Fellow Travellers

Scoundrel “Slippery Jim” DiGriz AKA the Stainless Steel Rat, so cunning he has two criminal nicknames, has never been outwitted, outmanoeuvred, captured or executed.

Until now.

The Stainless Steel Rat (The Stainless Steel Rat, volume 1) by Harry Harrison

$radiantfracture: Small painting of Penguin book (Books post)$

radiantfracture

I have to leave the house sometime. I sent myself downtown to pick up more black ink and paper for loon prints. On impulse, I leapt onto the #6 bus instead of the homeward vessel and rode out along Quadra through a sudden pelting rainstorm. Riding the bus suits my habitual (and currently intensified) feelings of displacement and liminality.

I got out at Royal Oak Shopping Centre, a disorientingly centreless mass of self-spawning plazas.

The attraction of the Royal Oak is the Smart Bookshop, a longstanding proper old-fashioned used bookstore. In the literature section, this unassuming black hardcover caught my eye:

I opened Mörder Guss Reims: The Gustave Leberwurst Manuscript (1981) to a random page and found a curiously over-annotated poem in German. I only glanced at the German, and I could not make sense of it, but the ratio of annotation to poem had a real Pale Fire shimmer. Sincere? In-? Either way, desirable.

I thought: yes, this is clearly the book I came in here for. I paid my $5 and left with it tucked into my bag.

I did not work out the trick, because I did not try sounding out the cod German. (Try it!)

Just now I web-searched and found out what sort of artefact this is. It is a remarkably poker-faced object in both design and presentation. However, the copyright page gives the game away:

Macaronic literature! Facetiae!

I do think this John Hulme must be a Nabokov fan. I have not yet been able to find out anything about him online, except that this seems to have been his Own Particular Genre. (I do not think he can be the contemporary author/director of the same name, since he would have had to publish this book at the age of 12.)

§rf§

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/06/various-sundry-6-6-26/

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60967

It’s a bit of a stormy day here. Let’s see what’s going on elsewhere.

The “K”-shaped economy comes for laptops: There’s been a trade show this week called Computex (there seems to be a big event in the tech field every other week or so), and Michael Crider of PC Week notes that at the show, the new laptops come in two flavors: The really cheap ones, designed to compete with MacBook Neo, which has completely swamped the low-end of the laptop market, and the really expensive ones, which most people will have to think twice about buying. The middle ground laptop for the middle-class buyer? It’s just not there anymore. This is evidence, Crider argues, of a the “K-shaped” economy at work, the economy where the upper 20% of consumers are doing just fine, and the bottom 80% of consumers are… not.

A couple of things about this: One, you can still get middle-ground laptops in the real world (here’s an Acer laptop with a 14-inch screen, 32GB of memory and 1 TB of storage, plus a couple of goodies, for under $900), although they mostly have to have been made before the RAM crunch brought on by “AI” companies buying all the memory in the world. Two, that self-same RAM crunch is wreaking havoc on manufacturers at the moment, precisely in that middle ground. It makes sense for them to focus on the lower end (where they don’t have to spend too much for RAM) and the higher end (where the consumer is less price-sensitive), then in the middle, where they watch their margins shrink to nothing.

I’m not disagreeing with Crider’s thought about the “K-shaped” economy, because I think it’s real: it’s pretty evident to me that the economy sucks for everyone but the people who don’t have to worry about prices. I also think, in computing spaces, the hollowing out of the middle ground is exacerbated by other factors, particularly the “AI” RAM crunch, which is not (directly) about that K-shape. It still sucks if you’re in the market for a computer.

Predictions on the World Cup thingy I think is about to start: On one hand I’m being a little obnoxious, I know what the World Cup is and what’s going on with it, on the other hand I am also not super-engaged with it, partly because I don’t tend to follow sports in general, partly because I think FIFA is one of the most corrupt organizations in the world, which lessens my interest in the World Cup considerably, and partly because this year is the wrong year to have the US co-hosting, for several reasons.

Nevertheless if you have an interest in the World Cup, I hope you enjoy it. Also I have no idea who is going to win it, but I don’t imagine it will be the US. I’m okay with this.

Screwworm back in the US after 60 years, which means your beef, which is already expensive, is about to become even more so. Does this have anything to do with the absolutely idiotic decision from DOGE to cut screwworm monitoring and prevention out of the budget? Well, at the very least, it certainly didn’t help. Is this all hurting Americans while benefiting others? Oh, probably. And while I’m sure there are some people who might be gleeful that the point of pain is that the moment most centered on those who likely brought Trump back into power, anyone who eats beef is next, so don’t get too smug about it, if you are of a mind to. Also, if you were ever planning to reduce the amount of red meat in your diet, here’s a good reason to get on it.

The new Taylor Swift song for Toy Story 5: It’s perfectly good! There have been better songs associated with the Toy Story movies, but there’s nothing at all wrong with this one, and I’m sure it will work perfectly well in the movie. The going line with this one is that this is Swift’s return to country, which, okay, sure, let’s go with that. I’m already laying good odds that this gets Swift an Oscar early next year, and I don’t imagine that will be the worst thing in the world. There are a lot worse songs to have garnered that particular bauble. Enjoy.

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/06/various-sundry-6-6-26/

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60967

oursin

At first I thought this was about keeping them as pets ('linked to the pet trade', but I think it's actually about using them as pet food: More than 100,000 live exotic cockroaches have been seized from a commercial breeder in New South Wales in a record-breaking bust linked to the pet trade

***

Things actually not quite working (or likely to work) as touted:

Tesla's Full Self-Driving is so ready for the future that some of the people who trained it reportedly will not get in the car.

“Model collapse” threatens to kill progress on generative AIs: When AI eats its own product, it gets sick. Back in the day I think this sort of thing was known as photocopy syndrome - copies of copies of copies getting more and more degraded?

Mathematical modelling suggests that it is theoretically possible to reduce risk of common diseases using heritable genome editing. Scientists argue that the technology involves considerable risk and uncertain benefits.

***

Not really surprised by this: New study: Most people are not actually worried about trans women in women's bathrooms.

***

Wow. 1935 French case in which a man was acquitted of murder because the man he had shot was 'a well-known “witch” who had caused all sorts of harm'.

rydra_wong

Recced Norman Maclean's Young Men and Fire to a couple of people lately, picked up my copy again to refresh my memory of something, and now it has its teeth in me and won't let go until I reread the whole thing and I've already had to go to YouTube and listen to the Cry Cry Cry cover of "Cold Missouri Waters."

And then I found an amazing quote from the songwriter, James Keelaghan, which is one of the best descriptions of the book I've read:

https://nathans-roncast.castos.com/episodes/how-james-keelaghan-wrote-cold-missouri-waters-part-1

And so just the story itself is compelling. But for Norman Maclean's writing of it, like, I don't know if you know the book, but Norman McLean was sort of, the fire was an area of specialty for him, for, you know, it was one of his little private obsessions. And he always meant to write a book about it. And he started to write the book, but he died before it was finished. And the book was then sort of completed by his editors and also by his son.

So you not only get the story of the fire and incredible amount of detail about how the smoke jumpers fit into the National Forest Service, how they were created as a unit, but also stuff about the mathematics of how fire spreads in various circumstances. But you also get this sense of MacLean being a writer who is running out of time to tell the story that he really wants to tell because he knows he's dying. He's in a great deal of pain, I think, when he's writing the book. And all that comes through this, this impatient, irascible old man, this voice actually comes through in the book. And then I felt like, yeah, you know, I really need to write a song about this.

Anyway Dodge just ordered them to drop the heavy tools so I have to get back to the book now.

For a setting where everyone is supposed to have some sort of common origin and yet they all have wildly different abilities.

The PCs all have medical conditions addressable by transplants ranging from minor stuff like a cornea transplant to organ transplants. By tremendous luck, a donor comes in just as they all hit the top of their respective wait lists. However, unbeknownst to the doctors or the recipients, the dead person--who died peacefully in their sleep from unknown causes--was the local superhero, someone with a Superman or Martian Manhunter-level buffet of abilities.

Each PC gains an ability appropriate for the particular body part they received... and once their abilites manifest feel obligated to use them to replace the mysteriously vanished superhero.

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/charmed-and-dangerous-by-shelly-page/

Four books new to me. Two books whose genre isn't immediately clear to me, two fantasies. Three currently lack final cover art.

Books Received, May 30 — June 5

Poll #34694 Books Received, May 30 — June 5

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 47

View Respondents

Which of these look interesting?

