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brithistorianI just got a kudo on one of my fanfics at AO3. The username of the person was Ash_From_Pallet_Town! (It was not a Pokemon fic.)
brithistorianEvery field has certain works that everyone working the field is expected to be familiar with. In art history, one of those is Walter Benjamin's 1935 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."
Every field also has students who make it all the way through their degree program without actually reading those fundamental works. In this case, that would be me. I absorbed the major points of Benjamin's essay from seeing it repeatedly mentioned in other works I read (particularly the idea of the "aura," or as I prefer to call it "the cult of the original") and skipped actually reading it. But when I saw it referenced in Jordan S. Carroll's Hugo Award-winning book Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right (2025, Best Related Work), I decided the time had come to actually read it.
I think it was worth reading. It did have quite a lot on the "aura," which I was already aware of, but it also contained a lot of material on film, surrealism, Dada, Futurism, and the differing ways that art was politicized in fascism and communism. I found the following quote, about the relationship between captions and photographs, and then how this is also related to movies, to be particularly interesting.
[Since the introduction of photography], captions have become obligatory. And it is clear that they have an altogether different character than the title of a painting. The directives which the captions give to those looking at pictures in illustrated magazines soon become even more explicit and more imperative in the film[,] where the meaning of each single picture appears to be prescribed by the sequence of all preceding ones.
ETA: The lines that Carroll was referencing come from the penultimate sentences of Benjamin's essay, where he says "[Mankind's] self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic." The ultimate sentence, which Carroll doesn't mention (or at least hasn't so far) is "Communism responds by politicizing art."
oursin‘I love you too!’ My family’s creepy, unsettling week with an AI toy:
Designed for kids aged three and over and built with OpenAI’s technology, the toy is supposed to “learn” your child’s personality and have fun, educational conversations with them. It’s advertised as a healthier alternative to screen time and is part of a growing market of AI-powered toys.
I thought I'd linked somewhere to the instructive tale of techbro who made, was it an interactive doll or was it a teddybear for his daughter, that would talk to her, and in very short order she turned the thing off and played with it as Ye Kiddyz have played with dolls since dolls were A Thing (Ancient Sumeria???). Can't find it, however.
Anyone else read Harry Harrison's 'I Always Do What Teddy Says'? which also springs to mind, although that is about plot to subvert conditioning via teddy.
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Much of the paratext for Uncertain Sons, the debut story collection from Thomas Ha, centres on the act of looking. Zachary Gillan opens his adroit and witty foreword with the sentence: “To read a Thomas Ha story is to watch someone choose how to see the world.” Gillan is joined in this conviction by Brian Evenson, whose blurb says that Ha “offers glimpses of weird worlds,” and also by Ha himself: In a 2024 interview with Ivy Grimes, Ha said about his prose style, “[W]hat I’m really trying to do is less paint what I see in my head, and more suggest, conjure, and open up some experiential hallucination in someone else.”
It’s a reasonable thing to focus on. The act of looking, both towards and away, is indeed repeatedly foregrounded in these twelve stories. In the spirit of choosing where to look, however, I want to use this review to discuss some aspects of Ha’s writing that have received less attention in the critical conversation so far.
For a start, Uncertain Sons is a collection spanning six years of Ha’s career. Ha is best known today for stories in that unsettled-and-unsettling subgenre we call weird fiction, earning publication in anthologies such as Brave New Weird, Volume 2 (2024) and a nomination for a Shirley Jackson Award. While most of the stories included here are firmly in this tentacular tradition, Uncertain Sons also contains two stories originally published in 2020, both of which may seem surprisingly conventional to readers (like me) who know Ha primarily for his more recent work.
The first of these, “Where the Old Neighbors Go,” is a fantasy story about an elderly witch outwitting a demon. The protagonist, Mary, is vividly rendered, an obsessive rule-enforcer whom neighbours write off as a busybody. But she is of a recognisable supernatural type, as is her opponent, who is introduced with the cheeky opening sentence: “The man standing on the porch that night seemed like an ordinary gentrifier at first glance: young and tall and artfully unshaven.” Their battle of wills is stock fantasy material, and the story’s twist, with Mary tricking the demon into destroying himself with the use of a magic circle, is almost cinematic in the neatness of its setup and payoff. None of this is to denigrate the piece; it is a thoughtfully constructed and entertaining fantasy story. Rather, it is to highlight that Ha’s current slippery and enigmatic style emerges from a firm grasp of genre fundamentals.
Even in this early work, though, there is a hint of what is to come when the demon’s disguise falls away to reveal an inexplicable mass: “Mary always had trouble seeing the real faces of his kind, but he, like all of them, looked like a shifting pool of ink to her, blurred and shapeless.” This emergence of weirdness from familiar genre tropes is also evident in the second 2020 piece, “Balloon Season.” The story begins with the middle-aged protagonist fortifying his house in “preparation for sundown,” and gradually reveals a world where militias of “whalers” struggle against inhuman hordes. The iconography, and the protagonist’s motivation to protect his wife and children, are the stuff of a typical zombie apocalypse. Where “Balloon Season” distinguishes itself is with its brilliantly conceived monsters: Bloated balls of hairy, glistening flesh, the titular “balloons” are guided at ground level by semi-human “anchors” who try to gain access to the protagonist’s fortified home. The mechanics of infection are not spelled out until near the story’s end, with a surprise balloon attack at the big box store where the protagonist has gone for supplies:
I hear a scream down the street, just as a tether flings out from the glistening underside of the balloon and sinks into someone’s back. I don’t know if it’s a man or woman who falls to the ground, their body starting to swell, filling with liquid. I’ve seen the videos and know that the body is going to get rounder and rounder until it pops like an over-easy egg, the armless, dripping shape of a parasitic anchor emerging from inside, and I don’t need to stay to watch it happen.
