Why? One, to get work done on the book. Two, because I feel like it. I’m also going to take a week off Twitter, too. Aaaaand probably won’t read news or otherwise see what the outside world is up to during that time either. I figure the planet can get along without me for seven days or so.
Here is a cat picture to sustain you until I post again.
See you all next Sunday!
It’s Friday the 13th, and here’s a very lucky collection of new books and ARCs that have arrived at the Scalzi Compound. What here would you feel lucky to have? Share in the comments!
Oh, hey! Whatever is now old enough to go drinking. It probably won’t go drinking, because I don’t drink, and also the blog is not an actual person, but I admit it’s amusing to think of my blog suddenly ditching me to go out on a bender, then coming back and drunkenly slurring out what it really thinks of me. There would be a lot of things learned in the late hours of that event, I would say.
It being the 21st birthday of Whatever reminds me again that regularly-updated personal blogs are now something of a rarity these days, as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook handle what blogs do at least as well for most people, at the mere cost of your privacy and the privacy of every other single person you know. I use Twitter and Facebook myself so this isn’t really a complaint, just an acknowledgement.
I do miss the heyday of the blogosphere but I also admit that missing of it is more based on a feeling than the practical day-to-day reality of the social media era. What I went to blogs for — catching up with friends, seeing what they think about things — is what Facebook and Twitter and other social media offer, so no real loss there. The real difference is feel. For lack of a better way to express this, blogs are free-standing houses, designed by the occupant. Social media are apartment blocks, where the floor plan is exactly the same for everyone. I guess I miss going to someone’s house and wondering how this funky place even actually holds together.
I do still tell people that they should keep their own sites for when whatever social media site they use the most eventually sinks into the Internet’s graveyard, they’ll still have some place to be. The longer I do this, the more I realize this makes me sound vaguely like an Internet Prepper, waiting and perhaps hoping for an online apocalypse that likely won’t come. I don’t mean it that way, honest. Writers and creators should definitely have their own sites, with information about them and what they do, if only for search engine purposes. Everyone else, well. Do what you want, I guess. I do, which is to keep this place running. When Facebook falls, you’ll all still want something to read! I’ll be the last site standing! Bwa ha ha hah ha!
More seriously, Whatever exists today for the same reason it began existing 21 years ago, which is, I wanted a place to write about things. The formula hasn’t really wavered in all that time; I write about the things I want to write about, when I want to write about them, for whatever length I feel like writing about them for. Sometimes I’m ambitious and post several times a day; other times I’ll post once a day and sometimes skip a day or two (or more). When I’m writing a book, I tend to post less. When I’m not, I’ll post more. I don’t take requests, unless I do. And so on.
Also, you know: I write here because I just plain like this site. This is, in more ways than one, my house and a reflection of me. I like how I’ve built it over the years and I like what it does. I like I have a place to say what I want to say. I like that I have a place where others occasionally come by to visit. I like that those people seem to like it too.
So, I’ll keep at it some more. Let’s see what happens from here.
So, I’m waaaaaaay behind on The Last Emperox (it’s my own damn fault), and as a result I’m now clacking away furiously and also, as it happens, very happily employing my nanny software during the day until I get my writing quota done. What this means is that when I sign back on to Twitter and other social media, people are often asking me what I think about whatever the hot topic of the day is, which has happened while I was not at all paying attention.
The answer to this question at the moment is usually two-fold: One, I probably literally just heard about it right that second (because my nanny software blocks news sites as well as social media), so uhhhh, I probably don’t know; Two, it turns out that writing all day makes my brain tired, so what it wants to do after a full day of clacking away is look at pictures of cats more than try to generate informed, nuanced opinions on things. This will likely continue to be the case through the end of the writing of the book, which, remember, I am now behind on, because I suck.
This is a long way of saying that between now and the end of the writing of the book (which I hope to God will be done before I leave for a week to Australia at the end of the month), I’m declaring Hot Take Bankruptcy, meaning whatever it is you want me to opine about, I probably won’t, and even if I do, I can’t guarantee that the take will be anything more than “Ehhhhhh… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯?” I know this will be frustrating for many of you, who rely on me for your daily dose of hot, hot takes, especially online. But, well, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯? For now, I just don’t wanna.
Mind you, this doesn’t mean I won’t occasionally point to a news story of our president (or the UK’s prime minister) doing some dumbass thing or another, or things of that type. But that’s usually about me tweeting something that already conforms to and confirms an opinion that I already have rather than attempting to formulate a whole new opinion on something I’ll need to read up on and think about. One’s work and the other isn’t.
