuminati are doing more than just give interviews. Paul Waldman of Public Notice recently brought all this into current focus in a post entitled “Big tech is coming for the midterms”. What do we learn here? Some excepts:
…venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, OpenAI president Greg Brockman, and other leading lights in the Valley, said it raised $125 million in the second half of 2025 in preparation for the midterms. Meta created a network of super PACs aimed at influencing federal and state elections; they say they plan to spend $65 million this year. According to Americans for Tax Fairness, Elon Musk has already spent $71 million ahead of the midterms in donations to super PACs and Republican groups.
… Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has predicted that within five years, AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white collar jobs and produce economy-wide unemployment over 20 percent. Mustafa Suleyman, who runs Microsoft’s AI efforts, said in February that within 12-18 months, everyone who works on a computer could have their job automated.
No one knows how accurate these predictions will turn out to be, but for the sake of argument let’s accept that at some point in the future, AI will drive millions of people out of work, and they will be unable to quickly find jobs at similar wages. What happens then?
The answer some tech leaders give is that there’s no need to worry, because AI will create a utopia of limitless wealth.
“There will be universal high income (not merely basic income),” says Elon Musk. “Everyone will have the best medical care, food, home, transport and everything else.”
Andreessen predicts basically the same thing: “A world in which human wages crash from AI — logically, necessarily — is a world in which productivity growth goes through the roof, and prices for goods and services crash to near zero. Consumer cornucopia. Everything you need and want for pennies.”
Sound familiar? These are the promises of science fiction, where energy is free and replicators instantly make everything we need. But these predictions don’t come from doe-eyed optimism – they are calculated pitches intended to convince all of us that if only we get rid of those pesky regulations, if only we stop worrying about unemployment, then billionaires like Musk will give us this idyllic future. All we need to do is elect their candidates into positions of power.
All I can say is this: Enjoy your SF, but don’t let these singulitarian robber barons, well, rob us.
Just this morning I received an email with wonderful compliments on my book, The Lady of Dungeness:
Hello Fernando,
The Lady of Dungeness is a beautifully layered tale that blends speculative fiction, quiet romance, and philosophical depth against the backdrop of a pandemic-altered future. Colin Petrie’s grounded humanity set against Beatrice Mirza’s cosmic trajectory creates a compelling emotional tension intimate and expansive at once. The journey into the infectious zone and the mystery surrounding the Lady of Dungeness promise readers not only danger and discovery, but also transformation rendered with poetic nuance.
My name is V*** R*****, and I’m a book visibility specialist. I work with authors to ensure their books continue reaching the audiences most aligned with their themes and tone, maintain strong positioning within their genres, and generate sustained engagement beyond launch. For a thoughtful speculative work like The Lady of Dungeness, a targeted visibility strategy could connect it with readers of literary science fiction, book clubs drawn to character-driven futurism, and communities interested in pandemic-era speculative narratives with emotional depth.
I would be glad to outline a tailored visibility approach designed to highlight the distinct voice and atmospheric strength of your story. Would you be open to exploring this further?
Respectfully,
V*** R*****
Book Visibility Specialist
Quick summary of the story: Colin Petrie, former professor of literature, former rock drummer, now barber, lives in a future London, say 100 years hence. For 5 years the world has been gripped by a pernicious pandemic with no vaccine possible. Colin has a romantic relationship with Beatrice Mirza. a spaceship designer who will soon depart on an interstellar voyage, without Colin. When Beatrice is infected by the virus, Colin turns to his eccentric scientist friend Chester, who offers the possibility of a cure. But Chester has a price: Colin must travel to Dungeness, which is an “infectious zone”, a region where the infected are quarantined, to deliver a message to the mysterious Lady of the title.
SHAMELESS PITCH: The Lady of Dungeness is a mere $0.99 for Kindle, and $8.75 for audio-book. It is an accessible, light-hearted story, that I guarantee.
Anyway, the email calls out many things I hoped to achieve in the book, like Colin’s “grounded humanity” compared to Beatrice’s “cosmic trajectory”. And “transformation rendered with poetic nuance” – sounds like I must be an undiscovered Cormac McCarthy!
Except this litany of praise was obviously created by AI and is in service of scamming me. Sigh.
Scamming Authors? Do they even have money?
By now I expect virtually anyone in tech can recognize AI slop when they see it – and a great many non-tech people as well. Here’s some of what you get when you ask ChatGPT to write a review of The Lady of Dungeness:
One of the novel’s greatest strengths lies in its characters. Elena, the enigmatic “Lady” herself, is portrayed with such depth and vulnerability that she feels utterly real. Her quiet strength and layered past unfold gradually, rewarding patient readers with a profound emotional payoff. Thomas, whose steady loyalty and internal conflicts ground much of the narrative, serves as a compelling counterbalance to Elena’s guarded nature. Their relationship is tender, complex, and refreshingly authentic.
I’m sure you’ll agree the vibe is similar to the email I received. A big difference: ChatGPT does not have the text to my book (which I confirmed) as there are no characters named Elena or Thomas in the story. The “Book Visibility Specialist” may have gotten my text somehow, perhaps from a pirate site; or maybe they just inferred stuff from the Amazon blurb for the book.
On one hand I’m baffled why scammers would bother with targeting authors. Unlike retirees, authors generally don’t have large amounts of savings to pillage – nor are we, as a class, polite and deferential. But on the other hand, authors can be desperate for validation, as evidenced by the long history of vanity presses, which charge authors fat fees just so they can say they are “published”.
“Real” published authors – ie, with agents and who receive advances and royalties – are getting solicitations to revive their backlists. 70-80% of all published books don’t earn back their initial advance, meaning their authors never receive any going-forward royalties. Getting some payback out of these dormant creations is a temptation.
If you give ChatGPT the full blurb of my book, you get a more truthful-sounding review:
In The Lady of Dungeness, Fernando Salazar delivers a quietly luminous work of speculative fiction that feels at once intimate and vast. Set in a future London still reeling from the long shadow of the PLQ pandemic, the novel artfully blends personal longing with existential stakes, creating a story that resonates far beyond its dystopian premise.
At the heart of the novel is Colin Petrie—ex-professor, ex-drummer, and now barber—an unlikely but deeply compelling protagonist. Salazar renders Colin with such tenderness and nuance that his small rituals, private doubts, and cautious hopes become as gripping as any interstellar mission. His love for Beatrice Mirza, a brilliant starship designer preparing to leave Earth forever, is portrayed with exquisite restraint. Their relationship is not melodramatic but oceanic—calm on the surface, fathomless underneath.
What elevates the novel is the tension between departure and devotion. Beatrice’s impending journey to colonize a distant world is already a poignant metaphor for the distances lovers must sometimes endure. When she contracts PLQ, that metaphor turns urgent and visceral. The stakes sharpen, but Salazar resists easy heroics. Instead, he explores the moral and emotional costs of hope. The bargain struck with an eccentric virologist—and the haunting quest to find the mysterious Lady of Dungeness—adds a mythic undertone to what might otherwise have been straightforward science fiction.
Salazar’s prose is measured and elegant, capturing both the melancholy beauty of a wounded London and the eerie promise of a future beyond the Solar System. The infectious zone and the titular Lady take on an almost folkloric quality, suggesting that even in an age of starships and pandemics, humanity still depends on legend, risk, and faith.
Ultimately, The Lady of Dungeness is less about escaping a dying world and more about what it means to choose love in the face of uncertainty. It is thoughtful, emotionally intelligent, and haunting in the best way—a novel that lingers long after the final page.