Like everyone else, I start to run now.
The balloons are a fantastic invention, a disgusting and memorable twist on the undead. The story’s final beat, where the protagonist realises he is not the heroic monster fighter he and his family might want him to be, is another genre staple. But set against a threat as nightmarish as this, it hits with a force it might not have otherwise possessed.
“Balloon Season” is an early example of a horror setup Ha often plays with: the defence of an American-style nuclear family home against sabotage from within or without. This formula describes the sublime “Window Boy,” in which a privileged child in an apocalyptic future has his view of the world altered by “house filters” that obscure the monsters beyond some panes of glass. The story has been justly acclaimed (including by me), scooping four award nominations and a Best American reprint, but in the context of this collection it reads as just one example of Ha’s success among many. In “Sweetbaby,” another middle-class child is forced to endlessly repeat Christmas dinner with her scientist parents and monster brother. In “Alabama Circus Punk” the hive-mind of a robot family (with a “father-body,” “mother-body,” and “son-body”) is hacked by a spiteful human “repairman.” These stories, too, expose the empty rituals of American suburbia by displacing it into fantastical settings, an emptiness hinted at by the meaningless phrase “Alabama Circus Punk.”
This is not to say that Ha is opposed to family life. He consistently talks in interviews about his relationship with his children, and it’s often touching to read. In a 2023 interview for the Horror Writer’s Association, Ha states that:
… much of what I write is a kind of invisible, indirect, and long-term conversation with my children … My hope is that through writing—and the timeless form of telepathy that it is—that I might get to have that harder, second type of conversation.
This idea of communing with the next generation is a persistent theme in Uncertain Sons. The title story is narrated by a dead monster hunter who survives as a set of bones carried by his son. This leads to some humorous moments of imagined dialogue: “—Time to go, I’d tell you, if I weren’t just a skull fragment and a jawbone in your backpack.” The parental dynamic lends a tender poignancy to a story that is otherwise a surreal adventure in the vein of Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness” (1931). In between the tentacled blood parasites and fungi with the faces of dead children, Ha drops in lines that speak to recognisable fatherly anxieties: “We brought you into a world of terror, and I worry that all you’ll be is terrified.” It’s a remarkable contrast, with the story’s humanity and the story’s monstrousness each heightening the other.
A more literal form of intergenerational telepathy takes place in “The Sort.” The central characters are a father and son travelling across the US, who can communicate nonverbally with italicised internal dialogue. They pull into an anonymous small town in time for the titular “sort,” a ritual involving the burning of unpalatable “modified” garlic. We eventually learn that the father and son are themselves “modified,” with the father at pains to blend in: “[W]e never know who’s going to get upset when they find out we come from a place where there are still some modified families like us.” Several details of this setup, including the father’s insistence on “Words” rather than telepathy and the son wearing aviators to deal with sensory overload, suggest a metaphorical reading about the experience of being a neurodivergent parent to a neurodivergent child. But the story is never heavy-handed, and nor does it reduce itself to a crass allegory. Instead, it’s a patient, slow-burning character study that also includes a talking tiger.
The book’s finest story, however, brings us back to the optical aspect I have tried so hard to minimise in this review. In “The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video,” we are introduced to a world in which physical books come with “brightness settings” and “rechargeable port[s].” The plot is set in motion when the narrator stumbles across a volume called The Winter Hills, which does not respond to his prodding. He concludes: “The book was dead.” In this dystopian future, “living” books are printed on “pixelated pages,” and can be rewritten at will. It’s a scenario reminiscent of Fahrenheit 451 (1953), and like that novel it addresses censorship of literature by the tyranny of the free market (although its prose style is one of noirish understatement rather than exuberant floridity). The narrator is confronted with incentives to look the other way when a mysterious dealer named “Caliper John” approaches him with an offer to buy the “dead” copy of The Winter Hills. Caliper John treats the narrator to an expensive dinner, where the background details point to the story’s thematic concerns of overlooking and forgetting:
Across from us, a couple laughed. The woman bent over and vomited quietly into a little silver pitcher with a lid and daintily wiped her mouth. One of the waiters came by discreetly and picked it up off the floor and took it away. Other customers seemed to have an easier time averting their eyes than I did, familiar with erasing unpleasant things like these.
It’s a chilling detail of the world of wilful blindness that Ha creates. But to me the most interesting moment comes when the narrator picks up a “living reprint of The Winter Hills for comparison.” Where the “dead” copy is a gritty yet meditative western with a downer ending, “haunting, strange, and unfamiliar,” the “living” text is sanitised and anodyne:
There was a shootout in Copper Hawk like before, yes. But instead of the loss and the blood and the shame of the rider, the iron-handed sheriff was the one to take a bullet. The miners of the town staged a revolt against the metals company in the third act. They set fire to some of the shafts with an explosion at the end of the action, to punctuate the triumph. I could almost sense the hand of audience-score maximizer programs in the plot.