The good news is, one, you’ll get a book out of it, and two, when the book is (finally for God’s sake) done I’ll almost certainly be back with all the takes you can possibly stand, hot, cold, tepid and everywhere else on the heat spectrum. Plus, I will finally get around to doing a Reader Request Week here, which is super late this year. Promise!
But in the meantime, please don’t expect much in the way of hot takes from me, even if the issue is important to you (and even if you think I should really care about it). The outside world’s gonna have to go on without me for a bit. You go on ahead. I’ll catch up eventually.
I’ve been aware of the “Many Worlds” interpretation of physics for some time — longtime readers of mine know it’s intimately connected with space travel in my “Old Man’s War” series of novels. But in the real world, how does it connect to the actual physics we know and (profess to) understand? Actual physicist Sean Carroll knows, and in his new book, Something Deeply Hidden, he delves right into it.
SEAN CARROLL:
If there’s one thing the world doesn’t need, it’s another book on quantum mechanics. I mean, who hasn’t written one? In preparation for writing Something Deeply Hidden, I searched on Amazon for books with titles of the form “Quantum X,” and was rewarded with Quantum Eating, Quantum Touch, Quantum Leadership, and many more.
The existence of these books reflects the widespread conviction that quantum mechanics, however scientists might think about it, is fundamentally profound and deeply mysterious, so it could mean just about anything. You might expect to find a countervailing stream of books by sober-minded physicists and science writers, doggedly explaining that quantum mechanics isn’t really all that inexplicable after all. It’s science, not mysticism.
That’s not exactly what you find. Sure, there are valiant attempts to dispel the worst kinds of quantum woo. But even the most hardnosed quantum books seem to agree that the subject is unavoidably murky, something so bizarre and ill-understood that it’s not meant to be grasped by mere human beings. This or that quantum phenomenon is trotted out, accompanied by an implicit shaking of the head – “Can you believe it? This makes no sense at all!”
So my big idea for Something Deeply Hidden was: quantum mechanics is understandable.
To be clear, the challenge is not just that quantum mechanics is complicated or recondite, like general relativity or the standard model of particle physics. It’s that physicists themselves, who are supposed to be experts, don’t understand it, and in their more honest moments they admit it.
Quantum mechanics sits at the absolute heart of all of modern physics; it’s the deepest, most important idea that physicists have. But what we teach our students, as philosopher Tim Maudlin has put it, is a recipe, not a theory.
We can set up a quantum system, like an electron orbiting the nucleus of an atom. And we can measure something about it, like its position. The quantum recipe tells us the probability of getting any particular measurement outcome. And that recipe has been tested to enormous precision, and has come through with flying colors every time.
What we can’t actually tell you is what happens when you measure a quantum system. What counts as “measuring”? How quickly does it happen? Do you have to be conscious?
All of these questions are, in the standard textbook formulation, left entirely vague. The resulting recipe is good enough for government work, or for building incredibly complex technologies, but it falls well short of the clarity and rigor we would expect of a well-defined scientific theory.
Thus, in the words of Richard Feynman, “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.”
At least, nobody thinks that other physicists understand quantum mechanics. Some of us, including myself, think we do understand the basics. The problem is that there is more than one honest, rigorous physical theory that reproduces the textbook quantum recipe in the appropriate regime. So we have multiple approaches, and have to decide which one is the best description of Nature; but that’s what scientists are always supposed to do.
So in the book I explain my favorite approach to quantum mechanics, the Many-Worlds formulation. It has a bad reputation, as it sounds a little science-fiction-y, or at least like you’re tacking on a bunch of extra stuff (entire universes worth) just to solve an irritating problem in quantum measurement. But the truth is the opposite: the theory is lean and mean, getting enormous mileage out of very few basic assumptions. The extra worlds are predicted by the theory, not tacked onto it.
One of the goals of Something Deeply Hidden is to make all that clear. But the broader, more important message is the one above: that quantum mechanics is understandable. Maybe my favorite understanding will turn out to be the right one, or maybe one of the various competitors. But they’re all ultimately intelligible, not ineffable.
It took me a while to come to this conclusion. I didn’t start out to be a rebel, fighting against the entrenched establishment of physicists who don’t want to face up to the quantum measurement problem. But the more I’ve worked in the field, and the more I’ve thought about it myself, the more irritating and embarrassing it is that we haven’t figure out quantum mechanics once and for all, and for the most part we haven’t even been trying. I’m hoping my book does its small part in changing that.
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Something Deeply Hidden: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s
Read an excerpt. Visit the author’s site. Follow him on Twitter.
