The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/05/announcing-3-days-9-months-27-years/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57185

This November, you know, after you’ve picked up The Shattering Peace and enjoyed the heck out of it, I’ll have another new thing for you: A short story called “3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years,” which will be part of The Time Traveler’s Passport, an anthology of stories about time and/or travel, edited by John Joseph Adams, which in addition to my story will feature stories by R.F. Kuang, Peng Shepard, Kaliane Bradley, Olivie Blake and P. Djèlí Clark. That is a hell of a line-up, if I do say so myself. These stories will also feature audio narration, and they will be for sale individually, but if you are an Amazon Prime member, you’ll get to read them for free, because Amazon is publishing this anthology, and that’s how Amazon do.

And what is “3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years” about? Here’s the pitch:

Time travel is real—and used for high-end tourism. Every moment of the past is open to visitors, and no matter what they do then, everything now waits for them, thanks to the sure hand of an experienced time travel technician. Come spend a day behind the controls of the time machine, and discover why, this day of all days, it’s time for this technician to make a change. Because sometimes, time travel is more than just an adventure. Sometimes, it’s a moral imperative.

Oooooh! Moral imperatives!

It’s a very good story, if I do say so myself (as are the other stories in this collection, no surprise given the line-up), and I’m looking forward to sharing it with you all in November. That’s not long now, and worth the wait.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/05/announcing-3-days-9-months-27-years/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57185

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/04/the-big-idea-gary-jackson/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57156

Move over, Shakespeare in the Park, today we’ve got poet Gary Jackson and the Big Idea for his newest collection of poetry. Follow along to see how small lives speaks to the reader in an unprecedented way.

GARY JACKSON:

It’s no secret that I love persona poems. When I teach my intro to poetry students about voice and speaker, I routinely ask: Who is talking to whom about what? I pose the question hoping to prompt them to consider how a poet employs pronouns, point of view, and psychic distance to not only render a speaker, but also address an audience—both inside and outside the world of the poem—often creating simultaneous meanings that can even contradict.

All of my books engage with persona in different ways, including the poems in small lives, which began as a handful of disparate persona poems in the voices of superhumans. Some of the first pieces I wrote for this collection, like “fly” and “The Telepath quits her day job,” feature two different speakers navigating the extraordinary in our contemporary moment. Both poems use the first-person point of view because I like to bring the reader closer into the world I’m creating. Third person tends to put more psychic distance between speaker and reader than I want, and the voice can teeter toward the omniscient, which I’m not usually after. But as I wrote more of these superhuman voices, I realized two things: 1) I was juggling a lot of speakers, and 2) a few main characters were emerging to form the core of the story I was telling: The Invincible Woman, The Willpower Man, and The Telepath.

Having multiple speakers populate a collection wasn’t new to me—my previous books also employed multiple personas. The easiest way to handle persona in the speculative world of small lives was simply to name the poem after the speaker, which gives you titles like “The Heartless Boy,” “The Never-Ending Man,” and “The Precog” (though that last one is interesting because it’s not the Precog speaking to us, but her granddaughter). The title, while relatively simple, does a great deal of work introducing the speaker before the reader even enters the poem.

It was clear early on that The Willpower Man, The Telepath, and The Invincible Woman would be the three recurring speakers throughout the collection. And though many of their poems include their names in the titles, several do not. And several challenges emerged: when they interact with one another, what’s the best way to handle those crossovers? Without always relying on the first-person point of view, how can I make it clear who is speaking to whom? That’s when I realized I had been leaving out one pronoun almost entirely when it came to identifying the subject position of the speaker: you.

Like most poets, I frequently use the second person to signify an absence, a placeholder for some recipient, or a presence implied by the you—a finger pointing outward to implicate the reader or directly address them. But what about conflating speaker and reader, bringing them directly into the difficult and impossible choices these characters face? What if I collapsed that psychic and narrative distance even further?

