The December Comfort Watches, Day Three: Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World
Posted on December 3, 2023 Posted by John Scalzi 10 Comments
The first thing to know about this film is that the protagonist, the 22-year-old Scott Pilgrim, starts off the film as an actual and verifiably shitty person. Does he know it? Really, not at all, partly because he’s 22 and that’s not a quality age for self-introspection, despite being a quality age for self-absorption. His friends are no help because they are also in that age group; only two of them — notably, both women — bother to let him know he’s trash. He absolutely unsurprisingly chooses not to acknowledge their pronouncements.
This would be the part where a movie marketing person might say that Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World is the story of Scott going from a shitty person to a good person. This would be incorrect. When the movie ends, Scott is not a good person. He is, however, a better person, with the potential to be good person somewhere down the road, probably in his mid-thirties or something, which in my experience is the time of life where the “decent human or awful shitbowl” question is finally sorted out and you go through the rest of your life being one or the other. You can still change in your 40 or 50s or whatever, but something like 99% of us don’t. If you’re an awful shitbowl at 36, you’ve committed to the bit in the way you probably weren’t yet at 22. It’s a long way back from there.
Scott Pilgrim still being obviously a work in progress at the end of the movie (implied extremely heavily by the last images before we cut to the credits) is one of the reasons I love this film. It’s easy to miss it in all the surface anarchy, clever humorous bits and videogame and comic book callouts, but in this matter — and kind of in this matter only — it’s one of the more realistic films about being in one’s early 20s, being full of inertia and yourself, and figuring out that maybe you can improve on yourself, if for no other reason than to be the person who still has a partner and friends five years down the road.
Which is not to say I don’t also enjoy the surface anarchy, clever humorous bits and videogame and comic book callouts . I certainly do. In fact, this is the first film by director Edgar Wright that I can say I really connected with. Wright was already beloved in comedy nerd circles for films like Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz (both featuring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost), and while those films worked just fine for me, they weren’t ones that hugely moved my needle in terms of needing to seek out everything Edgar Wright did. Wright was clever! Clever is good! (Well, mostly.) But it took this source material to get me to see that what Wright was doing also could punch you in the face with a narrative. All the absurdity and chaos works, because, let’s face it, one’s early 20s are mostly absurdity and chaos anyway.
Everyone is a mess in this film. Scott’s a mess, as mentioned before, and Michael Cera does a very fine job personifying that mess, but he is hardly alone. Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, perfect casting), with whom he falls in love, thus precipitating the narrative crisis that drives the film, is no less a mess than Scott. She’s just a different mess — and tellingly, she’s well aware of the fact she’s a mess, even if she has no idea how to stop being a mess, except by running away, which I shouldn’t have to tell you doesn’t stop you from being a mess, it just means you have more time alone with your messy thoughts. I’ve seen Ramona Flowers categorized as a “manic pixie dreamgirl,” but that’s two-thirds wrong. Scott does see her in dreams, so fair call there, but in the film at least she’s not a pixie, and she’s definitely not manic; she’s Daria with curves. She’s a work in progress too.
So are Scott’s friends, and so are the people he fights for Ramona’s affections, and so are even the bit characters in the film. Everything in the film is heightened and funnier than it is in real life, and also, anyone who was ever in their early 20s probably had an “oh shit I did that” moment of recognition watching the characters in this film. We were all a mess! Hopefully less so now! But even so! I have affection for nearly everyone in this film, even six of the seven “evil exes” Scott is obliged to battle, because all of them are clearly having a struggle I understand or at least can empathize with.
(Jason Schwartzman’s character, on the other hand, can go fuck himself. But then he is clearly meant to be older than the rest of the characters, and has enthusiastically self-sorted into the “shitbowl” category, so).
The other thing that rings for me in this movie is how very specifically run down and spare everything about it is, not because the film is cheap (it cost $60 million, which for its own financial well-being was probably $30 million dollars too many; it was a bit of a flop on release), but because when you’re in your early 20s and you don’t have anything approaching a livable amount of money to your name, you decorate in Dorm Room Cast Off style, your clothes are Goodwill Whatever, and you subsist off pizza and air. When you’re in your early 20s, this is fine! Try not to be caught doing it after 28. I certainly remember living in that mode when I was in my early 20s, loitering in that summer between college and my first real job.
All of which is to say that despite the substantial and literally fantastic artifice of Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World, and aside the humor and style, what brings me back to it over and over is its accuracy of the mode of being in one’s early 20s, not quite knowing who you are, much less who you are meant to become, and flailing about until you figure at least some of it out. In Scott’s case, it helps that he has Ramona to focus his attention on.
It’s been 13 years since the movie came out, Scott would be 35 now. I hope he’s mostly figured himself out. I hope Ramona has, too. I know where I want both of them to sort out.
— JS
The December Comfort Watches, Day Two: The Emperor’s New Groove
Posted on December 2, 2023 Posted by John Scalzi 29 Comments
I’ve loved The Emperor’s New Groove since the first time I saw it, because of all the Disney animated movies that have ever come out, it’s probably the one closest to my own comedic and storytelling sensibilities (although others come close, and, no surprise, some of them will show up later in the month). I love its anarchic-for-Disney spirit. But in the last couple of years I’ve felt an additional sort of kinship with it.
It’s well known in movie nerd circles that The Emperor’s New Groove is something of a last-minute, hail-Mary attempt to save the production of the film when an earlier and much more earnest version, called Kingdom of the Sun, crashed and burned. This saga has been extensively detailed in all sorts of articles and YouTube videos and such (this is one of my favorites for that), so I won’t go into detail about it here. Suffice to say, The Emperor’s New Groove was a real shitshow production, until it wasn’t, and then suddenly a totally unexpected comedy gem surfaced out of the mess.
As it turns out, roughly twenty years after The Emperor’s New Groove hit theaters, I had the same sort of thing happen to me: I was trying to write a (for me) dark and gritty story that I had pitched to my editors as “Das Boot in space,” but it was 2020 when I was trying to write it, which was the wrong year — for all sorts of reasons — to try to write that sort of story. I fumbled the novel for most of a year and finally had to admit defeat to my editor, who pulled the novel out of the release schedule… and then literally an hour after it was pulled, the entire plot of The Kaiju Preservation Society downloaded into my brain. I banged out that novel in a few weeks, it slid into the publication slot of that previous, failed novel, and, you know what? It did juuuuuust fine, and is generally hailed as one of my funnier novels.
So now, when I watch The Emperor’s New Groove, aside from enjoying it as a completely bonkers viewing experience, there’s also an added layer of empathy for the filmmakers, who scrambled to salvage something out of wreckage. On a much, much smaller scale (just me instead of hundreds of animators and other filmmakers), I’ve been there. Is what came out of it as good as what had originally been intended? We can never know that. But it’s more than good enough, and that’s gonna work for me.
The plot of The Emperor’s New Groove is just your usual callow-emperor-is-a-jerk, emperor-is-turned-into-llama-by-enemies, emperor-defeats-enemies-with-the-power-of-friendship story, just, you know, funny. The filmmakers, after Kingdom of the Sun was overthrown, admitted they leaned heavily on the Chuck Jones, Looney Tunes sort of humor and sensibility. It shows, and it was a very smart call on their part. Other Disney films had dipped their toes into this sort of thing (Aladdin is the most obvious, with Robin Williams being his own trickster spirit), but Emperor does a cannonball into the deep end, doing the sort of slapstick that keeps hitting you with pies to the face. If you don’t like the flavor of the pie, don’t worry, the next pie will hit your face in three seconds. It can be exhausting! But it’s my kind of exhausting.
Also — and I’m speaking here for comedic purposes and not as a matter of cultural sensitivity, hold that thought for a second — this is one of the most perfectly cast animated comedies in the history of the world. David Spade as the bratty emperor Kuzco? Well, that’s just typecasting. Eartha Kitt as Yzma, the deliciously conniving villain? Purrrrfect (those of you who have watched the movie will see what I did there). John Goodman as the decent soul put to use as the straight man? No one better.