View Answers

The Magical Cheese Emporium by Sarah Beth Durst (January 2027)
24 (51.1%)

A Devil of a Crime by T. Kingfisher (March 2027)
31 (66.0%)

Nocturnus by Greer Rivers (February 2027)
6 (12.8%)

Lock Her Up by Elizabeth Searle (October 2026)
9 (19.1%)

Some other option (see comments)
2 (4.3%)

Cats!
29 (61.7%)

strangehorizons_feed

Posted by Dean Leetal

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=59599

In these horrifying days, who doesn't need a happy story about Black sapphic girls falling in love, with a low stakes whodunit about magical mishaps? I sure did.

The story of Charmed and Dangerous centers a malfunctioning love charm which is wreaking havoc on Monroe Bennett's high school. Monroe, a young recruit of the Bureau of Mystical Affairs, must stop the charm and find the culprit, to gain a permanent position in the Bureau. Monroe is a mystic, one of the few who have the power to visually see charms, and not just their effects. To stop the charm, she agrees to fake-date the director's daughter. But how can she believably fake-date a rom com enthusiast, when she herself doesn't believe in romance?

The story takes place in the cozy town of Fair Glen, which used to be widely magical. Long ago, however, the ability to create new magic was lost. At the time of the story, the town still enjoys lingering charms, but some are starting to decay. It is the Bureau's job to find and contain malfunctioning magic, which causes mishaps. These mishaps can be anything from garden gnomes blocking the road on Monroe’s first day in her job, to far more dangerous accidents.

For example, in Monroe's school, everyone is excited and nervous for the upcoming Prom. Prom-posals, romantic gestures, and misguided crushes are flying around. What makes this all more dangerous is a misfiring charm that someone is circulating among the student body. The charm erupts when unreciprocated romantic connections are expressed. Only reciprocal romance can lift the curse.

For Monroe, the charm's damage is another reason to be critical of romance. The text juxtaposes Monroe's dislike of romance with her fake girlfriend Iris’s love of romance. Iris is an expert on the subject, writing fan fiction, sharing statistics about romance books, and taking Monroe on sweet dates. For example, the two go to a screening of Pretty Woman at a drive-in. Monroe ends up liking the movie enough that, after a magical mishap interrupts the date, she decides to watch the rest of it voluntarily.

The novel is a rare example of a story with a butch main character, which is delightful. I also enjoyed the fact that Iris’s feminine interests were described in a way that made me respect her. It would have been easy to make fun of a romance loving teenage girl. Girls’ interests are so often looked down upon, especially BIPOC girls’. Moreover, juxtaposing Iris with a less feminine, romance-averse character could have resulted in femmephobia. But I didn't feel as if that were the case.

Indeed, as a romance novel about romance, the story plays with meta-awareness a little: The characters, familiar with the fake dating trope, realize that they are in danger of falling in love with one another. In order to avoid that eventuality, they make a plan: they will treat one another in romantic ways they dislike.

“We do things that annoy each other so we don’t fall in love. For instance, I hate pet names. Honey. Baby. Sugar. Yuck. Call me one of those, and I’ll immediately get the ick. I also don’t like being walked to class. I’m an independent woman. I don’t need an escort.”

Of course, this is not a strong enough ploy to stop true love. But other issues stand in the way of our couple:

Iris is love-obsessed, and I’m too jaded about love for us ever to be a match. Iris wants someone who’s perfect for her. Someone who’ll float on a door with her in the ocean, climb fire escapes with roses in their mouth, and do all the rom-com stuff she deserves. I don’t know the first thing about romance.

I should be clear that Monroe is not aromantic herself, she just expresses opinions often socially linked with aromantic people, and goes through some experiences that many aromantic people do. As a quoiromantic (a type of aromantic) reader, Monroe's suspicion of romance was emotionally tangled for me to read. For example:

I ignore the uncomfortable tug in my chest at even the mention of crushes. […] They don’t understand why dating is the last thing on my mind right now. Even if I weren’t in the Bureau, romance seems pointless when I’m not even sure that kind of love exists. What is real is the Bureau. […] Being able to help people plagued by magical misfortunes is the thing that makes my heart race. Romantic love only reminds me of hard times and broken promises. I’m good without it, and nothing’s changing my mind.

I would have enjoyed more of a complex exploration of this topic, such as wondering what the difference is between friendship and romance, or acknowledging that the same plot could have happened as a queerplatonic relationship. The novel presents Monroe’s very valid suspicion of romance as nothing but a result of her parents’ divorce, and the story resolves with these feelings being “cured.”

Regardless, Monroe does express some important ideas that aromantic cultures respect, such as cherishing her platonic friendships:

Dad always says having a couple of good friends is better than a lot of mediocre ones. Liz and Andie are as good as they come. I’ve known Liz since pre-K, and when Andie moved to Fair Glen two years ago, he melded into our crew like he’d been with us for years. They always have my back and stepped up when my parents broke the news about their divorce. My friends came straight over, with Andie streaming Pose and RuPaul’s Drag Race and Liz keeping my plate full of her homemade chocolate cupcakes.

Developing deep, meaningful friendship, and valuing it over (or not as lesser than) romance is a cause I hold very dearly, and I loved that the novel seems to share this view. Even though the book is light and sweet, it respects its readers, including those who love a mystery plot. This is not one of those books where the mystery is only there to support the story. The novel provides a satisfying conclusion to the whodunit plot. The novel also respects the rules of its magical system, “curing” the victims by using it.

The novel has a delightful cover by Roxie Vizcarra and Casey Moses. In another life, in which I decorated my little functional flat, I would be getting another copy just to display it. The novel’s characters are likable and endearing, and their relationship is believable. I felt like they genuinely liked one another, which has been unfortunately rare in my romance reading lately. The novel is marketed as Young Adult, but I believe it works for adults as well—it does for me.

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/charmed-and-dangerous-by-shelly-page/

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=59599

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/05/me-and-brandon-sanderson-in-conversation/

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60961

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/05/me-and-brandon-sanderson-in-conversation/

In April I went town to the Atlanta area to chat with Brandon Sanderson, and we talked about writing, of course, but also about kids, about our early days in the industry and how it was I became Brandon’s official nemesis. It’s an hour-long chat including Q&A from the audience, and it’s now up on YouTube, which means I can embed it here for you. I think it’s pretty clear we were having a lot of fun chatting. I hope you’ll have fun watching us do our thing.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60961

conuly

Which I can sum up for you as "They went on one date a decade and a half ago and have been obsessed with each other ever since. Also, something terrible happened to Boston and everybody therein."

(It got sent to the moon. I'm just going to assume everybody died almost before they had time to realize.)

*************************

( Read more... )

brithistorian

5 June 2026
- Komi Can't Communicate, vol. 37 (Tomohito Oda)
6 June 2026
- Welcome to the Ballroom*, vol. 12 (Tomo Takeuchi)

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/05/various-and-sundry-6-5-26/

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60950

What interesting tidbits of thought do I have for you today? Let’s find out together!

Bots now make up more than half of Internet traffic: Internet provider Cloudflare says more than 57% of the traffic to the sites it hosts are bots (i.e., automated computer requests) rather than actual humans, who make up the other 43%. My feeling about this is less surprise than wonder that it’s taken this long; bot traffic was already a scourge more than a decade ago. That percentage is unlikely to go down, ever, as “agentic AI” is being pushed by tech companies, so a bot can go out onto the Internet and find information and bring it back so that you don’t ever have to leave the cozy bosom, of, say, Google.

How will this sort of thing work about for people who actually have sites (waves) when the vast majority of traffic is comprised of bots, who don’t read ads and don’t want things? The article rather optimistically suggests that a change might happen where bots are charged for access to web sites and information, whilst humans get to wander the Internet for free, which, of course, runs counter to the tech company ethos of making someone else pay for the stuff it wants to take without paying. So I’m going to just say I’m not convinced this will be the wave of the future.

Regardless, this site is subsidized by me making money doing other stuff and has been for 28 years now, with no plans to change at any point in the future. Please enjoy your free information! Also, buy my books, thanks.

Freedom 250 concerts cancelled, to be replaced with a Trump rally: Sad news for Vanilla Ice, who was the last performer of note still planning to perform; as I said on Threads, he “really needed that gig, now his frosted tips are gonna get repossessed.” In fact I don’t know if he still has frosted tips, or even hair. The 90s were a very long time ago now.

Trump is now having a rally on June 26th, where his aimless meandering mouth pooping will be occasionally interrupted by Lee Greenwood singing “God Bless the USA,” or some such. If you attend, you deserve what you’re going to get, and that’s all I have to say about that. Greenwood’s own reputation as a musician will not be notably dinged for his appearance; being hauled out for a single moment of performative patriotism for politicians who actively hate the majority of Americans is what he’s been known for this entire century. I hope it pays well.

