Episodes

  • “Probability Amplitudes”: Editing in 2026

    “Probability Amplitudes”: Editing in 2026
    Sep 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/Register for the 2026 Sturgeon Symposium:https://sfcenter.ku.edu/2026-sturgeon-symposiumIn 2023, with regard to Probability Amplitudes (my first science fiction collection), I shared my “intention to produce the highest quality work possible.” But I didn’t discuss what this might look like, beyond “[r]ounds of editing (by an experienced editor, not by me)” following “alpha- and beta-reading.”In the intervening three years I’ve acquired numerous tools, both physical and virtual, to make this job easier and less expensive—while letting me get the most out of paid, professional editing.Of course, the larger the number of tools, the easier it becomes for the editing process to get out-of-hand. To avoid this, I recently used Claude to create an editing/publishing outline, indicating where each tool best fits (based on Claude’s training data, as this is a subject beyond my own expertise).At this time, the process includes 14 separate tools, ranging from a method for creating character attributes that don’t all conform to my own biases (using the Dungeons & Dragons character generation system from the Moldvay Basic rules) to multiple software editing tools (AutoCrit, Hemingway, and ProWritingAid) to three different card decks—one each for story-building, character motivation, and self-editing (Sefirot Fabula, intùiti, and Edito, respectively). While complex, the purpose of this process is to allow me to put my best work in front of both editors and readers.I’m sharing the tool list and resulting outline for those readers and fellow writers who might find it helpful. It’s unlikely a large number of authors will want to use exactly the same tools, in exactly the same way. But perhaps what I’m doing will prove instructive for those who might want to create something similar for themselves.ToolsBelow are the tools I’ve chosen to incorporate into my process. Each is listed by name, the part of the process it addresses, and the format (website, software, card deck, etc.).AutoCrit: Dialogue ratio, adverb frequency, and pacing markers, compared with published work in the genre (website)Claude: Text indexing and search, streamlining work with Sefirot Edito (q.v.; artificial intelligence)CritiqueMatch: Critique partners and beta readers (website)Critters: Critique community (website)D&D Moldvay Basic: Characteristic generation, randomized to provide a variety of character types (ebook)Dialogue Doctor: Dialogue-based character design and growth (worksheet and ebook)Hemingway: Sentence length, adverbs, passive voice, and readability (website/software)Mind Prober: Personality profiling (software)1ProWritingAid: Line editing, grammar, and consistency (software)Scrivener: Word processor with character sketch templates (software)Sefirot Edito: Self-editing (card deck)Sefirot Fabula: Story-building (card deck)Sefirot intùiti: Character motivation (card deck)SFF Online Writing Workshop: Critique partners and possible professional review (website)Editing Process: Mixed-Length Collection (Self-Published)Flash fiction through short novel, with interstitial notesLegend: 🔴 Required · 🟡 Preferred · ⚪ Self-directedTHE CHARACTER CHAINSix steps, each feeding into the next.CC1. Character Generation (D&D: Moldvay Basic) — generate physical and mental baselines. Unexpected outcomes can produce opportunities (e.g., a high-Charisma, low-Wisdom result creates an interesting dynamic). Remember that six numbers describe a character’s capability, not who they are as a person.CC2. Personality Profile (Mind Prober) — build the character’s personality and psychology on top of CC1.CC3. Neuro-Variance — for each important character, pick a mental health category where they sit outside the expected range. Don’t treat this as a diagnosis. Use it to push the character in surprising directions. Guard against stereotyping; clinical categories make it tempting. Give the character a tendency that creates an obstacle to something they want.CC4. Sefirot intùiti — derive drives, motivations, and hang-ups from CC1–CC3.CC5. Scrivener Character Sketch — consolidate. Come back to this document while drafting.CC6. Character Voice/Growth Worksheet (Dialogue Doctor) — Five voice components, the character’s growth arc, and a list of important scenes based on these elements.Dialogue Doctor vs. Sefirot Fabula — CC6’s scene list and Fabula’s HERO’S DEVELOPMENT cards answer the same questions. Run CC6 first, then import its scenes into Fabula. Reversing this can cause Fabula’s archetypes to pull the character toward generic ...
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    34 mins
  • What in the worlds is dark matter?