Tulips, bitcoin, fantasy worlds — how to each relate to the other? Alexandra Rowland knows, and in their Big Idea for A Choir of Lies, they are happy to lay it all out for you.
ALEXANDRA ROWLAND:
Do you like coincidences? Here’s a cool one:
From November of 1636 to February of 1637, the Netherlands was gripped by the climax of tulip mania, the world’s first-ever economic bubble, and then a sudden crash of the market. At the height of the mania, a single bulb of the Viceroy tulip (which was not even the most expensive variety) sold for 2500 florins, more than $34,000 in today’s money.
From November of 2017 to February of 2018, the internet watched the rise and fall of the bitcoin bubble. There were rumors of people making their fortune because they’d bought into bitcoin years ago for pennies, and of people taking out mortgages to buy-in once the boom hit, then losing their homes when the bust followed.
And in November of 2017, I blithely started writing A Choir of Lies, a novel about fantasy tulip mania, thinking that it was going to be about something very obscure and difficult to explain to people. I wrote the fictional boom during the real boom, and the bust during the bust. To my enormous chagrin, I delivered the first draft to my editor at the beginning of February, 2018.
Yeah, I got nothin’.
Economics is a funny thing. Most people don’t understand it, so they think that it’s dull and boring. It’s supposedly about money and numbers and rules, and we hear a lot of pompous people using terms like “trickle-down” and talking about “the free market” with the same hushed reverence that some people use to talk about their god: An abstract and unknowable force to be worshiped and revered, which moves in mysterious ways and demands that we behave according to certain laws and principles or else.
But, like all the rest of our religions, economics is more about people than anything else. It’s just humans being human really, really hard at each other. We came up with “rules” of the “free market” based on simple observations of how people tend to behave in certain situations, and then we sort of… forgot that it was about them. We talk about the movements of money without thinking enough about who is moving it and why. This causes a ripple which turns into a tidal wave, and before you can think better of the whole sorry affair, you end up with late-stage capitalism and a bunch of CEOs who sweat and agonize about profit margins and, every decade, forget a little more that at the end of the day, it’s still just about people, and that people are important.
A Choir of Lies is narrated by Ylfing – if you’ve read A Conspiracy of Truths, you already know him: the sweet apprentice storyteller with a heart as big as the world. In the wake of the events of the first book (which you don’t need to have read to understand this next one), Ylfing is struggling with his relationship to his calling. He has seen stories used destructively, and he’s lost his connection to his audience. To escape having to tell stories, he takes a job as a translator to a wealthy merchant, Sterre de Wayer. However, as soon as she finds out the real extent of his skills, she persuades him to use those skills for her own ends and fan up a mania for her most recent import: bulbs of stars-in-the-marsh, an exotic bioluminescent flower. Ylfing can do what he does because he knows people. He knows that they will devour stories like a pack of ravening wolves. That’s all that marketing is—feeding your audience a story that whets their hunger instead of sating it.
The big idea for this book might seem fairly dry at first glance—a fantasy novel about economics? Really? YAWN—except that when I say that this is a book about economics, I mean that it’s a book about hunger and desire, about floods and famines, about how we determine our values (in every sense of the word—our worth, our cost, our morals). And, of course, woven through every line of it, it’s a book about… people. Just people being people as hard as they possibly can, with everything that that entails—the capacity for great kindness and self-sacrifice, the capacity for great greed and selfishness, and for the ability to hold those two contradictory impulses simultaneously in one hand.
Economics isn’t boring at all, it’s fascinating. It is as fascinating as political intrigue or comedies-of-manners or religious persecution or war, because all those things too are just people-being-people, coming up with intricate rules of a game that they’ve decided is terribly, terribly important, and then forgetting that that they can make new games with new rules, if the old ones no longer suit.
At the heart of the game of Economics (Late-Stage Capitalism Expansion Pack) is the idea that money is the most important resource. The big idea of A Choir of Lies, in one sentence, is just a question asked very softly: “But what if it isn’t?”
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A Choir of Lies: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s
Visit the author’s site. Follow them on Twitter.
And it looks like it’s going to be a merry Christmas for my little book, as it’s gotten positive reviews in Publishers Weekly, Booklist and Kirkus. And what do they say?
From Publishers Weekly:
“Scalzi (The Consuming Fire) unleashes his wicked wit in this stocking stuffer miscellany of mostly goofs and jibes directed at the holiday season. But not all is irreverence: two of the book’s 16 selections, ‘Christmas in July’ and ‘Sarah’s Sister,’ are sweet stories that exude Christmas cheer. Scalzi fans will find something here that appeals, no matter their feelings for the holiday.”