Looking back through my drafts, one of the first poems featuring you was an early piece for The Invincible Woman, simply titled “The Invincible Woman,” which served as her introduction. It would eventually become “The Invincible Woman has a one-night stand,” but in that first draft there was a line (that’s no longer in the published version): “And the world, like all things that grow up, forgot you.” Maybe that’s why I chose the second person for her voice—I wanted a persona that implicated the reader, myself, and anyone who encountered the poem. That fear of being forgotten became a touchpoint not just for the superhumans in the collection, but for something universally human: how value can be cruelly assigned to a life based on who remembers you, or how important you’re deemed to be in the eyes of a cultural or social group, a country, a world.

Eventually, I found a cleaner way to manage multiple speakers: assign each a primary pronoun. The Willpower Man was easy—his poems had always been in the first-person I. Since The Invincible Woman began in the second-person you, I kept her there. The Telepath was trickier; early drafts and even some published versions alternated between first and second person. It wasn’t until I knew these characters would inhabit the same book that I realized she needed a distinct pronoun to avoid confusion. I settled on the third-person she, which worked well since the book was already rich with first- and second-person voices that pulled the reader directly into the world of small lives. Any psychic distance created by third person was offset by the other perspectives—and, because she is a telepath who can inhabit other minds, that slightly more omniscient lens felt fitting.

I also included a brief “cast of characters” meta-poem to further clarify and avoid confusion, which gave me an opportunity to acknowledge the fluidity of all three pronouns, as well as the collective we and us of the first-person plural that appears throughout the collection. At times, these voices conflate reader, character, speaker, and self, sometimes intentionally contradicting each other in the ways only poetry can.

small lives: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Kobo|UNM Press

Author socials: Website

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/04/the-big-idea-gary-jackson/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57156

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/03/the-big-idea-rich-larson/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57140

Stories are there for us through good times and bad times. They can comfort us, perplex us, or connect us. Follow along in author Rich Larson’s Big Idea for his newest book, Changelog, where he seeks to connect us all to his grandmother.

RICH LARSON:

What’s the point?

That’s the only Big Idea that comes to mind as I watch my grandma gasping in her sleep. What’s the point of writing an essay to promote a book full of stories barely anyone will read? What was the point of me writing all those stories in the first place? What’s the point of writing anything?

Changelog doesn’t matter much today, so I’ll tell you about my grandma: not the shrunken, angular version of her on the hospital bed, but the earlier iterations.

She was born in a Mennonite village in Ukraine in 1927. She survived the Holodomor, the artificial famine imposed by the USSR – this bit of history is repeating itself today, both in the Russian government’s invasion of Ukraine and the Israeli government’s starvation of Gaza.

Her sister Mary died of fever, her brother Fritz from tuberculosis of the bone. Her father was arrested for writing religious poetry, and put in a cell so crowded that if one man rolled over, everyone had to roll over. He was released when the Soviets needed more mechanics, but came back white-haired and gaunt. 

Her village was liberated by German soldiers, because things are always more complicated than we would like them to be – this is a fact she pared away when she immigrated to Canada. Her journey west was long and dangerous, full of loss and reunion and wild coincidence that would never pass in fiction. The day she mentions most often is the day she swam for her life:

She was seventeen, and a Russian officer, drunken, victorious, was picking girls from the crowd of refugees trying to cross the Elbe River. Her brother John saw a boat close to shore, and whispered for her to swim. She threw herself into the icy water; the officer staggered after her but dropped his pistol in the river. She reached the edge of the boat. Some hands pushed her away, fearing the Russians would fire on them. Stronger hands pulled her in.

A year later she came to Halifax on a cruise ship full of Displaced Persons. The train ride that followed was so long she feared it would carry her all the way around the back of the world and leave her in Siberia. She arrived in Chilliwack instead, on Christmas morning. She remembers twinkling lights and supermarket stalls overflowing with oranges.