But the best casting is Patrick Warburton as Kronk, Yzma’s boy-toy-slash-henchman. Unlike Yzma, Kronk is not evil, he’s a good soul who fell in with the wrong crowd and is making the best of his circumstances in a slightly oblivious, slightly overwhemed way. He’s dimwitted, yet a font of very specific information (can you speak Squirrel?), and just wants to be helpful regardless of circumstances. The moment when Yzma finally turns on him you can genuinely feel his heart break, not because he’s been rebuked but because is his mechanism of care for others (spinach puffs!) has been rejected. His expression is exactly what a golden retriever’s is when he figures out that you, in fact, did not throw the ball. You want to reach right into the screen and give Kronk a hug.
(Should a film about Incans have been made with a cast that has absolutely no relation to that area, culture and history? No, but this was 2000, i.e., the tail end of Disney’s “just cast famous mostly white people, it’s fine” era, and this is what they went with. When the inevitable-yet-absofuckinglutely-unneeded live action version of this film comes to Disney Plus, no doubt The Mouse will rectify this, and the cast will be fine and show the animated version could have absolutely found appropriate actors at the time, even as the live action version itself will feel like two hours of nails dragged across chalkboards, like every other “live action” version of an animated Disney movie. Sorry, I got carried away. Moving on. PS: Watch Coco, it will rip your heart out.)
(Oh, and, I’m not in love with the film’s agism regarding Yzma, even if it’s mostly there to point out the jerkiness of Kuzco. Point taken, but it didn’t work 20 years ago, and it works even less now. A flaw in otherwise delightful patter.)
What makes Emperor work is that, exceptions above aside, all the jokes still land. No matter how many times I see them, I giggle at them. That’s down to the character work of the voice actors and animators, and the wham-wham-WHAM timing of the film. It’s one hour and eighteen minutes and it packs three hours of jokes into those 78 minutes. It never drags. That’s a minor miracle for any film. I have a feeling the Kingdom of the Sun may not have been able to say otherwise, which is why it’s not here and this film is.
I appreciate The Emperor’s New Groove, for the fact it’s a delight, and for the fact that making it was nothing approaching delightful. There’s something about a work that survives despite itself. The people who made it no doubt have stories about the whole ride. I can honestly say I know how they feel.
— JS
The December Comfort Watches, Day One: The Holiday
Posted on December 1, 2023 Posted by John Scalzi 32 Comments
I don’t know about the rest of you, but with the advent of the holiday season, and the fact by the second week of December everyone collectively decides, well, that’s all the work that needs to be done this year, I spend a lot of my time this month camped out on my couch, watching a bunch of movies that I’ve seen before many times but pretty much only watch in December, for the reasons noted above. Some of them are holiday-related! But others are just, oh, I like this movie, I can watch it with my brain turned off. The December Comfort Watches.
This month, because I thought it would be fun, I’ve decided I will share a list of some of my favorite December Comfort Watches, once a day until the end of the month, or until I get bored and wander off to, you guessed it, watch some films. I want to be clear that I am not staking a claim to these films being the best films ever made, or in some cases that they are even good films; they are just the ones that I’m happy to put on, wrap a blanket around myself, and then do nothing else until I get to the credits. “Intensely watchable during seasonal torpor” is perhaps how I might put it.
And to start us off, let’s do one that is in fact seasonal: The Holiday, the 2006 trifle written and directed by Nancy Meyers. As a director and writer, Meyer is known as a bit of a specialist in the amusing misadventures of the sort of well-off white women who have both immaculate kitchens and the staff to keep them so. The Holiday certainly doesn’t break from that mold: One of her film’s two protagonists, played by Cameron Diaz, makes film trailers and lives in the sort of fenced-off Beverly Hills house that usually quarters movie stars or producers, or their plastic surgeons. The other protagonist, played by Kate Winslet, is a journalist who lives in a rather more modest cottage in Surrey, England, but even that is picturesque in a way that clearly belies the hand of a set designer.
These respective houses are important because our two characters swap them over a Christmas holiday, both trying to get away from heartbreak: Amanda (Diaz) because her composer boyfriend is boinking a staffer and Iris (Winslet) because her longtime newsroom fling is getting married to a blandly respectable woman from — horrors! — the circulation department. Amanda, who has the money for impulsive behavior, sees Iris’ cottage on a vacation home site and wonders if it’s available for an escape; Iris, who does not have the money for any of this but needs her own escape, proposes a house swap. Presto, Iris is on her way to LA, and Amanda is headed for Surrey.
Other than this scene and two other very short moments, Amanda and Iris have nothing to do with each other the entire film; instead we get to watch them be fish out of their respective waters. Amanda is hating England until Iris’ brother Graham (Jude Law, extremely charming) drunkenly shows up and she shags him like a rug; Iris, on the other hand, is like a kid in the California candy store, running screaming with delight through Amanda’s house, making friends with everyone from the gardener to the befuddled old neighbor who happens to be a famous screenwriter, and meeting Miles (Jack Black), a schlubby but kind and funny composer who is happy to see what might transpire with this charming itinerant Englishwoman.
None of it has much relation to reality — the timelines in this film are all kinds of screwy — but this really isn’t the sort of movie you watch for gritty adhesion to the real world. It’s a fairy tale about two really attractive women inconvenienced by terrible men who solve their problems with the application of travel and other, presumably better, men. Along the way there’s some amusing dialogue, a couple of nice b-stories (Iris with the screenwriter, Amanda figuring out who is texting Graham and why), and lovely shots of film executive Los Angeles and postcard England.
Of the two main stories in this film, it’s probably no surprise that I enjoy the one with Kate Winslet more, being as I am a former journalist, and having as I do the belief that any storyline that has Jack Black as a surprisingly credible romantic lead is one that speaks to me as a fellow who also needs to get by more on funny than with looks. By contrast, Diaz and Law are merely two pretty people having pretty problems prettily. But even there, there’s quite a bit of charm. I don’t mind watching them come to their inevitable happy ending.
As a final note I will say that for a reasonably contemporary film, The Holiday absolutely takes place in the very year it happens and not one second later; the golden-era screenwriter could not be realistically be any older than he is in the film, and one pivotal scene takes place in a video store (not to mention, you know, newspapers being reasonably healthy entities). It’s just before Twitter, before Facebook, before Brexit and MAGA, before a whole bunch of nonsense, which makes it even more of a comforting escape in 2023. Who knew 2006 qualifies as the good old days?
— JS
The Big Idea: Aaron Sofaer
Posted on December 1, 2023 Posted by John Scalzi 1 Comment
Author Aaron Sofaer needed to do some worldbuilding for the novel Quill & Still, and in this case, there was no point in doing it halfway. Come along as Sofaer goes into detail about what it takes to make a kingdom from scratch — and that has also existed for a millennium.
AARON SOFAER:
Quill & Still was always a story about civics.
It was called “The Quill & Lathe” at first, and it was going to be notionally focused on woodworking, magic by way of writing, and the use of those two in tandem. (I had just re-read The Magic of Recluce by L. E. Modesitt, Jr., and it showed.) But the first piece of worldbuilding was a treatise on patent law and how it could be used to actually incentivize innovation, not anything related to the main character’s profession or her adventures; I knew, even then, that it was the civics and public policy which were compelling me to write the story.
What might it look like when a society makes decisions on purpose and in earnest, rather than as a byproduct of ossified systems of power and governance? The Kingdom of Shem was my answer, inspired by authors like Alexander Wales (This Used To Be About Dungeons), Elizabeth Bear (Ancestral Night), Becky Chambers (Records of a Spaceborn Few), and Graydon Saunders (A Succession of Bad Days). It’s a messy place, a place that considers itself a work-in-progress, a place of political factions fighting over what the right path to a better future is… but it’s a place where those battles are fought earnestly and in the open, a place where those fellow travelers would rather build a compromise than tear each other down.
