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The Cosmic Codex

The Cosmic Codex

Auteur(s): Brian Scott Pauls
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Living in a science fiction universe...

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  • John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series wins the Hugo

    John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series wins the Hugo
    Sep 3 2026
    Do you or someone you know need professional tech guidance for your author, coaching, or independent publishing business? If so, check out our sponsor Cloudessy, providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services. Simplify your tech stack, prevent launch failures, and build systems that actually support growth.https://marketing.cloudessy.com/30-minute-tech-stack-update/Greg Bear Birthday Humble Bundle:https://www.humblebundle.com/books/greg-bear-birthday-bundle-open-road-media-books?hmb_source=&hmb_medium=product_tile&hmb_campaign=mosaic_section_1_layout_index_3_layout_type_threes_tile_index_1_c_gregbearbirthdaybundleopenroadmedia_bookbundle&_gl=1*2thjm5*_up*MQ..*_gs*MQ..&gclid=CjwKCAjwwL_UBhAjEiwAEhuT5J6I3YtOIs2Ik9j35W4nlkDiNJBpz19T17oP3Hy94Vx6r4klmG_ZwhoCdIEQAvD_BwE&gbraid=0AAAAACzVokDVr7jJ6gZ2jgVi7LtdRGu3qby Brian Scott PaulsThis past Sunday, the World Science Fiction Society presented the Hugo Awards at LAcon V in Anaheim—the 84th Worldcon. Fantasy continued to dominate the novel categories, with one big exception. John Scalzi won the Hugo Award for Best Series with his seven (to date) novels in the Old Man’s War cycle. Tor published the first book, Old Man’s War, in 2005, and the most recent, The Shattering Peace, in 2025.1Just a reminder that Cloudessy, my consulting business providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services, is now a sponsor of this newsletter. If you or someone you know needs professional tech guidance for their author, coaching, or independent publishing business, check out the ad at the end of this post. Thank you!Born in 1969 in Fairfield, California, Scalzi received an AB in philosophy from the University of Chicago, where he edited the student paper and freelanced for the Chicago Sun-Times.2 In the nineties he worked as a film critic and opinion columnist at the Fresno Bee, then two years as an in-house writer and editor at AOL.3 In September 1998 he started his blog Whatever, still active today.4Scalzi discovered the value of “shareware” marketing early on. In 1997 he wrote Agent to the Stars as an experiment, to see if he could handle writing at novel-length. In 1999 he posted it for free on his website, asking readers to mail him a dollar if they liked it. By 2004 he’d received about $4000 from satisfied fans.5Learning from this experience, Scalzi serialized Old Man’s War on the blog in 2002.6 Then he sent Tor editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden a link to an essay he’d written about the experiment. Two days later, Nielsen Hayden replied, “as the blurb cliché goes, I couldn’t put it down.” Tor published the book in 2005. The next year it received a Hugo nomination for Best Novel and won the John W. Campbell (now Astounding) Award for Best New Writer.7The Best Series win is Scalzi’s fourth Hugo, following Best Fan Writer in 2008, Best Related Book in 2009 for Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded, and Best Novel in 2013 for Redshirts.8 In 2015 Tor signed him to a thirteen book contract over ten years.9Scalzi lives with his wife in Bradford, Ohio.10See below for the description of Old Man’s War, the first novel in the series, from the publisher’s website:"John Perry did two things on his 75th birthday. First he visited his wife’s grave. Then he joined the army.The good news is that humanity finally made it to the stars. The bad news is that, out there, planets fit to live on are scarce—and alien races willing to fight us for them are common. So: we fight. Far from Earth, the war has been going on for decades: brutal, bloody, unyielding.Responsible for protecting humanity, the Colonial Defense Force doesn’t want young people; they want people who carry the knowledge and skills of decades of living. You’ll be taken off Earth, never to return. You’ll serve two years in combat. And if you survive, you’ll be given a homestead of your own on a hard-won planet light-years from home.John Perry is taking that deal. He thinks he knows what to expect. But the actual fight is far, far harder than he can imagine—and what he will become is far stranger.11" This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thecosmiccodex.com
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    21 min
  • A critique of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Children of Time”