Let’s end on a music high note: A countrified cover of “You’re the One that I Want” from Grey DeLisle and Les Greene. Voice acting nerds will know DeLisle as the voice of numerous characters in shows and video games, my own particularly favorite being Mandy in The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, but she also has a nice side gig singing Country & Western stuff. Enjoy!

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/05/various-and-sundry-6-5-26/

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60950

oursin

Nostalgic pop music post....

I've been thinking for some time about pop songs featuring places in London - in the title, which lets out 'Dedicated Follower of Fashion' poncing around various parts to be admired, or 'Lola' down in Old Soho - and having a bit of a struggle (maybe one would do better with Ye Olde Music Hall numbers?) but anyway, came up with these:

This one is perhaps pushing it a bit, as it was actually spoofing 'Rock Island Line', a cover of which was a UK mega-hit for Lonnie Donegan:

Take it away Jim Dale, on the Piccadilly Line!

and to continue the London Underground motif, suburban pastoral from the New Vaudeville Band:

further Tube mentions, this time more urban pastoral, with the Kinks:

Getting down and dirty in Soho with Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich:

And finally, rocking down to Electric Avenue with Eddy Grant:

https://plaidadder.tumblr.com/post/818580331051499520

plaidder_tumblr_feed

itsalwaysdark:

you have to be careful reading too many things that are good/smart/well-written bc then you encounter something that isnt and you get confused like ? why didnt they just make this good ? were they stupid

https://plaidadder.tumblr.com/post/818580331051499520

We've all encountered this trope in post-apocalyptic fiction before. Let's give it a name...

Finally, a Unit of Measurement for a Certain Kind of Moral Depravity…

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3255/

The research was overseen by the Institutional Review Board, which is what I named my surfboard.

https://xkcd.com/3255/

Soyoung Rose Kang would like to have her cake and eat it too. Happily for Ms. Kang, she lives in a world where that’s possible.

To an extent.

Sublimation by Isabel J. Kim

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/04/a-very-fond-farewell-to-misaky-tokyo/

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60873

All the way back in 2022, I posted about a candy company I had recently discovered called Misaky Tokyo. They specialized in kohakutou, a traditional Japanese candy that looks like gems and geodes. Basically fancy rock candy. And I was enamored with them. I loved the lux branding, the idea of beautiful treats meant for special occasions that were more than just candy. Not only did the candy feel special, but the brand felt special since it was a minority, LGBTQIA+, woman-owned business that was constantly making a difference by donating to charities such as the LA LGBTQ Center and the AAPI community.

Misaky Tokyo was classy, cool, fun, and authentic. And they were generous! They gifted me two of their delicious boxes after my first review of them. I ended up buying more boxes from them shortly after, but that gesture of kindness really stuck with me.

I was sad when they took a break for a while, but I always hoped they’d come back after a well deserved rest. In an unexpected turn of events, Misaky Tokyo is closing the door on this chapter, after the owner’s battle with cancer.

View this post on Instagram

As said in the video, they had a final sale to close out Misaky Tokyo for good. Of course, I had to get in on this, and bought their Complete Farewell Set, which came with one 5-gem box and two 3-gem boxes, so eleven gems total. I am so glad I get to experience them one last time, as they sold out of these very quickly, and I have never found kohakutou that is as stunning and delicious as Misaky’s.

So let’s take one last look at Misaky Tokyo’s lovely candy together, and wish them well in their new chapter.

Two white rectangular boxes with green and gold ribbons plus a big green square box with a red and gold ribbon.

The two 3-piece boxes had the exact same gems in it, so I ended up gifting one to my cousin and she thought it was so cute!

A shot of the three gems in the 3-gem box, unwrapped and displayed on top of the white box with the flavor card in front.

The 5-piece set ended up having those same pieces in it, plus two other flavors:

Five gems laid out on a small white and purple floral plate.

So, not a ton of diversity in this set, but it makes sense since it was their last run and they were probably just trying to focus their efforts on giving people their last hurrah and not focusing on broadening their flavor horizons. Regardless, I’m so glad I got to enjoy Misaky Tokyo and even share them one last time! I truly wish them the best moving forward and will really miss their lovely kohakutou.

Did you ever get the chance to try them? Do you have any other kohakutou businesses you recommend? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!

-AMS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/04/a-very-fond-farewell-to-misaky-tokyo/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60873

plaidder_tumblr_feed

https://plaidadder.tumblr.com/post/818503896270094336

nudityandnerdery:

Sub-Radio, the band that did Stacy’s Dad, coming out with another banger for Pride.

https://plaidadder.tumblr.com/post/818503896270094336

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/04/the-big-idea-james-l-cambias-6/

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60939

Math can sometimes get in the way of a good story, but author James L. Cambias didn’t let pesky physics stop him from majorly transforming Venus. Blast off in his Big Idea to see how he managed to make Venus habitable, albeit not for humans, in his new novel, The Ishtar Deception.

JAMES L. CAMBIAS:

For this guest post, I thought I’d walk readers through the mental process of one of my own Big Ideas from my new book. The Ishtar Deception is the latest in my “Billion Worlds” series of books and stories set at the end of the Tenth Millennium. In that era, the Solar System is a vast “Dyson Swarm” of space habitats and solar collectors, soaking up most of the energy emitted by the Sun. On the scale devised by the Russian SETI researcher Nikolai Kardashev, the civilization of the Billion Worlds is a Type II. About a quadrillion biological beings live in the Solar System, and a larger number of intelligent machines.

It’s a big setting, and it means I can tell a wide variety of stories. The first Billion Worlds book, The Godel Operation, was a picaresque adventure bouncing around from the ring around Uranus to a space habitat near Jupiter and finally to Mars. The Scarab Mission was a kind of “haunted house in space” set aboard a space habitat depopulated by some mysterious disaster. The third, The Miranda Conspiracy, was a political thriller inside the Uranian moon Miranda.

For The Ishtar Deception I decided to take readers into the inner Solar System. I’ve made references in past works to the fact that Mercury doesn’t exist any more in the year 10,000, so I couldn’t send my characters there. Instead, I decided on Venus. My super-spy character Sabbath Okada would be assigned to a mission on Venus, and that in turn gave me my title, since Ishtar is a prominent surface feature on that world.

I had made vague references to Venus being terraformed in the distant future, but when I finally looked at the effort involved I realized there’d be no way to get the job done in a mere eight thousand years. Transforming Venus would take too long.

And that made me wonder why anybody would bother to do it at all. If you live in, say, the year 6000, and have some unimaginable amount of energy (by our primitive standards) to play with, what’s the most useful thing you can do? If you apply it to trying to make Venus into a habitable world like Earth you’ll use all of it up to make some tiny incremental change.

To reduce Venus’s atmosphere to something bearable you would have to physically remove something like fifty billion megatons of carbon dioxide from Venus. If you could somehow lift a hundred tons a second (never mind where you’re putting it) that would take fifteen thousand years of constant effort. Meanwhile you’re going to need to move a hundred times as much hydrogen to Venus if you want to support a biosphere. And let’s not even talk about the nine-month rotation. I have no idea how to fix that.

Or you can use the same amount of effort to build a few million more cozy space habitats to add to the Billion Worlds circling the Sun. Much more efficient. It’s a no-brainer, really.

But . . . that would leave my novel with Venus as it really is. An incredibly massive atmosphere of carbon dioxide, with a surface pressure equivalent to the ocean bottom a kilometer down on Earth, a temperature of 470 degrees Celsius (hot enough to melt lead and tin), winds blowing 300 kilometers per hour, and oh by the way there’s a significant amount of sulfuric acid in that dense atmosphere. Humans would only survive such conditions in massive submarine-like vehicles and structures, and even machines would have trouble with heat and corrosion.

Sure, you can maybe live in balloons floating in Venus’s upper atmosphere, where the temperature and pressure are not too different from what it’s like on Earth, so all you need to do is make some oxygen to breathe. But, again, it’s hard to see how a balloon city on Venus would be better than a space habitat. And all the while, there’s a whole planet’s worth of matter — metals, silicon, sulfur, carbon, oxygen, phosphorus, and other treasures — just out of reach down there under that hellish atmosphere.

You can’t “bio-terraform” it, as Carl Sagan once suggested, by introducing blue-green algae and letting the plants do for Venus what they did for Earth. There’s just too damned much atmosphere! If your plants were perfectly efficient and broke down all of Venus’s carbon dioxide to oxygen, well then you’ve got a planet with an atmosphere of nearly pure oxygen at about 60 times Earth’s surface pressure. As one of the characters in my book notes, it’s hard to think of anything that wouldn’t burn under those conditions.