Sophie Nadash is an outsider, so we don’t see a whole lot of that. Instead, what we see is an ongoing culture clash between the assumptions that underlie Shemmai society and both her own expectations and the reader’s. She comes from our own world, after all, and her own unfamiliarities are my main tool for exploring the concepts that underlie the story.
Those concepts evolved over time, sometimes in ways that were entirely unplanned. The inciting incident of meeting Artemis in the forest started out as a joke, a reference to a meme about trans women being put into that circumstance—and then it turned out that I had quite a bit to say about Judaism, atheism, and divinity. The role of Immortals in Shemmai public life and the way that represents a hijacking of the Theurgist’s System by the Maintainers similarly grew out of a much smaller seed: the notion of a formalized, quantified system of power as an ongoing project of social engineering.
Quill & Still was written initially as a web serial on the website Royal Road, though it’s now making its way over to Amazon. The readership is pretty niche overall, and in particular a large portion of the readers are looking for progression fantasy and “litRPG” in which gamelike mechanics are integrated into the story. The third piece of worldbuilding I wrote for Quill & Still was a reflection on that: if a System, a structured framework for progression and the wielding of magic, were designed to make a kinder and more just society, what might it look like? What kind of things would it reward, and what would it grant? And how does Sophie relate to all of this? The Maintainers are retired archmages and public servants, fiddling with the underlying infrastructure that society runs on—how does the outcome reflect their own preferences, in much the same way that git (a very widely used piece of software) continues to indefensibly use vim (an archaic, user-unfriendly text editor) as its default for new users?
Sophie doesn’t care about the answers to those questions, because she thinks it’s all ridiculous. Not only is the System just a tool to her, it’s one that’s a farce, in much the same way that the reader may reflexively consider it a farce. But as Kelly (Sophie’s combination social worker, lab assistant, and career coach) points out, quantizing everything we run across is basic human nature, and Shem has had a thousand years of data collection to draw from; and as Sophie herself acknowledges, we have levels everywhere from GSE levels to GS ranks and levels to comparing a Scientist III with a Senior Scientist.
I still regret writing it that way. Not enough to rewrite it, mind you—I find those questions to be meaningful and interesting. But for all the effort I put into making it enjoyable to the general audience, I have no doubt that it’ll be off-putting to many people who pick up the story.
It’s not the only thing that people will find off-putting, though, even if it’s one of the few design decisions I regret. For every one-star review which began by calling my story “communist gay utopia wish fulfillment” and continued on to call Sophie a generic blue-haired STEM gal with pronouns, thus providing me with top-notch marketing material, there were more which viciously took umbrage to all sorts of things in less useful ways. My writing was too flowery, my characters too prone to banter; it’s too slow, obsequious towards the Gods who dwell within the world, too lacking in conflict, too utopian in its economics and horrifying in the social expectation that people will be kind to each other, too queer.
And yeah, it’s pretty queer. Not in a way that the story centers on—there are seven distinct categories of gender expression which appear in the book and a variety of relationship arrangements, yes, but that’s just not noteworthy to the people of Shem. The story isn’t about queerness, not in the same way that it’s about the logistics of housing and food in a rural village of a couple hundred people, not in the same way that it’s about the choice society imposes on you between influence and immortality (as wonderfully executed in Elizabeth Moon’s work) or about the life-work balance that can sustain people for hundreds of years of productive, joyful life.
Shem does policy on purpose and in an effort to make a better future—that’s axiomatic, and it’s also what the story centered around from start to finish. My job as a writer, then, was to explore the question of how that gets expressed, of how the State funds itself and which things it would consider inefficient forms of taxation or which things are investments with a positive return even when they’re structured as handouts. My job was to take the deep and howling frustration I have as a parent raising a daughter (a toddler at the time, a preschooler now) with effectively no support network outside of my wife, myself, and whatever help we pay for, and ask: how could this be better, how could this save us all from burning out on our jobs while being worse parents than we’d like to be. My job was, by writing a thousand to two thousand words a day while working a full-time job and being a parent, to suggest to the reader that what said reader really wanted was to sit in the reading nook that Sophie saw in the library with a basket of dumplings and a book, which quite frankly was all I wanted to do most days.
My job was to transport my readers into Shem, to make them yearn for a place where the rat race gives way to the slow life and where we could live more joyfully as truer versions of ourselves; my job was to take everyone who yearns for that world there, if only for a couple of chapters a week (and now a book, and soon its sequel). And maybe my job was to say to some readers, readers who saw in Sophie a reflection of themselves which they had never been offered by an author before: I see you. You are not alone.
Quill & Still Book One: Amazon|Riverfolk Books
Author Socials: Website|Mastodon|Bluesky|Discord Server
Whatever Holiday Gift Guide 2023, Day Five: Charities
Posted on December 1, 2023 Posted by John Scalzi 30 Comments
For the last four days, the Whatever Gift Guide 2023 has been about helping you find the perfect gifts for friends and loved ones. But today I’d like to remind folks that the season is also about helping those in need. So this final day is for charities. If you’re looking for a place to make a donation — or know of a charitable organization that would gladly accept a donation — this is the place for it.
How to contribute to this thread:
1. Anyone can contribute. If you are associated with or work for a charity, tell us about the charity. If there’s a charity you regularly contribute to or like for philosophical reasons, share with the crowd. This is open to everyone.
2. Focus on non-political charities, please. Which is to say, charities whose primary mission is not political — so, for example, an advocacy group whose primary thrust is education but who also lobbies lawmakers would be fine, but a candidate or political party or political action committee is not. The idea here is charities that exist to help people and/or make the world a better place for all of us.
3. It’s okay to note personal fundraising (Indiegogo and GoFundMe campaigns, etc) for people in need. Also, other informal charities and fundraisers are fine, but please do your part to make sure you’re pointing people to a legitimate fundraiser and not a scam. I would suggest only suggesting campaigns that you can vouch for personally.
3. One post per person. In that post, you can list whatever charities you like, and more than one charity. Note also that the majority of Whatever’s readership is in the US/Canada, so I suggest focusing on charities available in North America.
4. Keep your description of the charity brief (there will be a lot of posts, I’m guessing) and entertaining. Imagine the person is in front of you as you tell them about the charity and is interested but easily distracted.
5. You may include a link to a charity site if you like by using standard HTML link scripting. Be warned that if you include too many links (typically three or more) your post may get sent to the moderating queue. If this happens, don’t panic: I’ll be going in through the day to release moderated posts. Note that posts will occasionally go into the moderation queue semi-randomly; Don’t panic about that either.
6. Comment posts that are not about people promoting charities they like will be deleted, in order to keep the comment thread useful for people looking to find charities to contribute to.
All right, then: It’s the season of giving. Tell us where to give to make this a better place.
The Big Idea: Felicia Day
Posted on November 30, 2023 Posted by John Scalzi 12 Comments
As children, we often dream of being a special one, even The Chosen One — but as a practical matter, how would being that special actually be? Especially if life threw you some curveballs on the way to Chosenhood? It’s a thought Felicia Day has considered, in her life, and in her new audio drama, Third Eye.
FELICIA DAY:
My latest project, Third Eye, is seven-hour fantasy adventure in audio. It began almost six years ago with the simple thought: What if a fantasy-genre Chosen One turned out to be a total loser instead of saving the world? How much would that poor loser’s life suck afterward?
The answer would be: A lot.
The concept tickled me. And sounded like something fun I could dig into. But as I started writing, the deeper Big Idea changed from a funny longline into: “How does someone recover from being a total Failure?” And that twist made the project much more personal. Because, back then, I felt like a total Failure, too.