The most damning note of the exegesis, however, is this: “I felt better in some ways, having read the new, happier ending, but I forgot it promptly.” This incentive to forget the unpleasant things we see around us feels apposite to the times, but more personally it’s a vivid sort of horror to put in front of a literary critic. We are not always the best judges of what will be remembered: History is littered with critically acclaimed books that survive as mere footnotes today. But I am willing to bet that I will not forget “The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video” in a hurry, nor the extraordinary collection in which it appears. If you choose to read it, I doubt you will either. Ha has produced an engaging, kinetic, and profoundly well-crafted set of stories. To indulge once more in visual terminology, it marks him out as one to watch.
james_davis_nicoll
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Today is the Day! The Shattering Peace, my 19th novel, the seventh book in the Old Man’s War series, and my second novel of the 2025, is finally out in North America in print, ebook and audio (UK, you have two more days to wait for print/ebook. Be strong). It’s received rave reviews in the trades, including receiving starred reviews from Kirkus and Library Journal, and the general consensus so far is that it’s an excellent return to the Old Man’s War series. This makes me happy.
It’s important for me to note that while this is the seventh book in the series, it’s designed to be one that people who have not read the series before can get into. It’s a standalone book (so far) in the universe, and everything readers need to know to enjoy the story is laid out in the first couple of chapters. Newcomers won’t get lost, I promise. For the people who have read previous books in the series, you’ll find some old friends here, as well making some new ones.
You will find The Shattering Peace in literally every bookstore, online and offline, that carries science fiction. Remember also that for the next two weeks I am also on a book tour here in the US; come see if I’ll be near to where you are. Also! If you desire a signed book but my tour dates are not near you, remember you can call any of the bookstores where I’ll be on tour and ask them to have me sign it and then ship it to you. We’ll both be happy to do that. Subterranean Press also has signed copies available, and if you are outside the US, they ship internationally.
I’m very happy with this book and its story and I’m so thrilled that it’s finally out in the world for you all to enjoy. Welcome back to the Old Man’s War universe, and who knows? If enough of you like this one, maybe I’ll write another.
— JS
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This hotel has given me my own patio, and look! I’ve also updated the operating system on my Mac! Truly, this is book tour is off to an auspicious start. It is also currently 102 degrees, but only 98 degrees in the shade, so that’s something, I suppose.
Tonight! I’m at the Poisoned Pen bookstore here in Scottsdale, and I’ll start doing my thing tonight at 7pm. If you’re in or near Scottsdale and Phoenix, please come say hello to me. I would love to see you.
Tomorrow! I’ll be at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, Washington (that’s just north of Seattle). That will also be at 7pm! Come on down.
Okay, now I’m going back into the air conditioning .
— JS
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For about five years now, I have absolutely loved the music of Mystery Skulls. It was only recently that I learned Mystery Skulls is actually just one guy named Luis Dubuc, and he’s the singer, songwriter, and producer behind it all. While I would largely describe the music as EDM, it honestly has such a unique sound to it that’s very unlike a lot of other electronic music I’ve heard before.
To me, Mystery Skulls’ music is more approachable than a lot of electronic music. With plenty of awesome lyrics and vocals, it is something I would show to someone who isn’t super into EDM already.
Back in May, I learned that Mystery Skulls was going on tour, and would be performing in Columbus in September. I immediately bought two VIP tickets, one for me and one for the friend that introduced me to Mystery Skulls in the first place.
I know I’ve mentioned it a ton of times before, but I am really not a concert person. I hate loud noises, don’t really like live music all that much, and I’m not fond of crowds. I’d rather just jam to my music by myself at the volume I prefer and not pay a ton of money for it.
All that being said, I had the most amazing time at the Mystery Skulls concert, and it was pretty much the best concert I’ve ever been to. My friend and I had so much fun!
The concert was held at Skully’s Music Diner in the Short North area of Columbus. I’d never heard of the venue before, but that makes sense considering I literally just said I don’t like live music (generally).
I loved this venue. It’s a bit of a smaller place, with two bars, a standing room area in front of the stage, and a balcony area. It’s got a dive bar vibe but with a stage. The bathroom really sealed the deal for me, with one of the two stalls having a broken lock, and the other one having a shower curtain instead of a door. At least the floor wasn’t sticky! I was very impressed by that.
So, I’m sure you’re all wondering what the VIP tickets included. At $85 dollars a piece, you got early entry for a meet-and-greet, where you got to talk to Luis and get a photo with him. I declined a photo and he asked if I was in witness protection program, which I found very amusing. After that, everyone got in line for a turn to play a round of Street Fighter with him in a one-on-one battle. I also declined this opportunity, as I suck at those type of fighting games and didn’t want to embarrass myself.
Plus, we got merch bags! A reusable bag with a cool lanyard and a VIP card that Luis signed when we met him, and a RFID card that unlocks early access to an album he’s planning to release in 2026.
So, how was the show? Well, there was an opener, and I don’t know about y’all, but I have never liked an opener at any concert I’ve attended. That was NOT the case here. The opener of the evening was NITE, two twin brothers from Texas with some of the coolest, dark-synth dance music. Like a gothic electronic vibe. It reminded me of if you were having a Stranger Things themed dance party.
I seriously loved every song they played, and they were so fun to watch perform. They really got the crowd hype for the main event. I highly recommend checking out some of their music, and I’ll leave two here for you that I particularly enjoyed:
Aside from NITE being a banger opener, Mystery Skulls kept the energy up the whole time, never slowing down or letting the vibes slip away for even a second. It was amazing to hear all my favorites, plus some new stuff that was special to the tour, and everything was seamlessly remixed together into an awesome blend of never-ending dance. Not to mention the light show was killer.
I know you’re probably at the edge of your seat waiting for me to share some of my favorite songs, so I shan’t keep you waiting any longer.
First up, we have my all-time favorite of his: “Ghost.” This is the first song I ever heard from Mystery Skulls, so it’s nearest and dearest to my heart.
