Martin's DW

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/11/15/view-from-a-hotel-window-11-15-25-jacksonville-fl/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58266

Folks, I think we may have hit the parking lot motherlode here: Three parking lots and a parking garage! Another city is going to have work very hard to ever beat Jacksonville’s bounty here.

I’m in town for an event at the Jacksonville Public Library, starting at 1pm: I’ll be interviewed, do an audience Q&A, and then sign books. Come on down and see me.

Then when it’s done I go back home and write like the wind, after all I have a novel to finish before (mumble mumble mumble). The life of a science fiction writer is always intense, it seems.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/11/15/view-from-a-hotel-window-11-15-25-jacksonville-fl/

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Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/11/13/the-big-idea-theodora-goss-3/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58247

Reality is both objective and subjective, but what if reality could be fundamentally changed just by enough people thinking about it really hard? Author Theodora Goss is here today not only to present her newest collection of short stories, but to make you question our very reality and what it means for something to be considered “real” in society. Follow along in the Big Idea for Letters from an Imaginary Country, and contemplate reality along the way.

THEODORA GOSS:

One of my favorite writers is Jorge Luis Borges, and one of my favorite stories by Borges is “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” I’ll try not to spoil the story too much, but if you haven’t read it and would like to before finding out what I’m going to say about it, don’t look any further. Instead, go find a copy of Borges’ short story collection Labyrinths. Once you’ve read the story (and every other story in the collection—you will inevitably want to read them all), you can come back here.

All right, let’s keep going. “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is about a secret society that creates an encyclopedia for an imaginary world named Tlön. Because the encyclopedia describes that world in so much detail, it begins to materialize; objects from Tlön being to appear in our world. Eventually, our world starts to become Tlön—the imaginary world has taken over the real one. This concept inspired two of the stories in my short story collection Letters from an Imaginary Country: “Cimmeria: From the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology” and “Pellargonia: A Letter to the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology.” Imaginary anthropology is just one of the imaginary sciences; one can also study imaginary archaeology, imaginary sociology, imaginary biology—and certain fields, such as economics, may always have been imaginary anyway. They are based on the Tlön Hypothesis: that if a group of people imagine something, describe it clearly and in sufficient detail, and get enough other people to believe in it, that thing becomes real. So imaginary archaeologists can imagine and then excavate an ancient civilization. Imaginary biologists can imagine and then locate a new species of animal. Practitioners of imaginary anthropology can imagine and then travel to contemporary human societies—countries like Cimmeria and Pellargonia. Of course, creating these societies can result in unexpected consequences, which is what my stories are about.

On one hand, the Tlön Hypothesis is a fantastical element—of course we can’t create reality just by imagining it. On the other, it’s fundamentally and demonstrably true. We can’t create real reality through imagination, but human beings don’t live most of their lives in real reality—where we find trees and rivers and mountains. As far as we know, other animals spend their lives in that reality. But we human beings spend most of our lives in an imagined reality that includes, and counts as “real,” countries and governments and corporations. I’m drawing here on Yuval Noah Harari’s idea, described in Sapiens, that any human society is largely an “imagined order.” We are born into that order, and its rules and values tell us how to live. We think of that order as “real” because it seems as natural and inevitable to us as trees and rivers and mountains. In the United States, we believe that we have a constitution (not just a piece of paper with writing on it) and that we spend money (not just other pieces of paper with more writing). We have also created a social structure that enforces those rules and values, so that if we steal pieces of paper with one kind of writing (doodles on napkins, for example), no one will care—but if we steal pieces of paper with a different kind of writing (like hundred dollar bills), we will be put in prison.

You could say I made up the Tlön Hypothesis because it seemed like a cool idea for my story. However, the Tlön Hypothesis is also the basis for human civilization—a society comes into being because we imagine it, and the only way to change that society is to imagine another order for it. (We had better get on that quick, by the way, because our “real” reality is starting to destroy the actual real reality, including trees and rivers and mountains, as well as the animals to whom they are crucially important.)

All of the stories in Letters from an Imaginary Country are, to a certain extent, about how we create the world through telling stories about it, whether those stories are fairy tales or academic papers. They are about the power of language, which I think is our main human superpower—the ability to communicate with one another in complex ways, and to create social structures because we agree on certain things, or wars because we disagree on others. All the great things we have achieved as a species are a function of our ability to communicate, as are all the terrible things we have done throughout human history. Indeed, the idea of human history itself depends on language.

I suppose if I want a reader to get any central idea from my collection, it’s that we have the power to make and remake our world through language (which is why writers, who seem so powerless in our capitalist system, are the first targets of authoritarian regimes). So let’s use language carefully, clearly, well. I’m certainly not the first writer to say this. George Orwell said it in much more specific detail; Ursula K. Le Guin, with much greater eloquence. But it’s worth repeating as many times as we need to hear it.

You might not get that particular point from reading my stories, at least not consciously—after all, I hope they are also fun reads. Feel free to enjoy them without philosophizing too much. But I’m grateful for the opportunity to philosophize here, and to talk about why I wrote them as well as how much I owe to an amazing writer named Borges.

Letters from an Imaginary Country: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author socials: Website|Facebook|Instagram|Bluesky

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Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/11/12/the-big-idea-stewart-hotston/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58222

Information is the name of the game, and today’s Big Idea has a lot of it! From quantum mechanics to Diet Coke, author Stewart Hotston takes you on a ride through how the galaxy works, and how his new novel, Project Hanuman, came to be.

