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The Cosmic Codex

The Cosmic Codex

Di: Brian Scott Pauls
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Living in a science fiction universe...

www.thecosmiccodex.comBrian Scott Pauls Arte Fantascienza Storia e critica della letteratura
Episodi
  • SF COMMUNITY: Club Codex Selections (2026-2027)

    SF COMMUNITY: Club Codex Selections (2026-2027)
    Oct 30 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/Club Codex, the official book club for The Cosmic Codex, offers a convenient way to discuss award-winning science fiction novels and collections. Each month, I’ll read a new selection and post my thoughts in the discussion thread. You’re welcome to participate, or just follow along—whatever works best for you!See below for our upcoming selections.November 2026In the Belly of the Whale by Michael FlynnWinner of the 2025 Prometheus Award for Best Novel of libertarian science fiction1Aboard a vast generation ship, the founders’ rigid rules for keeping humanity alive harden over the centuries into separate societies divided by class, belief, and identity. As those divisions deepen, talk of rebellion spreads through the crew, and the voyage becomes a test of how far people will go to win their freedom.2December 2026Time of the Cat by Tansy Rayner RobertsWinner of the 2023 Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel written by an Australian citizen or permanent resident3At Chronos College, humans and cats travel through time for a living, and the job is pure joy apart from the occasional lost traveler, or lost cat. A chance to rescue a missing legend sends the team to the 1960s, if they can persuade Professor Boswell, a famously cranky marmalade tabby, to come along.4January 2027Some Desperate Glory by Emily TeshWinner of the 2024 Hugo Award for Best Novel5Kyr has spent her life on Gaea Station among humanity’s last survivors, training to avenge Earth’s destruction. When her superiors send her brother to certain death and assign her to the nursery to bear sons, she breaks away with his rebellious friend and an imprisoned alien, and discovers a universe stranger and richer than anything she was taught.6February 2027Cassandra in Reverse by Holly SmaleWinner of the 2024 Audie Award for Science Fiction audiobook7Cassie remembers everything and understands almost nothing about other people. After one disastrous day costs her a relationship, a job, and her local café’s banana muffins, she discovers she can travel back in time and undo her mistakes. Unlimited do-overs, however, may not be enough to set things right.8March 2027The Artificial Man and Other Stories by Clare Winger HarrisClare Winger Harris, winner of the 2024 Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award for underread science fiction and fantasy authors9Ten pulp stories from a pioneering woman of early twentieth-century science fiction, selected and introduced by scholar Brad Ricca. Giant insects, Martians thirsty for Earth’s water, and a journey back to ancient Rome fill a collection that shows how much the young genre owed to a writer it largely forgot.10April 2027Cahokia Jazz by Francis SpuffordWinner of the 2023 Sidewise Award for Best Long-Form Alternate History11In an alternate 1922 where the great Indigenous city of Cahokia never fell, the Mississippi metropolis has become an industrial hub of many races and faiths, held together by a fragile peace. When two detectives find a body on a skyscraper roof one snowy night, a week of upheaval follows that may destroy that world or remake it.12May 2027A New Eden by Menilik Henry DyerWinner of the 2024 Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best Novel of New Zealand science fiction and fantasy13On a future Earth ruled by the Fermion Party, which preaches immortality through uploading into a simulated metaverse, four astronauts training on Mars become targets for assassination. Launched early in four ships guided by four AIs, they set out as uploaded minds to find habitable worlds, reunite across the stars, and survive first contact while the Fermions hunt them down.14June 2027Uncertain Sons and Other Stories by Thomas HaWinner of the 2026 Locus Award for Best Collection and the 2026 World Fantasy Award for Best Collection15Thomas Ha’s debut collection turns on familial love and trauma, set against societal and technological anxieties, questions of identity and class, and near futures slightly askew from our own. The title novelette won the 2026 Nebula Award.16July 2027Ancillary Justice by Ann LeckieWinner of the 2024 Hugo Award for Best Series, and of the 2014 Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke Awards17Breq was once the warship Justice of Toren, an AI commanding thousands of soldier bodies for the conquering empire of the Radch. After an act of treachery ripped that life away, she survives in a single human body, on a remote, icy world and closing in on the revenge she has pursued ever since.18August 2027Ancillary Sword by Ann LeckieWinner of the 2024 Hugo Award for Best Series19Now serving the Radch’s ruler and seeking atonement for...
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    21 min
  • CRITIQUE: “Children of Memory” by Adrian Tchaikovsky