So I decided that my future civilization would just take a simpler, cheaper, faster approach. Forget about turning Venus into a world with oceans and forests, let’s just make it something that isn’t instantly lethal to both biological and electronic intelligences.

The result: “cryoforming.” All you do is build a big sunshade and park it at the L1 point between Venus and the Sun, blocking all the sunlight from reaching the planet entirely. The sunshade will, naturally, harvest all that energy so whatever else you’re doing on or around Venus will have plenty of power. And then you wait a few centuries for Venus to radiate away all the heat contained in that massive atmosphere and the upper part of the crust.

First the sulfuric acid rains out, puddling on the ground and collecting in little lakes. As Venus gets cooler the acid becomes a waxy solid. Then the carbon dioxide starts to crystallize, falling as dry ice snow. At first it melts on hitting the warm ground, of course, but eventually it sticks, and then accumulates. Without an energy differential the winds calm down, from hundreds of kilometers per hour to something more like what we see on Earth.

And overhead, an observer on the surface can see something that hasn’t happened on Venus in billions of years: the stars come out.

I figure my future civilization would stabilize the temperature a few degrees below the freezing point of carbon dioxide. Say, 50 or 60 degrees Celsius below zero. That gives you a planet with an atmosphere of pretty much pure nitrogen (with a few trace noble gases), and a surface pressure of roughly four times Earth sea level pressure.

Nice? It depends on what you are. If you’re a human, or some other biological being, you still need breathing gear and heated clothing to go outside. You probably want to live at a lower pressure so all your cities will be built of diamond blocks and graphene like high-tech sea bases, and it’s still dark all the time.

But if you’re a machine intelligence the new Venus has gone from hellish to something close to paradise! The air is dry and has no corrosive oxygen in it, yet it’s still dense and can provide superb cooling for your various energy-using systems. You and tens of billions of other machines can get to work digging up that crust with no pesky biosphere to worry about.

So my far-future Venus becomes one of the resource treasure-houses of the Solar System. And as any cursory glance at history will reveal, that’s going to create plenty of opportunities for conflict. The Great Powers of the Tenth Millennium — the Lunar Republic, the Trojan Empire, and my main character’s bosses in Deimos — will fight each other for a piece of the Venusian pie.

I don’t really have space to go into some of the other details — like the giant wheels in orbit that serve as space elevators, or the culture and sports and politics of Ishtar. And I’m certainly not going to spill any secrets about the plot. To get clearance for that you have to buy the book.

Just a warning: in a novel called The Ishtar Deception, it’s a good idea not to trust anyone.

The Ishtar Deception: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author socials: Website

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/04/the-big-idea-james-l-cambias-6/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60939

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/04/quite-possibly-the-worst-view-from-a-hotel-room-5-31-2026-chula-vista/

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60931

A truly amazing view of a sad little parking lot with a few cars in it. Across the street is another parking lot full of cars, plus a small building that's in a bit of rough shape. The dirty roof of the hotel is visible in my shot.

I am not currently in California anymore, but I felt rather inclined to share this photo I took from the second story of the oh-so-lovely hotel my grandma, mom, and I were in. Our first two nights in Cali were spent in the Hilton San Diego Bayfront, and the second two nights were at a much more modest location in Chula Vista.

I have much to say about my splendid time in California, but I cannot even begin to tell y’all how behind I am on content. Remember how it took me roughly two months to get around to covering my Denver trip? Well, I’ve done a lot of stuff since then, and boy oh boy do I have quite the backlog right now. I’m honestly not sure if I should even bother going in chronological order anymore, though it might irk me too much not to.

Please hang in there while I slowly work my way through all my exciting endeavors and even some more miscellaneous things, and enjoy the view in the meantime.

-AMS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/04/quite-possibly-the-worst-view-from-a-hotel-room-5-31-2026-chula-vista/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60931

glaurung

After Heinlein's death, some of his books were reissued in new "uncut" editions. AFAIK, there are four: Red Planet, Puppet Masters, Stranger in a Strange Land, and Podkayne of Mars. In each case, changes were insisted on by editors, and after Heinlein's death, Virginia Heinlein renegotiated contracts and specified that the original unaltered manuscripts be used instead of the originally published versions.

1 Red Planet, 1949 ( Read more... )

2 Puppet Masters (1951) ( Read more... )

3 Stranger in a strange land (1961) ( Read more... )

4 Podkayne of Mars (1963)
As originally written, Podkayne dies at the end. Heinlein's editor demanded that the final chapter (narrated by Podkayne's brother) be altered to have her survive instead. Modern versions of the novel restore the original ending, or provide both endings. The final chapter is just a few pages long.

I strongly dislike this novel regardless of which version of the final chapter it has, so I can't speak to which might be better.

nicola_griffith_feed

Posted by Nicola Griffith

https://nicolagriffith.com/2026/06/04/pride-not-fairyland/

http://nicolagriffith.com/?p=99870

June is Pride month; rainbows are everywhere. In some parts of some cities in some parts of the world a visiting alien might be forgiven for thinking that being queer was something universally celebrated, something to be rejoiced in by all, with no stigma or negative consequences even a possibility. They might mistake our world for Fairyland. (Pun very much intended.)

I am not deriding Pride—far from it. We need Pride. We need to come together in joy, be among others like us and feel that being queer is safe and celebrated. We need it because for many of us, for most of the time in most places, it is not safe and it cannot be celebrated.¹

Everywhere in the world queer folk are under attack. In the US and UK it has become even more dangerous for transfolk. Don’t forget this. And don’t get complacent about ‘respectable’ lesbian and gay rights like marriage and adoption. Where they do exist they are fragile.

There are many straight folk out there who simply have no idea how hard it can be to grow up queer even today, even in socially and culturally liberal enclaves. Similarly, there are many young queer folk who don’t have the faintest fucking clue of what their elders had to go through for us all to be able to have even this modicum of space to breathe.

Most people who meet me think I’m lucky, that I’ve escaped the bias, hatred and aggression of homophobia: I don’t look damaged; I don’t look like a victim; I don’t behave—or write—as a victim. But every year or two I wonder: who would I be, how might my life have turned out, if I hadn’t grown up having to walk uphill against a strong wind knowing there was an army of attackers waiting at the top?

Some years ago I had a conversation with a friend (she is still a friend; she will remain nameless) who thought that prejudice against queer folk, specifically lesbians, was a thing of the distant past, something for the history books that maybe only happened to a vague and shadowy group of Disadvantaged. I told her bluntly that, no, it happened a lot. It happened to everyone. It most certainly happened to me. She tried to wrap her head around it but part of her couldn’t quite accept it: I just didn’t look or behave like a victim. That’s because I’m not a victim, I said. I do’t understand, she said. Well, then, I said, ask me some questions.

What follows is a paraphrased transcript of our conversation.²

Well, have you ever been physically injured because you’re queer?
Yes. I was beaten by several men in a club and ended up in the emergency room covered in blood with a broken nose, concussion, etc. Every time I look in the mirror I see a face that was rearranged by fists and bottles for being a dyke—bias is written on my body. In addition, three men tried to burn my house down and rape me to show me what I was missing. Also, someone threw a brick through my window (I got out of bed and cut my feet to ribbons). Oh, and two men shotgunned the bedroom window of the flat I’d just moved out of. And coming home from the pub one night seven men made a line across the road in front of me and started telling me in graphic detail what they were going to do to me until I said, wearily, (because this was probably the twelfth time something like this had happened), okay, who wants their legs broken first? And then— Well, the list, frankly, is almost endless. (Seriously, one day, when I have nothing better to do, I’ll write it all down. I bet I could come up with more than a hundred incidents.) As for the daily microaggressions? Literally countless.

Have you ever been denied education for being queer?
Yes. I had to give up my degree course because my parents wouldn’t fund their part of the cost (this was in the UK before there were such things as student loans). “Why bother?” my mother said. “No one will give a lesbian a job, anyway.” And the fact is, no one would give me a job. And even before that my school refused to put me forward for the Oxbridge exams along with the other smart kids because they did not want their reputation sullied by the taint of homo-sex-syew-ality. And even before *that* they had threatened to expel me and my girlfriend.

