Episodes

  • "Probability Amplitudes" is back over the halfway mark

    "Probability Amplitudes" is back over the halfway mark
    Feb 13 2025

    My novelette, An Illicit Mercy, is part of a new promotion in February: FREE Sci-Fi & Fantasy.

    Nearly 200 short stories, novels, samples and excerpts, available at no cost.

    She's an Artificial Intelligence Containment operative, monitoring AI for signs of sentience.

    Get your FREE copy of The Badge by Sheri Singerling!

    Sonja is an Artificial Intelligence Containment (AIC) operative, or a badge in hacker slang. As an operative, Sonja is tasked with finding and evaluating AI that may be sentient. If they are, her mission is simple—shut their system down. The world is already dealing with containing one rogue AI. As the AIC sees it, they can ill afford for others to follow suit. Sonja agrees. It's why she's a willing cog in the corporate machine and has devoted her life to serving the AIC. But nipping sentience in the bud can feel an awful lot like murder. Can Sonja push away the ethical quandaries of her work and do what needs to be done?

    Last year was a bit of a roller coaster as I brought Probability Amplitudes, my first collection, closer to completion.

    In September, I reported 43% of the required word count remained to be written.

    Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

    Then, in November, I took a few steps back, editing out more than 17,000 words of my story “Fire From Heaven.” Those words were, to use a technical phrase, “not good.” Striking them increased my outstanding percentage to 54%

    Well, I’m back, baby! After writing over 17,000 words of an as-yet unfinished novella, my outstanding percentage is once again 43%.

    One-third mark, here I come!

    Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! This post is public so feel free to share it.

    Current status: 57% of the material for Probability Amplitudes is in “First Draft” or “Final Draft” status.

    New Material Required: 68,656 words

    First Draft: 83,930 words

    Final Draft: 7414 words

    TOTAL: 160,000 words

    Questions? Please share in the comments!

    My latest novelette, “Fire From Heaven,” now appears in Boundary Shock Quarterly 29: First Contact.

    In the shadows of an alien world, terror awaits. On the radiation-blasted planet Janus, a team of explorers descends into Abbadon—an ancient mountain facility hiding unimaginable secrets. As they navigate bizarre chambers filled with cryptic carvings, they unleash a nightmare. But the true horror lies not in the alien ruins, but in the chilling implications of the team’s discovery.

    Fire From Heaven is the sequel to my previous novelette, “Nasty, Brutish, and Short.”



    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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    2 mins
  • RIP Science Fiction Book Club (1953-2025)