Yowza. Even free AI tools can make you sound like a literary expert with only a few clicks. When I think how easy it is to generate this stuff, on any conceivable topic, its pretty clear we don’t need to worry about AI destroying our civilization.
An author writing can be a bit like the prisoners in Plato’s allegory of the cave, where people who have been imprisoned since birth inside a dark cavern see shadows on the cavern walls and think the shadows are actual things. The writer writes a book expecting that people will want to read it, but what’s the basis for thinking that will happen? We are all exposed to books, movies and TV and we can’t avoid being influenced by them – inasmuch as our writing is unique, we also want to in some way echo the things we see that are popular. But, what if those things are actually shadows? Could it be there are “real” things that underly why certain books are successful? How can I know my book is something many people will want to read?
I’ve been mulling this question for a few weeks. I’m afraid I have no answers – I’d be an instant best seller otherwise – but I have gathered some interesting data points.
What Does Success Look Like?
Who are the most successful science fiction writers? What are their books like? I’ll start with some obvious examples …
Here’s a Horatio Alger author story if ever there was one: Unknown writer serializes a book on their blog, some people like it, then in 2014 the author self-publishes The Martian on Amazon at $0.99. In a few months it sells 35,000 copies, a traditional publisher picks it up, and now it has sold over 5 million, and was made into a movie starring Matt Damon. Weir’s 2021 book, Project Hail Mary, has sold 2 million copies and is also a movie, starring Ryan Gosling.
I haven’t read any of his books, but I have seen the movie of The Martian, and between that and Google here’s my sense on why people like Weir’s stuff:
He uses a combination of real science and dramatic problems that get us invested in what is going on. When the main character of The Martian Mark Watney is faced with starvation all alone on Mars, he MacGyvers his way to a solution to create pressure and water for growing potatoes and finally fertilizes the crop with his own poop. This is called competency porn and American audiences in particular love it, as in movies like Apollo 13 or TV shows like The Pitt. (BTW, the real science is that the plucky Mr. Watney could never in reality have survived, due to the high levels of radiation on Mars and due to perchlorates in the soil that would make growing food impossible.)
His main characters are witty and relatable. They are educated and intelligent, but clearly not members of the “elite”. They use sarcasm, self-deprecating wit, and ultimately have hearts-of-gold.
The stories are exciting, with a lot of action and little to no digression into deep themes.
Marth Wells has authored 35-some novels, across multiple genres: Sci Fi, Fantasy, YA, Adult, as well as stories set in the Star Wars and Stargate universes. Her most recent works, The Murderbot Diaries, have sold over 1 million copies, and is a TV series starring Alexander Skarsgård. What typifies her writing?
Rich and nuanced characters. Murderbot is a socially anxious killing machine who takes solace in binge watching SF soap operas. Moon (from The Books of the Raksura) is an orphan from a shapeshifting, flying lizard-lion-bee species, who struggles to find his place in a new, complex society.
Worldbuilding. Wells has a BA in anthropology, and this comes through in the diverse societies she creates. Those lizard-lion-bee aliens are bisexual and polyamorous, and live in a matriarchal society.
“Cozy” atmosphere. Like cozy mysteries, Wells’ books can be comforting reads and despite some tense action generally have optimistic tones.
John Scalzi started his paid writing career in 1997 with a “shareware” release of Agent to the Stars – readers could pay him whatever they felt was fair. His first “real” book was Old Man’s War (Tor, 2005) – Scalzi himself described it as ”Starship Troopers with old people.” This book has been an enduring success, selling 5000-7000 copies a year for 20 years. OMW started a series, now with 7 books. His biography has 27 novels total, comprising 5 series and several standalones. Scalzi estimates his career sales are over 4 million copies. What common traits/qualities do I discern across his catalog?
New twists on old tropes. As I mentioned Old Man’s War was a fresh take on military SF, a somewhat hidebound sub-genre. A more recent work, Starter Villain, is a twist on James Bond-esque super-villain thrillers.
Accessible style, conversational with lots of dialog, fast pace and minimalist descriptions.
Relevant themes. His book Lock In, and the follow-on Head On portray a world where a disease causes peoples’ bodies and senses to go “dead” while their brains remain healthy; the consciousness of such people is therefore “locked in” the shell of their body. In this work, which is a police procedural style story, Scalzi explores the themes of awareness and being.
Less Obvious Examples
Weir, Wells and Scalzi are so well-known, outside science fiction as well as in, that it’s fair to say they have become franchises – any new work these writers come out with will be successful. That’s not to say they have guaranteed permanent success – I’d offer Orson Scott Card as an example of a franchise author who’s star has dimmed.
What about their writing attributes? It seems to me the things these 3 authors do are too general to add up to a success formula. It’s all well and good to have relatable characters, fast-paced plots, fresh looks at old ideas, all sprinkled with nuanced worldbuilding and the occasional deep thought. But you might as well just say, Write better books.
Anyway for an author trying to break into the business, emulating big names like my three examples would never be a practical strategy. A book taking off the like The Martian requires a lot of luck in addition to having a high-quality, readable product. What other data is out there we might look at to get a handle on this question?
Instead of looking at authors we can look at categories. The de facto taxonomy for book categories is Amazon (sigh) and that’s where the numbers below come from. The book I’m currently submitting to agents, FORLORN TOYS, is a Science Fiction Adventure book. Here’s the top bestsellers in that category, together with their blurbs:
#1 Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir
A lone astronaut must save the earth from disaster in this incredible new science-based thriller from the number-one New York Times best-selling author of The Martian.
#2, 5, 6, 7, 8 Red Rising Series, Pierce Brown
Darrow is a Red, a member of the lowest caste in the color-coded society of the future. Like his fellow Reds, he works all day, believing that he and his people are making the surface of Mars livable for future generations. Yet he spends his life willingly, knowing that his blood and sweat will one day result in a better world for his children. But Darrow and his kind have been betrayed. Soon he discovers that humanity reached the surface generations ago. Vast cities and sprawling parks spread across the planet.
#3 Operation Bounce House, Matt Dinniman
All colonist Oliver Lewis ever wanted to do was run the family ranch with his sister, maybe play a gig or two with his band, and keep his family’s aging fleet of intelligent agriculture bots ticking as long as possible. He figures it will be a good thing when the transfer gate finally opens all the way and restores instant travel and full communication between Earth and his planet, New Sonora. But there’s a complication. Even though the settlers were promised they’d be left in peace, Earth’s government now has other plans. The colossal Apex Industries is hired to commence an “eviction action.” But maximizing profits will always be Apex’s number one priority. Why spend money printing and deploying AI soldiers when they can turn it into a game? Why not charge bored Earthers for the opportunity to design their own war machines and remotely pilot them from the comfort of their homes? The game is called Operation Bounce House.
#4 A Parade of Horribles: Dungeon Crawler Carl, Book 8, Matt Dinniman
As chaos and mass panic spread outside the dungeon in the wake of Faction Wars, Carl and Donut find themselves on the tenth floor, where they’re forced to compete in a surprisingly normal set of tasks. Well, normal for the dungeon.
Races. Get from point A to point B, and don’t come in last. After each race, they pick an upgrade for their vehicle and the track gets more challenging. It all seems a little too normal, a little too simple.
Ignore those strange glitches that are occurring with increasing frequency. Don’t listen to those whispers about what’s happening on the mysterious eleventh floor, something the system AI calls A Parade of Horribles. Nobody, not even the showrunners, knows what that means. Just that the AI has ominously dubbed it “a coming-out party for the ages.”
Everything is fine, Crawler. I repeat, everything is fine.
Carl hates that it’s business as usual. The rules of this floor have taken away his agency. That just will not do.