From Booklist:
“The collection shares Scalzi’s joy of the season and reminds the reader of the importance of the holiday, without being too serious.”
From Kirkus:
“Bestselling sci-fi author Scalzi injects plenty of holly and jolly into his second short story collection, a follow-up to Miniatures(2016). You’ve finished rewatching your bootleg version of The Star Wars Holiday Special and every episode of Futurama featuring the murderous Robot Santa, the Doctor Who Christmas special won’t be on for hours yet, and you already have Jonathan Coulton’s ‘Merry Christmas From Chiron Beta Prime’ on infinite loop. How else can you fill the Yuletide season with geekiness and laughs? This slim stocking stuffer may be just what you need.”
God bless them, every one.
Also, this is your reminder that you can pre-order the signed, limited edition of the book from Subterranean Press directly, and when you do, you will also receive the electronic version of the book (DRM free!) as a throw-in. And it will arrive in more than enough time for Christmas itself.
I’m pleased the book has been so well-received by the trades — a themed short story collection is not a guaranteed hit, to say the least. It’s nice it filled them with cheer. And it’s a good way to start the week!
Oh, hey, look at the time: It’s “A stack of new books and ARCs” o’clock! As it often is on Fridays afternoons. What here looks enticing to you? Share in the comments.
In today’s Big Idea for The Innocent Dead, a famous Muppet is revealed to be a master of teleology by author Steven S. Drachman. And that’s not the wildest idea on display today!
STEVEN S. DRACHMAN:
My Watt O’Hugh books (they’re now at long last a “trilogy”) are about a time-roaming 19th century gunman and his seemingly hopeless battle against a magical, secessionist, Utopian movement known as the “Sidonians.” The Sidonians, and their showy ruler, are responsible for the deaths of those Watt has loved, and are to blame for the shambles that his life has become. Shortly into the third book, this obsessional fight takes Watt all the way to the Hell of the Innocent Dead, the 6th level (out of a total of 18).
It is a land born from Chinese mythology, where those who die before their time go to await justice. It’s not the worst possible Hell: no one is on fire, but everything smells really bad, it’s damp and always just a little bit too cold, and the food is awful. Still, it is terribly unfair, a torment for someone who has really done nothing wrong, who simply cannot leave behind the terrible injustice of his death, who haunts the living when he sleeps.
But it is something more, too. It is not just a place, but an idea.
“Hell was invented by humans,” a long-time denizen explains to Watt. “Somebody thought of that and someone believed it. And here it is.” (He unwittingly quotes Kermit the Frog, who seems to have had a good grasp of the nature of Hell.)
The idea that consciousness plays some kind of role in the life of the universe is an old and appealing idea; and it is also an unprovable one, at least until we learn, Doolittle-like, how to talk to electrons. Still, physicist Arthur Eddington once announced, “The stuff of the world is mind stuff,” and, as the New Yorker writer Jim Holt noted in Why Does the World Exist, this opened a whole panpsychist Pandora’s box of philosophical musings (and some scientific musings as well, notably by Roger Penrose).
If the stuff of the world is mind stuff, and our consciousness comes straight out of the stardust that swirled about during the Big Bang, then you are really not an insignificant fleck of sand in an indifferent universe of two million quintillion planets. Instead, every atom is conscious, and we are all part of a single, universal thought.
So, in my tome, the 6th level of Hell still exists in the 19th century, because somebody thought of it long before, and the rest of us believed it, and it will be there until we collectively come up with a better theory, and prove this better theory. The superstitions of the past are not things we proved false and outgrew; they are things that used to be true and are not true anymore. At one time, in other words, there were turtles all the way down, and the stars in the sky were just pretty lights.
“We were eternal,” says Billy Golden, a colleague in the anti-Sidonian resistance. “At one ‘time’ you — we — were half-Divine. Then, we still danced with eternity. Beauty still existed, then. Now we are chromatids and centromeres, and our ‘soul’ is nothing more than ‘subjective experience,’ a part of evolution, a necessary survival mechanism. Look what we gave up when we rewrote the story.”
But a made-up reality that might change under your feet is a no-less deadly reality. So Watt is chagrined but not surprised to discover that the Sidonian rebellion is full-blown even in the 6th level of Hell, where he is soon designated a “general” as the battle approaches.
In the world of Watt O’Hugh, we’re all helping the universe decide what it wants to be when it grows up. And the Universe, as with any sentient, conscious creature, will either grow up to be “good” or “bad,” live a long life or die young.