    RIP Science Fiction Book Club (1953-2025)
    Jan 31 2025
    My novelette, An Illicit Mercy, is part of a new promotion in January and February: Moral Dilemmas in Fantasy & Science Fiction.Over 40 short stories, novels, samples and excerpts, available at no cost.A marine's duty is to fight. Her curse is to remember.Get your FREE copy of The Blade Within by Dylan McFadyenCommander Sorăna Mirra has spent years leading a hand-picked team of marine special operators. Together they've taken the fight to humanity's oldest foe, the vicious Kyrans, defeating them time and again—time and again, knowing they’ll get no credit for their victories.When an audacious Kyran raid strikes deep into human territory, Mirra and her team are thrust into the heart of hostile space to retaliate. It's business as usual—until a shocking discovery in the enemy compound calls the true purpose of their mission into question, and dredges up painful memories of the Great War.Now, Mirra must battle not only the enemy, but her own buried regrets as she and her team fight for survival, retribution, and the truth. But in war, truth—like memory—can be a dangerous thing.After more than seventy years, the Science Fiction Book Club (SFBC) is shutting down.I first learned of the SFBC through Parade Magazine, delivered to my home each Sunday morning as an insert in the Wichita Eagle-Beacon newspaper. I don’t recall if the Science Fiction Book Club advertisements were full-page spreads or large additional inserts slipped into Parade, but the organization must have spent lavishly on them. Each listed many different sf books, including small cover images and brief descriptions. Before the Internet, this was one way (along with library displays and talking with friends) I stayed abreast of the latest science fiction books.Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.During my high school years, the father of one of my best friends (and a staff member with the school district) was a member of the SFBC. One day he brought a large box of science fiction books to school and told me he’d already read them. I was welcome to borrow any I wanted to read for myself. That’s how I first encountered C. J. Cherryh’s 1981 Hugo Award-winning novel Downbelow Station, part of her Company Wars series and set in her Alliance-Union universe.Nelson Doubleday, Inc., an associate entity of Doubleday, created the Science Fiction Book Club in 1953. At the time, the phrase “book club” referred to “…a subscription-based relationship between purchasers – who normally agree to buy a certain number of titles a year – and the organization which publishes or distributes these titles, usually at a very significant discount from the retail price in bookshops.”Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! This post is public so feel free to share it.According to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, the SFBC, particularly under Nelson Doubleday, “…was in its day a major force in sf publishing” releasing “…its own editions (including special hardcover editions of paperback originals)” and “…omnibuses of various sorts…especially for its members.”I own a two volume SFBC omnibus edition of E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman series, and can attest to the quality of their production.The SFBC is no longer what it once was. Following the sale of Doubleday to Bertelsmann in 1986, it became “…less active as an original publisher.” When I recently visited the site for the first time in years, I found myself dismayed to discover so many contemporary thrillers and romance novels promoted alongside science fiction. The site struck me as merely an extension of the SFBC’s current parent organization, the Book of the Month Club. Although I didn’t know the SFBC would soon shut down, this seemed like a bad sign. The appeal of science fiction, fantasy, and other speculative fiction is narrow and focused. Anything going by the name of the "'Science Fiction' Book Club" should be focused as well. The original creators of the SFBC understood this. It’s too bad the corporations that acquired the fruits of their labors didn’t.What memories do you have of the Science Fiction Book Club? Please share in the comments!In the second half of January, I’m reading Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Memory, the third book in his Hugo-Award winning Children of Time trilogy. I’m sharing my thoughts on Club Codex, where any Cosmic Codex subscriber can follow along, comment, or ask questions.From this week’s post:“There should be a difference between telling the story of characters caught in a loop and forcing the readers to go through that same loop themselves. Regrettably, in "Children of Memory," Tchaikovsky doesn't find this difference. .”Click below to participate:My latest novelette, “Fire From Heaven,” now appears in Boundary Shock Quarterly 29: First Contact.In the shadows of an alien world, terror awaits. On the radiation-blasted planet Janus, a team ...
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    4 mins
  • A critique of Ned Beauman's Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning novel "Venomous Lumpsucker"