Now, you might say, “Felicia, that’s wild, eight years ago is when you were on the covers of magazines, and running a big digital company and throwing parties in stadiums!” And I would answer, “Yes, but when you are a traumatized gifted child, there is nothing you can achieve that will be ever be enough to make you feel like a winner outside of others’ praise. Because you have never seen yourself as anything outside what you achieve. I mean, spiritually, you’ve kind of never existed on the inside at all, so…excuse me, I gotta go write a comedy now, bye!”
My life and Laurel Pettigrew, the lead character I play in the show, have a few similarities. Laurel had a prophecy about her defeating the Great Evil of the world, I was a violin prodigy at age three, and then an internet content prodigy as an adult. She choked at her big battle, and I FELT that I choked when my internet business didn’t revolutionize…something? It’s been a lot for me to unravel in therapy, but in the end, everyone in the show treats Laurel like she Failed the world, which she kind of did, and that’s what I felt about myself at the time. Deep in my bones. So diving in over the last few years and creating a world and characters to take Laurel on a journey away from that loathful self-image was a very healing process for me. We are both better for it.
I surrounded Laurel with some fun sidekicks: A grift-y faerie princess played by the hilarious London Hughes, and a loser vampire played by Sean Astin. Terrible roommates, great friends. They tolerate her self-loathing in a wonderful way. But when a teenager who inconceivably thinks Laurel is her hero (?!) enters her life, it blows up everything Laurel thought was true about herself and the world. And ultimately leads her to a place where she can…tolerate herself. Which I guess, is an improvement for some people. (Me and Laurel, at least!)
Ultimately, writing the project lead me to conclude that being “special” as a kid is a curse you’ll have to outrun your whole life. I see it in myself, I see it in Hollywood with former child actors, and I see it from afar with kid YouTube stars (*shudder*). There’s a reason I let my daughter drop out of classes she doesn’t want to do. Because, even if she’s good at the piano, I don’t want her to ever think that she is her piano playing ability. She’s just a kid, who has worth outside everyone else’s opinions of her. So if dropping out helps her form a healthy self-image of herself, I’ll consider myself a prodigy at parenting!
Just kidding. I hate that word now.
P.S.: Outside of the Big Idea, there are a few lines in “Third Eye” I am very proud of. One fart joke delivered by Sean Astin is a complete chef’s kiss, and Neil Gaiman saying the words “crab hand rolls” “tiny little horses” and “nipples” in the show is something I creepily have cut together in an mp3 on my computer desktop which I play when I’m feeling unfocused. Oops, shouldn’t have shared that, bye!
Third Eye: Audible
Whatever Holiday Gift Guide 2023, Day Four: Fan Favorites!
Posted on November 30, 2023 Posted by John Scalzi 39 Comments
For the first three days of the Whatever Gift Guide 2023, We’ve had authors and creators tell you about their work. Today is different: Today is Fan Favorites day, in which fans, admirers and satisfied customers share with you a few of their favorite things — and you can share some of your favorite things as well. This is a way to discover some cool stuff from folks like you, and to spread the word about some of the things you love.
Fans: Here’s how to post in this thread. Please follow these directions!
1. Fans only: That means that authors and creators may not post about their own work in this thread (they may post about other people’s work, if they are fans). There are already existing threads for traditionally-published authors, non-traditionally published authors, and for other creators. Those are the places to post about your own work, not here.
2. Individually created and completed works only, please. Which is to say, don’t promote things like a piece of hardware you can find at Home Depot, shoes from Foot Locker, or a TV you got at Wal-Mart. Focus on things created by one person or a small group: Music, books, crafts and such. Things that you’ve discovered and think other people should know about, basically. Do not post about works in progress, even if they’re posted publicly elsewhere. Remember that this is supposed to be a gift guide, and that these are things meant to be given to other people. So focus on things that are completed and able to be sold or shared.
3. One post per fan. In that post, you can list whatever creations you like, from more than one person if you like, but allow me to suggest you focus on newer stuff. Note also that the majority of Whatever’s readership is in the US/Canada, so I suggest focusing on things available in North America. If they are from or available in other countries, please note that!
4. Keep your description of the work brief (there will be a lot of posts, I’m guessing) and entertaining. Imagine the person is in front of you as you tell them about the work and is interested but easily distracted.
5. You may include a link to a sales site if you like by using standard HTML link scripting. Be warned that if you include too many links (typically three or more) your post may get sent to the moderating queue. If this happens, don’t panic: I’ll be going in through the day to release moderated posts. Note that posts will occasionally go into the moderation queue semi-randomly; Don’t panic about that either.
6. Comment posts that are not about fans promoting work they like will be deleted, in order to keep the comment thread useful for people looking to find interesting gifts.
Got it? Excellent. Now: Geek out and tell us about cool stuff you love — and where we can get it too.
Tomorrow: Charities!
Whatever Holiday Gift Guide 2023, Day Three: Arts, Crafts, Music and More
Posted on November 29, 2023 Posted by John Scalzi 70 Comments
The Whatever Holiday Gift Guide 2023 continues, and today we move away from books and focus on other gifts and crafts — which you can take to mean just about any other sort of thing a creative person might make: Music, art, knitting, jewelry, artisan foodstuffs and so on. These can be great, unique gifts for special folks in your life, and things you can’t just get down at the mall. I hope you see some cool stuff here.
Please note that the comment thread today is only for creators to post about their gifts for sale; please do not leave other comments, as they will be snipped out to keep the thread from getting cluttered. Thanks!
Creators: Here’s how to post in this thread. Please follow these directions!
1. Creators (of things other than books) only. This is an intentionally expansive category, so if you’ve made something and have it available for the public to try or buy, you can probably post about in this thread. The exception to this is books (including comics and graphic novels), which have two previously existing threads, one for traditionally-published works and one for non-traditionally published works (Note: if you are an author and also create other stuff, you may promote that other stuff today). Don’t post if you are not the creator of the thing you want to promote, please.
2. Personally-created and completed works only. This thread is specifically for artists and creators who are making their own unique works. Mass-producible things like CDs, buttons or T-shirts are acceptable if you’ve personally created what’s on it. But please don’t use this thread for things that were created by others, which you happen to sell. Likewise, do not post about works in progress, even if you’re posting them publicly elsewhere. Remember that this is supposed to be a gift guide, and that these are things meant to be given to other people. Also, don’t just promote yourself unless you have something to sell or provide, that others may give as a gift.
3. One post per creator. In that post, you can list whatever creations of yours you like, but allow me to suggest you focus on your most recent creation. Note also that the majority of Whatever’s readership is in the US/Canada, so I suggest focusing on things available in North America. If you are elsewhere and your work is available there, please note it.
4. Keep your description of your work brief (there will be a lot of posts, I’m guessing) and entertaining. Imagine the person is in front of you as you tell them about your work and is interested but easily distracted.
5. You may include a link to a sales site if you like by using standard HTML link scripting. Be warned that if you include too many links (typically three or more) your post may get sent to the moderating queue. If this happens, don’t panic: I’ll be going in through the day to release moderated posts. Note that posts will occasionally go into the moderation queue semi-randomly; Don’t panic about that either.
6. As noted above, comment posts that are not from creators promoting their work as specified above will be deleted, in order to keep the comment thread useful for people looking to find interesting work.
Now: Tell us about your stuff!
Tomorrow: Fan Favorites!
New Music: Study of Decay I
Posted on November 28, 2023 Posted by John Scalzi 2 Comments
Hey, feel like you could use a few minutes of relentless industrial droning? Well, then, have I got a track for you! It started off much more chipper and in a different key entirely, but little by little it ended up here. I guess I’m in that kind of mood musically, as November grinds down to cold and early darkness. Maybe I need some Christmas music or something. Or a hug.
Anyway, enjoy the bleakness, if bleakness is a thing you enjoy.
— JS
The Big Idea: Paige E. Ewing
Posted on November 28, 2023 Posted by John Scalzi 1 Comment
Fayetteville may not have been on your radar as a hotbed of fae activity, but as Paige E. Ewing is here to tell you, it’s the place to be for her novel, Explosive Chemistry.