    CRITIQUE: “Children of Memory” by Adrian Tchaikovsky
    Oct 25 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/Children of Memory is the weakest entry in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s original Children of Time trilogy.1 Tor published this third volume in the U.K. in 2022 and Orbit did so in the United States the next year.2 The trilogy won the Hugo Award for Best Series in 2023—a win Tchaikovsky has declined to claim because of irregularities in the administration of Hugo nominations that year.3The ColonyThe book’s premise resembles certain elements found in Children of Time.4 The ark ship Enkidu, under Captain Heorest Holt, carries its sleeping cargo to a terraformed world.5 In the first book, the terraforming project went wrong, producing a civilization of spiders. Here it goes wrong, producing a world that can support human life, but just barely. The planet Imir is marginal from the start, with soil chemistry not quite lethal to Earth life, but “wrong enough to have all sorts of long-term impacts.”6 The ocean provides no recourse: “There was also a too-big moon, which had its own moon, making the tides a wild riot. This meant settling anywhere near the sea would be a fatal mistake; so much for maritime aquaculture.”7Generations later, Holt’s descendants live in the farming town of Landfall, where equipment is failing and harvests are getting worse.8 A militia keeps order on behalf of “the older Landfall families,” resulting in a community ruled by status and force: “The punching around here only goes one way, and that’s down.”9The fragile ecology the terraformers created is the root of the colony’s decline: “A collapse of the resource web leads to a collapse of infrastructure which leads to the collapse of everything else.”10 Here, “everything else” includes civil society. Landfall’s ruling class needs enemies to maintain order, and when it can’t find real enemies, it invents them. Tchaikovsky captures this stark reality with phrases such as “You defined us by not being them”11 and “…find someone more them than you are, and put the boot in.”12So far, so good. But Landfall is a dull world filled with dull characters, and while Tchaikovsky is skillful enough to convey that dullness convincingly, he’s unsuccessful in writing an interesting story about an uninteresting place.Holt is a decent man worn to a nub, the parts of him “that wanted to scream and beat at the walls … locked away for now.”13 Liff, the main character for much of the story,14 is a clever girl15 who doesn’t receive enough opportunities to make her cleverness count. The townsfolk are a mob in waiting, and little else. The novel forces readers to spend far too much time in their company, waiting for an unsatisfying payoff.It’s not helpful that Tchaikovsky resorts to a plot device that may still make headlines, but which creators have overused in the past quarter-century. Long-time science fiction readers are likely to see it coming, and a twist that the reader anticipates is no longer a twist.The CorvidsJust as the strongest elements of Tchaikovsky’s excellent Children of Ruin were the octopuses and the Nodan organism,16 here they’re the Corvids and the Interlocutor.The Corvids are Gethli and Gothi, a pair of crow-like birds traveling with the strangers,17 and they are the most humorous and most unsettling characters in the book. Each Corvid on its own is a clever animal. Together they’re…more. Their species works in bonded pairs, one partner storing and recalling information while the other analyzes and invents.18 Tchaikovsky depicts this partnership as a single mind emerging from the interaction of two entities. The birds trade “a quickfire rattle of ratchety consonants that serve as thoughts from one side of their shared brain to the other”19—as Tchaikovsky puts it, “In the space between each pair, a mind.”20As with the spiders and octopuses, he knows what he’s talking about. Real corvids have become a major subject of research on animal intelligence, and researchers have documented tool manufacture, caching strategies that take account of which other birds were watching, and apparent planning for the future—abilities that developed independently of the great apes’ and amount to a case of convergent evolution.21 Like many real corvids, those in Children of Memory pair for life. Tchaikovsky turns the pair bond into the species’ seat of cognition.22What makes the Corvids memorable, though, is how they characterize their own cognition. They insist, cheerfully and at length, that they are not conscious. “We’re a mistake, basically,” one of them explains; “…what we really are is a ...
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    18 min
  • “Probability Amplitudes”: Why am I writing this, anyway?