    What in the worlds is dark matter?
    Sep 13 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/Five-sixths of the matter in the universe is a mystery to us. Now, we might have taken a step closer to figuring out what it is. Maybe.On September 1, the team running the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment searching for dark matter reported a development at a conference in Tendo, Japan. Nearly a mile underground in an old South Dakota gold mine, the team watches a tank containing ten tons of ultra-pure liquid xenon. Going through 220 days of data collected in 2023 and 2024, they found a flash of light—the signature of a xenon nucleus recoiling with 248 kiloelectronvolts of energy it picked up from a source no known background phenomenon explains. They calculated the significance of the event at 2.6 sigma—meaning the background would throw off an event like this roughly once in two hundred tries. That isn't enough to call the detection a "discovery," which typically requires five sigma or higher. They didn’t claim to have seen direct evidence of dark matter. But they saw something interesting.1If LZ, or another experiment, repeats this finding, it could have major ramifications for astrophysics and cosmology. Dark matter out-masses all the rest of the matter in our universe at a ratio of about five to one,2 and yet we don’t know what it is.In 1933, Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky determined the galaxies in the Coma cluster were moving too fast for the cluster’s visible mass to hold them together. Something else—he called it dunkle Materie3—had to be supplying the necessary gravity. The astronomy community basically ignored his finding for 40 years.4 Then in 1970, Vera Rubin and Kent Ford measured how fast the outer regions of the Andromeda galaxy rotate and found the same problem—the edges were turning nearly as fast as the middle, which Newtonian gravity flatly forbids unless the galaxy’s mass is distributed in ways that don’t match what our instruments detect.5Fast-forward to 2006, when a team led by Douglas Clowe mapped a pair of galaxy clusters caught mid-collision. The gas in the clusters—which is where nearly all the ordinary matter lives—had piled up in the middle, slowed by the impact. But gravitational lensing showed the center-of-mass to be separated from the center of the gas by a significance of eight sigma. They called their paper: “A Direct Empirical Proof of the Existence of Dark Matter.”6The cosmic microwave background provides additional confirmation. The Planck satellite’s measurements fix cold dark matter at roughly five times the density of ordinary matter. Everything we can identify—gas, planets, nebulae, stars, galaxies, quasars, etc.—amounts to about a sixth of the material universe.7 Everything else is invisible and intangible, detectable to us only by its gravity.So, what is it?Maybe it’s not invisible, just really hard to see…Before we dive into speculative explanations, let’s address the simplest possibility. Perhaps dark matter isn’t really exotic; it’s just faint—burnt-out stars, drifting planets, stray black holes. These are often called massive compact halo objects (MACHOs). Anything dense enough passing in front of a background star will briefly brighten it by gravitational lensing, so the idea is directly testable.8The EROS-2 survey watched millions of stars in the Magellanic Clouds for 6.7 years. If the Milky Way’s halo were made of objects around four-tenths of a solar mass, roughly 39 lensing events should have shown up in the bright-star sample—only one did.9 The cosmic microwave background and Big Bang nucleosynthesis independently cap the total amount of ordinary matter far below what the galaxies' gravity demands—no matter how faint that matter might be.10Whatever holds the galaxies together, it isn’t made of the same stuff we are.Science fiction is on the case. Three novels in particular—Mike Brotherton’s Spider Star, John Gribbin’s The Alice Encounter, and Stephen Baxter’s Ring—each take a different approach to dramatizing the problem.WIMPs to the rescue?If dark matter isn’t just ordinary matter that’s hard to see, maybe it’s a particle no one has found yet.The favorite candidates for decades have been “weakly interacting massive particles” (WIMPs)—hypothesized to be heavy, stable particles produced in abundance in the early universe and left over when the cosmos thinned out.11 But we’ve hunted for a long time and nothing suitable has turned up.LZ published its low-mass results last December, based on 417 live days—the largest dataset any dark matter detector has ever assembled—and found nothing between three and nine ...
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    39 mins
  • 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 mins
  • 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 mins
  • “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 mins
  • Where is all the antimatter?