PAIGE E. EWING:
When Solifu, the impossibly ancient Egyptian mystic, held her tiny spider-kin daughter in her arms, she knew she would never bear another. She would bear two more sons, lion-kin like their father, Simon the last surviving prince of Nemea, but Liliana would be her last daughter. She would not survive to see the adult this babe would one day become. “I give you my word on this, little one. Your childhood will be filled with love and music, dancing and joy.”
Ixchel, the Peruvian jaguar-kin who owned both her and Simon’s hearts touched the infant’s face. “She only has two eyes. Is she a Normal?”
“She is like me,” Solifu said. “Her sight will mature, but it will be hard for her. She will need all three of us.”
When Liliana was five, a little boy pushed her and curved razor-sharp blades popped out of her forearms, scaring them both. Solifu, Simon, and Ixchel took turns training their tiny daughter in combat discipline, so she could handle her natural weaponry without harming herself or others.
At ten, Liliana looked like a petite child of seven. She opened new eyes on her temples, green and shimmering like chrome. Unnamed spectrums filled her vision. Her development stopped as her mind re-shaped itself to adapt. Liliana laughed in a world with new colors in all directions at once. The bright beads of gypsy scarves sparkled even behind her as she danced to the music the Romani circus people made on well-worn instruments.
By twenty, little Lilly as her father called her, had the body of a Normal girl of twelve. The third pair of eyes that opened like black pearl tears showed her souls tinged yellow with pity as her old friends found husbands and wives. In time, with the help of combat training and focus, her mind adjusted again.
Each new kind of vision made her more different, but circus children didn’t mind different, and still played hide and seek with her. And now, Liliana could fly. She danced joyously on the high wires and leapt fearlessly from the trapeze swings. Her father’s strong hands were always there to catch her.
When she finally grew up, Lilly wanted to be like her adult sister Isabella, who had her own caravan and made her living as Madame Bella, the seer of all that is hidden. Her baby brothers, Petros and Jason, for the first time gave Liliana someone smaller than her to care for. They grinned her father’s smile at the brightly-colored toys she made for them.
At thirty, when Lilly’s body reached a fourteen-year-old’s adolescence, her final large swirly pair of spider-kin eyes opened on her forehead. Her mind drowned in overwhelming images of what was, what might be, and what had been. She couldn’t close her eyes. She couldn’t shut it out.
It was too much.
Liliana’s young mind lost itself so completely that her parents had to dress her and feed her like a babe that first year. Her mind tried to fight its way to sanity, but often it just shut down, leaving Lilly floating in an empty dark place that time didn’t touch. The universal therapy of combat discipline brought her back – the swish and clash of blades, the feel of the ground beneath her feet. Slowly, her mind re-shaped itself.
She remembered how to dance and remembered how to fly, but her joy was gone.
Liliana’s sister Isabella bid her goodbye one day. She had foreseen a daughter coming to her and her husband, but the not-yet-conceived child would only be safe if they fled Europe to Iceland. So they did.
At night, Lilly’s control slipped and bloody nightmares came. Wars across time. The deaths of everyone she knew. Emotionally charged events were the hardest to shut out, and nothing was harder to not see than death. Her father and first mother died, the blood too bright, the growls of the red Celtic werewolves ripping them apart too loud.
Solifu saw the same visions, but she told her daughter she had a lot of practice navigating the paths of the future. It was a true statement, but not truth. Her daughter trusted her to use her vision to find a safe path.
But Solifu made a different choice.
She hoped one day her daughter would forgive her.
Liliana’s nightmares came back with a vengeance one night, more vivid than ever. As she often did when nightmares plagued her, Liliana crawled into the cage with the big, lazy true lions to sleep. The lionesses guarded her between them like a frightened cub. Just as she drifted to sleep again, her second mother Ixchel opened the cage door and ushered in two lion cubs. Lilly recognized her two brothers, Jason and Petros, pretending to be true lions.
“Shh,” Ixchel said. “Stay hidden.”
The circus never moved in the dead of night, but that time it did. The animals, all the misfits, and the Romani got on board a big ship, leaving the beautiful wooden caravans, their homes, behind.
Liliana’s father and first mother didn’t board.
Screams, her father’s bone-shaking roar, blood and violence filled Liliana’s fourth eyes, crisp and sharp, real and now.
Solifu, her husband and eldest sons fighting at her side, delayed the pack of Himmler’s red wolves while all their Roma friends, their beloved wife, Ixchel, and their youngest children escaped on the tide. Liliana saw other possible paths, but they were all filled with the death of the Romani, the gypsy children she’d grown up with who now had children of their own.
Solifu and Simon could have run, but they chose to stay and die so their friends could survive.
And Liliana, helpless to shut it out, helpless to change what she saw, watched them die again and again like her second mother’s gramophone stuck in a bloody groove.
****
Over a hundred years later, Precise Oaths, first in the Liliana and the Fae of Fayetteville series, starts. Thirty years in our future, the Green resurges, gaining strength with every clean air initiative, and combustion engine rusting in a recycle lot. The Green feeds power to the hidden peoples with kinship to beasts and plants and stones.
Neurodivergent loner, Liliana, as Madame Anna Sees All, guides the people of Fayetteville, North Carolina away from danger and toward happiness. Crippling social anxiety ensures that the only people she talks to in her little town are paying clients.
When a red wolf-kin, Peter Teague, and two police officers accuse her of being a serial killer, she flees. But the red wolf just wants to stop more deaths. Lilly fights shoulder-to-shoulder with this decent man descended from her parents’ murderers. Siobhan, the flower sprite lends bullets from her machine gun, and the goblin Doctor Nudd lends wisdom and healing to their victory.
Faytetteville is safer, and Liliana has friends again. Friends bring her laughter, music, tea parties, and dancing. Their commanding officer, Colonel Bennett, a Fae prince in hiding, flirts with her in his voice like deep honey, promising more.
In Explosive Chemistry, book 2, Liliana’s fourth eyes see murder coming for all of them, friends and clients alike. It’s a wave of blood darker than she has seen since she hid in a cage full of lions as an adolescent. How can she save everyone she knows? She and Pete stopped the serial killers already. What did they miss?
Many paths of the future where she saves her friends show her own death, but Liliana refuses to be alone again.
For the first time, she understands Solifu’s choice.
It’s her life. Liliana will decide who is worth the risk of it.
Explosive Chemistry: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s|Universal
Author Socials: Personal site|Instagram|Twitter|Bluesky
Whatever Holiday Gift Guide 2023, Day Two: Non-Traditionally Published Books
Posted on November 28, 2023 Posted by John Scalzi 240 Comments
Today is Day Two of the Whatever Holiday Gift Guide 2023, and today the focus is on Non-Traditionally Published Books: Self-published works, electronically-exclusive books, books from micro presses, books released outside the usual environs of the publishing world, and so on. Hey, I put my first novel up on this very Web site years ago and told people to send me a dollar if they liked it. Look where it got me. I hope you find some good stuff today.
Please note that the comment thread today is only for non-traditional authors and editors to post about their books; please do not leave other comments, as they will be snipped out to keep the thread from getting cluttered. Thanks!
Authors/editors: Here’s how to post in this thread. Please follow these directions!
1. Authors and editors of non-traditionally published books only. This includes comics and graphic novels, as well as non-fiction books and audiobooks. If your book has been traditionally published — available in bookstores on a returnable basis — post about your book in the thread that went up yesterday (if you are in doubt, assume you are non-traditionally published and post here). If you are a creator in another form or medium, your thread is coming tomorrow. Don’t post if you are not the author or editor, please.
2. Completed works only. Do not post about works in progress, even if you’re posting them publicly. Remember that this is supposed to be a gift guide, and that these are things meant to be given to other people. Likewise, don’t just promote yourself unless you have something to sell or provide, that others may give as a gift.
