Posted by Athena Scalzi

You don’t have to fully understand something to enjoy or get value out of it. New York Times bestselling author William Alexander expands this idea to life itself in the Big Idea for his newest novel, Sunward. Read on to see how the world, though sometimes scary and incomprehensible, can also be pretty amazing.

WILLIAM ALEXANDER:

Sunward is space opera about parenting—specifically about parenting robotic kids, and more broadly about parenting kids who are wildly, gloriously, transformatively different from ourselves. 

It started as a short story that I wrote for Sunday Morning Transport, when pandemic parenting was much on my mind. My own kids were stuck at home, quarantined from the world but still trying to learn about it via disembodied classrooms. Their experience of grade school was simultaneously contracting and expanding in ways that I had no frame of reference for—except maybe in science fiction. Home was a spacecraft, isolated in the void. We lived in cramped quarters, bouncing off the walls and staring out the windows, but at least we could communicate instantaneously with every other ship and station. 

This mix of coziness, claustrophobia, catastrophe, and possibility messed with my head. I tried to squeeze the whole mess into a short story. Then the story grew into a novel—albeit a short one—about parenting juvenile bots in a turbulent solar system. 

Science fiction has lots of robotic kids. Some inhabit Pinocchio retellings, others Peter Pan retellings. Some are changelings, embodying old fears alongside newer uncanny valleys. Samuel Butler panicked about mechanical offspring in his 1863 essay “Darwin Among the Machines” (which also predicts eventual war between the machines and humanity). Osamu Tezuka’s beloved Astro Boy broke ground for so much of our science fictional landscape; his 1962 story “Robot Land” includes a robotic uprising set in an amusement park, published eleven years before the movie Westworld

Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects (which you can find in his second collection Exhalation) critiques the impossible shortcuts that we almost always take in our stories about mechanical people. “Science fiction is filled with artificial beings who, like Athena out of the head of Zeus, spring forth fully formed,” he says in the story notes, “but I don’t believe consciousness actually works that way.” The digients of his novella are infants raised up by the constant attention of caring adults. Intelligent life needs to be nurtured. It takes time. There are no shortcuts. 

As adults we become increasingly skilled at pretending—to ourselves, and to everyone else—that we stand on certainties. Kids know better. They are much more accustomed to moving through worlds that they don’t understand, and don’t yet expect to. They find ways to navigate incomprehension. 

Science fiction can help us remember how to do the same—not necessarily in its literal predictions of the future, or in its warnings and cautionary tales, but in the way SF fosters an intuitive sense that all of this… <flails at the world like an unhappy muppet> …could be wildly, gloriously, transformatively different. 


Sunward: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Books-A-Million|Bookshop

Author socials: Website|Bluesky

[ SECRET POST #6832 ]

Sep. 19th, 2025 05:51 pm[personal profile] case posting in [community profile] fandomsecrets
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⌈ Secret Post #6832 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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Posted by John Scalzi

Today’s view not only has a parking lot, but also a freeway onramp! This makes it a high-quality view from a hotel window!

(The room and hotel are pretty nice, just to be clear. Tor does not put me up in murder hotels.)

Tonight: I’m at Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego, 7pm! Be there or be somewhere else, I guess.

Tomorrow: I go all the way to Boise, Idaho, for an event at the Boise Public library (Hillcrest Branch), co-sponsored by Rediscovered Books. Also at 7pm! The event is free but please register at the link so they know you’re coming.

— JS

Posted by Jen

ARRRRRR, me mateys! Today be Talk Like a Pirate Day! So let's get starrrrted by going over arrr vocabularrrry with a quick pop quiz:

 

Q: Where are we going tonight?

A: To a BARRRRR. 

 Q: And what will we drink?

A. StARRRRla's Sangria!

 

 Q. How will we get to the bar?

A. In a cARRRRR!

 

Q. What will we play during Karaoke?

A. Air guitARRRRR.

 

Q. What do we call this ugly golf ball cake?

A. SubpARRRRR

 

Q. What do dinosaurs say?

A. RARRRRRR!

 

Q. And finally, who's on our pirate flag?

A. The Jolly RogARRRRR - but this scalawag looks like an impostARRRRR!

 
Thanks to Suzanne S., Beth C.,  Rock, John M., Kelly H., Adrienne D., and Paul & Storm, who I blatantly 
ripped off honored with today's post.

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September 19th, 2025next

September 19th, 2025: I recognize that this hobby is not for everyone. BUT: it is for SOME of the ones.

– Ryan

Posted by John Scalzi

Forgot to post a “view from a hotel window” view today, but this interesting contraption was right down the street from me, so I thought you might like it instead. Tonight’s event was lovely and tomorrow I will be in San Diego, at Mysterious Galaxy bookstore at 7pm. You should come by and say hello to me there.

— JS

[ SECRET POST #6831 ]

Sep. 18th, 2025 06:58 pm[personal profile] case posting in [community profile] fandomsecrets
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⌈ Secret Post #6831 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


01.


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 06 secrets from Secret Submission Post #975.
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Posted by Athena Scalzi

What’s scarier, a haunted school or lifelong trauma? Spooky season is upon us and author Dan Rice has brought the ghost stories with his newest book, Phantom Algebra. Follow along in his Big Idea to see how ghastly high school can really be.