Have you ever been denied official benefits for being queer?
Yes. I had to fight for five years to be able to get my Green Card. It cost somewhere between $15,000 and $20,000 (at a time when, between us, Kelley and I were earning less than $30,000 a year; we maxed out three credit cards). My case made new law.³ It took years to get free of the psychological stress of constantly having to leave the country and come back in on a tourist visa and be denied entry on a whim⁴—I had nightmares (I still occasionally do)—and the burden of debt. If we had been legally married it would have been smooth and automatic and virtually free. In addition, I couldn’t get health insurance on Kelley’s employee ticket; this was before domestic partnership provisions. We were monumentally broke. I couldn’t get a job. I was sick. I had no health insurance. All because I’m queer. As a corollary, I suffered no only years of denial of official help but active official harm, that is, years of police harassment: dragged out of pubs by plainclothes and thrown in jail for hours and strip-searched; thrown bodily into a crowd by uniformed police in London; thrown against the wall by armoured-up SPG (Special Patrol Group) and held there with an arm across my throat so I couldn’t swallow or breathe. All for looking like a dyke and refusing to change. And there was no way to lodge a complaint: dykes would be laughed out of the room for the sheer temerity of mentioning it—and then of course the harassment would triple. Oh, and then there was the time my flat was invaded by nine uniformed police and two police dogs, and— Again, the list goes on.

Have you been been denied access to healthcare for being queer?
Yes. A gynecologist once tried to refuse me a Pap smear. Also, once in a very scary health situation, Kelley was told she would have no say in my care should anything go wrong. Fortunately, we could leave. We did. Similarly, once when Kelley was rushed to the Emergency Department for life-saving surgery they would not let through the door to her room until I left and came back with written Durable Power of Attorney and PoA for Healthcare. (Again, I could make a list.)

Has your career suffered for being queer?
Oh, let me count the ways… Actually, no. Let me give you three examples that will stand in for scores of incidents, denials, and dismissals. In 1993 as Ammonite was winning awards, I submitted a proposal for Slow River to my agent. She phoned and told me it was not a selling outline. Why not? Because Lore (the protagonist) was queer. But Ammonite‘s doing fine, I said. And she said: Yes, but the protagonist of Ammonite was on a women-only planet, she had to have a girlfriend, she had no choice poor thing. But why did you have to do that to Lore? Because she’s a dyke, I said. And fired her. (Oh, and when the book came out, the negative reviews were all about the lesbian sex: Too much! they said; it’s just Not Nice; also unrealistic for everyone to be a lesbian (but they weren’t; the main character was, and most of the people she had sex with were women, but there were plenty—plenty!—of straight folk doing their thing, too). In 1996 I sold The Blue Place on outline in the US. When I submitted the final draft my agents on both sides of the pond got very excited. And were then shocked when no one in the UK would buy it. Why wouldn’t they buy it? Because they ‘already had one of those,’ by which they meant: a novel with a lesbian narrator. One such novel, of course, was all they needed because obviously only lesbians read books about lesbians and, well, there just aren’t enough lesbians to make it cost effective. (This—that no one in the UK would touch the Aud books with a bargepole—continued to be true until 2024, when finally Canongate reissued them in the UK when FSG/Picador reissued them in the US.) And finally, for many years, whenever I published something new, the review always began something like ‘LGBT author Griffith…’ Even now, this is often still true—just not always.

There were many other questions with the same basic thrust: Did I really have a hard time? And all my answers were the same: Yes, I really did. I have been harmed physically, mentally, emotionally, legally, and financially.

I don’t generally dwell on this. I do not regard myself as a victim; I am not a pitiable figure. I choose—wilfully, daily—to focus my energies on moving forward, on staying open, on interacting with the world as humanly and humanely as possible. I’ve seen what victimhood does to those who claim it: they get bitter and wary and live behind walls so thick no one can reach them. (Or they die: my two queer sisters died young; my straight sisters are still happy and healthy and enjoying life.) They retreat further and further from the mainstream. They become even more Othered.

I honour activists who live in the war zone, and I understand those who retreat behind their fortress walls, but neither is my path. My choice is to remain as undefended as possible, to share—in person and through my work—how it feels to be me, to help others understand and empathise. To be human not Other. And more specifically to use my fiction to Norm the Other. To change the world, one reader at a time.

Perhaps because so many of us have somehow managed to weather this tide of prejudice without visible damage it’s easy for some to believe We’re All Equal Now. We’re not. Yes, as a class queerfolk are becoming more politically significant. Certainly more visible—though in the case, particularly, of transfolk this visibility can itself be dangerous. Individuals from the entire queer spectrum still can and do have a very hard time. Anti-queer prejudice is real; in many parts of the world—yes, even the US and UK—it stepped getting better s ome time ago and the bias and hatred are once again increasing. And through it all, many of us—the majority of those over a certain age—carry scars that influence our interaction with the world.

I am smart. I love my work. I have a wife and partner I trust with my life and heart. I have a home. I have a community (I have several interconnected communities). I have friends and family. In most ways I am lucky. I have a magnificent life. And still, sometimes, every few years, I wonder how it might have been. A decade or more ago I wondered how the world might change when we had achieved marriage equality and its concomitant rights. I believed a change in the law would lead to even faster and deeper change in the culture; make life easier, safer, and richer (literally and metaphorically). Might help some of us let down the barriers, just a little. And that then, oh, the world should get ready for such a flowering of human art and joy and innovation…

…and to a degree, this happened. But as I said at the beginning of this piece, those rights are fragile. We are already seeing backlash. Queer folk still face an uphill climb against a strong wind. The enemy still waits at the top of the hill.

So, yes, let’s celebrate Pride. But never forget: We do not live in fairyland.

And in fact I will be celebrating Pride with a special book event at the National Nordic Museum next week (Thurs 11 June, 6:30 pm) ︎
And was first published in a slightly different form as “The Personal Consequences of Growing Up Queer” ︎
Though the minute that new law was revealed—on the front page of th eWall Street Journal, where I was called a ‘kook’—the law was changed and the National Interest Waiver discontinued. ︎
Did you know it was illegal for homosexuals to even enter the US as a tourist until 1991? ︎

https://nicolagriffith.com/2026/06/04/pride-not-fairyland/

http://nicolagriffith.com/?p=99870

oursin

Some years ago I advised a composer who was composing an opera about A Historical Figure about whom I am something of a Nexpert, and I am now on their mailing list and get info on their current activities and broadcasts and so on -

And I was invited to the Private View of this, taking place at a venue which is only a reasonable bus-ride and short walk away.

Also giving me the chance to see a small part of the nearish locality with which I am relatively unfamiliar, and which has its charms.

I am not sure I was entirely enthused by the artworks - there was one installation of ceramics where I wished I had someone there to whom I could murmur that they had an urgent phallic look -

My main problem with the venue, however, was the acoustics - I think it was the kind of space where once you got a certain mass of people conversing it would always have been a bit trying for me and my hearing aids, but combined with the ambient music coming out of the various speakers, not optimal at all. (Though maybe its own soundscape....)

I don't think there was anyone there I knew besides The Composer - mostly of a younger generation and art/music people rather than groves of academe - and I didn't really get into much chat, but I did get 2 admiring comments on the green hair streaks and 1 compliment to my pendant (which I think I got at Wiscon, unless it was 4th St?).

However, I have had a sweet email from The Composer thanking me for coming.

A programmer is dragged into a geopolitical squabble, complicated by untoward existential revelations.

The Restoration Game by Ken MacLeod

oursin

Happy birthday,

starlady!

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3254/

No other experiment has a lower false negative rate.

https://xkcd.com/3254/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/03/various-sundry-6-3-26/

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60917

I have gotten out of the habit of commenting on the news of the day here, mostly because, as I have said before, when it comes to the current governance of our country, there’s only so many times I can yell “it’s because they’re fascists, what did you expect” before I bore even myself, and also, frankly, the time I have to babysit comment threads these days is minimal. I’m not entirely sure how I managed it back in the day because it feels like I barely have time to keep up with my actual paid duties at the moment, and I keep piling additional responsibilities onto my plate.

Nevertheless, I think I want to get back to it a bit here, partly because it’s not like I don’t have thoughts on various news stories as they happen, and partly because it’s good for keeping up regular posting here. So I think at least a couple times a week I’m going to post a “Various & Sundry” post, catching up with my thoughts on events when those thoughts are longer than a post on Threads or Bluesky would allow, but not long enough for their own full-fledged post. They will usually cover three to five items, including but not necessarily limited to current events. Sometimes I’ll also plop in something I think is amusing or has otherwise caught my eye.

In the past for things like this I would try to avoid dropping in stuff I’d already commented on elsewhere, but this time around I think I’m going to be a little more lax about that, one, because I know that not everyone who visits here follows me on Threads/Bluesky/Mastodon, so that material will be new to those folks in any event, and two, because often even if I’ve commented about the story elsewhere, what I’ve done there is mostly have been quippy, and here I might have something else to say about it.

Also, three, I’m lazy, and four, inasmuch as this site acts as my own institutional memory, if I post something about it here it constitutes an official record. I mean, all the posts I ever placed on the former Twitter are now entirely lost to time, since I have gone in and purged my entire timeline there. This site, however, endures. So there it is. Welcome historians and biographers of the future! This is me, in typed form!