So Carl is planning a party of his own. It’s a plan so dangerous, so insane, he can’t even consult his friends lest the AI put a stop to it. Because if it goes wrong, it’s not just the end of Carl and Donut. No. The stakes are higher than they’ve ever been.
I’ll stop there. Andy Weir I already spoke about. The Red Rising books, by Pierce Brown, seem to be in the more modest bestseller class. Without digging too deeply, my sense is its success comes from the dystopian premise – a slave caste of laborers working below ground on Mars – and from its quick pacing. Everything else I see about it suggests the writing is not the best. One reviewer put it this way:
It is a mishmash of The Hunger Games, Dune and Game of Thrones. But instead of being a respectful nod, it seems more like a poor imitation. The romance in The Hunger Games seems quite real. The romance in Red Rising seems childish. Frank Herbert reveals keen insights about the nature of power, how the pathologically corrupt seek absolute power, how religion is the most powerful force in human history, how even people with the noblest intentions lose their way once they become powerful. This book has the shallow ideas of an immature teenager about what attracts people to power. If the author has deeper insights, he did a superb job of keeping them from the reader.
But that’s nothing compared to #3 and #4 on the list, written by Matt Dinniman. The Dungeon Crawler Carl series is LitRPG, a genre that blends role playing game elements, like hit points, dice rolls, etc. into the story’s action and plot – a LitRPG story is like a recording of a gaming session, just with more purple prose. I’ve skimmed the samples from Amazon … thirteen-year-old me probably would have liked it, but present-day me could not endure a single paragraph. Yet the DCC books have more than 50,000 reviews on Amazon.
Don’t get me wrong in my comments on writing quality. Millions of Americans eat fast food every day. Why should books be any different? Sometimes you’re in the mood for One Hundred Years of Solitude, other times you want to read one of the Destroyer series.
My takeaway is these lists don’t help much, they are dominated by known A-list authors, or, like Dungeon Crawler Carl, by unique, one-off books that have no lessons to offer on what sells, in a practical sense.
What’s A Cave Dweller To Do?
I admit I had a bit of an expectation that there would be an algorithmic answer to the question of what will readers want to read – 35+ years of software engineering will do that to you. But looking at best-selling authors doesn’t give any such formula, nor does looking at best-sellers in a single category.
Here’s the best I can do: There’s an apocryphal story about an author and an agent, that goes like this:
Author: What should I do for my next book? I want to write something that sells.
Agent: Write a new book same as the last book.
Author: The same?
Agent: Yeah, the same – but different.
Readers want the conventions of their genres respected: Mysteries must have murders and detectives; Romances must have happily-ever-afters; and Science Fiction must have the future, unexpected consequences, strange discoveries and new worlds. And certain readers also want certain styles of writing: Sometimes it’s brutal and hard-boiled; or it’s cozy and charming; or it’s shocking, tense and fast-moving; or it might be epic.
All that is the “same” part. What can be different is how you combine those things, and how you envision the details. There’s many Sci-Fi books that feature planetary peril. There’s also a lot of S-F that features detailed problem solving. And it’s becoming common across many genres to have an ensemble of characters, with the point of view moving from character to character. Well, how about a book that combines all three of those things? That’s the short description of FORLORN TOYS.
Will this combination be distinctive enough for the book to grab an agent’s attention? Time will tell.
The milestone most people think about when they imagine writing is the moment when the author types “The End”. (Spoiler alert: Whenever I start a new manuscript the first thing I type is – END – in bold, centered text.) Of course this is important … it’s a rare writer who is invulnerable to doubts like “Can I finish this?” or “Does this story have an ending?” But as satisfying as it might be to get to “the end”, that is hardly the end of work, certainly for any writer hoping to publish.
What comes after? Welcome to the twilight zone of REVISION. Here I’ll share what I’m doing with my current book, FORLORN TOYS.
What are the problems?
So you wrote your book and presumably you like it – otherwise why would you have written it the way you did? But at some level, depending on your goals as a writer, you want other people to like it. How do you know how your new creation stacks up?
The starting point is beta readers – people who get a free copy of the book, read it, then tell you what they think. I use different levels of beta reader:
Friends and Family: We’re talking siblings, children, maybe parents, and of course your reading-inclined acquaintances. I actually consider this pretty important – if people who know you the best don’t find much to say about your book, either the topic/genre is super far-afield, or the book is a tough read. And don’t discount the positive feedback as just politeness – I look for specific comments from this group, like “I loved character X!” or “The spaceship was so cool!” as core validation. But don’t expect much actionable criticism here.
Your Writing Circle: I belong to a few writers’ groups and its common for members to “trade” beta-reads – I’ll read yours if you read mine. What you can expect here is a more writing-craft level of feedback. I was fortunate to get two such readers, and they gave me lots of detailed feedback on slow pacing, including *why* it feels slow.
Paid Beta Readers: Nowadays there’s a substantial industry around supporting writers, both would-be and established. I use a company that offers both editorial services and beta-reads. The actual beta-readers are all pros, one way or another: they are editors, writing teachers, sometimes authors themselves. I have found this paid feedback is the most comprehensive and best presented.
I got important signals out of the FORLORN TOYS beta-read:
The core concept is a winner: A reaper who harvests technology from dead worlds learns of an ancient alien threat to all civilization. There’s an evil corporation, bad guys, henchmen, and a good amount of ultra-advanced tech in the story.
Everyone liked the characters. Some cited the revenge-driven main character Irá as their favorite, others were in the camp of robotically-enhanced, cheerful nihilist Judd, while still others were taken with flamboyant Promakos or wise and thoughtful Sejal.
The most consistent critique was on pacing, especially on scenes having to do with technical problem solving.
This gave me confidence to make the investment in the next round of feedback, engaging a developmental editor – a process that looks at the foundation elements of your book: Setting, Plot, Character, Structure. I say investment because this service typically costs between $0.02 and $0.05 per word. FORLORN TOYS is 92,000 words. Well, it was less than a full set of pro-line golf clubs.
Every editor will have their own process. if you are a writer and are interested in this, I urge you to have a get-acquainted convo with candidate editors before you sign a contract. My editor takes about a month for an edit, and gives back a letter – a 10+ page document that gives a summary of findings and recommendations – and manuscript comments. For FORLORN TOYS, I got 1,120 comments. Some examples:
I don’t know what this means, like who are they and what was stolen? I’m okay with not knowing, but am I supposed to understand or is it supposed to be developed over time?
Fantastic description of the space station, which feels cramped, poorly lit, and probably dusty.
Here’s where the story starts in earnest. Now I know she’s waiting for someone, she’s expecting a business deal to occur, and she probably needs the money. Is it possible that the story starts around here, or maybe when her business counterparts arrive?
What to do about it?
Here’s what I do with all this material:
I read every comment and assign it a status: INFO ONLY means just that, an observation, not a request for change; EVALUATE means I see the issue described and I will (later) try and address it; finally DISAGREE means I feel the comment misses the mark and that I won’t act on it. The breakdown of comments was 68% INFO ONLY, 21% EVALUATE, and 11% DISAGREE.
My next step is I then export all that to a spreadsheet so I can more easily read through the comments in isolation. This lets me identify themes in the comments, issues that probably need action at more than one point in the book. Some of these larger themes/issues:
More about Irá’s enemies: Irá has three adversaries, people who betrayed her and put her in prison for 10 years. Their names are mentioned on page 11 or so, but then the next mention, of a single name, is 90 pages later. I needed to reiterate these names more and have Irá a bit obsess over them and what they did. Then when that name comes up, we know who it is.