3. One post per author. In that post, you can list whatever books of yours you like, but allow me to suggest you focus on your most recent book. Note also that the majority of Whatever’s readership is in the US/Canada, so I suggest focusing on books available in North America. If your book is only available in the UK or some other country, please let people know!
4. Keep your description of your book brief (there will be a lot of posts, I’m guessing) and entertaining. Imagine the person is in front of you as you tell them about your book and is interested but easily distracted.
5. You may include a link to a bookseller if you like by using standard HTML link scripting or URL. Be warned that if you include too many links (typically three or more) your post may get sent to the moderating queue. If this happens, don’t panic: I’ll be going in through the day to release moderated posts. Note that posts will occasionally go into the moderation queue semi-randomly; Don’t panic about that either.
6. As noted above, comment posts that are not from authors/editors promoting their books as specified above will be deleted, in order to keep the comment thread useful for people looking to find interesting books.
Now: Tell us about your book!
Tomorrow (11/29): Other creators (musicians, artists, crafters, etc!)
Whatever Holiday Gift Guide 2023, Day One: Traditionally Published Books
Posted on November 27, 2023 Posted by John Scalzi 98 Comments
Welcome to the first day of the Whatever Shopping Guide 2023 — Our way of helping you folks learn about cool creative gifts for the holidays, straight from the folks who have created them.
Today’s featured products are traditionally published books (including graphic novels and audiobooks); that is, books put out by publishers who ship books to stores on a returnable basis. In the comment thread below, authors and editors of these books will tell you a little bit about their latest and/or greatest books so that you will be enticed to get that book for yourself or loved ones this holiday season. Because, hey: Books are spectacular gifts. Enjoy your browsing, and we hope you find the perfect book!
Please note that the comment thread today is only for authors and editors to post about their books; please do not leave other comments, as they will be snipped out to keep the thread from getting cluttered. Thanks!
Authors/editors: Here’s how to post in this thread. Please follow these directions!
1. Authors and editors only, books only (including audiobooks). There will be other threads for other stuff, later in the week. Any type of book is fine: Fiction, non-fiction, graphic novels, etc. If you are not the author/editor of the book you’re posting about, don’t post. This is for authors and editors only.
2. For printed books, they must be currently in print (i.e., published before 12/31/2023) and available on a returnable basis at bookstores and at least one of the following three online bookstores: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powell’s. This is so people can find your book when they go looking for it. For audiobooks, they must be professionally published (no self-produced, self-published audiobooks) and at least available through Amazon/Audible. If your book isn’t available as described, or if you’re not sure, wait for the shopping guide for non-traditional books, which will go up tomorrow.
3. One post per author. In that post, you can list whatever books of yours you like (as long as it meets the criteria in point 2), but allow me to suggest you focus on your most recent book. Note also that the majority of Whatever’s readership is in the US/Canada, so I suggest focusing on books currently available in North America (if your book is available only in the UK or elsewhere, please note that).
4. Keep your description of your book brief (there will be a lot of posts, I’m guessing) and entertaining. Imagine the person is in front of you as you tell them about your book and is interested but easily distracted.
5. You may include a link to a bookseller if you like by using standard HTML link scripting or a URL. Be warned that if you include too many links (typically three or more) your post may get sent to the moderating queue. If this happens, don’t panic: I’ll be going in through the day to release moderated posts. Note that posts will occasionally go into the moderation queue semi-randomly; Don’t panic about that either.
6. As noted above, comment posts that are not from authors/editors promoting their books as specified above will be deleted, in order to keep the comment thread useful for people looking to find interesting books.
Got it? Excellent. Then tell the folks about your book! And tell your author friends about this thread so they can come around as well.
Tomorrow (11/28/23): Non-traditional books!
O Captain, My Captain
Posted on November 26, 2023 Posted by John Scalzi 16 Comments
I deejayed a dance at a Star Trek-themed convention over the weekend. I set up my DJ stuff on the main stage of the convention, which, naturally enough, had a starship bridge on it. Krissy came up and sat in the captain’s chair, and, may I say, it was a natural fit for her. I would definitely let her lead me to strange new worlds, and such. Indeed I did, since she’s the reason I moved to Ohio.
The DJ set was the last public event I have in 2023; now I am at home for two! whole! months! before heading to the Confusion convention in Michigan in late January. What shall I do with my time? Sleep, for one. Spend a bit of time zoning out watching movies, for another. We’ll see where I go from there after that.
— JS
Whatever 2023 Holiday Gift Guide Starts Monday!
Posted on November 24, 2023 Posted by John Scalzi 20 Comments
Every year as the holiday season begins I run a gift guide for the holidays, and over the years it’s been quite successful: Lots of people have found out about excellent books and crafts and charities and what have you, making for excellent gift-giving opportunities during the holiday season. I’ve decided to do it again this year.
So: Starting Monday, November 27, the Whatever Holiday Gift Guide returns! If you’re a writer or other creator, this will be an excellent time to promote your work on a site which gets tens of thousands of viewers daily, almost all of whom will be interested in stuff for the holidays. If you’re someone looking to give gifts, you’ll see lots of excellent ideas. And you’ll also have a day to suggest stuff from other folks too. Everybody wins!
To give you all time to prepare, here’s the schedule of what will be promoted on which days:
Monday, November 27: Traditionally Published Authors — If your work is being published by a publisher a) who is not you and b) gets your books into actual, physical bookstores on a returnable basis, this is your day to tell people about your books. This includes comics/graphic novels and audiobooks.
Tuesday, November 28: Non-Traditionally Published Authors — Self-published? Electronically published? Or other? This is your day. This also includes comics/graphic novels and audiobooks.
Wednesday, November 29: Other Creators — Artists, knitters, jewelers, musicians, and anyone who has cool stuff to sell this holiday season, this will be the day to show off your creations.
Thursday, November 30: Fan Favorite Day — Not an author/artist/musician/other creator but know about some really cool stuff you think people will want to know about for the holidays? Share! Share with the crowd!
Friday, December 1: Charities — If you are involved in a charity, or have a favorite charity you’d like to let people know about, this is the day to do it.
If you have questions about how all of this will work, go ahead and ask them in the comment thread (Don’t start promoting your stuff today — it’s not time yet), although I will note that specific instructions for each day will appear on that day. Don’t worry, it’ll be pretty easy. Thanks and feel free to share this post with creative folks who will have things to sell this holiday season.
— JS
Announcing the John Scalzi Humble Book Bundle, Benefitting First Book
Posted on November 23, 2023 Posted by John Scalzi 26 Comments
Humble Bundle is an organization that bundles up things like video games and books and other stuff that people like to have, offers them pretty cheaply, in various tiers, and then donates a portion of the proceeds to charitable organizations. A couple of months ago, Tor approached me about doing a Humble Bundle project with them, and as it happens, I had a charity that I thought would be perfect for such a bundle: First Book, which provides books to and champions literacy for children all around the United States. Children’s literacy, and their access to books, is more important now than ever. So I was happy to come on board.
With all that as preamble, allow me to announce the John Scalzi Humble Book Bundle Collection, which for the next 20 days allows you get up to $184 worth of the electronic versions of many of my novels, novellas and short stories for a mere fraction of that cost, with First Book as the bundle’s official charitable recipient.
For those who have never done this Humble Bundle thing before, it’s pretty simple: There are tiers of access, and the more you pay, the more you get. Want to pay a single dollar? We’re happy to give you Old Man’s War for that. Got $10 to spare? Then you get Old Man’s War, The Ghost Brigades, The Last Colony and Zoe’s Tale, the first four books in the Old Man’s War series.
But if you really want to splurge, for $18, you can get all six books of the Old Man’s War series, all three books of the Interdependency series, the two books and novella of the Lock In series, four stand-alone novels including Redshirts, my Hugo award winner, and the Kaiju Preservation Society, as well as my Hugo-winning essay collection Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded, and even a smattering of short stories, including the infamous “Shadow War of the Night Dragons: Book One: The Dead City: Prologue” (which was, improbably and delightfully, nominated for a Hugo as well). All told there are 21 items in the top tier package, if you pay $18 or more. That’s a pretty good deal.