    “Probability Amplitudes”: Why am I writing this, anyway?
    Oct 17 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/Writing a book, I’ve learned, is a lot of work. But there’s a difference between knowing this from an intellectual standpoint and understanding it from experience as I watch the process extend through days, weeks, months, and years.“So,” you might ask, “why do it at all?”It’s a question each writer must answer to their own satisfaction. For me, the key lies in my personal relationship to science fiction.I first encountered written science fiction in third grade when my brother Steve, four years ahead of me, brought Stanley A. Widney’s “Elevator to the Moon” home from the McPherson Junior High library.1 The cover illustration portrayed two people in spacesuits, one of them beset on all sides by what appeared to be long strips of neon confetti.Something about the cover engaged my imagination in ways few books had managed previously. Nearly fifty years later, I still remember lying on my stomach in our shared bedroom, reading “Elevator to the Moon,” which I had “borrowed” from Steve—probably when he wasn’t around to object. While most details of the plot have long since slipped my mind, this blurb from Goodreads captures the essence:“Two men take what they think is an elevator which in reality is a well equipped spacecraft and end up on the moon and encounter ribbon like aliens and have other adventures.”2Maybe this book wouldn’t stick in my mind if it weren’t for what happened one day when I couldn’t find it. I asked where it had gone, and my mom told me it had reached its due date, necessitating its return. Pleading with her to get it back, I took great affront when she characterized it as too advanced, which implied I hadn’t really been reading it. She told me I needed to stick to books appropriate for my age. This experience seared a minor middle-grade book into my memory.While “Elevator to the Moon” represents the first step of my science fiction journey, more important steps followed, in which my brother continued to play an instigating role.The next came a year or two later with a book he brought home from our local public library. And this is a book many readers will recognize—“The Zero Stone” by Andre Norton.3As with “Elevator to the Moon,” the cover pulled me in. It featured an evocative illustration by Robin Jacques of the two main characters exploring a wrecked ship in space.4Goodreads describes the story as follows:“Murdoc finds phenomenal powers in the stone ring that he inherits from his father but only comes to understand those powers completely through contact with an interplanetary wanderer in the form of a feline mutant.”5Here, more of the characters and events have stuck with me over the years—a tribute to Norton’s abilities as a storyteller. She knew her audience well. Her main character is young, still learning his trade, and Norton reveals a lot about his home life before he accepts an apprenticeship with a gem merchant. She portrays his close relationship with his father, as well as his strained relationships with his mother and brother. While not my experience, these elements provided enough familiar touch-points to make Murdoc real to me. And the plot moves fast—first in the city where we meet him and then across the stars to a wilderness planet full of danger and adventure. I loved it.What I didn’t know was that “Andre Norton” was a woman. She intended this, of course, adopting the name in 1934 for her first book, ‘The Prince Commands,’ to better sell her work in a market targeted at boys—and legally changing her name to Andre Alice Norton that same year.6 Looking back, the book must have had an “About the Author” page, but if so, I didn’t read that part. It would be another two or three years until a junior high classmate sagely informed me, “Andre Norton is a man.” This revelation taught me to be careful of my assumptions about writer identities. It also served as a basis for later understanding the importance of representation in a commercial field that can be unfair to some participants.But more discoveries awaited me.My introduction to Isaac Asimov likely occurred as part of an annual tradition in my hometown. Each year, the school children of communities in McPherson County get the first or second Friday of May off for “All Schools Day,” a celebration centered on a large parade down McPherson’s Main Street.7 It also involves several activities following the parade. I don’t know if this tradition has continued, but as a kid, I always hit up the used book sale in the gymnasium of the Community Building. The ...
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    20 min
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