Irá’s Regeneration: A major aspect of the main character Irá is that she is a 70-year-old woman in the body of a 10-year-old. I always knew why that was: Irá at age 70 wouldn’t have the stamina to go on a mission of revenge so she needed to rejuvenate – but because she’s impatient, doesn’t plan on subduing her enemies by main force but instead will out-think them, and because she wants to save money (hey, those months in the regen pod ain’t free!) she opts to stop at age 10. Like I said, I always knew this, but never put it in the book; I was too taken with just writing the action. But this needs to be in there, it grounds the character and let’s the reader concentrate on what happens next, vs. theorizing about why she is 10 years old.
Motivation. FORLORN TOYS has a fair bit of complexity, around how alien worlds are discovered, how languages are translated, how reapers compete by keeping secrets, etc. I’m afraid as I wrote the story I concentrated a lot on what was being done, and left out a lot of the why. For example, early on Irá takes on a reaping job for someone she knew in her previous life, like 50 years back. The what is to do an archeological survey, and I showed a ton about that, but the why, which was she did this in order to secure help in her revenge plot, was just not clear enough.
What does this look like in practice? Here’s a before and after for a motivation-related change:
BEFORE
But she had two distractions. First was the anticipation of Duncan Baird’s help with her master plan. She was certain Baird had contacts at Dross that could introduce him to Volkov, or to Abara or D’Amboise. . And there was some chance he might already be connected to one or more of them.
AFTER
But she had two distractions. First was the anticipation of Duncan Baird’s help with her master plan – luring her betrayers into a fake technology hunt. Between the archaic writings and the cube artifact, Irá was confident she had more that satisfied Duncan’s brief for Breezeway, and that should dispose him to help with her plans – using his contacts at Dross that could link to Volkov, or to Abara or D’Amboise. And there was some chance he might already be directly connected to one or more of them.
Calling a Halt
I’ve been working on making actual manuscript changes for three weeks now. All told I’ve added 3,400 words. That’s about the length of a chapter, but of course it’s scattered across the whole story. Now I’m going to do a short line-edit for repeats and adverbs, then a full line-by-line read through. I’m hoping that’s no more than 1 week. After that, it will be preparing a package to send to agents.
I will say I’m optimistic about the revisions I’ve done. One big reason is I always intended for Irá’s character to change from a self-centered person obsessed with avenging wrongs she’s suffered, to someone who is more aware of the amazing scope of the universe and the futility of revenge, vs. justice. Irá’s actions all fit with that story, but if we don’t hear from her the why, we can’t understand her change.
Anyway, happy to report this time “revision” was not a Twilight Zone of mirrors and no path out … with all the high-quality feedback from my beta-readers and editor I think I was able to focus on things that made FORLORN TOYS a better book.
Maybe next post I’ll share about agents, query letters, synopses and all that … but that will be less of a Twilight Zone and more of a Valley of RejectionDespair umm, Optimism. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
That time of year, for a look back at what I’ve read since Last January 1. First a quick writing update:
Have gotten a fair amount of beta feedback on FORLORN TOYS and I have to say, it looks good. Some of the positive feedback I’ve received was about pace – several readers said “page turner”! Also the cast of characters and the multiple points-of-view structure of the book seem to be working. Now, the book is in the hands of my developmental editor. That process will look at the foundations of the book – worldbuilding, characters, plot – and will weigh in on how they can be improved. I expect to get that report a bit before Christmas, and then I’ll take stock on what updates/revisions to do.
Meanwhile I’ve already started work on the follow-on. Don’t want to say much so early, but I will give the title: THE HUNGRY JUDGES. It’s inspired by some lines from Pope:
… declining from the noon of day, the sun obliquely shoots his burning ray; the hungry Judges soon the sentence sign, and wretches hang that jury-men may dine.
– Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock
Now, on to the books!
Science Fiction & Fantasy
Adam Roberts’Lake of Darkness is a “concept” book. The blurb proclaims this, when it says “Good is a construct. Evil is a virus.” So, how did the concept read?
The book has big ideas that are pretty cool. The main plot is kicked off when two FTL spaceships meetup to investigate a black hole. Someone on one of the ships, without warning, murders all their crewmates. The crew of the second ship intervenes and among the things they find out is there are some sort of signals coming *from* the black hole – which of course, should not be possible. Another cool thing is a subplot about a thrill-seeking adventurer, kind of like a present-day YouTuber, who proposes to walk on the metallic core of a planet. This is an undertaking of mega-proportions, including excavations of tunnels leading to aforesaid core. Finally there’s lots of sciencey and social evolution stuff just thrown out there without much comment – for example, we learn that Nobel prizes are now handed out based on worldwide popular vote, and so there are tens of thousands of such prizes every year. Coming back to the “evil is a virus” thing, as the book unfolds we see that the compulsion to murder that seized the person from the first starship is a bit contagious.
How does all this work, as a book? I give it very high props for inventiveness but in the end the story did not bring me anywhere. Not that I expect or want a Hollywood ending with Hallmark-style moral, but when I reached the end I was disappointed the inventiveness did not say more.
One Level Down by Mary G. Thompson is a short work, 128 pages. It starts out on a colony planet, a hardscrabble place. A young girl, Ella, is on a fieldtrip with her schoolmates to the place where a spaceship landed everyone some years back. The setting is meadow and forest, and Ella claims to have seen a rabbit. But we immediately learn that all of this is a computer simulation, created by Ella’s Dad. And Ella knows more about what has happened to bring everyone there than other people know. Things are going wrong in the simulation – there used to be birds but now they’re gone, and the truck that took the class on the fieldtrip suddenly disappears. A mysterious “Technician” will soon arrive and supposedly they will fix everything.
I won’t recap the whole plot, I’ll just say a lot of it is about Daddy-issues – Ella is actually 60-some years old but her father has locked Ella’s simulation at about the 5 year-old level. The meaning of the book’s title is this: Ella discovers there’s simulations within simulations within simulations. And there’s a bit of a found family ending, with Ella exploring the multiverse with some new comrades. So pretty good SF worldbuilding and story, but I would have preferred less Daddy-issue stuff.
Speaking of found-family, You Sexy Thing by Cat Rambo is 100% that. The subtitle of the book, “The Disco Space Opera Book 1”, totally proclaims what you’re going to get. The main character Niko Larson is a female former admiral in the space force of the “Hive Mind”, a kind of Borg-like galactic power. With Nico are a motley crew of former teammates, including: Dabry, an eight-foot-tall, four-armed alien with Iron Chef-level cooking skills; the squidlike Skidoo; and Thorn and Talon, twin were-lions. The title of the book is the name of the sentient ship that the gang commandeers and makes their own.
How to describe the book? Umm, stuff happens, I guess. A lot of stuff. The two biggest bits involve an exiled space princess and a vengeful space pirate. Come to think of it, there’s very little in this book that can’t be reasonably prefixed by the word “space”.
How to sum up? Lake of Darkness and One Level Down were big idea books – LoD especially – and they made my head hurt hunting for deep meanings. You Sexy Thing is as close as you’re going to get to a plain ‘ol fun SF read, no deep thinking required.
It’s hard to establish a new book series. Worldbuilding is more important, you need a setting and premise that readers will want to visit over and over again. Character is always important, but for a series you need to make sure your character(s) have enough room to change and grow over multiple books. Finally, story has to be there, but no more than in a standalone – in fact you want plots that leave lots of stuff unanswered, so you can have more to write about in books 2, 3 and beyond.