She lived with distant relatives and set herself to learning English, falling asleep with th and wh on her tongue. She cleaned houses in Vancouver, where two old British women gave her cold mutton for lunch. Her stomach was unaccustomed, so she wrapped it in a napkin and hid it in the garbage – but then their great big dog came sniffing around, so she had to stealthily transfer it to her bag.

She became a nurse, and years later forgot her nurse’s watch at a relative’s wedding. The young crooked-faced farmer who returned it became her husband. She wrote poetry; he quoted her Shakespeare. They homesteaded twice in rural Manitoba, and paid off the farm just one year before he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. They had three children, one of whom was my mother. 

Knowing facts and anecdotes about my grandma is not the same as knowing her. Knowing her is more like this:

You stumble in from playing in the snow, and she yanks off your mittens and claps your ruddy hands to her warm cheeks and yelps in mock-pain and says oh! icicles!

You sleep over at her house and wear your dead grandpa’s pajamas, white with pale blue stripes, and she makes thin pancakes and watches Spider-Man cartoons with you.

You trek to her house in summertime and she meets you halfway, and when you arrive there’s ginger ale – she mixes hers with cranberry juice – and fresh buns, or cinnamon rolls, or the chocolate-chip brownies you now bake whenever you need to befriend new neighbors.

You have your first heartbreak, already in a different city, and she listens, then quietly asks what did she look like, because she knows that’s important, that a person is more than a name and a decision.

You stay with her for what you don’t realize is the last time, and every day you walk around the pond, using momentum – der Schwung – to get down the grassy ditch and up the other side. She teaches you Scrabble and regrets it because it’s then the only game you want to play. In the evenings you watch Jeopardy or Murder She Wrote.

You call her from dozens of different cities, and every time she says Richie! Where in the world are you now? When your mom says her memory is starting to go, you don’t believe it. Your grandma is warm and sharp and funny as ever.

You surprise her with a visit, make plans to see her the next day. When you buzz her door from outside the apartment, she says Richie! Where in the world are you now? and she is not joking. You begin to pre-mourn her.

You pre-mourn her for years, and it still rips your heart out to see her lying here. Her bed is tilted nineteen degrees. Two wild roses sit in a jar of water beside her.

That’s not knowing her either.

Her voice is faint now, and she doesn’t have her teeth in, and she slips between English, German, Plautdietsch, sometimes Ukrainian or Russian. More and more often, her eyes look confused. I try to cherish every last spark – like yesterday, when I said I wish I could see what’s going on inside your head, and she puffed a laugh and said so do I.

And I guess that’s the point.

I’ve been writing stories all my life, and they’ve served me in a variety of ways. When I was a kid, they let me escape sad rooms like this one. As I got older, they became anchors in time, each story reminding me of where I was, who I was, who I was with when I wrote it. They let me try, over and over, to understand things that will never make sense and put endings on things that don’t end.

But the biggest reason I write is this: you’ll never know my grandma, and you’ll likely never know me, but writing stories – whether hewn whole from life or filtered through imagination – feels like closing the gap just a little. I’ve always wanted so badly for someone to see what’s going on in here.

Changelog: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author socials: Website|Facebook|Instagram

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/03/the-big-idea-rich-larson/

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Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/02/further-thoughts-on-the-m4-mac-air-and-pixel-10-pro/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57112

First the M4 Mac Air and then the Pixel 10 Pro, because, I don’t know, we’re going from largest to smallest.

M4 Mac Air: The first thing I note is that I think I forgot how much I enjoy this particular form factor for a laptop. Don’t get me wrong, I really am happy with my MacBook Pro, but it is an actual beast of a machine, big and heavy and kind of a pain in the ass to take places. Again, I bought it more or less as a desktop replacement, so I’m not faulting it for these facts; it’s doing what I intended it to do. But it is a lug to carry, and not a computer you can comfortably one hand as you move about the house.