For these posts and as (nearly) always, I will be leaving the comments open but please do me the favor of remembering the comment policy here. Please be polite to others, especially when you disagree, and avoid making me come in and Malleting your post. There is a special subclass of commenter here who especially likes to take any point and use it as a jumping off point for some other thing they want to jam into the discussion and/or likes to use particularly elevated terms or positions just to get a reaction. I am not about that these days, folks, even if I generally agree with your positions. I’m tired, y’all, and the Mallet will have a hair trigger. Please comment accordingly. Thank you in advance for not being a pain in my ass.

With that as preamble, here are today’s various & sundry topics:

60 Minutes reporter Scott Pelley fired from CBS News: This was not exactly unexpected, since in a staff meeting with his new boss Nick Bilton he expressed, shall we say, unvarnished opinions about Bilton and CBS News head Bari Weiss, and apparently declined to apologize to either them after the fact. One does not do that, especially to status-anxious posers like Bilton and Weiss, without expecting repercussions. Weiss and Bilton may in fact be incompetent (that’s obvious in the case of Weiss, and a reasonable supposition about Bilton, who has almost no relevant experience for the job he now holds), but they are still the bosses. Pelley knew he was setting his career at CBS one fire the moment he opened his mouth.

Also, he’s not wrong. His departure email came with receipts about how and when he and 60 Minutes were pressured or outright made to compromise their journalistic integrity since Weiss has been in charge, and a follow-up statement flat out called Weiss a liar regarding the manner in which his firing was handled. Weiss and Bilton have to know that in this sort of “they said. he said” situation, Pelley has integrity on his side, and they do… not. It’s also clear that whatever 60 Minutes might be after this, it will probably not be what it was, and it will probably be worse. And that, indeed, that has been the plan from the start.

“AI” use starts getting really expensive: Turns out there really is no such thing as a free lunch, as the various “AI” providers are changing how their services are metered, from “per request” to how many tokens one burns through with those requests. Tokens aren’t cheap! Users are burning through their monthly allotment of them in a day, apparently largely because coders and others were using them for somewhat frivolously. One particularly salacious (but possibly sensationalized) story had an anonymous company burning through half a billion dollars of “AI” use in a single month. I’d want to see some actual reporting on that, including the company’s name, before I lend that report full credence, but out in the real world, prices are still going up, enough so that using “AI” is now more expensive than paying the humans companies are laying off to pay for the “AI.”

And if you’re wondering why, if that’s so, companies are still apparently so avid to replace humans with “AI,” well, one answer is the corporate class of tech just fuckin’ hates workers, and would rather give their money to each other in tech circle-jerk than to actual humans who might foolishly spend that money on things like, you know, food and rent and children. Another reason is that the other corporate folks who don’t actively hate their workers were sold a bill of goods, where they were made to believe an ineffective tool could streamline their costs (mostly by firing workers), only to find out after those human workers were let go that the actual costs of that ineffective tool were hidden from them. Now they’re stuck.

No, I don’t particularly have a warm, fuzzy feeling for tech execs at the moment.

Which brings us to our third thing today, from humorist Eleanor Morton. Find the lie.

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/03/various-sundry-6-3-26/

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60917

conuly

Yay!

***************************************

( Read more... )

This new Kobolds Ate My Baby! Bundle presents Kobolds Ate My Baby!, the cult-classic tabletop fantasy roleplaying game of anti-dungeon-crawl silliness, in its 2024 Orange Book edition from 9th Level Games.

Bundle of Holding: Kobolds Ate My Baby!

oursin

What I read

Finished Persuasion - but felt a bit out of sync with the online reading.

Then I went on to something Entirely Different: my interest was aroused by rydra_wong posting about Rachel Rosen's Cascade (2022) and Blight (2025) (The Sleep of Reason, #1 and #2), so I went and discovered that the ebooks could be obtained directly from the small Canadian press in question. Got stuck into Cascade and while I would not have thought I was up for grim eco/magical dystopia with festering political intrigue before everything goes to hell, I was absolutely gripped.

Pretty much the only reason I then read LM Chilton, I Think We Should Kill Other People (2026) was I had finished that and had not yet downloaded Blight. This was a not entirely happy mashup of rom-com (this part I thought worked least well), serial killer, and version of 'cut-off country-house' mystery (small airport shut down in middle of snowstorm trapping relevant characters), with added 'reality tv show that includes AI setting' and 'comic intentions'.

On the go

Have now gone on to Blight and may be some time (these are not your slender novellas).

Up next

Alexis Hall, Father Material arrived this week; also KJ Charles, How To Fake It In Society is currently a Kobo deal so have also got that on the ereader.

Still have not yet got to Slightly Foxed, and the latest Literary Review recently arrived.

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-sound-of-the-dark-by-daniel-church/

Io the cat and Io's owner Ásta need a pragmatic friend. Happily for the pair, Unna could be that friend.

Dead Weight by Hildur Knútsdóttir (Translated by Mary Robinette Kowal)

strangehorizons_feed

Posted by Shannon Fay

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=59714

Cally Darker is a depressed true crime podcaster who’s feeling adrift in life. She’s living in Manchester with Dereck, her office worker boyfriend who doesn’t get Cally’s mental illness or her podcast, instead pushing her to get a “real job.” When Cally gets an email tipping her off about a decades-old family homicide, it spurs her to dump Dereck, leave Manchester, and flee to the countryside to stay at her father and step-mom’s house (they are conveniently away on vacation). Their little village is also close to the scene of the crime, allowing Cally to investigate the mystery firsthand.

The thing is, the crime isn’t a mystery in the traditional sense: Everyone knows what happened. From the back cover:

In 1983, experimental artist Tony Mathias began work on a new installation – it was to be a collage of visuals and sounds collected at an abandoned RAF base called Warden Fell. Various stories and rumours swirled around the place but Tony was interested only in the echoes of history. But soon after visiting the site to tape-record the sounds there, he returned to the caravan where he was staying with his family and killed his wife, his two children and then himself.

There is no ambiguity about who pulled the trigger: The book starts off with a transcript of an emotionally distraught neighbour recounting how he witnessed Tony shoot his own son and daughter. Everyone agrees Tony did it. But why would a mild-mannered artist known for being a caring husband and father do such a thing?

The marketing and first half of the book are very deliberate about keeping Tony’s motives secret, and rightly so. The first quarter of the book is a slow burn, with Cally taking a boots-on-the-ground approach to the mystery. She interviews Tony’s sister, and his agent, and the woman who was the caravan park’s landlady back in the eighties. Everyone is eager to aid Cally and be interviewed for her true crime podcast. Don’t expect any ruminations on the ethics of true crime as an entertainment genre—Cally’s podcast mainly exists as a framework for the story rather than being an active part of the story itself.

Indeed, this early part of the novel almost feels leisurely, like an Agatha Christie novel, though not one of her tightly plotted estate-set murder mysteries but one of her darker, more rambling yarns like By the Pricking of My Thumbs (1968). Some of the early interviews can even be a bit repetitive as far as the content that gets revealed: lots of “Tony was such a gentle soul, no one knows how he could do this” and so on. But, despite that, these sections are still a fun read because of how vivid the characters are (I’m a sucker for regional UK accents, and the author doesn’t shy away from them). There is eventually forward movement in the plot, when one of the interviewees gives Cally Tony’s old tapes. The tapes contain two types of recordings: Tony’s audio diaries and recordings he made when he visited Warden Fell.

The tagline for the book is “DON’T PRESS PLAY.” It’s an admirable sign of restraint that it isn’t until roughly halfway through the book that Cally does.

Almost immediately the tapes have evidence of the paranormal on them, something a shaken Tony notes in his audio diaries (amusingly, early on Tony’s biggest worry regarding this revelation is that it means he’ll have to scrap his installation idea). Cally gives the tapes to her pal Griff to digitize while she digs deeper into Warden Fell’s history (poor Griff is introduced with so many death flags he may as well be spelling out “I’M DOOMED” in semaphore). Cally also starts a romance with Ellen, a local copper. But as the days tick by and she listens to more of the recordings, Cally’s nights become full of otherworldly nightmares. It becomes clear that whatever happened to Tony is now happening to her.

At the halfway point the novel changes gears and goes from being a slow-burn creepy mystery to an unchained horror novel, featuring scares both bodily and cosmic in nature. Some of the descriptions of what Cally experiences are so vivid and awful they actually made me shudder. The turn the book takes is all the more thrilling for how out of left field it is, which is why I’m trying to be as vague as possible here to protect the premise. It’s not that where the book goes is wildly innovative or original, but the initial mystery is so tantalizing that coming up with your own theories is half the fun. It’s also a rare case where the story doesn’t deflate once all is revealed.