The Fourth Consort by Edward Ashton aspires to start a series. I’m afraid it falls short. It puts forth a space opera world with two major powers: The Unity, and The Assembly. The main character, ex-soldier Dalton Greaves, is a human who is working for Unity on first-contact missions. The problem in the story is that the Assembly sends a first contact team to the same planet where Dalton is working. So Unity and Assembly are competitors, and over the course of the action we find the Assembly are more compassionate and egalitarian than Unity. The title of the book comes from how the planetary matriarch takes a shine to Dalton and names him her consort – she already has 3, so he is the 4th.
The problem with this book is it’s too shallow. Dalton has little in the way of aspirations or problems – he’s a slightly confused everyman who serves as a vehicle to learn all the facts about the aliens, and about Unity and Assembly. In the final chapters I was skimming bigger and bigger chunks. Don’t think that I’ll look at any subsequent books in this series.
Here’s another series: These Burning Stars, the debut novel from Bethany Jacobs, and book 1 of a trilogy; it came out in 2023, books 2 and 3 came out in 24 and 25 respectively. As the winner of the 2024 Philip K. Dick Award I had high hopes for this book.
Alas, it fell short. This is another space opera. The dominant polity is called the Kingdom, and it has 3 ruling castes: Clerics, Secretaries (technocrat types) and “Cloaksaan” – soldiers. Their respective attributes are: Righteousness, Cleverness, and Brutality. As you might guess, there’s a grimdark vibe in this book, which is not to my taste. Among the main characters is Esek Nightfoot, a hyper-competent (I hate it more already) female cleric who is driven to dominate everything she encounters – politically, militarily, and sexually. Her seeming adversary is “Six” – in the Kingdom you have to earn your name and you’re referred to by a number until you’re 15 or so – or until you die. And – who would have seen this coming? – Six is the only being in the universe who can match Esek in skills, cunning and self-centeredness.
To which I say: Ho hum. There’s a zillion other characters in this book, and they are all defined by their relationship to Esek: fearful, worshipful, resentful and so on.
I did not finish These Burning Stars. It descended into one implausible encounter after another, so I guess you could say the burning stars fizzled.
Rivers of London is the first book in a very successful series of 10. The author Ben Aaronovitch has written for Doctor Who, Blakes 7 and other series, and was GOH at BOSKONE 2024. I had high expectations for this.
The worldbuilding in Rivers of London is tremendous. The idea of elves, faeries and animate spirits being real and hidden all around us has been used in many fantasy works, from War for the Oaks (which has a real claim as the first contemporary urban fantasy) to Harry Potter. Aaronovitch’s version has an earthiness to it, I think because his conception is so tightly tied to the places and vibe of London. On top, the notion that you have detectives who specialize in supernatural crime is also not new – “ghost detectives” have been a staple of Asian fiction for centuries. Again, bringing the idea into Scotland Yard and having rivalry with non-supernatural crime fighters made it fresh.
Now the bad news. This book desperately needs an edit. There are more than a few “traveloguey” sections of several pages where Aaronovitch waxes at length on the details of Covent Garden, or the decor of a river spirit’s flat. And the main character Peter Grant is not my fave, and in fact is kind of a jerk as his romantic interests oscillate between his human friend Lesley and various female animate spirits.
But still, I’m glad I read it. I can see why there were nine more after the intro.
I got Future’s Edge after reading a review in Locus, that said “Future’s Edge is a fun, generally fast-paced space opera.” Also the book’s blurb alluded to space archaeology, which also features in my work-in-progress FORLORN TOYS, so I thought I’d see this author’s take on it.
This turned out to be another story about a thrown-together band of plucky adventurers striving to save all life in the galaxy – no pressure, right? The archaeology was extremely light: sometime in the past the main character got exposed to a 50+ million year old alien artifact and something happened that essentially gave her super-powers. Now the plucky band is on a quest to get back to that artifact because it is the key to thwarting the “Cutters” – savage aliens bent on killing everything. One interesting fact: The main character, Ursula, has an ex-boyfriend, Jack, captain of the warship Crisis Actor. When Ursula meets up with Jack, he is now *married* to the Crisis Actor – it is an AI sentient ship that can manifest in a robotic humanoid body that, like Data from the Enterprise D, is clearly “programmed in multiple techniques”.
This book has a lot in common with You Sexy Thing. It could be that cozy Science Fiction is a bigger trend than I thought.
Next to last in SF & F is Slow Gods, by Claire North. I also came to this from reading a review in Locus, that ended “I hope Slow Gods will appear on awards ballots, best-ofs, and many to-be-read piles. I expect it to prove to be one of the best science fiction books of 2025.”
The book certainly lives up the the “slow” in its title. Now, I don’t need firefights and amazing discoveries on every page, but you have to give me something. The main character is named Mawukana na-Vdnaze, who thankfully goes by “Maw”. After some grim dealings on his home planet – there everything you do, including just being born, incurs debt – Maw is made to pilot a starship. Because of the way the author conceives of FTL travel, the brains of pilots rarely survive more than one trip. But something happens with Maw and it turns out he can survive and remember multiple trips. This makes him the natural vehicle to chronicle a slowly unfolding – over centuries, if not millennia – catastrophe of supernovae and the waves of destruction they project.
For me, all this chronicling is a major problem. I’m 33% into the book and I’ve yet to see Maw do anything. He sees, he relates what has happened, but not much else.
There is an aspect of the book I find maddening: tons of synthetic pronouns. Because there’s lots of alien species and lots of new, alien-specific genders, apparently he/her do not suffice. So we get sentences like “I looked to Rencki for advice, but whether because qe had none or qis processors were occupied elsewhere, qe said nothing.” Other formulations include xe, xer, xis, and te, ter, tis.
The Locus review pointed out cases of political allusion in the book. I’ve yet to really get that. The starting point of the society obsessed with debt is so heavy handed its more like a cartoon; I haven’t yet got to other political references. Regardless, I’m put in mind of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s famous dictum on the purpose of literature: “To entertain, and then to instruct.” So far, Slow Gods is not entertaining me.
Tales of Galactic Pest Control is 33 stories, mostly new, some old, and all about dealing with alien pests – or i should say, pests that are alien to the residents, as in a few stories it’s humans that are the pests. Here’s a sampling of what you get:
David Gerrold explains how tribbles came to be and what they really mean.
Stephen Chappell writes about Clyde and Ray from Acme Pest Control dealing with a transdimensional wuzzlesneus.
In a story from 1950, Reginald Pretnor relates how gnurrs come out of the woodwork, and how they can be used in war.
In the Slime of Life, Edward M. Lerner tells how a sentient planet deals with that most pernicious infestation, men.
This is old school SF story telling – much recommended.
Writing
When I got Future’s Edge by Gareth Powell, Amazon had a deal where I could get About Writing for free. This is a “craft” book – the category writers use for books about how to write.
For me personally it was not super-enlightening, but if I had read it 3 years ago, it would have had a much greater impact on me – it’s just that I’ve already absorbed a lot of what Powell writes about through other books and experiences. But if you are interested in writing and want to explore making a go of it, this is the most inclusive book I’ve encountered. The structure is great. It starts with practical advice on how to organize as a writer – for example you have to take a lot more notes than you probably think – Powell’s recommendation that note-taking and idea recording have to be part of your day-to-day is solid. Likewise, his emphasis on knowing what your book is about – the theme and the idea, as to opposed what happens in it – is spot on. Then the book goes on to more detailed topics: Knowing your genre; How to get published; Finding an agent; Working with editors; Marketing your book; and so on.