Its prognosis, furthermore, doesn’t look good.
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Watt O’Hugh and the Innocent Dead: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s
Visit the author’s website. Follow him on twitter.
The Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas has announced that it’s changing the name of its annual conference from the Campbell Conference (named after Analog editor John W. Campbell) to the Gunn Center Conference. In the same announcement, it notes that it is discussing alternative names for its current Campbell Award, this one for best novel (yes, there were two different Campbell Awards for over 40 years; yes, this was a source of no small amusement during that time). “When a decision is made, we will announce it,” the Gunn Center said, which suggests that it’s not a question of if the name change will happen, but the timing of it.
This will no doubt start another round of anguished wailing from certain quarters about the erasure of John W. Campbell from the annals of science fiction history. The answer to this is he’s not being erased, he’s merely being reassessed. And the reassessment is: His extensive paper trail of bigotry, reactionary thought and pseudo-scientific nonsense wasn’t a great look at the time — a fact amply detailed by a number of his contemporaries in the field — and it’s even less of a great look now. As a result, his name is being taken off some things it was on before, because it staying on them means those things (and the people administering those things) would then have to carry the freight of, and answer for, his bigotry, reactionary thought and pseudo-scientific nonsense. And they would rather not.
“But why now?!?” comes the anguished cry. What is it about 2019 that suddenly makes John W. Campbell’s star fall? It’s easy for those angry to blame Jeannette Ng, who in winning what was then called the Campbell Award (the one for new writers, not the one for best novel, see, it was confusing) went up on stage and called Campbell a fascist. She wasn’t the first to say it — Michael Moorcock allegedly said it out loud and in public as far back as 1971 — but she said it while on a stage, accepting an award with his name on it.
But Ng wasn’t an errant spark that caused an unexpected explosion; she was the agitant that caused a supersaturated solution to crystallize. Generations of writers, editors, readers and fans have come up with no personal connection or allegiance eother to Campbell, or his particular vision of science fiction and fantasy. These generations include (and indeed have at their forefront) those who Campbell would have implicitly and explicitly not welcomed into the field. What was basically a long-standing whisper network about Campbell’s reputation became a shout when Ng said what she said. Ng could not have precipitated a change so suddenly if there wasn’t already something to precipitate. This was a long time coming.
Blah blah blah political correctness blah blah — Look. Campbell’s reputational demotion isn’t just because he “once said something that wasn’t nice.” Campbell was for many years the apex editor in his field. Writers aspiring to write in the field wrote to his specifications in the hopes of selling to him; writers established in the field (even Heinlein) wrote to his specifications and to his direction to continue to sell to him. If Campbell rejected a story, writers would send those stories out for submission to other places — which meant that even stories that appeared in other magazines and anthologies were written for Campbell first. Science fiction was made in Campbell’s image for decades.
Right! Which is why those awards should still have his name on them! Hold on there, chuckles. Science fiction was made in Campbell’s image for decades — and Campbell was also a bigot and a reactionary, and liked his stories just so. For some people, he was the primary market to sell to, for better and for worse. For others, he was damage to be routed around, or put up with, and an impediment to the work they could publish. Not because their writing wasn’t good or interesting or important in itself, but because they were who they were as writers and humans, and Campbell was who he was as a writer and editor.
The field of science fiction is what it is in many ways because of who Campbell was. This, however, is not an argument that science fiction was the best it could have been because Campbell was who he was. Was the field genuinely best served by having a man who was a bigot and a reactionary as its apex editor? Jeanette Ng wasn’t the first to think it wasn’t — indeed, entire branches of science fiction literature arrived at least in part as a reaction to Campbell and his editorial dictates. Today’s writers, editors, readers and fans are not inherently bound to Campbell by sentimentality, by duty, or by philosophy, editorial or otherwise. They don’t owe him deference, nor are they required to see his decades-long primacy in the field as a wholly positive thing (or indeed, positive at all).
People aren’t perfect and you take the good and the bad together — but every generation, and every person, gets to decide how to weigh the good and the bad, and to make judgments accordingly. In the early seventies, in the wake of Campbell’s passing, such was Campbell’s reputation in the field of science fiction that he could be memorialized by two separate awards in his name, and apparently nobody batted an eye (or if they did, they didn’t count). Nearly fifty years later and at the end of the second decade of the 21st century, such is Campbell’s reputation in the field of science fiction that Campbell’s name is off one award, and may be off the other soon enough. In another 50 years, Campbell’s reputation in the field may be different again, or may simply be what so many things are after a century, which is, a historical footnote.