A very close second place song would be “Hellbent.”
For a more funky fresh vibe, I recommend “Freaking Out.”
And for a more clubby, EDM vibe, I recommend “Losing My Mind.”
There’s so many songs of his that are great but I won’t spam you with all of the ones I like.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t tell you about the very interesting and surprisingly in-depth animations that feature Mystery Skulls’ songs, and are the very thing that my friend sent me to begin with.
While these animations don’t actually have anything to do with the music or Luis himself, the series features several of his songs and is inspired by the music.
The series, called Mystery Skulls Animated, starts with “Ghost,” and introduces us to a Scooby-Doo-esque crew who come across a haunted mansion. But things aren’t quite as they first appear.
There were tons of people at the concert in Columbus wearing merch of this animated series, and pretty much everyone I talked to at the concert had seen the animations, too. So while they’re not canon in any capacity, they are huge in the Mystery Skulls fandom itself.
I won’t link all the videos in this post since I’m mainly just here to tell you about the concert, Mystery Skulls, and NITE, but if you want to see the rest of them, here’s an in-order playlist for you.
These animations are absolutely wild and it’s so cool to see the skill and talent progress over the several years they’ve been released. Honestly I loved revisiting these for this post.
So, there you have it! My adventure to Columbus for the Mystery Skulls concert was a huge success, and I’m so happy my friend and I got to see a musician we love perform. I think I’m starting to realize I don’t hate concerts as much as I thought I did, and am mainly not a big fan of huge arena type concerts with 50,000 people and mega-screens you watch the performers on because you’re so far back that they look like a speck on the stage.
What’d you think of the songs? Are you an avid concert-goer? Let me know in the comments, be sure to follow Mystery Skulls and NITE on Instagram, and have a great day!
-AMS
oursinOr, do the details matter?
Concede that sometimes they do, cue here whingeing from me and from others about historical inaccuracies anent the rules of succession, the laws on divorce, etc, which have completely undermined our belief in the narrative we were reading.
But exchange earlier today on bluesky about specific time/place cultural references, do they throw you out -
At which I was, have I not read books involving baseball, and, on reflection, elaborate gambling scams, and I do not understand these at all, but this does not interfere with my enjoyment of the story. Possibly we do need to feel that the author knows what they're writing about and is not commiting solecisms on the lines of 'All rowed fast, but none so fast as stroke' - though apparently this is apocryphal.
I also felt that when I was reading that Reacher novel the other day that perhaps we had a leeeetle more detail than we really required about his exact itinerary whenever he went anywhere - the street-by-street perambulations in NYC, for ex. I am sure one could trace them exactly on a map, and any one-way systems were correctly described, and the crossings in the right place.
Which is sort of the equivalent of where I got 'futtock-shroudery' from, which was reading Age of Sail novels with Alot of period nautical terminology. (On the whole I though O'Brian got the balance on this right.)
There has been a certain amount of querying expressed in the Dance to the Music of Time discussions about some of the significance of parts of London invoked by Nick Jenkins, which is not just geography but Class (there was at least one passage where I was getting strong Nancy Mitford's Lady Montdore dissing on Kensington vibes), connotations of bohemianism, etc.
Sometimes the detail is load-bearing. But often it's not, particularly.
james_davis_nicoll
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To Oxford comma, or to not Oxford comma? That is the question. Thankfully, author Ian Randal Strock is here with some answers. Or, at the very least, plenty of research about punctuation throughout history that he’s organized into his new book, Punctilious Punctuation.
IAN RANDAL STROCK:
As all the best arguments do, it started with something very, very small. In this case, it was a comma.
Specifically, I wrote an article for the Mensa Bulletin marking the centennial of Isaac Asimov’s birth. [Footnote 1] My first job in science fiction was as the editorial assistant at Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine (and also Analog), so I met Isaac my second day on the job. Of the day we met, I wrote an amusing anecdote, and noted that “We laughed, and were friends for three years” (that is, the last three years of his life).
The editor removed the comma, and when I questioned that decision, he said, “Two dependent clauses/compound predicate so no comma is needed.” I disagreed… emphatically. To my mind, the use of the comma means: “we laughed briefly, and after that incident, we were friends for the next three years.” Without the comma, to me, it means: “we laughed for three years and we were friends for three years.” We did not laugh for three years.
The editor, however, was operating under the strict interpretation of the Associated Press Stylebook, which seems to be waging its battle against punctuation (a carry-over, perhaps, from its use for newspapers, in which saving typographical space is of paramount importance). That, too, is why the serial (or Oxford) comma has all but disappeared from news reporting.
The article in question, however, was not a newspaper report in which saving column inches was a desperate need. And I still feel the loss of that comma (but he’s the editor, so what he says goes [just wait until he writes something that I publish <insert evil grin here>]).
That interaction got me thinking about punctuation in general, and about the need for punctuation, and the wonderful things writers can do with punctuation when using it properly, and the horrible things e e cummings did to us with his minimal use of punctuation and majuscules. Punctuation, in written language, serves the same purpose as vocal inflection and body language in spoken language. Without it, we’re communicating on a flat plane. With it, we’re communicating in three dimensions.
As a science fiction writer, it may be ironic to note that I’m not an early adopter of every new thing that comes along: I still listen to CDs in my car; I maintain my unshakeable faith in the primacy of WordPerfect; and I won’t eat red or blue M&Ms. With a similar tenacity, I couldn’t let that comma go.