    A critique of Ned Beauman's Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning novel "Venomous Lumpsucker"
    Jan 23 2025
    My novelette, An Illicit Mercy, is part of a new promotion in January and February: Moral Dilemmas in Fantasy & Science Fiction.Over 40 short stories, novels, samples and excerpts, available at no cost."When the skies turned red and the stars fell, humanity's fight for survival began."Get your FREE copy of Defending Earth by C. S. Hawk.When a horde of slimy extraterrestrial creatures arrives on Earth with an insatiable appetite for destruction, three unlikely heroes step up to defend our planet.As they navigate the dangerous terrain of a world under siege, they face countless obstacles and setbacks but never lose their sense of humor. After all, when the fate of humanity is on the line, there's nothing like a good joke to keep your spirits up.Will they succeed in repelling the alien invasion and saving the planet? Only time will tell.In his review of Algis Budrys’ 1960 Hugo-nominated novel Rogue Moon, James Blish calls its characters “as various a pack of gravely deteriorated psychotics as has ever graced an asylum.”Ned Beauman might have writtenVenomous Lumpsucker with this statement pinned to the wall above his monitor. He tells the story of broken, deranged people living in a broken, deranged world. Climate change is breaking their world and driving it mad. The characters’ collective guilt for this existential crime is doing the same to them.Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.Venomous Lumpsucker would be depressing if Beauman wasn’t so deft with his satire. The fate of the world he’s created makes me want to cry, because it’s the fate of the world we’re creating right now. But the human foibles Beauman throws into sharp relief are so familiar, I ended up wanting to laugh—at myself and everyone else.The novel tells the story of Mark Halyard, a near-future business executive with a problem. He’s about to get caught short-selling “extinction credits” he doesn’t own.Extinction credits are financial instruments like carbon credits. Each gives the owner the legal right to drive one species into extinction, and they’re traded on an exchange. Halyard steals his company’s credits and sells them on the exchange. He plans to buy them back when the price drops, so he can replace them before his company realizes they’re gone.Halyard’s plan revolves around a coming regulatory change that will cause the price of extinction credits to crash. He sees selling short as a can't-lose proposition. But when the unthinkable happens, the value of the credits instead skyrockets. Halyard is left holding the bag for the now exorbitant price of the credits he stole.He hopes the company won’t need their credits—meaning they won’t cause the extinction of any species—before he can devise some way out of his predicament. But this hope is dashed when Halyard learns automated undersea mining equipment owned by the company has plowed through the last known habitat of an endangered species of fish—the venomous lumpsucker. Now the company will want to redeem their credits to pay for their mistake. Unless Halyard can find a surviving population of lumpsuckers to stave of his own financial and legal Armageddon.Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! This post is public so feel free to share it.This leads him to Karin Resaint, perhaps the world’s foremost living expert on venomous lumpsuckers. Together, they set off across the globe in search of survivors—she to save them, and he to save himself. Along they way, I learned about what a world facing an “extinction crisis” has done to them both, how it has driven each of them crazy in their own way. And they meet a host of characters who are just as crazy, or crazier. These include a former government minister from a country known as the “Hermit Kingdom” (which isn’t where you may think) and an entrepreneur on a city floating in the ocean who has dedicated a project to churning out clouds of flies and setting them free.Venomous Lumpsucker is a sad, humorous, and philosophical book about evolution, ecological peril, extinction, animal consciousness, capitalism, and moral culpability. It’s filled with thoughtful observations from flawed characters, such as when Halyard sums up the worldwide destruction of the “biobanks” which were supposed to save the data profiles of extinct species so humanity could someday resurrect them. “We had pawned those animals intending to buy them back one day when things were a bit less stretched, and now the pawn shop had burned to the ground with all the animals inside.”Or Resaint’s cynical take on the same topic.“‘…I never really gave a s**t about the biobanks. I never believed we were going to bring any of those species back, except maybe a few of the cuddly ones. It was always just an empty ritual.’”Beauman is at his best when he’s talking about both the brutality and the beauty of evolution.On the one hand, it’s savage ...
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    7 mins
  • From the depths of the sea to the depths of space