    A critique of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Children of Time”
    Aug 27 2026
    Do you or someone you know need professional tech guidance for your author, coaching, or independent publishing business? If so, check out our sponsor Cloudessy, providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services. Simplify your tech stack, prevent launch failures, and build systems that actually support growth.https://marketing.cloudessy.com/30-minute-tech-stack-update/Stream the Hugo Awards Ceremony 2026:https://www.youtube.com/@lacon-onlineGreg Bear Birthday Humble Bundle:https://www.humblebundle.com/books/greg-bear-birthday-bundle-open-road-media-books?hmb_source=&hmb_medium=product_tile&hmb_campaign=mosaic_section_1_layout_index_3_layout_type_threes_tile_index_1_c_gregbearbirthdaybundleopenroadmedia_bookbundle&_gl=1*2thjm5*_up*MQ..*_gs*MQ..&gclid=CjwKCAjwwL_UBhAjEiwAEhuT5J6I3YtOIs2Ik9j35W4nlkDiNJBpz19T17oP3Hy94Vx6r4klmG_ZwhoCdIEQAvD_BwE&gbraid=0AAAAACzVokDVr7jJ6gZ2jgVi7LtdRGu3qby Brian Scott PaulsIf you put Andre Norton’s “The Stars Are Ours,” Robert A. Heinlein’s “Orphans of the Sky,” Frank Herbert’s “Dune,” David Brin’s “The Uplift War,” and Vernor Vinge’s “A Deepness In the Sky” in a blender on ‘high,’ you might get something like Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Children of Time.” This is a description, not a criticism.“Immature poets imitate;” Eliot tells us, “mature poets steal...” Refugees from a ruined Earth escaping to the stars, a generation ship fallen into savagery, an epic sweep of future history, terrestrial species uplifted to sentience, even a culture of intelligent, spider-like “aliens”—none of this is new. After more than a century of genre science fiction, new ideas are rare. But Eliot also said “…bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” Tchaikovsky isn’t necessarily better than Norton, Heinlein, Herbert, Brin, and Vinge, but without a doubt he gives us a unique and memorable combination of these elements.In 2023, Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time series won the Hugo Award for Best Series, and this first book won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2016. I’ll review the following volumes, Children of Ruin and Children of Memory, over the next two months.Also, please remember Cloudessy, my consulting business providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services, is now a sponsor of this newsletter. If you or someone you know needs professional tech guidance for their author, coaching, or independent publishing business, check out the ad at the end of this post. Thank you!Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.Children of Time begins with Dr. Avrana Kern’s plan to seed a terraformed world with monkeys, along with a nanovirus meant to accelerate their evolution. When a sabotage attack kills the monkeys, the nanovirus escapes and infects other species already on the planet, including a population of Portia labiata (“jumping spiders”.) Kern survives in suspended animation emerging at long intervals to watch over the world below.Thousands of years later, the ark ship Gilgamesh approaches the planet after fleeing a ruined Earth. This results in a confrontation with Kern, now psychologically unstable after long isolation, who is unwilling to share “her” world with the unexpected and unwelcome refugees.Tchaikovsky structures Children of Time in a back-and-forth narrative which compares and contrasts the gradual development of the “Portiid’s” spider civilization with the technological and cultural decline of the humans on their decaying starship. Of the two, the Portiids are the most fascinating.Trained in psychology and zoology, Tchaikovsky is at his scientific strongest when depicting how arthropod-type species think and behave. The real life Portia labiata ranks among the most cognitively studied arthropods. Experiments have documented specimens selecting routes before moving, executing detours that carry them out of sight of their prey, and adjusting their tactics against spitting spiders of the genus Scytodes. From this framework, Tchaikovsky constructs a believable, and (which is more important here) a believably non-human society that nevertheless piques our curiosity and sympathy.The Portiids even develop biotechnology allowing them to build computers out of ants:Each colony has been carefully trained, by subtle manipulation of punishment, reward and chemical stimulus, to perform a specific service, giving the great minds of the spiders access to a curious kind of analytical engine, using the cascading decision trees of the colony’s own governance as gearing. Each colony is good for a very limited set of related calculations—a vastly skilled yet vastly specialized idiot savant—and retraining a community of ants is a long and painstaking task.Tchaikovsky goes to great lengths constructing a new species we’ll accept as “real.” And when the Portiids reach orbit, he drops an ...
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    31 min
  • “Probability Amplitudes”: Picking up where we left off