I researched the history of commas, and punctuation in general, and found Florence Hazrat (a Fellow at the University of Sheffield), and her article “A History of Punctuation” [Footnote 2], in which she writes, “In the broad sense, punctuation is any glyph or sign in a text that isn’t an alphabet letter. This includes spaces, whose inclusion wasn’t always a given: in classical times stone inscriptions as well as handwritten texts WOULDLOOKLIKETHIS—written on scrolls, potentially unrolling forever.” Continuous script seems to arise from the use of writing merely as record of speech, rather than a practice in itself. And since we’re hardly aware of the infinitesimal pauses we make between words when speaking—other than William Shatner [Footnote 3] and certain other enunciators—it isn’t obvious to register something we do and perceive unconsciously with a designated sign that is a non-sign: blank space.
Perhaps the main use of writing in Ancient Greece and Rome was for people giving lectures and political speeches, not publishing books. Before making their speeches, orators would work on their texts, using whatever symbols and marks would remind them which were long and short syllables, where to pause for rhetorical effect and breathing, and so on. There was as yet no such thing as reading at first sight.
This personal writing without punctuation lasted for hundreds of years, before writing slowly became standardized as a form of communication unto itself. And with that growth came the need to punctuate.
And as many science fiction writers do, I quickly fell down that research rabbit hole. Before I knew it, I had enough information to give an hour-long lecture on the subject, tinged with my own brand of humor. And then, because I’d put so much effort into it, I did even more research, theorizing, and writing, and turned it into a book. So yes, this entire book exists because I had an argument over a comma.
And by the way: serial commas rule!
***
Footnotes:
Footnote 1: “Isaac Asimov: Remembering the Literary Icon I Worked With” by Ian Randal Strock. Published in the November/December 2019 issue of the Mensa Bulletin. Available at https://www.us.mensa.org/read/bulletin/features/isaac-asimov-writer-polymath-chemist-mensan/
Footnote 2: “A History of Punctuation,” by Florence Hazrat, Aeon, Septmber 3, 2020. https://aeon.co/essays/beside-the-point-punctuation-is-dead-long-live-punctuation
Footnote 3: See, for example, “Is William Shatner’s Signature Speech Style Fake?” by Robin Zabiegalski, published February 1, 2021, on Heavy.com. In the article, Shatner is quoted as saying that “each person’s speech style [is] their own personal ‘music’.” https://heavy.com/entertainment/star-trek/william-shatner-signature-speech-style-fake/
—-
Punctilious Punctuation: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Powell’s
lydamorehousejames_davis_nicollWhich 2014 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
65 (95.6%)
God's War by Kameron Hurley
24 (35.3%)
Nexus by Ramez Naam
10 (14.7%)
The Adjacent by Christopher Priest
5 (7.4%)
The Disestablishment of Paradise by Phillip Mann
1 (1.5%)
The Machine by James Smythe
3 (4.4%)
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I'm pleased to announce the release of Erik Hofstatter's Bankrupting Skybanks, in both print and e-book editions, from Aqueduct Press. Bankrupting Skybanks, a novella in dark poetic prose, is the ninety-seventh volume in Aqueduct's Conversation Pieces Series. You can purchase it now at www.aqueductpress.com.
The disquiet in our heads has started fires again. God tries to smoke us out. We have red hair because our heads are alight. But we resist His interpretation. Red also shows our willingness to bleed.
Everyday more flesh leaves our bones. They all leave. The people we love—only out of habit, for contentment. The people we love—only out of respect, for blood shared. Even our own flesh leaves us when we stress. God leaves us when his sky path goes dark. And he waits for us to die so he can peck away. But we don’t know if there’s holy flavor left in us anymore.
Bankrupting Sky Banks is an introspective work inspired by the infamous Borgia family. A half-burned invitation written to God.
We are the prey that prays.
Advance Praise
“A shocking, scandalous, searing story, made all the more visceral by the fact that it has its roots in true history, Hofstatter’s Bankrupting Sky Banks is an extraordinary foray into the dark and deceptive world of the Borgias.” —Christa Carmen, Bram Stoker Award-winning & Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author of The Daughters of Block Island
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Why? Well, one, my book tour starts tomorrow and that’s two weeks straight out on the road, and after that I have events basically every other weekend through November, so better to prepare than not (I got a flu shot a couple months back, so I’m good there, too), and two, our dimwit-not-even-qualified-enough-to-call-himself-a-quack Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., may be about to try to make it more difficult for everyone under the age of 75 to get a COVID vaccine, based on absolute bullshit that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, so fuck him, I got mine. I booked my appointment at CVS, went in, got shot up and was on my merry way in less than ten minutes. Simple! Easy! Smart!
Naturally, I strongly encourage all y’all to get your own shots in as soon as you can (allowing for previous vaccine schedules and/or previous infections). Take care of yourself out there, because at this particular moment, the US federal government isn’t gonna do you much good.
— JS
oursinThis week's bread: the Country Oatmeal aka Monastery Loaf from Eric Treuille and Ursula Ferrigno's Bread (2:1:1 wholemeal/strong white/pinhead oatmeal), turned out nicely if perhaps a little coarser than the recipe anticipates (medium oatmeal has been for some reason a bit hard to come by).
Friday night supper: ven pongal (South Indian khichchari), v nice.
Saturday breakfast rolls: eclectic vanilla, texture seemed a bit off, possibly the dough could have been a bit slacker?