    From the depths of the sea to the depths of space
    Jan 9 2025
    My novelette, An Illicit Mercy, is part of a new promotion in January: Strong Women.80 short stories and novels, available at no cost.Will humanity come together to save a dying Earth?Get your FREE copy of A Fading Star by Greg HickeyEarth is dying. Ravaged by disease, hunger, climate change and world wars. Can humanity unite to avoid extinction?In 2153, cancer was cured. In 2189, AIDS. It seemed like humanity was headed for the stars.Global population soared, surpassing 24 billion. Then came the floods, washing over Bangkok, Buenos Aires, Mumbai, Jakarta, Dhaka and New Orleans. Then a fourth world war, with 289 million casualties. Frequent droughts plague Los Angeles, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Melbourne, Mexico City, São Paulo, Stockholm, Vienna and Moscow. Now humanity teeters on the brink of extinction.A few individuals fight for our survival. A determined physicist. A brilliant oncologist. A team of daring astronauts. A small group of investors funds a desperate search for another habitable planet. But time is running out.This past July, Martin MacInnes won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for his novel In Ascension.Hailing from Scotland, MacInnes won the Manchester Fiction Prize for his first short story, “Our Disorder,” in 2014. He received the Somerset Maugham Award in 2017 for his first novel, Infinite Ground. MacInnes is a former Royal Literary Fund fellow.Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.The website for Grove Atlantic, MacInnes’ U.S. publisher, describes In Ascension as follows:Leigh grew up in Rotterdam, drawn to the waterfront as an escape from her unhappy home life and volatile father. Enchanted by the undersea world of her childhood, she excels in marine biology, travelling the globe to study ancient organisms. When a trench is discovered in the Atlantic ocean, Leigh joins the exploration team, hoping to find evidence of the earth’s first life forms – what she instead finds calls into question everything we know about our own beginnings.Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! This post is public so feel free to share it.Her discovery leads Leigh to the Mojave desert and an ambitious new space agency. Drawn deeper into the agency’s work, she learns that the Atlantic trench is only one of several related phenomena from across the world, each piece linking up to suggest a pattern beyond human understanding. Leigh knows that to continue working with the agency will mean leaving behind her declining mother and her younger sister, and faces an impossible choice: to remain with her family, or to embark on a journey across the breadth of the cosmos.Questions or comments? Please share your thoughts!This month, I’m reading Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Ruin, the second book in his Hugo-Award winning Children of Time trilogy. I’m sharing my thoughts on Club Codex, where any Cosmic Codex subscriber can follow along, comment, or ask questions.From this week’s post:“Octopuses are by far a better choice than spiders. For one, octopuses are legitimately intelligent, and appear to even possess a sentient consciousness. At the same time, they're so different, they are commonly referred to [as] aliens right here on Earth.”Click below to participate:My latest novelette, “Fire From Heaven,” now appears in Boundary Shock Quarterly 29: First Contact.In the shadows of an alien world, terror awaits. On the radiation-blasted planet Janus, a team of explorers descends into Abbadon—an ancient mountain facility hiding unimaginable secrets. As they navigate bizarre chambers filled with cryptic carvings, they unleash a nightmare. But the true horror lies not in the alien ruins, but in the chilling implications of the team’s discovery.Fire From Heaven is the sequel to my previous novelette, “Nasty, Brutish, and Short.” 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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    2 mins
  • "Fire From Heaven"