Campbell’s current reassessment doesn’t mean he stops being a part of the history of science fiction, or an influence on the field. I’ve noted before I write science fiction in a fashion that is essentially “Campbellian” in broad subject matter and tone, and it’s done pretty well for me, and I suspect will continue to for a while to come. It would be difficult (and dishonest) for me not to acknowledge his influence on my work, or his continuing impact on the field in general. I also acknowledge that so much of the best science fiction and fantasy today is not Campbellian in subject or tone, and written by people and voices I suspect Campbell wouldn’t have deemed essential to the genre. The state of the genre today is such that it has room for all of us, and the genre has never been healthier. There’s no one editor serving as a bottleneck, either for writers or readers. This is good news.
Campbell is and will always be part of science fiction’s history. But history isn’t static, even if the facts of history stay the same. Anyone notable enough to be part of the historical record will find themselves the subject of reassessment, for however long they grace history’s record. It is, weirdly, a privilege not many people get. Campbell was never guaranteed a pedestal, or an award, or a conference in his name, even if he got them for a while. He was never guaranteed to keep them. No one is.
Seriously, these flowers arrived on my doorstep with a note that said “Congratulations for just being a pretty awesome person” and it was signed “The Internet.”
And, well. I’m actually touched. Whether I am actually awesome enough to truly deserve flowers from the Internet remains to be seen, but I certainly appreciate the vote of confidence and will endeavor to live up to the flowers (and when I don’t, to at least try to learn from it).
But, yeah. Getting unexpected flowers made my day. Thanks, Internet!
Reboot, reimagine, reinvent — there is nothing new under the sun, as they say, and humans find ways of looking at old stories in new ways. This is an idea that acclaimed editors Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe have taken to heart in their new anthology The Mythic Dream. Here they are to go into the details.
DOMINIK PARISIEN and NAVAH WOLFE:
We’ve always known that old stories have power. And as editors and readers, we’ve always been drawn to retelling those old stories. There’s something uniquely compelling about seeing authors taking the bones of an old tale and giving it new life. There’s a certain kind of narrative truth that comes from reading a familiar story turned on its head.
Retellings are a pleasure for authors to write, and for audiences to read and fall into. They give that shiver of recognition, that thrill of having something familiar refocused in dramatic ways. They’re also a joy to work with as editors. On a commercial level, there is of course the benefit of working with stories that people recognize. But, more importantly, putting together these types of anthologies is an incredibly creative process for editors, much more than simply compiling narratives. We get to delve deep into the bones of those stories, work with our authors to help them determine which bits might be worth exploring, which might resonate in today’s world and how, to juxtapose familiar and unfamiliar tales and find the connective threads between them across time and cultures.
Our first anthology, The Starlit Wood, was born on our shared love of fairy tale retellings. It was an absolute joy to get to immerse ourselves in an editorial project that let us explore and play with the stories we grew up with, the stories that shaped our narrative, story-loving minds. For our second book together, Robots vs Fairies, we went in a very different direction, but retellings still slipped in as reimagined versions of Pinnochio, Peter Pan, The Tempest, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. We couldn’t quite leave retellings in our rearview window.
And so for our third project together, we knew we wanted to return to that same familiar territory, but like a retelling, differently. We wanted to play some more in that liminal space that comes when you retell an old story in a new way. So it was immediately clear to us what our next anthology should be.
We’ve always been fascinated by myths. Not just the two of us—the human race. And how could we not be? Myths are stories with power. They resonate across ages and cultures and help us understand the world, as it was or might have been, as it could be. Our myths define us. They’re the stories we tell and retell that shape our past, that tell us where we come from, how we got here. They anchor us into a common history, and make us feel rooted, like we belong. If our stories have been told for generations, then we’ve been here at least that long. Where stories have history, so do we. But what happens when our origin myths fail us? When the stories that define us don’t leave space for marginalized voices and identities?
When we were figuring out what we wanted this book to be about, one quote from Madeleine L’Engle kept resonating with us: “When we lose our myths, we lose our place in the universe.” We knew we wanted The Mythic Dream to use myths to reclaim our place in the universe. And so we asked eighteen brilliant writers to take these classic stories and reimagine them, to explore our collective past, examine our present, and take hold of our future.