Today's lunch: the roasted Mediterranean vegetable thing - whole garlic cloves, red onion, fennel, red bell pepper, baby peppers, baby courgettes and aubergine (v good), served with couscous + raisins.
conulyjames_davis_nicoll
file770_feedfirecatfile770_feedconulyfile770_feedscalziwhatever_feed
It’s come ’round again, the anniversary of the first day I sat down and wrote something here intended for daily(ish) updating, twenty-seven years ago, long ago enough that AOL was still a viable and ongoing concern and that blogs weren’t called “blogs,” they were called “online diaries” or “online journals.” Because I was a former journalist and also a bit of an ass, I spurned both those titles (as I would the word “blog” a little later), preferring to say that I wrote an “online column.” Over time, I have become rather less precious about this, especially now that “blog” is a concept that now hearkens back to a cretaceous era of the Internet, before social media and algorithms and the concept of being “terminally online.” If only we knew then what we know now. We might all go running into the night, never to return.
Be that as it may, Whatever continues, and I still post here regularly, along with my daughter Athena, who was a couple months from being born when I started this whole thing. At this point in time, she actually does more here than I do; she posts almost all the Big Ideas, and writes as many of the longer pieces here these days than I manage. This partly because so much more of my professional life happens offline these days — in the last week or so, as an example, I wrote a short story, a script treatment and some of my novel, and then traveled to Portland for a convention, and starting Monday I embark on a two-week book tour — and partly because Athena is writing cool and interesting stuff and I’m really happy about that. The Whatever is better for having her as part of it, and it’s been fun watching this place grow from my personal soapbox into a two-person shop. I like that 27 years on, this site is still evolving.
I am very really happy with what’s going on in my professional writing life at the moment (I have some very cool stuff going on right now I absolutely cannot tell you about yet, but when I can tell you, I think you’ll be excited), and one side effect of that is that at the end of the day I often don’t have it together to post more than something short here. I don’t think this is a tragedy, but I would like to write slightly longer here than I have recently. I have some ideas how to do this, but a lot of that will have to wait after the book promo season I am about to find myself in. In the meantime, there will be views out of a hotel window, posts about cats, and more cool stuff from Athena.
And so, onward — for Whatever and for me and Athena. I like where everything is with Whatever, and I look forward to where we go from here. Another year awaits.
— JS
oursinSeem to have been seeing a cluster of things about litter, and picking it up, lately, what with this one Lake District: Family shouted at for picking up litter, and the thing I posted recently about the young woman who was snarking on the Canals and Rovers Trust about what she perceived as her singlehanded mission to declutter the local canal bank: "Elena might feel alone in tackling London's litter waste", and then this week's 'You Be The Judge' in the weekend Guardian is on a related theme:
Should my girlfriend stop picking up other people’s litter?
(She is at least throwing it away in a responsible fashion: I worry about the couple whose flat is being cluttered up with culinary appliances where one feels maybe the ones that aren't actually being used anymore could be rehomed via charity shops before they are buried under an avalanche of redundant ricecookers etc).
As far as litter and clutter goes, National Trust tears down Union flag from 180-year-old monument. Actually, carefully removed, and we think there are probably conservation issues involved: quote from NT 'We will assess whether any damage has been caused to the monument'. See also White horse checked for any damage caused by flag. We do not think respect and care for heritage is uppermost in the minds of people who do these jelly-bellied flagflapping gestures.
scalziwhatever_feed
Our newest addition to the Scamperbeast clan continues to be friggin’ adorable, and also his personality is beginning to show more. He is rambunctious, which is to be expected in a kitten, and also a bit of menace, since he discovered that he enjoys both the stairs and being underfoot, which is a dangerous combination with one is trying to navigate the stairs at night and suddenly there is a kitten. There are reasons why, when I turned forty, I trained myself to start reaching for the railing on the stairs, and this kitten is definitely one of those reasons.
In terms of the other cats, Saja continues to be an annoyance to Sugar and Spice, the former of whom still wants nothing to do with him, and the latter of which has come to grudgingly accept that he might be on the bed at the same time she is. Smudge is more congenial to him and the two of them tussle on a regular basis now:
This is lovely for us, as it reminds us of when Smudge was the kitten a Zeus was the one tusslin’ with him. It’s nice to know the tussle reaches over generations. Charlie and Saja also continue to get along famously. It’s as good an integration at this point that one could hope for.
The one real annoying thing Saja will do is try to eat my face, which he does every night between three and five am. He’s probably not actually trying to eat my face, he’s probably trying to nurse, which will not avail him of anything, alas for him. This will continue until I grab him, take him downstairs and then plop him in front of a cat food bowl, at which point he goes, oh, right, that’s where the food is. I’m hoping he grows out of this; I would really prefer to sleep through the night. We’ll see.
— JS
james_davis_nicoll
Which of these look interesting?
Daughter of No Worlds by Carissa Broadbent (October 2025)
8 (17.4%)
Outlaw Planet by M.R. Carey (November 2025)
20 (43.5%)
Champions of Chaos by Calum Colins, et al
1 (2.2%)
Slow Gods by Claire North (November 2025)
24 (52.2%)
The Divine Gardener’s Handbook: Or What to Do if Your Girlfriend Accidentally Turns Off the Sun by Eli Snow (August 2026)
22 (47.8%)
Death Engine Protocol: Better Dying Through Science by Margret A. Treiber (April 2025)
13 (28.3%)
Some other option (see comments)
0 (0.0%)
Cats!
30 (65.2%)
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We’ve made it to another Friday, and here is a new set of books and ARCs that have come to the Scalzi Compound. What here is piquing your interest? Share in the comments!
— JS
oursinOkay, my dearios, I am sure all dear rdrs are with me that tradwives are not trad, they are deploying an aesthetic loosely based on vague memories of the 1950s - and meedja representations at that - and some very creepy cultish behaviour - they are not returning to some lovely Nachral State -
And that as I bang on about a lot, women have been engaged in all kinds of economic activity THROUGHOUT THE WHOLE OF HISTORY since economic activity became A Thing.