(And yes, you can pay more if you would like, and allocate the percentages so that more of what you spend goes to First Book. It’s all right there on the bundle page.)
Oh, and another thing: Yes, I will get a cut of the amount that goes to Tor/Macmillan for this sale. You should know that half of my cut is going directly into The Scalzi Family Foundation (up to $50k), which we use to fund our own charitable, educational and cultural giving. The Scalzi Family Foundation, as you may recall, was the primary sponsor of the GenCon Writers Symposium this year, and this year we’ve also donated to local food banks, educational and cultural organizations, and other organizations which benefit both our local communities and communities across the US.
I hope you’ll take a look at the bundle and consider stocking up on the Scalzi eBooks that you haven’t gotten yet. Additionally, I hope you’ll tell other people about it. You probably know some folks who wouldn’t mind getting more Scalzi ebooks really cheaply and/or supporting a very excellent literacy charity. Here’s how to do both!
— JS
The Existential Longing for Walkies, 11/23/23
Posted on November 23, 2023 Posted by John Scalzi 11 Comments
When you really want to go outside and run around, but your human is busy, like, staring into that incomprehensible glowing rectangle of hers. Oh! The suffering!
Yes, I realize this is the second “dog walk”-themed photo this week. But look at the pathos here! I couldn’t resist.
Here in the US it is Thanksgiving, so for all who celebrate it, I hope it is a happy and reflective day for you. Everyone else: Hey, enjoy your Thursday, okay?
(Also: Very shortly after this picture was taken, Charlie was indeed taken on a walk. Existential crisis averted.)
— JS
The Big Idea: Alvaro Zinos-Amaro
Posted on November 22, 2023 Posted by John Scalzi 4 Comments
Some writers have a “thing” – a niche, a trick, or a trope that they make their own. And then some other writers… wander. In this Big Idea for Being Michael Swanwick, a non-fiction exploration into the life and works of the multiple-award-winning author, Alvaro Zinos-Amaro explains how Swanwick’s thematic diversity is, indeed, his thing.
ALVARO ZINOS-AMARO:
Life is like a box of Michael Swanwick stories.
In fact, read enough of them, and the membrane separating his fiction from our reality becomes increasingly porous, so that we might say that Michael Swanwick stories are like a box of life.
When we discussed his story “Universe Box” Michael shared with me that he enjoys cigar boxes–probably not surprising from the author of Cigar-Box Faust and Other Miniatures (2003).
“Universe Box” opens with a trickster stealing the whole universe and hiding it inside a cigar box. That seems like an apt image for the magic of Swanwick’s writing. He can conjure up an entire cosmos in a few thousand or even just a couple of hundred words, which was part of what inspired me to produce Being Michael Swanwick.
Stations of the Tide (1991), a Nebula winner, was my first encounter with Michael’s fiction. I found the novel in a used bookshop during a blazing summer in the south of Spain. A teenager at the time, I devoured the book in a white heat that rivaled the weather, and by the time I put it down I half-believed the whole thing had been a dream. Some years passed and, now a late teen, I hit on his short story “The Dead” (1996), which made me sit up very straight. It took me a few stunned minutes to accept that its author was the same guy who had written that memorably trippy book. This happened a third time in 2001, when, in my early twenties, I read the Hugo-winning “The Dog Said Bow-Wow,” the first in what would become a series of irrepressibly fun stories, and managed to “discover” Michael Swanwick yet again.
Some writers have such distinctive or consistent approaches to their material that their prose becomes almost as identifiable as their bylines. Not so with Swanwick. One of his trademarks, I realized, was that he could completely disappear into the voices and aesthetics of his tales.
Darger and Surplus, the protagonists of “The Dog Said Bow-Wow” and many other fabulous romps, are masters of deceit. Looking back, it’s not surprising that Stations of the Tide features shapeshifters, or that a variety of tricksters keep popping up in Swanwick’s work (“Legions in Time,” “Coyote at the End of History,” “Annie Without Crow,” and so on).
He himself is the ultimate literary chameleon.
As a quick showcase of his versatility, consider these three openings from stories all published in 2010:
“You’re not the master.
No, I’m a police officer.
Then I have nothing to say to you.”
– “Steadfast Castle” (2010)
“In 1646, shortly before the end of the Thirty Years’ War, a patrol of Hessian cavalrymen, fleeing the aftermath of a disastrous battle to the north wherein a botched flanking maneuver had in an hour turned certain victory to abject rout, made camp at the foot of what a local peasant they had captured and forced to serve as a guide assured them was one of the highest mountains in the Spessart region of Germany.”
– “Goblin Lake” (2010)
“Miles and weeks passed under the wheels of Victor’s motorcycle.”
– “Libertarian Russia” (2010)
From the start, I wanted Being Michael Swanwick to celebrate the possibilities of short fiction. Swanwick’s work has remarkable scope and variety along every conceivable literary dimension. He’s been playing with form, narrative structure and tone with admirable results for over forty years.
If we think of short fiction as a laboratory, Michael is no doubt one of its most brilliant experimentalists. He might even be a mad scientist. After all, he’s written books like Michael Swanwick’s Field Guide to the Mesozoic Megafauna (2004) and The Periodic Table of Science Fiction (2005)….
In his Introduction to Cigar-Box Faust he says: “The primary rule of writing is to use exactly as many words to say something as it takes, no more and no less.”
His bibliography is a testament to the diversity of things he’s wanted to say. If you enjoy short fiction, I hope that our discussions in Being Michael Swanwick will lead you to interesting discoveries. The dozen books that gather Michael Swanwick’s short stories are, by definition, collections–but, because of his phenomenal range, they double as anthologies. Open up any of his literary boxes, and you’ll find he’s thinking far outside it.
Being Michael Swanwick: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s
Why There’s No New Scalzi Novel Next Year, Why You’ll Get Two New Scalzi Novels in 2025, and What I’ll Be Up To in 2024
Posted on November 21, 2023 Posted by John Scalzi 59 Comments
Let’s address that first thing first: Yes, I am currently writing a novel! Also, that novel will not be out in 2024. The reason is actually pretty simple: The date in 2024 that Tor had available for my book to come out was the first Tuesday in November. Which, if you check your calendar, is Election Day here in the United States. Do I want to have a book come out on Election Day in 2024? No. No, I do not. And neither does Tor! We both very enthusiastically agreed that we didn’t want that date.
Before you raise an objection, here’s a fun fact: I’ve already had a book released on Election Day in the United States. It was my very first book, The Rough Guide to Money Online. The release date was intentional: Rough Guides figured after the election there would be a lull in news, and it would mean that they could get me on TV to promote my little book. It was a great theory, which rammed hard into the fact that the Election Day in question was the one in 2000, when the election wasn’t settled for weeks. The news shows were jammed up, my media tour was cancelled after two days because no one had time for me, and the book flopped, not just because of the election (there was also the collapse of the Web 1.0), but also because of the election.
Now, the 2020 election, you may recall, was quite contentious, and the 2024 election, pairing as it likely will the same two contestants, is also likely to be quite contentious. I know the sort of book I am writing, and as much as I think it’s lovely and fun and that the people who enjoyed The Kaiju Preservation Society and Starter Villain will really enjoy this one too, I am also aware it’s absolutely the wrong fucking novel to go up against the 2024 election, especially if things go wonky and sour, which, again, they may very well do – indeed, let me suggest that at least one of the likely candidates for president in 2024 absolutely wants things to go wonky and sour.
So: If you’re an American citizen, please vote in 2024, and also, please understand why there’s no novel from me that year.