The book has lots of Powell’s own experiences and techniques, which makes it more real-seeming. One of those examples gave me the one really new thing I got out of this book: I’ve been seeking an agent for 2 years now. In that time I’ve got hundreds of rejections. Many say “I just didn’t fall in love with your book”. That made me grumpy – what is this, Valentine’s Day? But Powell pointed out that getting an agent who doesn’t love your book makes no sense – how can they wholeheartedly sell it otherwise? Now while those rejections still sting, its not the fall-in-love part that’s responsible.
Speculative Whiteness by Jordan S. Carroll, a 2025 Hugo winner, was an eye-opening book. You can’t be an SF fan, much less an author, without having awareness of the connections the genre has to the far right: You probably know about sad puppies, that Heinlein had a strong affinity to right-wing tropes, or that Orson Scott Card is highly homophobic. But for all that, I always had the sense the genre, almost by definition, was inherently forward looking and would leave those negative ideas behind.
Speculative Whiteness paints a grimmer picture. On the 1st page you learn how the first major neo-Nazi party in the US was led by an SF fan, who was in turn inspired by a far-right SF author. From there the book jumps to define metapolitics – a political model that leverages popular culture to build a sense of inevitability or inherent rightness behind a movement’s ideas. The book’s thesis is that the far-right connection to SF is a metapolitical strategy intended “to transform white nationalism from an unthinkable possibility into an inevitable future.” A critical bulwark of this strategy is the worldview that only white-people are mentally equipped to envisage the future. Every time a far right figure asserts that people of color are unable to plan rationally and can’t resist acting impulsively, they are laying claim to the idea that only white people can create meaningful SF.
The book has 4 sections: An introduction explaining metapolitics; “Invaders from the Future”, that covers Nick Land, the appropriation of geeks and nerds as natural alt-right members, and how genetics will eventually lead to a “marching morons” world that the nerds have abandoned ; “Whitey on the Moon” about the tension of NASA spending to send white people out to explore, vs. the ignored plight of non-white people; and a conclusion, “Tomorrow Belongs to Everyone,” a short piece that highlights recent progressive SF responses to the alt-right.
Speculative Whiteness could be “too much information” for the average fan. But if you care about the genre and/or intend to work in it, I would say it is an essential read.
Although Reverse Colonization, by David M. Higgins, is cited in Speculative Whiteness, that is not how I happened on the book. I came across it in this Substack, by Noah Berlatsky.
The subject of the book is stories where white people end up on the receiving end of being colonized. Probably the best well known such story is Wells’ War of the Worlds. Why do these stories exist? The book cites several drivers:
By claiming the role of the victim, colonizing societies perceive justification for their actions.
Through the acts of resistance typically presented, colonizers create a narrative of their own resourcefulness and self-sufficiency.
This is a dense book that examines its subject from many angles. For example the chapter “Victims of Entropy” looks at the writing of J. G. Ballard and Michael Moorcock, relative to the theme of imperial decay. Higgins asserts that Elric – sickly and weak – represents the British Empire and the his sword, StormBringer – black, vampiric and addictive – represents colonialism, which the Empire is trying to break away from but never totally can. Too florid of an analysis? Maybe, but I can’t deny it is thought provoking.
A data point on how relevant this is outside of SF: The Substack I linked to at the start of this bit is entitled “How Fascism Explains Trump’s Tariffs.” In the article Berlatsky notes how often Donald Trump says other countries are “ripping us off”, “making us look like fools”, and “they have allowed fentanyl to come into our country at levels never seen before … nobody’s ever seen anything like it.” What Trump is claiming is victimhood – just like the white characters in reverse-colonization stories are victims – to justify his tariffs.
This is not a book for fans, or even very many writers. But it is a great guide to the more esoteric underpinnings of the SF genre.
“Wonderful” is the literal best way I can describe Adam Roberts’Fantasy: A Short History. Despite the qualifier in the title, the book is encyclopedic: it covers everything from Gilgamesh through Beowulf through Bunyan, the Victorian Era, the fantasy trends and sub-genres of the 20th century, and the same for the 21st. Through all that Roberts mostly keeps an intriguing thread: Despite the common wisdom that Fantasy is somehow “about the past” and Science Fiction “about the future”, Roberts contends the opposite is true. Over and over again SF takes something in the past – like WW2 – and projects those same circumstances onto an imagined future; while Fantasy concerns itself with worlds that never have been, but could be. Some highlights:
The Ballantine and DAW Books Fantasy “boom” of the 70s and 80s.
Romantasy, Grimdark, and Video Games.
This is a scholarly book, but highly readable. Recommended for authors and fans alike.
The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell is a book in the mold of Fantasy: A Short History – though I should say the other way round, as Fussell’s book preceded Roberts’ by decades, and takes on a culturally much more significant topic.
The “modern” in the title means much more than “recent” or “up to date”. It is an attempt to capture how different an effect the Great War had on the psyche than previous wars. The pre-modern memory would recall wars as epic, tragic, ennobling, or any other of many grand literary themes. For Fussell, the memories his war invoked were ironic, futile, pathetic. The Great War was not merely larger in scope – it was an entirely different thing than any war that had come before.
Literature is Fussell’s context to examine these memories. The range he covers is vast: the troglodyte metaphors of the trenches; the naming of the enemy, “he”, while the British are always “we”; mythic appearances, like the Angels of Mons; the “theater” of war as both reality and farce; and the pastoral homoeroticism of “soldier boy” stories.
I can’t convey in this little space what an affecting book this was for me. Anyone who proposes to write about war in any fashion must read this book – along with, I would say, John Keegan’sThe Face of Battle, published in 1976, a year after The Great War and Modern Memory.
In the late 90’s, Mike Resnick and Barry Malzberg, long time stalwarts of the SF genre, started a regular column in the SFWA Bulletin about the business aspects of writing. Ultimately they put out 47 such columns, most of which are compiled in The Business of Science Fiction.
The articles here date from 1998 to 2010, so this is a bit of an historical document. Even in 2007 Resnick and Malzberg were skeptical on e-books, holding that while they would eventually become popular it would take a long time. That very year the Kindle was introduced. In 2007 the global ebook market was $33 million. In 2024, it was $20-40 billion.
Yet other of their observations seem to me very relevant. Resnick had a great example on differences between agents: His first agent always sold to the same publisher and never made any foreign rights sales; he switched to a new agent that ran auctions for his books, and made 31 foreign sales in 18 months. I’d love to have problems like those – hope I get there.
Their take on conventions was interesting (Malzberg anti, Resnick pro) and their collective advice on professionalism seemed to me spot-on. One chapter titled “False Doctrines” seemed a good take on how wrong common wisdom can be. Example, in 2008 they both advised to skip the common-wisdom first step of selling a bunch of short works to magazines and then start trying to do novels. Even then the short fiction market was radically shrinking and they were right to call this out.
But in the end I have to say this was mostly a nostalgic look at a world that has since radically changed.
Non-Fiction
The first presidential election I voted in was 1980. I recall the decade as perplexing. Inflation was high – 13% – but Volcker got it down to 1% by 86. Reagan fired air traffic controllers, cut taxes, was important in the fall of the Berlin Wall. Myself, my wife and lots of our friends didn’t agree with what was happening, but all in all things didn’t seem so terrible. I daresay the years since have made clear a different conclusion.
It is the late Reagan era where John Ganz’ book, When The Clock Broke, begins. In it we learn how all the things that are so radically, tragically wrong today had their seeds in the late 80s and early 90s. Among the characters Ganz profiles:
David Duke, avowed KKK member and author of a sex-help book for women. While he won only a single election, for Louisiana State Representative (he served 2 years,) over time he ended up normalizing white supremacy as a political position.
Ross Perot, loopy populist billionaire (sound familiar?) who actually wanted to increase taxes on the rich (*not* familiar).