    "Fire From Heaven"
    Jan 2 2025
    My novelette, An Illicit Mercy, is part of a new promotion in January: Strong Women.80 short stories and novels, available at no cost.When we encounter alien life among the stars, will they have made the same mistakes we have? Worse? Will we even be able to understand them? And what will they understand about us?My new novelette, “Fire From Heaven,” the sequel to “Nasty, Brutish, and Short," appears in Boundary Shock Quarterly 29: First Contact.Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.In the shadows of an alien world, terror awaits. On the radiation-blasted planet Janus, a team of explorers descends into Abbadon—an ancient mountain facility hiding unimaginable secrets. As they navigate bizarre chambers filled with cryptic carvings, they unleash a nightmare. But the true horror lies not in the alien ruins, but in the chilling implications of the team’s discovery.Here’s an excerpt:“Fire From Heaven”by Brian Scott Pauls“Then the LORD rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven; And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.”—Genesis 19:24-25I can’t say exactly what happened. I didn’t have a good view when the trouble started.Delvalle took point when we went into the mountain, followed by Kuna and de Cries, then Pagnol and Laing with their instrument pack. I came next, while Keahi and Ashishishe brought up the rear—eyes, ears, and nose peeled for threats.Not that we expected trouble. We all “knew” the desolate half of Janus was unoccupied. The wildly chaotic menagerie of organisms Lieutenant Keahi, Ash, and I had discovered on the other side of the planet gave way to an entire hemisphere devoid of life.Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! This post is public so feel free to share it.Of course, by the time you read this, you’ll probably know what we found—or, to be more accurate, what found us. I’m sure our report will make quite a stir when it reaches Earth. The implications of what we encountered still keep me up at night. Of course, it's a lot more recent to me than it will be to you, relatively speaking.Beacon is an artificial black hole accompanying Janus in geostationary orbit. You’d think it would have evaporated by now, but ice balls arriving from the outer system continually feed it mass. Apparently, the Janusians used it as a power generator before they destroyed themselves—and Beacon played a major role in that.To function as a generator, the black hole must have once been contained. But that containment is gone. Now it just revolves about Janus, eating ice and belching gamma rays. Nothing unshielded can live on the side of the planet facing it. Even viruses are absent—if not because of the radiation itself, then because there’s nothing to serve as a host.Meanwhile, an increased mutation rate in organisms living close to the irradiated hemisphere has resulted in a greatly accelerated evolutionary pace.At least one intelligent species inhabited Janus. Diamond buildings remain in hundreds of cities spread around the world. Some appear to be fully intact, while the ruins of others surround giant blast craters. Whoever lived on Janus had fun tossing fusion bombs around before something wrecked Beacon’s containment, wiping out civilization. The cities in the verdant hemisphere are overgrown with life. Those on the ravaged side are as dead as everything around them.Abbadon appears to have been the receiving station for power beamed from Beacon. The Janusians scooped off the mountain’s peak, then set the dish of a large microwave antenna into the rock.We dropped to the surface in one of the Zheng He's aeros, each of us except Ash strapped into a seat modified to fit the extra bulk of our armored suits. The synth wore the lynx body it had developed especially for Janus, and made do with a cargo net.The standard Zheng He pressure suits wouldn’t protect against gamma radiation. Our excursion into the dead zone required the Physics and Engineering sections to fabricate tungsten carbide exoskeletons, so heavy they included powered augmentation to allow us to move. Instead of transparent faceplates, the fully enclosed helmets used cameras and other sensors to transmit details of the external environment directly into the sensoriums maintained by our cerebral implants.Each suit could reduce gamma exposure enough to allow 36 hours on the surface. We estimated twelve hours to get from the Zheng He, in geostationary orbit on the opposite side of the planet, to the surface, and then to the entrance. Getting back to the ship would require an equal amount of time. Technically that left a mere twelve hours in the mountain, but the rock would provide additional shielding against the radiation. We wouldn’t know how much extra time we’d gain until we were inside.Pagnol and Laing, a ...
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    7 mins
  • Pioneers in an alien sky