I have a spot of nitpickery to apply - it rather skips over and elides the move from the household economy into factories e.g., leading to 'separate spheres' with wife stuck at home (and even that was a very blurry distinction, I mutter); and also the amount of exploitative homeworking undertaken by women of the lower classes (often to the detriment of any kind of 'good housekeeping').(Not saying middle-class women didn't also find ways of making a spot of moolah to eke out household budget.)
And of course a lot of tradwives are actually performing as economically productive influencers: TikTok tradwives: femininity, reproduction, and social media - in a tradition of women who made a very nice living out of telling other women how to be domestic goddesses, ahem ahem.
plaidder_tumblr_feedCONN: Hello everyone, and please welcome to the show a legend in her own time, Theamh ni hUlnach na Craiobh!
THEAMH: Who are you talking to?
CONN: Don’t ask. Shriia, thanks for coming on the show, I know you’re very busy doing other things right now.
THEAMH: I mean you told me you needed something so I kind of had to be here.
CONN: True. I just…I can’t find the usual host, I don’t know where she is. Hiding, is my guess. But I just…wanted…no. No, I needed…I mean I need to talk to a shriia. And you were the first one I could find.
THEAMH: Idair moves in mysterious ways. You know in all the millions of words in this saga, I don’t think we’ve ever actually met. I mean, there was that one time–
CONN: But that’s not canon. No, in the actual books, I don’t think we ever meet. We just…watch each other from afar.
THEAMH: Well I hope I will live up to the legend. So…what do you need, friend?
CONN: I…
…
CONN: You won a war against the worst and most evil people to ever come out of our country without killing anyone.
THEAMH: We did.
CONN: How did you do it?
THEAMH: I mean, with the help of Idair, the way we do everything.
CONN: I know. I just…I’m looking for models. Hope. Inspiration. Something. Can you give me some details.
THEAMH: So first of all, we did lose a lot of people. There were eighteen shriic martyrs in that war. So that’s one thing nobody wants to talk about really but it is very important: you can decide not to kill, but you can’t always decide not to die. And you have to know that and be ready to die. And maybe that’s easier for us, because we have Idair, and we trust that when we die she’ll take care of us, one way or the other.
CONN: I never thought about whether I was ready to die. I just…did what I felt like I had to do.
THEAMH: In times like these, that’s basically what it means to be ready to die. But of course you also have to know how to fight. I’m bad at strategy, other people handled that. But I do know how to fight.
And it also helps that we’re usually not fighting dark users directly, one to one. They do their work and we thwart their work and most of the time we don’t actually meet in battle. Which is good, because in one on one combat with dark users our disadvantages are significant. If you don’t have surprise or the numbers advantage, in a hand to hand firefight you’re most likely going to lose. I mean it’s a lot easier to kill an opponent than to disable one. You can block and wrap people but that’s temporary and it’s exhausting. If you want to disarm one of us, you really have to disarm her.
CONN: That’s horrifying.
THEAMH: Sorry. It’s a scoil joke. But I guess I think I should point out that we didn’t take out all of our opponents. They took each other out. Frequently.
CONN: How did you get them to do that?
THEAMH: I think the only role we played in that was putting stress on their system. When things started getting harder and going wrong and not working, they turned on each other. Dark users don’t work well together. They never really trust anyone, and most of them can’t see anything beyond their own desires. That’s what made Lythril so dangerous. She actually understood the importance of organization and she tried to do it. But when the going got tough, she just started getting rid of the people who’d failed her and pissed her off.
CONN: So you’re saying you didn’t beat the Dark One, the Dark One beat itself.
THEAMH: Call it a joint effort. I mean you can’t just trust the Dark One to defeat itself. You have to fight it. But it helps to know that when you fight it, the Dark One will eventually start fighting itself.
CONN: Why? I mean are dark users not smart enough to figure this out and stop doing this?
THEAMH: One, most dark users are actually not that smart–Lythril is unusal that way–and two, even the smart ones just…can’t help it. It’s the nature of evil. I get what I want for me and mine and to hell with you and yours. They can cooperate with each other against a common enemy in a specific and limited way. But no dark user will go against his own interests to help out another dark user. No dark user will sacrifice herself–or really anything that matters to her, including her gold or her leisure or her pleasures–for another. I mean I have not had the chance to test this theory but I am pretty sure that self-sacrifice is a loss violation on the dark side.
CONN: What is the Dark One anyway? You must know.
THEAMH: You know it as well as I do. It comes out of her world and you’ve spent so much more time in that than I have.
CONN: I still don’t…I don’t think I really understand it.
THEAMH: Friend, nor do I. But I know what it’s made of. Greed.
CONN: Right. Hatred.
THEAMH: Violence.
CONN: Cruelty. I mean that’s basically hatred plus violence. Ambition?
THEAMH: Ambition takes on the color of whatever you put it next to. There are some true shriias who are ambitious. Morat, in her way. Aine, in a different way. Just not me.
CONN: Where does the laughter come in?
THEAMH: What?
CONN: Dark One’s Laughter. That’s an oath on the dark side, right?
THEAMH: Yes.
CONN: But you…you all make jokes, you all laugh.
THEAMH: Sure. But the Dark One’s laughter is different. It’s bitter and black and contemptuous. It’s hateful. The Dark One laughs at suffering and pain. If you laugh at death that’s the Dark One’s laughter. You fight evil and you get to really hate certain proponents of it and there are temptations. But I hope I’m dead and burned before I ever laugh with the Dark One.