That second thing second: The novel I’m currently writing, which was originally scheduled for 2024, will now come out in February of 2025. It doesn’t have an official title yet (you’ll find out what that is when I turn the novel in) and I want to be cagey on the details for now. I will say that, like KPS and Villain, it takes place in contemporary time and has its cast of characters dealing with an extremely high concept plot device. I’ve taken to thinking of it as the final installment of an unintentional and otherwise unrelated trilogy of “weird shit, modern times” novels that I didn’t even know I was writing until I started on this novel and was, like, oooooh, I see where my brain has been recently. To be clear, KPS, Villain and this book are not in each other’s universes. They, do however, vibe pretty well together.
But what’s this about another novel in 2025? I hear you ask. To which I respond with a question of my own: Hey, did you know that 2025 marks the 20th anniversary of Old Man’s War? Well, it does! And what better way to celebrate the 20th year of the existence of the Old Man’s War universe than with a new story within those worlds? No better way, I say!
And so: In late 2025, expect Old Man’s War #7.
To answer your immediate questions: No, no title yet for this either, since (among other things), I have to finish a whole other novel before I get to this one. Also, I don’t want to reveal plot details, except to say that like The Human Division and The End of All Things, there will be a time jump from previous novels. It is likely that some characters from previous novels will appear in this new one, but who they are and in what capacity I’m not prepared to share, in no small part since I’m still in “moving bits around to see how they play together” mode.
In fact, the answer to any question you might have at this point involving this particular book, other than I know I’m going to write it, and that it will be out in late 2025, is “uhhhh… I dunno, I guess we’ll see.” Except that I feel pretty confident in saying that it will fit extremely well into the OMW universe generally, since, you know, I’ve had that universe in my head for two decades now, and have a pretty good idea how it works.
So those are the two novels you’ll see from me in 2025: Another book similar to KPS and Villain, and another book in the OMW universe. In other words, a pretty good year for Scalzi books.
Third things third: So, what does that mean for me in 2024? Well, there’s likely to be a novella from me, in some form or another – I’m still working out the contractual details of that, but when those get nailed down and the thing is written I will let you know here. So you will not be entirely without new fiction from me next year. Again, no details about the novella, except to say it’s definitely science fiction (there will be aliens in it!) and it’s going to be funny. I think 2024 will need some funny in it, even if I don’t want to plant it directly on Election Day itself. Also, I have a couple of cool things coming that I can’t talk about yet but will happen next year. Stay tuned!
Aside from that? Well, I’m writing a film column in Uncanny Magazine through the next year, so you’ll see me there every other month. Plus I’ll be here and on the social media that is not the former Twitter, so you’ll not be lacking in things to read from me. To the delight of some and the annoyance of others, I never really completely go away.
Also, 2024 is a year where I plan to start the ball rolling on a number of long-term projects that won’t see fruition until later, some possibly a few or even several years into the future. I have writing to do but I don’t have a huge amount of promotional or travel commitments, like, for example, a book tour that stretches across two months. So that’s more time for working on cool things that will pay off, uh, eventually! What I’m saying is, it’s good to have an occasional year where I mostly stay at home.
(I do have events in 2024, mind you: The Confusion convention in Detroit for January, Boskone in Boston for February, the Joco Cruise in March, and so on. I’ll be updating my Upcoming Events soon. But doing one event a month is fine, in terms of time/effort, etc. It does leave me time for strategy and planning, and, you know, writing.)
There you have it: A basic precis on my literary 2024 and 2025, and what’s coming out and when. It’s nice — for me! — to know what I’m up to for the next 24 months. I thought you would like to know, too.
— JS
The Big Idea: Naomi Kritzer
Posted on November 21, 2023 Posted by John Scalzi 10 Comments
How is the ocean like space? Naomi Kritzer knows, and in her new novel, Liberty’s Daughter, she uses those similarities to the advantage of her tale – and for the adventure her protagonist finds herself on.
NAOMI KRITZER:
Liberty’s Daughter takes place on a seastead – a collection of micronations in human-made structures floating in international waters. I usually tell people that seasteading is real-ish, in the sense that people are actually trying to do it. I don’t usually go on to explain that I first heard the term from my sister, who went to college with Patri Friedman, the main person responsible for popularizing the idea.
Patri describes the idea as “homesteading the high seas” and the thing that’s absolutely fabulous about a seastead from a science fiction storytelling perspective is that the whole concept is just plausible enough to allow for a near-future setting that’s almost as bonkers as a space station. You can have isolation, totally dysfunctional self-governance, defiance of any and all current legal standards, and deeply weird oligarchs running stuff, and you don’t even have to go to the moon. You can stick it on a decaying cruise ship anchored in international waters.
The problem, of course, is cruise ships require a lot of diligent maintenance. Oceans are full of salt, which will corrode every surface it touches, from the bottom of your boat to the instrumentation inside. Preventing a seastead from sinking into the sea would require endless manual labor. Who would do this work? For that matter, which people on a seastead would cook the meals, wash the dishes, care for young children, scrub the toilets? If there’s a tourism industry, who launders the towels? If there’s a hospital, deals with the bedpans?
The people who fantasize about life on a seastead are mostly imagining themselves with a lot more personal power than they have as citizens of the US (or whatever country they live in) – they’re not fantasizing about scrubbing floors. I started thinking about the people on the seastead who would have much less power – because they’re living in precarcity or even debt slavery, or (as in the case of the protagonist) because they’re the teenage child of someone who can wield money and influence to control her.
As I was pondering the setting and possible characters, one of the employees at my grocery store vanished, and everyone pretended she’d never existed.
I did my grocery shopping on the same day every week, and I’d gotten into the habit of seeking out a particular checker because I liked chatting with her. Then one week she wasn’t there, and the next week she didn’t come back. And when I asked about her, the other employees acted like they had no idea who I was talking about, which was surreal. This woman had worked at that store for years. I assumed that she’d been fired, and that everyone was afraid to talk about it, and since I didn’t want to get anyone else in trouble, I stopped asking.
But that weird, frustrating puzzle fell into the world I’d been piecing together: Beck, the teenage girl protagonist, became a detective hired out of desperation to investigate a missing person case. A teenager who grew up sheltered, who felt safe because of who she was, Beck could refuse to take the hints that she’s not supposed to keep asking. Instead, she turned her curiosity and privilege towards the task of finding the missing woman, coming face-to-face with aspects of life on the seastead that she’d never looked at closely before. Everything fell into place.
About a year later, I asked again about the woman who’d disappeared – I had a new regular checker and a bunch of time had passed.
“Oh, yeah,” the guy said. “Management moved her to a different store because she had a stalker.”
And suddenly all my assumptions about her were flipped on their head. Of course I got stonewalled – they didn’t know that I wasn’t the person stalking her! Their silence was not fear; it was protectiveness. Even management wasn’t the bad guys here – they hadn’t fired her, they’d moved her somewhere she’d be safer.
In the years since I started writing this, several people have attempted to create seasteads, including a small group of crypto bros who bought a cruise ship during the pandemic (and discovered that there are actually an astonishing number of regulations for cruise ships). There’s now a book about the “Free Town Project,” in which libertarians moved into and took over Grafton, New Hampshire; the result was the town winding up overrun with bears.
The irony of the grocery store checker’s disappearance inspiring this story is that I initially assumed it was a story about capitalism finding someone disposable – instead, it was a story about a community pulling together to protect someone vulnerable. And in fact as Beck’s story continued, it also became a story about a community pulling together – the workers form a union, and when things go very wrong and the people with money and power use it to get the hell off their island, the people left behind start trying to solve things together.
I am, as you may have guessed, not a libertarian. But I have a lot of faith in people and community and that’s a big part of what this book wound up being about.
Liberty’s Daughter: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s
Walk? Walk!
Posted on November 21, 2023 Posted by John Scalzi 12 Comments
Someone is excited about the possibility of a long walk at the local nature preserve! Can you guess who it is? The answer may surprise you!
— JS
Whatever Everyone Else is Saying