    Pioneers in an alien sky
    Dec 28 2024
    Beneath the frozen silence, a world awaits discovery.Get your FREE copy of Under the Ice by Marie-Hélène Lebeault!Beneath the frozen silence, a world awaits discoveryIn a future where the Earth's surface is uninhabitable, humanity survives under the ocean, within a protective Dome. Ryn, a unique individual unable to adapt to aquatic life like the others, faces a dire situation when the Dome's stability is compromised. As their only hope for survival lies beyond the icy barrier above, Ryn embarks on a perilous journey to the unknown.Science fiction and libertarian political philosophy have a long history together, perhaps “growing out of the 1930s and 1940s when the science-fiction pulp magazines were reaching their peak at the same time as fascism and communism…” resulting in “…speculations about societies (or sub-groups)…in direct opposition to ‘totalitarianism.’”Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.In 1979, this close association inspired sf author L. Neil Smith to create the Prometheus Award “to honor libertarian science fiction.”Dave Freer dedicates his 2023 Prometheus Award winning novel, Cloud-Castles, “[t]o the memory of the men and women of the Eureka Rebellion,” a reference I had to look up. The Eureka Rebellion started in 1851 as a series of protests by gold miners in Australia’s Colony of Victoria against its British administrators. Matters escalated over the next three years, ending with the Battle of the Eureka Stockade, in which twenty-seven people (mostly miners) died.Freer borrows a number of elements from Australia in general and the Eureka Rebellion in particular, transposing them to the gas-dwarf (mini-Neptune) world of Sybil III.The planet itself is mostly sky, punctuated by the eponymous cloud-castles (Freer never explains the hyphen) islands of “floating vegetation,” and the “trading-plate.”Freer’s describes the world he’s created in fascinating detail:Sybil III just had no land. None. Or none that any human could survive on. It was a gas dwarf world, and its solid core lay somewhere many, many miles down below at enormous temperatures and pressures. The lifezone, such as it was, was up in the outer atmosphere. It was a vast lifezone, just resource poor, and short of solid landing platforms.Two extraterrestrial, extrasybillian, and formerly imperialistic species inhabit the cloud-castles, which have been around longer than humans have been in space. Unfortunately, the Thrymi and the Zell hate each other. Their respective interstellar empires seem to have destroyed one another long ago, leaving the sybillian populations the only known (to humans, at least) examples of the two species.Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! This post is public so feel free to share it.Trade represented the one area of common interest between the two alien societies. Before their empires vanished, they built an “anti-gravity trading plate” in the skies of Sybil III to serve as neutral ground, a tradition the local aliens maintained even after their two species annihilated each other elsewhere.Humans first arrived on Sybil III aboard the failing FTL ship Botany Bay, which managed to crash on the trading plate. The survivors threw together a ramshackle settlement they named the “Big Syd”, made of scrap taken from the wrecked ship and whatever suitable native vegetation they could gather.By the time of the story, the Big Syd is a dangerous frontier town in which life reflects a Hobbesian state of nature—“poor, nasty, brutish” and often unnaturally short.Other human planets maintain embassies on the Big Syd. This is mainly due to competition over the hoped-for attentions of the Thrymi and Zell, who never-the-less tend to snub everyone equally.Enter Augustus StJohn Thistlewood III, youngest son of the wealthy Thistlewood industrial family on the planet Azure. Augustus is an idealistic university graduate. When he found working in his family’s factories as a boy had already taught him more engineering than his professors knew, he added sociology courses to his workload. As a result, he’s come to Sybil III to help “uplift” the local residents of the Big Syd out of poverty and ignorance.Augustus follows in the literary tradition of the “lucky fool.” While a brilliant, naturally gifted engineer, he has no “street smarts” at all. Time after time, this places him in perilous situations. Yet somehow everything seems to work out. He often remains blissfully ignorant of the chaos going on around him, which he himself has caused.Much of Augustus’ good luck is just that—luck. But some of it is manufactured by his local “guide,” Briz, who recognizes his wealth and naivety early and latches on to him as an easy meal ticket:“She didn’t care what he’d done to be made a remittance man here. It wasn’t something that she needed to know. There were a quite a few men and women that ...
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    9 mins
  • Making the future better than it used to be

    Making the future better than it used to be
    Nov 28 2024
    My novelette, An Illicit Mercy, is part of a new promotion in November: Short Story Smorgasbord.Nearly 65 short stories, available at no cost.When aliens arrive in Sol, how does humanity react in the first few hours?Get your FREE copy of Dark Nebula: Contact by Sean WilsonAfter several years of unstable peace throughout Sol, mankind is confronted with the arrival of an unknown alien force. Everyone deals with the unexpected arrivals differently.Military forces guarding the front lines of a century old conflict struggle to comprehend the alien arrival. Unhealed wounds from past battles stress Inner and Outer Ring soldiers, as a rogue among them takes matters into her own hands.Hours into the alien arrival, the president endeavors to contain a centuries old subterfuge. She never imagined she’d be the one responsible for guiding mankind in its darkest hour.A washed up vid-sim sports star turned messiah predicted the alien arrival with uncanny accuracy. How does a world react when his prophesies come true?New York City hosted the first World Science Fiction Convention, or “Worldcon,” in 1939. Pulp illustrator Frank R. Paul attended as Guest of Honor, along with about 200 writers, fans, and other artists.Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.Since then, the World Science Fiction Society has sponsored Worldcon every year except the World War II years of 1942-1945.This year, Glasgow hosted the 82nd Worldcon, with a half-dozen Guests of Honor and a total of more than 8000 attendees, about 7200 in-person and upwards of 600 online.Worldcons offer a number of activities, including Guest of Honor presentations, panel discussions, author autograph opportunities, multiple parties, the Hugo Awards, board games, card games, role-playing games, a vendor’s room, art shows, and a business meeting to decide the location of future conventions.Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! This post is public so feel free to share it.Seattle will welcome the 83rd Worldcon from August 13-17, 2025, hosted by authors K. Tempest Bradford and Nisi Shawl. Guests of Honor will include:* Martha Wells (author)* Donato Giancola (artist)* Bridget Landry (fan)* Alexander James Adams (musician)“Building Yesterday’s Future–For Everyone” is the theme of next year’s convention, celebrating science fiction’s optimism from a half-century past, expressed in today’s spirit of multiculturalism and inclusion.You can register online to attend in person or virtually. Registration includes the right to vote for next year’s Hugos.I plan to attend. Please respond in the comments if you expect to be there as well. Perhaps we can set up a small Cosmic Codex party to join the fun! :)Questions or comments? Please share your thoughts!My latest novelette, “Nasty, Brutish, and Short,” now appears in Boundary Shock Quarterly 28: SF Horror.When the first expedition to the mysterious planet Janus takes a deadly turn, Lieutenant Carita Keahi must fight for survival against an alien ecosystem unlike anything humanity has ever encountered. As crew members fall victim to bizarre and lethal life forms, Keahi races against time to escape the dangers of this two-faced world. With mind-bending alien biology and gut-wrenching sacrifices, this tale of planetary exploration gone horribly wrong will keep you on the edge of your seat until the very last page. Prepare for a journey into the unknown that will challenge everything you thought you knew about life in the cosmos! 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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    3 mins
  • "Probability Amplitudes": Elements in flux