CONN: What if you hear it in your head?
THEAMH: Is that why you really needed to talk to me, friend?
CONN: It is.
THEAMH: Listen, friend. You fought these people too. And you won. Without killing anyone. How did you do it?
CONN: I wasn’t in the resistance. I was locked up.
THEAMH: Friend, you were locked up because you were in the resistance. You WERE the resistance. All of it that we had at the time.
CONN: I don’t know who they had to fight to get us out of there or how much damage they did.
THEAMH: They waited until they could do it without staining the victory. They waited for us to weaken the dark users and they waited for the ordinary people to turn on the traitors. I mean they were working at it, not just waiting. But that’s how any of it’s possible. You weaken their power and then when it’s too weak to withstand you, you break it. And when you break it, instead of fighting, they run.
CONN: It seems like a lot to ask. That much work and that much patience and that much dying.
THEAMH: It is a lot to ask. And…I mean…like I can say “without staining the victory” and you know what I mean because even though you’re not a shriia you understand that death is a stain. We live the way we live and have the rules we have because we’re trying to show people why we have to protect life even in our enemies. And we don’t pretend it’s easy. And some of us die doing it. And we hope that makes it easier for ordinary people to protect life and hate death. But…I don’t think the Cretid Nation has anything like the Order.
CONN: It doesn’t. It has guns and prisons and police and the Dark One’s laughter. So…if you’re a Cretid…how would you do this? Defeat evil without killing anyone?
THEAMH: Don’t you think that if there were an easy answer to that, Aine would have found it?
CONN: I guess I do.
THEAMH: You want the hard answer?
CONN: If you have one.
THEAMH: You can’t free the Cretid Nation. You have to turn the Cretid Nation into some other place, and then free it. I mean in the way we’re talking about. Because all of this–your way of fighting, my way of fighting–it only works at all because we have the people with us. In the Cretid Nation the people can’t be with you, they can’t be with each other even.
…
THEAMH: I told you it was the hard answer.
CONN: Yeah.
…
THEAMH: Have I given what you need?
CONN: The closest thing to it that I can have, I think.
THEAMH: Goodbye then. Take care, friend. Idair with you.
lydamorehouseBut, yeah, I've literally been doing that thing that I do, which is to google the crap out of things that were mentioned in the film, like saja (fascinating stuff there!) and Korean water demons (mul gwishin), etc.
For those of you who saw it, what did you think of KPop Demon Hunters?file770_feed - Remembering Robert Redford (1936-2025)brithistorian - Fun with usernamesbrithistorian - QOTD: Walter Benjamin on the relationship between photoraphs and captionsoursin - Creepy, creepy, creepystrangehorizons_feed - Uncertain Sons and Other Stories by Thomas Hajames_davis_nicoll - The Feast of Saint Janis & Ginungagap by Michael Swanwickscalziwhatever_feed - The Shattering Peace is Out!james_davis_nicoll - Five Artificially Layered Planets and World Citiesjames_davis_nicoll - Spread Me by Sarah Gaileycarmilla - Dear Trick or Treat creatorfile770_feed - Remebering Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (1942 – 2025)oursin - (no subject)file770_feed - 2025 McIlvanney Prize and Bloody Scotland Debut Winnersfile770_feed - Pixel Scroll 9/15/25 Pixel, Pixel, Pixel, I Made You Out Of Scrollfile770_feed - 2025 Horror Writers Association Scholarship Winnersscalziwhatever_feed - View From a Hotel Chaise Longue, 9/15/25: Scottsdale, AZscalziwhatever_feed - Attending A Mystery Skulls Concert At Skully’s Music Dinerxkcd_feed - -Style Pizzaoursin - Futtock-shrouderyjames_davis_nicoll - Bundle of Holding: Dread Laironomiconscalziwhatever_feed - The Big Idea: Ian Randal Strocklydamorehouse - My Weekendjames_davis_nicoll - Clarke Award Finalists 2014aqueductpress_feed - Bankrupting Skybanks by Erik Hofstatteroursin - (no subject)rydra_wong - "If you like Dark Souls, it's hard to shut up about Dark Souls"file770_feed - Emmy Awards 2025file770_feed - Pixel Scroll 9/14/25 Pixels, Like Tribbles, Are Comfortingjames_davis_nicoll - Transitscalziwhatever_feed - Got Myself a COVID Shot Todayoursin - Culinaryconuly - So, the way I grew up I'm actually shockingly good at deep cleaningjames_davis_nicoll - The Dosadi Experiment (ConSentiency, volume 2) by Frank Herbertoursin - (no subject)file770_feed - Pixel Scroll 9/13/25 May Your Pixel Live In Scrolling Timesfirecat - We need to talkfile770_feed - 2025 Deutsche Science Fiction Preisconuly - I saw a whole family of deer the other day!file770_feed - 2025 SFRA Awardsscalziwhatever_feed - 27 Years of Whateveroursin - Rubbishscalziwhatever_feed - Catching Up With Sajajames_davis_nicoll - Books Received, September 6 — September 12file770_feed - Pixel Scroll 9/12/25 Me And The Pixels Know How To Napxkcd_feed - Mantle Modelscalziwhatever_feed - New Books and ARCs, 9/12/25oursin - Even housewives weren't necessarily exclusively housewifingplaidder_tumblr_feed - This Fcking Timeline, Episode Interminable: Dark One’s Laughterlydamorehouse - Lost in FEELSconuly - Another year, another lovely daybranchandroot