Pat Buchanan, anti-foreign intervention, anti-immigration, anti-abortion, anti-gay, and likely anti-semite.
Newt Gingrich, one of the originators of winner-take-all, zero-compromise politics.
The book ends with the election of Clinton, the very year that The End of History was published, arguing that liberalism would be the dominant political theme of the years to come. That didn’t quite happen, though today various pundits and politicians are talking about “what comes after” Trump and MAGA. When The Clock Broke shows how the roots of the MAGA movement are deeper than just Trump … in that light, the MAGA movement may last longer than expected.
If you are interested in politics, this is highly recommended.
Abundance by NYT columnist Ezra Klein and contributing writer at The Atlantic Derek Thompson has been the subject of mixed responses from Progressives. On one hand many like it because it optimistically echoes the big goals of the New Deal era; on the other, many condemn it as inherently elitist and non-responsive to the most important injustices in the US. So, what is “abundance”?
The core idea is that the origin of many of our most pressing problems, around housing, energy and transportation to name a few, is in scarcity. Housing is super-expensive because there is not enough of it. Same for energy. The argument Klein and Thompson make is this scarcity is an unintended consequence of government policies – many of them supported by progressives – that individually are reasonable but in the aggregate create major roadblocks to making new stuff. An oft-cited example in the book is the California High-Speed Rail Project. Originally conceived in 1996, the idea floundered for years without a clear vision. In 2008, voters approved $33 billion for it. In 2011 when Jerry Brown returned to the governorship, he made it his signature project. The Obama administration strongly supported the project. But in 2018 Brown started lowering expectations, and Newsom, governor since 2019, dinged the project as too costly and taking too long. Today construction is active on only 119 miles of track, out of a total length of 776 miles.
The cause of this non-progress? The book submits it is the massive amount of negotiation – over eminent domain, over environmental impact, with unions, and more – that holds everything back. While many might debate the conclusion, its hard to get over the fact that in Canada – which has laws, government, and unions much as we do – builds a kilometer of rail for $295 million, while in the US it costs $609 million.
Abundance by itself is not the answer we need. But ignoring its arguments risks condemning us to the same old/same old. Highly recommended.
The Notebook, by Roland Allen, is a kind of book I love: Exploration of a workaday, overlooked bit of history that has had unexpected impact over centuries. The title tells you what it is about. Some highlights:
Paper first was manufactured in volume in 13th century Italy. Empty ledgers were among the very first things made from the paper.
Ink can easily be scraped off parchment, but it sinks permanently into paper and can’t be erased. Italian merchants seized on this property and starting recording financial information in notebooks. Around this time they invented double-entry bookkeeping.
In the 14th century, Geoffrey Chaucer was an English diplomat in the court of Genoa. There he learned about Italian commercial innovations, read the Decameron, and became a convert to the Italian practice of zibaldone – a vernacular journal where one copied passages from books you read, before the valuable book was returned to its owner.
This book encompasses a lot – police notebooks, author’s notebooks, journaling as self-care, naturalists notebooks and too much more to list. If you have an interest in the important minutiae of history, this book is for you.
I’m reviewing Farewell To Reality and The Ant Mill together because they are both about the same thing: The state of theoretical physics today and how it got there. I read these books because in THE HUNGRY JUDGES, theoretical physics plays a part, and I want to get a sense of the terrain.
I daresay most SF fans have at least heard of The Standard Model, String Theory or possibly Quantum Gravity. The Standard Model is the framework of particles, forces and their interactions that make up matter and energy: protons, neutrons, electrons, quarks, bosons, fermions, electromagnetism, the weak force, the strong force, stuff like that. The Standard Model doesn’t have a good answer for gravity – it postulates gravity is “transmitted” by a particle, the graviton, but this has not yet been proven. The first bits of the Standard Model date from the 1920’s, and its greater part was in place by the late 80s. In 2013 the Higgs Boson was confirmed.
The Standard Model explains a lot but not everything. So for decades that is exactly what many physicists have been pursuing – a Theory of Everything that unifies Relativity and what it says about space and gravity with the Standard Model. String Theory first emerged in the late 1960s and has been through too many iterations and side-branches to count. Quantum Gravity is more of a category that encompasses many discrete theories, like Loop Quantum Gravity, M Theory, or Noncommutative Geometry.
Jim Baggot and Jesper Grimstrup in their respective books cover the landscape I’ve outlined. But their purpose is not purely informational; they jointly make the same case, that, for decades theoretical physics has been stuck in a closed loop, making no progress. The crux of this is how these candidate theories are virtually pure mathematics – while the relevant super-complex equations may balance out, there’s no way to experimentally prove their assertions. Without the pressure and confirmation of experiment, this work devolves into a kind of navel-gazing tribal activity – Grimstrup cites personal experiences of how certain conferences are informally “String Theory only” while others are “Loop Quantum Gravity only.” Researchers work on papers that are increasingly small refinements of their chosen tribal theory. And they have many co-authors, because in the physics science establishment, numbers of publications and numbers of citations all add up to more grant money.
If you are interested in this, YouTuber Sabine Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist herself, has many videos on the topic.
So in my layman’s reading, the human race is not much closer to a “Theory of Everything” than it was 30 years ago. Maybe for me as an SF writer that’s good – since the specific answers to this stuff are not known, then I can just make stuff up! My main candidate to steal from is The Information Theoretic Universe.
And The Winner Is …
My favorite book of 2025 is not going to win a Hugo, be a bestseller, or even a medium-seller. It’s a Fantasy story with likeable, grounded characters, enough of a plot to keep you reading, an easy-going style, and *not* grimdark but with an optimistic message. It is a very authentic book, that is no more than it needs to be.
The book is Whisperlights, by Canadian Philosophy professor/Author Brendan Myers. In it we meet the twelve year-old Athena Kildare, her mother and father, and mysterious wizard/mentor Dubhdarra, who Athena claims materialized into a man out of a flock of birds. Dubhdarra gives Athena a magic token that will allow her to call upon him three times, then departs into mists. Not long after, Athena her parents, and her whole village are abducted by soldiers, as laborers or conscripts.
This is where the journey begins. Athena must abide her captivity a while, growing and learning. When the time is right, she breaks free. Then, aided by chance companions and sporadically guided by the faerie-like whisperlights, she seeks the Scatterlands, which contain the Gates of Morning. There, Athena will demand of the gods why they allow so much injustice in the world.
No, it is not a super-philosophical, allegorical kind of book, and that’s one of the reasons I like it. Myers keeps a light touch on his theme, with a good flow of action and rest, success and betrayal, all the stuff a good genre story should deliver. And the ending, I daresay very true to his Canadian outlook, is entirely common-sensical.
I’m looking forward to this author’s next books – I hope others will check him out.
Whew! A longish post, to be sure, hope people will get something out of it. Let me close with a snippet from the just-started THE HUNGRY JUDGES, where one of our heroes, Promakos, is talking with their aide de camp Andrew:
“It took some doing, but I have contrived a shipment for Vargas Station, fifty-four containers classed as ‘repair components’. At the same time, I have completed arrangements with the factor on Zerua for twelve kilograms of plutonium 239, also to be delivered to Vargas. Finally, all non-Hellenic operations on the station have terminated, everyone not an H-S employee has vacated.”
Promakos inclined their head gently.
“Excellent! No one can do logistics like a soldier – you have my thanks.”
Andrew blew out their cheeks.
“Don’t thank me yet. The time may come when you wish I had not enabled you to build three fusion bombs.”
“Four, or possibly five,” Promakos corrected. “I believe we can improve on standard designs and use less plutonium per package.”