STEWART HOTSTON:

My fate was sealed in Leicester Square, London when I was six years old and I was taken to see Return of the Jedi. That was the day I fell in love with Space Opera. 

From then on, I was a big fan – going so far as to get my PhD in theoretical physics, before ditching academia for ‘a real job’ as my grandmother declared. Over the years I’ve learned to keep my opinions about science fiction to myself – not least because I realise that pointing at a movie in outrage and screaming ‘that’s not how angular momentum works!’ is fun for exactly no one including me. It really isn’t how angular momentum works though. 

Instead I’m going to enjoy the story, accept the nonsense for dramatic licence and try not to remind anyone that we’re unlikely to ever leave the solar system.

Honestly, most of the time I’m happy someone made some science fiction at all. 

Many of us have some idea of just how weird it would be to be close to a blackhole, and we know that travelling near the speed of light does odd things to our experience of time. 

But beyond that, the universe is far weirder than our wildest tropes. There could be moons made of diamond, there could be planets with atmospheres so dense that if there was life inside them it would exist the same way that animals at the bottom of the Earth’s oceans do – via derivative energy sources rather than directly harvesting their local sun’s energy. 

One of the big ideas I’ve been fascinated by for a long time now is the role of information in mathematics and, more generally, the universe itself. We tend to think of information as something we collate, gather and record. Except it’s entirely possible that information is the foundation stone of the entire edifice that is reality – that information is Real with a capital R. There’s an interpretation of Quantum Mechanics called Quantum Information Theory (QIT for short) whose entire thesis can be catchily summed up as the ‘Bit before It’.

What holds my ongoing fascination with QIT is how it suggests that every part of reality right down to the most fundamental components are, actually, bits of information. This might sound very esoteric (and, sure, it is) but some of the biggest problems in physics today focus on the nature of information and how that reflects reality. 

When I say information I don’t mean how much my six pack of caffeine free Diet Coke costs nor even what the words caffeine free Diet Coke signify. If it’s not that then what do we mean when we talk about information? 

When we talk about information in this cosmic context we talk about information as the thing which defines the very nature of reality. Consider a photon: the photon’s state (you could say the very nature of what it is) is encoded into its wavefunction. A wavefunction here is a mathematical expression for the very nature of the photon – describing among other things, its energy, position, chirality and entanglement. You add those things up and you get the photon. It’s not that information comes from describing the photon, it’s that information makes the photon. The information comes first and, according to this way of seeing the universe, is a real thing (it is THE real thing). Information is more real than the stuff you can touch because it’s the reason you can touch stuff in the first place.  

This could feel very philosophical, too much woo-wah to be practical or interesting except to a small coterie of mathematicians, philosophers and physicists. Yet the answer to what information is informs a myriad of real world technologies such as how small we can make computer chips and how fast they can go. It informs subjects such as how birds navigate and how whales detect magnetic fields, and how information is transmitted via mechanisms such as DNA. After all, information is everywhere; information is everything. 

If you put your head in the clouds you could see a world in which you could change the information that makes a photon and turn it into something else. Imagine a civilisation that could manipulate the information that builds reality the way you can edit a story on a word processor.

When I came to write my own space opera after years of not knowing the story I wanted to tell, I realised that a central thing I wanted to achieve was to bring space opera into the present by reflecting some of the most cutting-edge physics. You could say the big idea was to answer this question: what would Iain Banks’ Culture look like if it was founded on what we know now about the universe? 

Which sounds fine, if overly ambitious, until you think about what that means. It means building civilisations that might categorise themselves not by their access to energy (the famous Khardashev scale) but by how easily they can manipulate information. After all, if you could take a bunch of hydrogen atoms and change the information that makes them hydrogen and reprogram the universe to have them as gold…then the amount of energy you have access to becomes pretty irrelevant (as does gold). Indeed you’d look at those who were stuck with mundane matter as technological primitives.  

It’s what Star Trek’s replicators are based on – matter/energy transformation through manipulation of information – after all, you have to know what the information is that expresses hot dogs if you want to turn raw energy into the best hot dog in the galaxy.

If it’s a minor point in Star Trek, for me it’s a major one – what could threaten a civilisation that can turn your laser beams into cotton candy? What would be their struggle if they can access the very fundamental nature of the universe at will? 

The thing is science doesn’t explain everything – and here I’m quoting the most brilliant physicist I ever met, Prof Tom McLeish – it’s the art of being wrong constructively. There’s always more to know and, potentially, always someone else who knows it. I settled here – if human brains are limited in how we encounter the universe and hence how we manage to imagine it, all other types of being will also have this category of limitation – be they AI, life evolved from bacteria or giant sentient stars – our shapes will define our experience of the world. 

Hence, even if the universe really is information as stuff, we are, all of us, made of that stuff. If we could tweak the world by editing the page we’d still be limited in our ambitions, our scope, by the fact we are beings living inside the system.

“Bit before It” might change the very way we build our society, but I’ve become convinced that the ‘It’, the people processing that information, remain at the heart of the story. And that’s the big idea. 

Project Hanuman: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Books-A-Million|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author socials: Website|Instagram|Bluesky

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