The Mac Air, on the other hand, I’m happily carrying around all over the place, and I’m genuinely looking forward to traveling with it when I head out to Portland this weekend and on tour later in the month. It is literally no problem just to pick up and move around. It’s a pleasure to type on (which is what it has over my iPad Pro with the Magic Keyboard), and everything else about it just works: The screen is pretty nice, it’s loud enough when I play something through its speakers, and the battery efficiency is such that I’ve been running it unplugged for a couple of days, writing, scrolling social media and watching YouTube, and haven’t gotten close to draining the thing. It’s basically a perfect portable computer, or at least a close to perfect one for me.

This is not entirely surprising as the various reviews I’ve read and watched have pretty much said the same thing; the general consensus is that for the non-power user (which is nearly everyone who is not a coder, a serious PC gamer and/or someone working with tons of video), the M4 Mac Air is probably as much computer as you need. I’m inclined to agree with this. My use case of writing, browsing and some light photoediting does not come close to maxing out the capabilities of this chip, and while I chipped out a little bit extra for more RAM and SSD space (which also got me a slightly better-specced processor), the base model with 16 gigs of RAM would not exactly be hurting doing what I’m doing, either. Spec snobs will note that the screen on the Air is not OLED and only refreshes 60 times a second (unlike iPad Pro, which has the OLED, or the screen on the MacBook Pro, which has variable refresh rates up to 120 times a second). However, having a recent Mac Pro to compare, allow me to say: I literally don’t care. The screen is perfectly good. I don’t notice the lack of OLED or high refresh rates when I’m using it, and I’m not running it next to the MacBook Pro to notice the supposed deficiency. It’s fine.

In the real world, the drawbacks I’ve noticed on this Mac Air are thus: Having both USB-C/Thunderbolt ports on the same side of the computer is a very minor annoyance, and the small size of the computer means that when I am sitting in my office Eames Chair, the cats choose to pretend they don’t see me working on the Air and want to sit in my lap. Which is cute! But makes it hard to work. I would also say, with respect to the Sky Blue color of my particular laptop, that what Marques Brownlee said about it is correct: This is homeopathic blue, like Apple made a silver laptop and then whispered “blue” to it as it was being put into its packaging. Dear Apple: Don’t be afraid of actual color.

(Oh, and: apparently this M4 is optimized for “AI” but nothing I use it for needs it to run AI, and if the computer or the programs I use offer to run AI, I usually just shut off that capability because I already have a work flow established, so, meh?)

But, yeah. Great little computer, it’s doing everything I wanted it to, and can do considerably more than that if I ever need it to. Good purchase, A+++, would buy again.

Pixel 10 Pro: So far, I’m using this almost exactly like I used the Pixel 9 Pro before it and the Pixel 8 Pro before that; honestly, on a day-to-day basis the way I know that I actually switched phones is that this new one has a slightly different color. Now, Google just downloaded Material Design 3 into my phone so all my on-screen buttons and some of my apps look different, so I guess there is that. But that doesn’t really change how I use the phone all that much.

But what about all the new “AI “stuff they packed in the latest Pixels, that are supposed to be the big market differentiators to everything else out there? I hear you ask. Well, I already talked about the most prominent example of that, being the “Pro-Res Zoom” AI which kicks in when you zoom the camera above 30x, and you may recall I was not hugely impressed with that. I am more impressed with the “AI Enhance” photo function, which does not redraw your entire photo but rather adjusts color/brightness/etc automatically. I’m not sure it really qualifies as “AI,” it’s just applying tweaks, but it’s generally pretty good at it. There’s now also a function where you can edit a picture by talking to your phone rather than moving sliders around and such; you can ask the Pixel 10 to remove someone from a photo, or brighten the sky, or, say, remove the background entirely and replace it with an “AI” generated image. The former is cool, I suppose; the latter once again gets us to the point where your photo is no longer a photo and is instead just an image based on a photo you once took. Whether this is something you want, I leave you to consider. I don’t have much use for it personally.