And we couldn’t be happier with the resulting stories. Alyssa Wong imagines an Artemis and Acteon, where the hunting ground is the internet rather than the woods. Seanan McGuire puts Persephone in a carnival. Amal El-Mohtar gives Bloddeuwedd back her voice, her agency, and her vengeance. Arkady Martine’s Inanna takes command of galaxies and starships. Carlos Hernandez’s Cuban bogeyman becomes a source of hope instead of terror. Indrapramit Das asks what happens when an Indian AI become a goddess. Carmen Maria Machado’s Erysichthon gets a powerful dose of consequences.
And that’s the big idea of The Mythic Dream. Taking the stories that shaped and defined us, and shaping them in turn, in order to create the world we want to see around us. So join us in The Mythic Dream, and reclaim your place in the universe, one myth at a time.
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The Mythic Dream: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s
First, this tweet from CoNZealand 2020 (next year’s Worldcon), regarding how it intends to proceed with the newly-renamed Astounding Award:
This is relevant because there were some folks who were saying that due to the name change and the WSFS constitution, the Astounding Award could not be administered/given out until the WSFS constitution itself noted the change of name, a process which could take two years or longer. Fortunately for everyone involved, the people who are actually running the convention recognized this was trivial nickpickery of the highest order; it’s the same award and there’s no reason not to keep doing things as they have been. So it’s good that’s settled.
Second, there’s not been any guidance to how people who won the award when it was known as the Campbell should refer to themselves in relation to the award today: Are we still Campbell Award winners, or are we now Astounding Award winners? Well, I’ve personally made the unilateral decision that I will be referring to myself as an “Astounding Award winner” and when necessary for context I’ll say “Astounding Award (formerly the Campbell Award)” or some such*.
Why? Mostly because I think it makes sense to standardize how we refer to the award and to use the current name for doing so. I think previous winners and nominees adopting the new name in reference to their nominations and wins is useful in terms of helping with the transition from one name to the next. There may be some previous award winners and nominees that prefer to continue using the former name and that’s their right, for whatever reason, but I’m fine with the new name. So: Astounding Award winner it is.
With regard to others referring to the Astounding Award, my suggestion is they also use the new name for the award, but given the history of the award and the length of time the Astounding was the Campbell, I’m not going to go out of my way to be offended if people refer to it as the Campbell. It’s possible a very small minority of people who are performatively outraged at the name change will insist on calling it the Campbell in the same way and for the same reasons that some people think saying “Merry Christmas” is striking a blow against political correctness, or whatever. Those people are silly, and also a little bit sad. But to each their own.
In any event, hi, I won the Astounding Award, back when it was called the Campbell. But you can say I won the Astounding Award for short.
(* Please note that while I am adopting the Astounding name moving forward, by and large I am not going to go back into this site’s archives and swap out “Campbell” with “Astounding” in previously written entries. That would be a lot of work, and I am lazy. I will probably update it on professional bios/CVs and such. That is much less work.)
David Koepp is already one of the most successful screenwriters of all time, with films like Jurassic Park, Spider-Man and one of my personal favorites, Death Becomes Her, to his name. Now he’s turned his attention to novels with the bio-thriller Cold Storage. Koepp is here to tell you how the novel began, and why this time it is a novel, not a screenplay.
DAVID KOEPP:
New York City, as is its habit, pushed the big idea in front of me, disguised as a very small one.
I was walking down the street in mid 2017, up early on a steamy August morning. It was only 7 a.m. but the city was sweltering already, and walking the two blocks from the deli to my apartment had covered me with a thin sheen of yuck.
It was the look on the guy’s face that I noticed first. He was a Hispanic guy in his mid-twenties, thin and looking exhausted, dressed in a security guard’s uniform. I figured he was on his way home from the night shift. Then again, it was 6:30 in the morning, so he might have been up early. Coming or going, his expression told me he hated his job.
I thought back on jobs I’d had and hated when I was his age, and that despite my loathing, I was grudgingly grateful to have had them. Maybe this guy felt the same way. I wondered, if something weird happened at his boring-ass job that night, what if he decided that, even though it was a shitty job, it was his shitty job, and god damnit he was going to do it well.
That’s a guy you could tell a story about.
All my ideas for the past thirty years have come in movie form, so I assumed this one was a film as well. I collected string for a few more months, waiting for other parts of the story to pop into my head from my daily life – a mysterious beeping smoke alarm somewhere in the attic that took weeks to find, my own fears of infection and decay – and then I sat down to start throwing words at it.
Movies often begin as treatments, horrible documents that reflect neither good prose nor good screenwriting but are more a summary of what a script could be. For some reason, after the first couple sentences on this one, I couldn’t face working in this-happens-and-then-that-happens form for the umpteenth time and decided to try it as half-decent prose. I think that because the story originated as a character idea – a hard-working, resentful but earnest young man trapped in a polyester shirt on a hot August morning — the telling of it began as thoughts inside someone’s head.