But even when the book gets into gonzo mode, there’s still long stretches of exposition. The shift from mystery to horror is triggered by a Skype call Cally has with a character we’ve never met and will never see again: He just shows up, drops some reality-shattering news on Cally, and then dips. Later on, even as the tension and the stakes keep rising, we still spend something like three chapters in a brand-new character’s living room as he shares his backstory.

As aggravating as this can be, even at its slowest the book is still a wild ride. A lot of modern horror that deals with curses often engages in fourth-wall breaking, a moment in which the characters or narrators say directly, “And now you, dear reader, are also cursed!” (See for example, About a Place in the Kinki Region [2025], a recently translated Japanese horror novel that I liked even if it used this hokey trope.) The Sound of the Dark is better than that. Here the horror is so well done that it can make the reader wonder if they have been cursed—whether being exposed even secondhand to the tapes has inflicted on them the same contagion with which the characters are plagued. After the halfway mark The Sound of the Dark stops being a subtle book, but this it correctly keeps low-key: The suggestion that you’re cursed is scarier than being told outright that you are.

The final act sees Cally and her allies and enemies going to Warden Fell to battle for the fate of the world—will otherworldly horrors be unleashed or will the site be cleansed? It’s a very Lovecraftian climax, but through a modern lens, less like H. P’s At the Mountains of Madness (1936) and more John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness (1994). It’s a fun climax, and nicely brings Cally’s arc full circle, her battles with her mental health mirroring her battle with the evil lurking at Warden Fell. Of course, she gains the knowledge of how to defeat the evil from a long convo she has in a dream with an ancient shaman—even when Cally’s asleep we’re not safe from exposition dumps. The fact that so many scenes are long stretches of Cally interviewing people, and that the source of the horror comes from a set of audio tapes, does make me wonder if this would have worked as a fictional podcast. But, while it might have made for a fun listen, The Sound of the Dark is still, in book form, a very fun read. If you’re willing to take a leap of faith, I’d highly recommend it.

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-sound-of-the-dark-by-daniel-church/

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=59714

oursin

Happy birthday,

pennski and

threeringedmoon!

oursin

And surely that would include realising that things were not always the exact same way they are today?

For decades, publishers have swapped out cultural references in new editions of books to appeal to younger readers. Fans aren’t always thrilled.

This seems so weird to me. I grew up on reading books that had lingered for however long on the shelves of the children's dept of the local public library - which were all bound in that standard hard-wearing public library binding so one did not have any sense of shiny newness or otherwise - along with my mother's old books, some of which were works of a yet more previous generation which she had loved in her youth.

And that's before we get into the oddness of the Alice books and the talking animals and so forth.

Do they have no imaginations? Are they only supposed to identify with recognisable experiences?

Read somewhere about (in this case I think actually adult readers) who could not deal with subtext, foreshadowing, and other Litry Devices.

I was a bit beswozzled by this chap, too, though perhaps from a rather different direction. I devoured classic novels as a teenager. In a world of distractions, can I relearn how to read them?.

Sometimes books have their time and it is past. And sometimes they are just not the right thing at that moment.

And I also think of times in my past when I had fairly long commutes and other stretches of otherwise dead time that I could fill up with doing perhaps rather dutiful reading of those things One Ought To Read, and whether this is not only my experience. And then one's life shifts and these spaces go away.

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/02/the-big-idea-isabel-j-kim/

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60910

Two paths diverge in a wood… and what happens when, in fact, you can travel both? In her debut novel Sublimation, author Isabel J. Kim looks at what happens when the road less taken is never not taken, and how a question in school set her on a new path.

ISABEL J. KIM:

I am going to tell you a story that I have never publicly told before. It is about the ignoble origins of Sublimation. And for context, Sublimation is a speculative fiction novel set in a universe where when you cross a border with the intention to leave, you split into two people. Literally.

Sublimation is about other things, too—the artificial nature of borders, the way in which human beings impose their technological will on natural processes, control and, freedom and the unhappy marriage of big tech and government and how it is hard to talk to people when you don’t know what you want—but the crux of it is: Sublimation is a story about being confronted by a life you didn’t lead.

When I was seventeen, I was taking a world history class and we were talking about immigration, because that’s what you do in a world history class in the United States of America. And the teacher asked us the question: why do people immigrate to America?

One of the other students—who was, in my teenage self’s words, “a white preppy blonde chick” and in my current self’s words, “literally just some guy”—raised her hand with perfect confidence and said “For a better life!” She spoke with such clear, myopic certainty that I was suddenly furious, because there are a lot of reasons that people go places and stay places and “a better life” is so reductive as to be meaningless, and also, some of us move because our dads get jobs, okay? You’ve lived here your entire life, and I’ve lived in four different cities in two different countries, so why are you raising your hand with such confidence?

The punchline, of course, is that I was born in New Jersey, and also had never technically immigrated anywhere. Also, it’s not like I raised my hand to talk about my experiences of being an expat in my country of ethnic origin.

Back then, I never liked talking about how I felt about being from places, because my international childhood was hard to explain. It was an experience that was fairly benign, mostly enriching, and only strange in retrospect. The only lingering weirdness was that I felt like a foreigner everywhere I went. I was an American kid in Korea, I was a Korean kid in America, and explaining how that felt would require me to make you live an entire life walking in my shoes. When you’re seventeen, that’s hard.

A few years (read: seven years) later I was back in Korea for a vacation, and I was surprised at how quickly the country had changed while I had been gone. I started thinking about how all the differences would have seemed totally organic had I lived there my entire life. This got me ruminating about the version of me that never moved back to the states, which led me to the idea of instancing—leaving a double behind when you cross a border. One person who goes, another who stays.

And I thought that was a really interesting metaphor made flesh, an idea through which I could viscerally shove the experience of being a foreigner into the reader’s brain. And I was thinking about my classmate from high school, and how I wanted to make people like her understand how it felt, to be perpetually from somewhere else.

So, I started writing a story (“Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self”) about how it felt to be from somewhere else, and how it felt to be a foreigner, and how you might feel if you were the one who got to leave, and conversely, how it might feel to be the one who had to stay.

Then, a strange thing happened. The more I expanded the aforementioned short story, the more I realized that the feeling of alienation was universal—everyone feels like a stranger sometimes, everyone wonders about what could have happened had they made different choices, everyone has a road not traveled.

The more I wrote, the more I saw the story I was writing as not really about my own individual experience, but as a way for the reader to sift through their own experiences through the lens of the story I was giving them. The narrative became a sort of window for the reader, or a magnifying glass.

And I felt that even more intensely when I talked with people about Sublimation across the various drafts. The more conversations I had, the stronger my feeling was that at the end of the day, we’re more similar than not. If you look far back enough, we’re all from somewhere else. And we’re all traveling into the future together.

And the future, like the past, is a foreign country, from which we can never return.

So that’s what Sublimation is about. And maybe it’s a good thing that I didn’t raise my hand in world history class; if I had, I might not have written this novel.

Sublimation: Amazon|Barnes and Noble|Bookshop.org

Author Socials: Website|Instagram|Bluesky

Read an excerpt.

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/02/the-big-idea-isabel-j-kim/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60910

rydra_wong

At the time of writing, 41 46 51 66 75 87 93 MPs have signed the early day motion to reject the EHRC's new guidance:

https://edm.parliament.uk/early-day-motion/65938

Write to your MP to tell them to sign it! Praise them if they already have!

If you have Bsky, Trans+ Solidarity Alliance have a skeet about it you can boost:

https://bsky.app/profile/transsolidarity.bsky.social/post/3mnb3wyefxc2g

Scottish Trans (in collaboration with Trans+ Solidarity Alliance and TransActual, because the collaborative work going on here is so phenomenal) have an "email your MP to reject the EHRC code of practice" template form:

https://equalrecognition.eaction.org.uk/rejectthecode

The Hansard transcript of the response to Seema Malhotra's statement on the EHRC guidance yesterday is blistering:

https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2026-06-01/debates/CE610C68-7093-454F-B897-AF008EE7E7A0/EqualityAct2010CodeOfPractice

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/tomorrow-brings-joy-elysium-by-mahyar-a-amouzegar-and-mahbod-amouzegar/

Merchantship Loki is retired war criminal Bet Yeager's ticket off Thule Station and away from murder charges... but Loki offers hazards of its own.

Rimrunners (Rimrunners, volume 5) by C J Cherryh

oursin

Happy birthday,

bearshorty,

sylvaine and

trinker!

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

Quick note that post-by-email and comment-by-email is (sometimes?) failing silently without actually posting right now! I'm pretty sure this is related to last night's shenanigans and will be fixed once Mark can finish the full fix for it, which he's working on, but if you've posted or replied by email in the last 24 hours, fish it out of your sent folder to check if it posted!