    “Probability Amplitudes”: Picking up where we left off
    Aug 20 2026
    Do you or someone you know need professional tech guidance for your author, coaching, or independent publishing business? If so, check out our sponsor Cloudessy, providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services. Simplify your tech stack, prevent launch failures, and build systems that actually support growth.https://marketing.cloudessy.com/30-minute-tech-stack-update/Nearly half the matter in the universe is missingThe ledger of particle physics doesn’t balance.Physics tells us the Big Bang should have created matter and antimatter in precisely equal amounts—which should have mutually annihilated on contact, leaving nothing in the universe but radiation. Yet, here we are, asking why.Here’s what really happened. For approximately every billion matter-antimatter annihilations, one particle of matter survived. This matter made the stars, planets, nebulae, and us.Physicists call this the “baryon asymmetry problem,” and it’s one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of science. The ratio of surviving matter particles to photons is about six in ten billion—but we can’t explain why.Science fiction has been playing with antimatter for nearly a century, but mostly as fuel and firepower. Jack Williamson's "Seetee" series puts antimatter asteroids in the Belt and sets engineers to taming them as fuel for spacecraft and power plants. E. E. Smith weaponizes antimatter as the "negasphere," a bomb of “negative matter,” in Gray Lensman. While some authors have written stories skirting the central mystery of baryon asymmetry, none seem to have tackled it directly.One quick reminder—Cloudessy, my consulting business providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services, is now a sponsor of this newsletter. If you or someone you know needs professional tech guidance for your author, coaching, or independent publishing business, check out the ad at the end of this post. Thank you!Maybe the antimatter is just hidingThe simplest solution to the baryon asymmetry problem is to deny it exists. Perhaps the universe is balanced—the antimatter is simply somewhere else. This was a respectable scientific position for much of the twentieth century. Antimatter atoms would form antimatter planets, stars, and galaxies. From a distance, we wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Light emitted by an antimatter atom is identical to light emitted by a matter atom.Larry Niven’s 1967 story “Flatlander” is an sf treatment of this idea. Beowulf Shaeffer investigates a rogue planet inbound from intergalactic space—an object so strange and lethal the mystery of its true nature drives the plot. Of course, it’s made of antimatter. This planet is a relic from the universe’s missing half, preserved for billions of years only because it stayed in the void between galaxies, where there was nothing to touch.Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.The “hiding” hypothesis hasn’t aged well. If any substantial region of the universe were made of antimatter, gamma radiation from the annihilation of gas particles would light up its boundary with neighboring matter regions. Astronomers have looked. The sky shows no such signs, out to distances comparable to the entire observable universe. Experiments like the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02) aboard the International Space Station have hunted—so far without confirmed success—for even a single heavy anti-nucleus (such as one atom of antihelium) that could only have come from an antimatter star.Sakharov’s recipeSomething, very early on, treated matter and antimatter differently.In 1967, the Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov worked out exactly what that “something” would require. To cook a matter surplus from balanced ingredients, the universe must satisfy three conditions.* A way for baryon number to change: Some process must be able to create matter without creating an equal amount of antimatter.* Violations of two symmetries called C and CP: the laws of physics must, at some level, distinguish between particles and their mirror-image antiparticles.* A departure from thermal equilibrium: a moment of rapid, one-way change—such as the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang—when reactions couldn’t run backward and erase the surplus as fast as it accumulated.It turns out our universe does satisfy these conditions—just not enough. The second condition made headlines when CP violation showed up in the laboratory. Physicists first caught nature favoring matter over antimatter in the decays of kaons in 1964, then in B mesons at the turn of the century. In 2025, the LHCb experiment at CERN added a long-sought piece: the first observation of CP violation in baryons—the family of particles that includes the protons and neutrons we’re made of—measuring a small but unmistakable difference in how a particle called the beauty-lambda and its antiparticle decay.But when we add up all the CP...
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    14 min
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