DAN RICE:

While writing Phantom Algebra, I encountered a challenge I had never faced before. The setting is a shared universe, specifically the fictitious town of Pinedale, North Carolina, located approximately fifty miles or so from Raleigh. The action needed to center around the berg’s haunted high school, Pinedale High.

I wanted the protagonist, Zuri, to be an outsider —the new kid at school —and not someone who believes in ghosts. But how to get her to Pinedale? I could have had a parent land a job in the city and have the story open with the family moving into a new home or Zuri stepping onto the school grounds for the first time. I don’t know…I felt that had been done before and wanted to do something a little different. 

I settled on the horror trope of a traumatic past. Zuri and her mother are on the run, have been for years, from Big Jake: estranged father, abusive husband, former boxer, and full-time gangland enforcer. This leads them to Pinedale after Zuri coldcocks her current high school’s star quarterback, ending his attempt to sexually assault her.

Despite the trauma of watching Big Jake nearly beat her mother to death, Zuri is a fighter like him, dreams of being a world champion, and remembers fondly learning to punch, kick, and grapple under his tutelage. Zuri can’t escape the past because every time she follows her first instinct to solve her problems with her fists, she perpetuates her family’s violent legacy. Isn’t that true of all of us? We can never escape the past because it is carried within us. The best we can do is to learn to cope healthily.

At Pinedale High, Zuri encounters challenging academics, especially mathematics, and a student body that believes the school is haunted. She doesn’t believe this for an instant, only giving credence to what she can beat into submission. When circumstances prove she can no longer deny the ghostly world, Zuri is presented with a problem as gnarly as an algebraic equation. How can she battle bullying poltergeists she can’t see or strike?

Zuri navigates Pinedale with the aid of new friends, fellow outcasts like herself, and eventually bonds with a tween spirit haunted by trauma she cannot escape even in death. Freeing the spirit from her abuser means unearthing Pinedale’s celebrated founding father’s legacy of filicide and satanic magic. Many of the town’s inhabitants haven’t an inkling that Pinedale’s foundation is awash in the blood of an innocent, but they will suffer for their communal past unless Zuri and her friends can face down monsters living and dead.

In the end, I found that Pinedale High being a shared story universe didn’t limit my storytelling. By leveraging the character-centric horror trope of past trauma, I told Zuri’s unique story while remaining within the bounds of Pinedale, the high school, the nearby haunted forest, and the handful of shared characters that give the series continuity.


Phantom Algebra: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|IndieBound|iBooks

Author socials: Website|Bluesky

Read an excerpt

Ow.

Sep. 18th, 2025 01:00 pm[syndicated profile] cakewrecks_feed

Posted by Jen

Presenting the world's most painful landing:

Or perhaps the world's most unfortunately shaped, colored, and placed mat logo.

Either way, I'm sure it made a real splash on the audience.

 

Beth C., would you care to join me in a casual crossing-of-the-legs?

*****

And from my other blog, Epbot:

(no subject)

Sep. 18th, 2025 04:51 am[syndicated profile] apod_feed

Can you spot famous celestial objects in this image? Can you spot famous celestial objects in this image?


[ SECRET POST #6830 ]

Sep. 17th, 2025 05:55 pm[personal profile] case posting in [community profile] fandomsecrets
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⌈ Secret Post #6830 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


01.


More! )


Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 12 secrets from Secret Submission Post #975.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Posted by Athena Scalzi

I know, I know, you’re probably all terribly sick and tired of seeing our super adorable new kitten Saja, but I’m going to make you look at him again.

Saja, laying in a lap, looking at the camera and being oh so adorable.

This little guy has a vet appointment today; a follow-up to his previous one when I took all three of the kittens in for shots and whatnot. This is just a second round of the necessary shots, and we’re going to see if he’s old enough to get fixed yet! So that may be scheduled, soon, as well.

I’m so thankful that Saja (and the other two kittens) were relatively healthy and that everyone is doing amazing now. It’s truly so lucky that none of them had serious health concerns or feline leukemia or anything like that.

Having Saja around has been absolutely amazing. It’s hard to express how much I love him. I don’t know if it’s because I rescued him off the street or what, but I am so attached to this baby, and I have been since I first saw him. He means so much to me, and my heart feels so full when I look at him. Cuddling him, seeing him play and be a kitten, and just seeing him be alive and well is so incredible.

I’m so excited to know he’ll be in my life for many years to come.

-AMS

Posted by John Scalzi

My hotel room in Spokane is in fact really nice. The view? Maybe less so.

Tonight! Spokane! I’ll be at Auntie’s Bookstore at 7pm. I’ll read stuff and answer questions and sign books, mostly in that order!

Tomorrow! I’m at Bookshop Santa Cruz, also at 7pm! More reading! And answers! And signing! Fun!

— JS

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September 17th, 2025next

September 17th, 2025: In the other part of my life (writing comics for Star Trek and Marvel and DC Comics) I have four (four!) new books out today! If you head down to your local comic shoppe, be sure to check out KRYPTO: THE LAST DOG OF KRYPTON #4, and/or FANTASTIC FOUR #3, and/or STAR TREK: LOWER DECKS: SECOND CONTACT (the collection of my new run on the book!) AND/OR Deadpool/Batman #1, for a li'l 3-page backup story that brings back something I am really excited to see return! Thus concludes the pitch for Ryan's books here on Ryan's Webzone. :0

– Ryan

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