“I wonder why we even need one,” Andrew gave back, almost wistful in his tone.
“Andrew, I daresay when we are certain of the need, it will be too late to build that one bomb.”
Another writing milestone reached: Just after Labor Day I finished the draft of my 2025 work, FORLORN TOYS. Now a bit more than 3 weeks later, I’ve done my first round of copy edits and the draft is ready to be read! What was up with that, you say? How can you be “done” but not done? Before the draft can be usefully read by others, I had to deal with 3 main things:
Handling repeated words
I read back to myself everything I write, and I read it aloud to Kim. That identifies a lot of awkward wording or construction. But a lot sneaks by. An example:
Irá ran to the common area of the suite and called for light. Consulting her vox, she found in a minute that what she needed was available on Badami. Sending messages, she was pleased to find the right person available at this late hour. She made her requirements known, and was assured the requested equipment would be delivered first thing in station morning.
The two “availables”s just look and sound clunky. So that gets changed to:
Irá ran to the common area of the suite and called for light. Consulting her vox, she found in a minute that what she needed was on Badami. Sending messages, she was pleased to find the right person available at this late hour. She made her requirements known and was assured the requested equipment would be delivered first thing in station morning.
This is a simple example. There were literally 1000s of such repeats to examine, the majority of which are perfectly Ok.
“I must expunge every last adverb,” said Tom editorially.
Doubtless many of you recognize a Tom Swifty when you see it. In this case, it’s no joke – too many adverbs in your text do make it read like a dime-store offering from a bygone time. Two examples I seemed to have used a lot were softly, and barely. I also got flagged for perpetually but that’s alright – the name of the heroes’ spaceship (and a minor star of the story I might add) is the Perpetually Unimpressed Bystander.
Getting Consistent
Consistency may be be the hobgoblin of little minds, but in a book it counts for a lot. If in chapter 3 you say, “This trip will take seven whole days”, and in chapter 5 when the trip is done someone says “Well, that was a well-spent five days”, believe me, readers will notice.
Consistency is more than just timelines. Here’s one thing I found in going through my draft: About midway in the story the heroes find an important fact, that a certain person went to a certain star-system at a certain time. They learn this from a transponder on the relevant spaceship. Later in the story, the heroes need to locate that star system, and they use a very cool way to do that. But as I went through the book start to finish, it hit me: Didn’t the transponder thing already tell them that answer? The cool method I mentioned is necessary to the story line and I couldn’t drop it. So I had to go back and change the details of what the transponder was able to determine.
“Complete but there are probably bugs”
After decades developing software it’s too much to hope for that I would forget what a beta release is: Code that has been updated to include a target group of features, but that likely contains defects. The same concept applies to fiction: The story is complete but likely contains defects. But, how can a story have a “defect”? It’s not like we’re launching a rocket and downcasting a critical 64-bit floating point number into a 16-bit integer. Isn’t a story’s quality purely a subjective thing? No, not really.
For example, if a story tells us multiple times a character is a math genius, but then math never comes into the story, that’s a defect – we’ve confused and probably disappointed the reader by getting them to expect something and then not delivering. Pretty much all readers will have that poor experience. Another common defect involves settings: the story is set in a place that is either under- or over-described, or in place that has no connection to the plot and the characters. Again, the reaction to this kind of thing is pretty universal.
Certainly there some issues that bother some readers more than others. An example is the science in science fiction. Some SF readers are more interested in character or theme, and gloss over hand-wave-style magic technology. Others have a higher bar – they want to read about things that have at least some possibility of being consistent with real science.
The list of possible problems an author might have in their newborn book is long: unconvincing characters, sluggish pacing, confusing structure, dialog that sounds the same for everyone, unbelievable or unsatisfying plot turns, and so on. Of course I myself have opinions on whether those things are issues in my book, but I am also not objective and, after spending 9+ months staring at and typing the story, my brain is a bit numb to it. So I need other people to read the book and tell me what they think is wrong, or right, about it.
So far I have 6-5 “friends & family” beta-readers, and 3 paid beta-readers. All of of these are equally valid and important to me. But the feedback from the paid readers does have an extra benefit: these readers typically are English teachers, librarians, editors, or other writers, and so their feedback will speak directly to principles of the writing craft. They will say things like “Character XYZ’s personal stakes were not compelling”, “Supporting character ABC’s sub-plot is too thin” or “The build of tension in act 2 is too slow”. But still, it’s absolutely valuable to me to hear from regular readers “The plot seemed far fetched” or “This part made no sense” – it’s all important.
Sign up today!
I still could use more beta-readers so if you’d like to give it a try, drop me an email at: author (at) wild-puma (dot) com. FORLORN TOYS is about 92,000 words, typical size for a present-day SF novel. Here’s a short blurb that tells what you’d be getting into:
Irá Norlander – a 70-year-old woman in a regenerated 10-year-old body – wants revenge against the 3 false friends who stole from her the greatest discovery of extinct alien technology ever found. But as she searches for weapons to use against her enemies, she discovers how so many intelligent species became extinct, and how humanity could suffer the same fate.
The Gernsback era as I outlined above. Above and beyond Amazing Stories, representative works include The Scarlet Plague (1912) by Jack London, Last and First Men (1930) by Olaf Stapledon and Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley.
This is the age boomers like me think of when we think of SF. I was 14 when I read Asimov’s Foundation – borrowed from a classmate – and I was hooked. That was the late 60s and the “Big 3” – Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke – were considered the defining writers of the genre. I read all of Asimov, a lot of Clarke, and much of Heinlein. At this time, all SF was what today we would call “hard”, but there was also an even-more technical contingent typified by Hal Clement, and by the infamous story The Cold Equations (1954), where a stowaway girl must be put out the spaceship’s airlock because, you know, maths.
Starting in the 60s, SF started exploring themes intended to do more than entertain, but to express big ideas and perspectives, generally not in line with the techno-optimism of the Golden Age. My cover-pick here is a favorite of mine, Lord of Light (1967) by Roger Zelazny; its a cool adventure to be sure, but it also takes on the idea of religion as a tool to dominate society; on top of that its characters are full of doubts and uncertainties, unlike the automatons of Asimov.
In 1982 I got an Apple //e personal computer and a CompuServe account. In 1992 Michael Crichton published Rising Sun, a murder mystery set in the intersection of American and Japanese high-tech industries. 1982’s film Blade Runner implicitly showed Japanese culture “winning” out over the west – that Japan was going to become the predominant world technological power was a prominent theme of the time. This is the era of Cyberpunk, an outgrowth of the New Wave that emphasized near-future dystopia and particularly the power and danger of information technology, mostly with gritty, noir-style characters and plots.![20260722_163535[1]](https://i0.wp.com/fjsalazar.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/20260722_1635351.jpg?ssl=1 "20260722_163535[1]")
What this “age” means is that since the late 90s, sci-fi has gotten too diverse to say there’s a single defining theme. The cover I picked for this one, by Adrian Tchaikovsky is hard SF with a problem-solving core – its like a Golden Age book, but with better characters and craft. But I could have picked All Systems Red by Martha Wells, wherein a deadly android achieves free will and decides to spend its time watching soap-opera like space TV shows; Murderbot books vibe on anti-capitalism and the existential dread that many Gen Z people feel. Or I could have picked Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie, where an AI starship seeks revenge against an evil empire for causing the death of its captain – aside from the political aspects of the book, it is also an exploration of personhood. Finally I might have picked You Sexy Thing, by Cat Rambo, where an ensemble cast try to run a restaurant, flee from a malicious hyper-intelligence, rescue a space princess, and more – this is cozy sci-fi.
– but I have gathered some interesting data points.