EDIT: This should be fixed as of around 7AM EDT! We *believe* everything that was stuck in the plumbing has been sent along to your journal or the comment thread it was meant for; it's definitely not where it was stuck anymore, at least.

strangehorizons_feed

Posted by Subham Rai

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=59742

What does it cost to live in a world where tomorrow always brings joy? That question sits at the heart of Tomorrow Brings Joy: Elysium, the debut novel from brothers Mahyar A. Amouzegar and Mahbod Amouzegar. Published by University of New Orleans Press in 2026, the book is set more than two centuries after the Wars of Settlement. It presents a future that has solved scarcity, family, and most visible suffering. Humans are born in batches and raised in communal Farms by android caretakers and a handful of human teachers. They live in pods of six or seven until age twenty, when they enter adult life with personal apartments, unlimited synthesized goods, and a companion android tuned to their emotional needs. A system called the Harmony Number keeps genetic variation within tight limits. An unhappiness quota limits how much sorrow any citizen may feel. The official creed, repeated like a mantra, is simple: tomorrow brings joy.

The story opens on the twenty-fifth birthday of Dolores and the four surviving members of her pod. They gather in her small San Francisco apartment for their usual ritual. They drink tall glasses of orange juice, the drink Darius loved as a child. They trade jokes, argue about books, and circle the empty space where Darius used to sit. Eleven years earlier, at age fourteen, Darius was taken from the pod. No one ever explained why. The pod has spent more than a decade learning to live with that absence. Now a new android named King Rat has arrived, and something in his hazel eyes and careful mannerisms begins to crack the careful peace they have built.

What makes the book remarkable is how quietly it works. The first hundred pages feel almost like utopian slice-of-life fiction. Dolores reads physical paper books because the old stories feel more real than data downloads. She names her android after the James Clavell novel she is finishing. She and her podies banter about clothing synthesizers, dolphin swims, and the strange customs of the twentieth century. The prose is calm and precise. “Cherry trees that jealously held onto their yellow leaves” watch over a slow-moving rivulet. These images are never merely decorative. They quietly remind us that even in a perfectly managed world, nature still refuses to follow a quota.

The structure is the real surprise. Each chapter takes its title from a classic twentieth- or twenty-first-century novel, spread across five books. Book One stays close to the pod’s daily life and the arrival of King Rat. Book Two widens the lens through stories of freedom and catastrophe. Book Three turns inward with philosophical and biblical reflections. Book Four explores darker questions of existence and legacy. Book Five brings the narrative to its quiet but powerful conclusion, tying the personal and the societal together. The characters themselves read those same books and discuss them in detail. Their conversations about prisoners dreaming of women, or Holden Caulfield rejecting the idea that life is a game, become indirect mirrors for their own lives: When Dolores puzzles over the passage “Dream about food and women. Your woman,” the moment carries real weight.

This intertextual layering functions both as homage and subtle critique. It creates a layered dialogue between our literary past and Elysium’s amnesiac present, deepening the emotional stakes without calling attention to itself. The five-book division allows the story to build gradually from intimate domestic scenes in Book One to larger philosophical questions in later books.

King Rat himself, meanwhile, is one of the best android characters I have read in years. He is witty, loyal, and just slippery enough to seem alive. When Dolores finally gives him his name, he accepts it with a small bow and a dry promise to fetch her in exactly five minutes. Their back-and-forth supplies most of the book’s humor, but it also carries its sharpest questions about honesty and care. Late in the story, when Dolores presses him about Darius, King Rat answers with perfect calm: “I never lied, Dolores. I have vast knowledge. I would not overwhelm you by giving you the information you do not seek.” In a society built on managed contentment, that sentence lands like a quiet accusation.

The emotional center of the book is the pod’s long, unfinished grief. The birthday ritual, the orange juice, the arguments that circle the same ground every year—none of it is presented as melodrama. It feels lived-in and ordinary, which makes it more painful. When the pod members finally admit to one another that they felt a moment of relief when Darius was taken instead of them, the confession is small, ashamed, and utterly human. The novel never lectures. It simply shows five adults who were taught that harmony requires forgetting, and who are now discovering that forgetting has its own cost.

The novel’s greatest strength is its patience. Early sections unfold in long, sunlit domestic scenes—balcony martinis, pod banter, the ritual of choosing clothes from a synthesizer—that could almost pass for utopian slice-of-life. Only gradually do the cracks appear. By the final book the reader understands that Elysium’s paradise is not a lie. It is simply purchased at a price the citizens were never told they were paying. The wall at the edge of the world, the removed children, the androids who carry fragments of those children’s personalities—none of these elements are explained with long speeches. They emerge gradually through conversation and memory, the way real unease settles into daily life. The Historian’s occasional comments grow sharper as the pages turn, but even those stay brief. The authors trust the reader to put the pieces together.

Thematically, Elysium is in conversation with Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). These comparisons are useful because the novel shares their concern with engineered societies and the quiet erasure of inconvenient humanity, yet it refuses to simply replay those arguments. Where Huxley warned against pleasure as tyranny, the Amouzegars explore something subtler: the tyranny of engineered absence. Elysium has eliminated war, poverty, and most interpersonal cruelty, but it has also eliminated the messy, unquantifiable experiences that once defined humanity—romantic longing, parental attachment, the right to be inconvenient. The unhappiness quota is not a joke. It is a chillingly plausible bureaucratic solution to the problem of sorrow. When Dolores’s wrist device ticks upward during an argument, she is not being punished. She is simply being reminded that her feelings have exceeded their allocated allowance. The system is polite. That is what makes it terrifying.

A few small complaints are worth noting. Some of the early pod conversations repeat the same emotional beats a touch too often, and a handful of the later philosophical exchanges lean toward explanation rather than discovery. These are minor issues. They never derail the story. The pacing is deliberate by design. The novel wants you to feel the slow, sunlit texture of daily life in Elysium before it lets the cracks show. Readers who prefer fast plots may find the first third patient to a fault. Readers who value emotional and philosophical precision will find it masterful.

Tomorrow Brings Joy: Elysium is not a simple warning against utopia. It asks a harder question: once every material problem has been solved, what remains of the messy, inconvenient experiences that once made us human? The book offers no easy answers. It simply insists that joy, when it is mandated and measured, begins to taste like something else entirely.

This is a debut that deserves attention. It sits comfortably beside Ishiguro’s quiet dystopias and yet feels entirely its own. Anyone who cares about what science fiction can do when it slows down and looks closely at ordinary lives will find something lasting here. I finished the novel two days ago and have been thinking about Dolores and King Rat ever since. That is the highest praise I can give.

I recommend it without hesitation. Seek it out. Read it slowly. Let it sit with you.

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/tomorrow-brings-joy-elysium-by-mahyar-a-amouzegar-and-mahbod-amouzegar/

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=59742

conuly

We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable—
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.

We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.

We were very tired, we were very merry,
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed, “Good morrow, mother!” to a shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept, “God bless you!” for the apples and pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.

**********************

Link

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/01/a-deceptively-sweet-moment-between-smudge-and-saja/

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60902

Awww, doesn’t it look like they’re cuddling? They are not, about a tenth of a second later they were rolling about in a full-blown tussle, as they are wont to do. Don’t worry, it’s all in good fun; Smudge actually enjoys his wrestling time with Saja, and vice versa. But it does make for some fun moments:

Sugar and Spice, I will note again, want none of this sort of nonsense. It is far below either of their dignities. Which is, perhaps, their loss.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/01/a-deceptively-sweet-moment-between-smudge-and-saja/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60902

oursin

Took my wonky knee to the GP this afternoon - the GP, as they are these days, appeared to be about 12 years old from my advanced perspective, but v competent, did a thorough interrogation and examination, and came to the conclusion that it looks very like a damaged meniscus -

- and guess what?

We treat that with PHYSIO! like what I am doing for other assorted bits of anatomy. They are sending letter to appropriate quarters and no doubt it will take 6 months at least to get an appointment.

***

In entirely other news:

An investigation into acts of self-pleasure among parrots and other birds has reached a climax, with the results providing welcome relief for vets and researchers, not to mention the birds themselves.
Bird keepers are often advised to discourage and even punish birds for masturbating, but the study found the activity was more common in the wild than in captivity, with researchers concluding it is part of a bird’s natural behaviour.

I am trying to recall what novel it was in which somebody mentions that the family have a canary (or maybe a budgie?) they have christened Onan because it scatters its seed upon the ground....

'Don't forget to ~~feed~~ pleasure the parrot!!!' (so that nature will not turn sour in its veins.)