The other “AI” stuff I haven’t really encountered yet, mostly because none of it is really useful for someone staying at home and doing not a whole lot of nothing. I’m not speaking to people who don’t share my language, so an auto-translate that speaks a different language in a voice similar to my own is not a priority, and when I’m spending time in my home office I’m not needing my phone to surface my flight information while I’m texting. I’m traveling this week so maybe it’ll come in handy then. But right now? Yeah, it’s not doing much for me. For the moment, at least, none of the new “AI” features of the Pixel 10 Pro are ones that I have much use for.

Which is not to say I don’t like this phone. I do; as a smartphone, doing all the things I want it to do, it’s great. The cameras are very good just as cameras, the phone is snappy enough opening apps and doing the stuff I need it to do, and I still very much appreciate having the stock Android experience on the Pixel, without all the crap other manufacturers or carriers add on to their phones. Pixel still has the best iteration of Android, if you ask me.

I don’t regret getting the Pixel 10 Pro (especially as my old phone was showing real wifi connectivity issues). It’s an excellent phone I would highly recommend to any Android phone user, if they are in the market for a new phone. But if you already have a phone you’re happy with, and you’re not someone who cares about “AI” to any great extent, there’s nothing here that would make you want to exchange the phone you already have. It’s a good phone! Just not necessarily in the ways Google is selling it as.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/02/further-thoughts-on-the-m4-mac-air-and-pixel-10-pro/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57112

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/02/the-big-idea-charlie-n-holmberg-5/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57102

Sometimes, books require a lot of planning and outlining, and sometimes you just need to start and it ends up revealing itself along the way. Such was the case for author Charlie N. Holmberg, much to her type-A dismay. Follow along in her Big Idea to see how she skipped the outline entirely for her newest novel, The Shattered King.

CHARLIE N. HOLMBERG:

I literally wrote the book on magic systems.

Okay, I wrote a book on magic systems. Charlie N. Holmberg’s Book of Magic, to be precise.

But this isn’t about that book. It’s about the book that came from that book.

Almost all my novels start with a magic system. Some element, some power, some spark from which plot, character, and setting bloom. I wanted to guide others in finding this spark, so in this Book of Magic, I included a handful of appendices to help people jumpstart their magic systems. One of these appendices is a list of commonly used magic systems in fantasy novels. This list allows the writer to do one of three things: 1) use one of these systems to keep their learning curve shallow, 2) avoid these systems to find something more original, or 3) take one of these systems and put their own spin on it (you know, like Stephanie Meyer did with Twilight).

I was mulling over this while playing Final Fantasy XVI with my husband and thought, okay, Charlie, take your own advice. How would you make something incredibly common new and exciting? 

I picked healing from the list. Started playing around with it.

And then I sparked.

What if healing wasn’t done directly to the body, but via a representation of the body? In some sort of dreamlike, liminal space created by magic and accessed only by those who could wield it. Like a dream, this liminal space could take on all sorts of visuals: a painting, a garden, a castle wall. Any sickness or injury would appear as something off or broken—tears in canvas, wilting flowers, cracks in stones. I call this space a “lumis” (because it sounds pretty), and no two are exactly alike.

Cue the video game I’m playing, Final Fantasy XVI. I really liked one of the main characters: Joshua. Joshua, a prince, was born powerful, but also sickly, and nothing seemed to be able to heal him. So what does a monarchy do when none of their doctors can’t heal one of their own? They force the task upon the magical peasants, of course.

And that is where The Shattered King starts. Against the backdrop of war, a healer is forced to leave her family and journey across the country to the capital to try her hand at healing the unhealable prince. She has every intention of failing. The sooner she disappoints the nobility, the sooner she can go home.

But what Nym Tallowax considers to be low-effort magic ends up doing more for Prince Renn than any healer before her. Now if she wants to go home, she’ll have to cure the ailing prince first.

But for whatever reason, Prince Renn’s lumis refuses to be healed.

This idea really took me by the horns—so much so that I started writing it before I had an outline. I’m a type-A personality. All my novels have notebooks, storyboards, and thorough outlines. But the need to make this one happen usurped everything else. 