    "Probability Amplitudes": Elements in flux
    Nov 21 2024
    My novelette, An Illicit Mercy, is part of a new promotion in November: Short Story Smorgasbord.Nearly 65 short stories, available at no cost.Get your FREE copy of Warmonger by Monique Singleton!In the near future, France is ruled by an ultra-right minded president. The country is in chaos, the chasm between rich and poor is ever increasing. Unwittingly a beautiful woman becomes the catalyst that starts not only a new French Revolution but also the Third World War.But what is the role of the strange priest in all this? Who is he? Or more appropriately, what is he?An intense story full of international intrigue, unexpected twists and a mind-blowing finale.Download your free copy of Warmonger and emerge yourself in the Primal series. You will not regret it.Back in September, I reported a status of “First Draft” or “Final Draft” for 56% of the material intended for Probability Amplitudes, my upcoming collection.Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.I’m finding this journey through my first book to be an exercise in refining my progress tracking. In this case, I’d based my estimates on a completed (or so, at 26,000 words, I thought) first draft of a story entitled “Fire From Heaven,” and my plans for its as-yet unwritten 20,000 word companion story, “Nasty, Brutish, and Short.”Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! This post is public so feel free to share it.Those of you who’ve read my article from October 7, or have purchased Boundary Shock Quarterly 28: SF Horror, may be aware "Nasty, Brutish, and Short" turned out to be nowhere near 20,000 words. It ended up a “mere” 9779 words. And when I’d finished editing “Fire From Heaven,” I discovered it to be a 8722 word novelette hiding inside 26,000 words of a (to quote author Anne Lamott) “shitty first draft.” This sent approximately 7500 words right back into “New Material Required” status.But I’m happy about it. Because "Fire From Heaven" is better at 9779 words than at 26,000. Much better.I expect more course corrections like this as I work my way toward publication, but as long as they make the book better, bring them on!Current status: 47% of the material for Probability Amplitudes is in “First Draft” or “Final Draft” status.Questions or comments? Please share your thoughts!My latest novelette, “Nasty, Brutish, and Short,” now appears in Boundary Shock Quarterly 28: SF Horror.When the first expedition to the mysterious planet Janus takes a deadly turn, Lieutenant Carita Keahi must fight for survival against an alien ecosystem unlike anything humanity has ever encountered. As crew members fall victim to bizarre and lethal life forms, Keahi races against time to escape the dangers of this two-faced world. With mind-bending alien biology and gut-wrenching sacrifices, this tale of planetary exploration gone horribly wrong will keep you on the edge of your seat until the very last page. Prepare for a journey into the unknown that will challenge everything you thought you knew about life in the cosmos! 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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    2 mins