    Where is all the antimatter?
    Aug 14 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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    13 mins
  • A critique of "The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith," by Josephine Saxton

    A critique of "The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith," by Josephine Saxton
    Aug 7 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/Text of original article:In 2023, Josephine Saxton won the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award, which elevates the work of deserving, but lesser known, science fiction and fantasy writers.When Saxton’s The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith hit bookstore shelves in 1969, it did in fact carry the imprint name “Doubleday Science Fiction.”It’s not science fiction. Not by today’s standards, at least. If this book were published in 2026, the publisher would almost certainly label it “magical realism.”Ostensibly, what we have here is a post-apocalyptic narrative. A boy (but no dog, sorry) makes his way through the countryside of a nearly deserted England.So far so good. And at first the world seems very post-apocalyptic indeed. In the first few pages we learn the boy is traveling alone and on foot. The environs through which he walks are very quiet. So quiet, in fact, that the song of a bird causes him to cry with joy.“This morning he had seen a bird, and it had been singing, and the sound had excited him until he had tears running down his face, and he had been very happy. It was a long time since he had heard anything at all, except the sounds that he himself made.”What sort of apocalypse is this, that leaves a country so barren even sound is all but extinguished?We might think a boy stranded in such a situation would be seeking help—perhaps an adult who could offer food and shelter. But the opposite is true.“…if he ever saw another human being, and sometimes he did, he would avoid contact, and he knew that this was right, for in this way, trouble was avoided.”What do we have here? A plague? Perhaps a zombie plague? George Romero’s original Night of the Living Dead came out just a year before this book.Soon the boy hears a sound he attributes to some sort of animal—perhaps a rabbit. At least we know there are animals (other than the occasional bird) left in this strange world! But Saxton quickly minimizes even this slight consolation:“…it might be a rabbit although he knew this was a remote possibility, as he had only had one rabbit in his whole life.”Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.In any case, the “rabbit” turns out to be a newborn baby girl, umbilical cord still attached to her dead mother. Here we get some insight into the boy’s response to mortality.“Death and the dead must at all costs be avoided,” he thinks, and backs away “full of shock and distress.”Then Saxton throws us a curve ball.“The boy was fourteen years old. He had been walking alone now for ten years…”Wait…this kid has been walking through a nearly silent world, avoiding people whenever possible, since he was four years old?Subsequent events increase our perplexity. Against his better judgement, based on “rules” he’s learned (apparently at the age of three and four) from someone, the boy chooses to rescue the baby—even though he has no idea how to care for her.He carries her to an empty town, finding a grocery store with an automatic door (that still functions after a decade) and shelves still stocked with soda water and condensed milk.Later, he locates a bathhouse with functioning toilets and a pool still filled with chlorinated water heated to “a temperature of about eighty-three degrees Farenheit.” Eventually he discovers an indoor shopping mall (also fully stocked) where the heat and even a coffee machine still work.This is a very odd apocalypse.That’s because we aren’t reading a science fiction novel. We’ve been hoodwinked by Doubleday’s late-60s marketing department. Instead of a literal end-of-civilization scenario, this apocalypse is a stand-in for something else.The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith is about the differences between boys and girls on the one hand, and women and men on the other. The empty world, seemingly devoid (or nearly so) of adults is more a representation of how the grown-up world is largely invisible to children, who are primarily the inhabitants of their own needs, desires, and imaginations.Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! This post is public so feel free to share it.This is symbolized by a monument the boy finds in the empty village.“...he came upon a statue of a man on horseback, with an inscription beneath it. The inscription thus:“’To the memory of those brave men of the town of Thingy, who gave their lives in the First World War.’”Here it’s important to understand the meaning of the word “thingy” in British English:“a person or thing whose name one has forgotten, does not ...
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    9 mins
  • INTERVIEW: Kate Ristau, president of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association

    INTERVIEW: Kate Ristau, president of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association
    Jul 30 2026

    Last year, right before I lost my job and suspended this podcast so I could focus on re-inventing my professional career, I recorded this interview with Kate Ristau, president of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association. I'm so glad I can share it with you now!

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    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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    27 mins