It made me [insert choking noise] discovery write. 

I started it in the middle of a family vacation and finished it in fifteen days, an all-time record for me. For kicks and giggles, I asked my editor if she wanted to see it (and let’s be honest, this was mostly because I wanted a reason for her to pay attention to me). Shortly after, my publisher informed me that they wanted to completely rearrange my release schedule to put this book first. Whatever spell this story put me under apparently worked some sort of magic on them, too. And while I know there’s a few readers out there who are getting tired of the romantasy trend, romantic fantasy is my JAM, and I’m happy to butter readers’ biscuits with a little bit of my own.

The Shattered King: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author socials: Website|Instagram|Facebook

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/02/the-big-idea-charlie-n-holmberg-5/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57102

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/01/kitten-update-all-hail-the-fuzz-butt/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57079

So, we kept the black kitten.

I want to stress this was not the plan all along. I did in fact have a new home scheduled for this kitten, but then, more or less at the last minute, the people at the new home had a change in circumstances that made receiving a new kitten not possible. Which is fine, sometimes that happens. This gave Athena, who had been angling to keep the black kitten, another chance to plead her case, and by this time both Krissy and I had spent enough time with him to warm to the idea. So the original kitten recipient’s unfortunate loss is our now our gain.

We did, of course, have some concern as to how the other pets might receive to the new kitten, and the short answer is, it’s been mixed, but not disastrously so. Charlie loves and is obsessed with the kitten and follows it wherever it goes, and fortunately the new kitten seems to like Charlie. Smudge was like “oh, I guess there’s a new kitten now,” and doesn’t seem to be overly bothered.

Sugar and Spice, on the other hand, are unpleased:

However, so far their response has been to avoid the new kitten when possible rather than to attempt to murder it, and there already have been instances of the new kitten napping in the same room as one or the other of these two without bloodshed. I so suspect that, as with the arrival of Smudge a few years back, there will be a week or two of adjustment to the new kitten being all up in their space, and then a new “normal” where everyone has their new general territories and life goes on. We’ve had four cats before, and these three cats were part of that living arrangement. I suspect they’ll get used to it again, and quickly.

It’s helpful that the kitten is exceedingly well-tempered, at least so far. He’s not a jerk to the other cats, nor is he afraid of them or of Charlie. He’s very affectionate and curious when it comes to the humans, and overall seems pretty comfortable with his surroundings. He acts like this has always been his home, which is reassuring. He’s still a kitten, mind you, which means getting into a little bit of trouble and being inconveniently underfoot and so on, all the usual kitten stuff. But that’s what makes kittens adorable, and everything suggests that when he’s not a kitten anymore he’ll be an excellent cat.

What we don’t have yet is an official name for the kitten. Earlier, Athena suggested “Shoyu,” which is a type of soy sauce (the kitten’s black fur has a brown sheen in strong light), but it’s not sticking. I’ve offered up “Śuri,” which is an Etruscan volcano god, whose name derives from the Etruscan word for “black,” but this may be too esoteric. I think what we may end up doing is just letting the kitten be around and seeing what name fits him. I will say that I’ve been taking to calling him “Fuzz Butt” as a shorthand, and while I don’t think that’s going to end up being his official name, it’s useful on a temporary basis, and also, entirely truthful. Some official name will present itself in time. Yes, you are allowed to offer suggestions in the comments. Please note we may ignore them entirely. But I know that won’t stop you.

So, please welcome this new kitten, He Who Is Temporarily and Unofficially Known as “Fuzz Butt,” to the Scalzi household, and also as the newest official Scamperbeast. He’s a delight and we look forward to lots of adventures with him. He is an accidental kitten, but then, “accidental kittens” is what we specialize in around here. Our cats have a history of just showing up. We wouldn’t have it any other way.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/01/kitten-update-all-hail-the-fuzz-butt/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57079