Yowza, what a difference.
In thirty years of movie writing, I’d never written a character’s inner thoughts before. Lame, but true. The script writer is limited by the tools of the medium, able to write only what an audience sees or hears. If a character doesn’t see, say, or do it, you can’t get it in your movie. The lucky writer of prose, by contrast, gets to write anything, anywhere, anytime. Thoughts inside a person’s head? No problem. The point of view of an inanimate object, like a deadly fungus? Sure, go right ahead, sounds cool.
And the pace of a book! Movies are slaves to plot, they thrive on constant forward movement. Tarantino digresses for ten or twelve minutes and everybody loses their mind; we’ll be talking about his boldness for decades. But in a book, an author can wander off in any direction at all, like a four-year-old chasing a butterfly in a meadow. The reader will usually hang with it. Mostly, the butterflies I chased were the inner thoughts and feelings of that night shift security guard.
Maybe I got him completely wrong. Maybe he loved his job and just didn’t like the heat. Maybe he’d just started his own private security company and was overcome with responsibility, or maybe he STOLE the uniform and had left the real guard dead in a doorway somewhere. All I had to base my 300 pages of assumptions on was the look he had on his face in a single moment.
In the couple years since the moment that sparked the book, I’ve had time to think about the big idea lurking behind that chance moment of passing, the question raised by that flash of perceived insight into the life of another person.
How come we don’t know each other anymore? Our communication is broken down, despite unprecedented ability to get our thoughts out into the public discourse, and to read and hear the thoughts of others we might not agree with. Of course, we don’t read and hear them, we click away at the speed of light, and because we can’t see their faces, we’re never forced to wonder what makes them tick.
But the city knows better, it pushes us into each other’s paths. The city said “hey, check out this guy,” so I did; it asked “what’s his deal?,” so I wondered.
I hope your day at work was unshitty, dude. With zero deadly fungal outbreaks.
—-
Cold Storage: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s
I woke up early enough that dew was still on the spiderwebs. I imagine it’s a little annoying for the spiders, but it sure is pretty for the rest of us.
(And yes, we have quite a few spiders. Which means we have fewer of the others sorts of bugs. Fair trade.)
He’s got a good view of it all, I have to say.
At the airport now and heading home. Hope you’re having a lovely Labor Day weekend.
As we roll into the final weekend of summer*, here’s a hefty stack of new books and ARCs for your consideration. What’s in this stack you’d like to see summer off with? Tell us all in the comments!
(*Northern Hemisphere only. Statement inaccurate in terms of equinoxes. Your mileage may vary. Consult a doctor if problems persist.)
This view is very similar to another view around this time a couple of years ago, for the reason that I’m in the same city with the same purpose — I’m in Washington DC for the National Book Festival. My particular event is tomorrow at 1pm, and I’ll also be signing books right after. If you’re in the area, come see me there. Or don’t, I’m not the boss of you. But it should be fun anyway.
I’m a simple man, and so I can say one of the things that made me feel like a real fancy pants person — someone who had really made it in the world — was the day we got a new refrigerator and instead of throwing out the old one entirely, we moved it to the garage, where it took on a new and even more celebrated life as our drinks fridge. Look, when you get to a point in your life where you have a whole fridge just for drinks, you’re kind of top of the heap. Call me provincial, but I still wholly smug about it.
Today I was out and about, and we were running low on soda, so I went ahead and stocked up. Krissy and I don’t generally drink sugared sodas at this point, so most of the soda here is diet. We have both Coke Zero and Diet Coke (regular and caffeine-free versions), and I also have the Vanilla and Orange Vanilla versions of Coke Zero just to mix things up. We also have diet Barq’s, Sprite Zero, Cherry 7-UP, Diet Cherry Dr Pepper and Caffeine-Free Diet Dr Pepper, Diet Orange Crush and Diet Ginger Ale with Lemonade, plus various other drinkables, including Krissy’s beer and mixers (there’s usually a 12-pack of Michelob Ultra down there on the bottom shelf as well).
Yes, we drink a lot of soda. Don’t worry, we have water from the tap (which we then filter, because we have well water). It’s in the other fridge, along with milk and various fruit juices. We do drink other things, is what I’m saying. Try not to worry too much about our kidneys.
Do you have a drinks fridge? Do you feel smug about it if you do? Do you want one if you don’t? I’m genuinely curious.
“Gaaaaah! So much effluvia!”
Thank you for your attention. Have a fine evening.
