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Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/08/14/the-big-idea-thomas-r-weaver/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56833

How different would the world look if humans stopped downplaying our problems, such as climate change? Author Thomas R. Weaver imagines a near-future where we hand over control to someone, or something, who won’t ignore said problems. Follow along in the Big Idea for his debut novel, Artificial Wisdom, and see if we can face our problems head on.

THOMAS R. WEAVER:

Humans love burying our heads in the sand. I adore this idiom because it stems from a wonderful misbelief about ostriches that dates back to the Romans and Greeks. Ostriches don’t bury their heads in the sand to confuse predators at all, but we’ve talked about humans doing it to avoid our problems since the 1600s. Yet if ostriches did try it, we’d all see the obvious flaw: the predator simply gets a head start.

In our daily lives, we do this all the time. We do it when we leave writing an essay to the last minute (ahem). We do it when we ignore potential warning signs about our health. We do it when we really don’t want to see how much money is left in our bank account, or the size of our credit card bill. We’ll happily trade extended pain tomorrow over a sharp jab today, like how we might tolerate a toxic relationship because we don’t want to handle the breakup. And it first dawned on me how dangerous this was for our species, and our world, during COVID.

In those early months of 2020, some countries acted swiftly on things like border controls, lockdowns, containment measures and vaccines, and others acted slowly, hoping the problem would go away without having to make hard decisions that might imperil economies. What was fascinating and terrifying was how quickly it seemed to polarize us all into one camp or another, and still does today.

I can vividly remember taking a solo walk in the local woods during lockdown, as we’d eventually been allowed to do. Walking makes my brain fire up, and on this particular stroll, despite the fresh air in my lungs and birdsong in my ears, I started to worry about the future.

If it was that easy for governments and society to bury their heads in the sand over something that challenged our daily lives, like a pandemic, wouldn’t it be the same with the upcoming societal shifts we’d almost certainly see from the rise of Artificial Intelligence? Wouldn’t it be even more so with the climate crisis, at an even bigger scale? We’d already sat on that problem too long, in denial and unwilling to make moderate changes today that would inconvenience us, but nothing like the kind of inconvenience we’ll face down the line if we don’t get a grip on it. It’s always the same old story: when we’re finally forced to pull our heads out the sand and look around, the problem is a lot closer and we have to run a lot harder to get away from it than we would have done if we’d run at the start.

And so I decided to take both of these things and write a near-future technothriller. I wanted to see what the world could look like only twenty-five years into the future, and what daily life might be like if we’ve made no interventions on, in particular, the climate, but also where we finally had superintelligence.

In the world of Artificial Wisdom, it’s taken a wet-bulb heatwave disaster that killed millions to catalyze the nations into agreeing that something needs to be done, and because it is now too late to make ‘local’ changes and the climate knows no borders, a proposal has been made to do as the Romans once did in times of crisis: give a mandate to a single leader to marshal all resources required to solve the crisis, then hand power back.

At the time, I’d been listening to some of Dan Carlin’s excellent Hardcore History podcasts, particularly his two early series on the Romans. I was fascinated with how they occasionally appointed what they called a dictator to deal with civilizational-risk events, like Hannibal crossing the Alps. What if we were left with no option but to give power to a global leader with the authority to make hard choices the nations couldn’t make for themselves? How would we even choose that? 

In Artificial Wisdom, the world has opted for the more Cromwellian title of protector for a global leader. The final two candidates emerging from global primaries are both unexpected and regarded as poor choices. One is a former US President our main character believes is responsible for geoengineering that caused the heatwave disaster. The other is the world’s first political artificial intellect, Solomon, and questions hang over the hard choices an AI would make to save humanity, and whether we’d be trading freedom for salvation.

I wasn’t sure, at the start, that the typical fiction reader would want to actually crack open a novel about any of this. Many of us are terrified about the climate and don’t want to know more. We might go out of our way to avoid scary news reports or scientific papers about it. It makes us feel helpless. Similarly, there is a swelling of justifiable concern about the progress of AI right now, and the potential impact on many different categories of jobs. We’ve somehow instantly polarized ourselves yet again, some loving the technology and becoming dependent on it, others hating it and avoiding it. Would people really read fiction about two things they maybe wanted to bury their heads in the sand about? 

I decided that if sci-fi had one real superpower, it was in telling stories about tomorrow that help make sense of today. Stories and fiction help us process things in a safe way, seeing worst case scenarios through the eyes of characters who are going through the most challenging days of their own lives. Books about the future can become a safe space to deal with those things. Our brains are primed to worry, to simulate threats before they happen, allowing us to prepare for them and avoid danger.

As a debut writer, this was still a huge challenge. I wanted to avoid preaching, and certainly wanted to avoid pretending I have the right answers. Instead, I wanted to make it clear that when we bury our heads in the sand, there are no right answers anymore. I had to ensure that was a story people want to read with characters they enjoyed spending time with, and that’s the real craft of writing a novel.

So Artificial Wisdom became my attempt at that: a conspiracy thriller and murder mystery woven into a future we may still be able to dodge. If we pull our heads out of the sand in time, that is.

Artificial Wisdom: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author socials: Website|Instagram|Threads

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/08/14/the-big-idea-thomas-r-weaver/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56833

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/08/13/going-greek-at-manna/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56806

As much as I frequent Salar, I almost never visit their sister restaurant, Manna Uptown. It opened about three years ago, which I had been really excited for, but it’s actually like twenty minutes further from me than Salar, which is already forty-five minutes. So, I don’t get out there often, but it’s a beautiful space that I would like to try to visit more often.

In the spirit of that desire, I decided to attend their “Chef Talks” event last week. A fifty dollar ticket got you a three-course meal with an accompanying glass of your choice of red, white, or bubbly wine. The theme of the evening was Greece, as Chef Margot had just returned from a trip overseas to Greece, and wanted to serve us some authentic Greek food.

If you haven’t been to Manna before, it’s located smack-dab in the middle of Centerville’s historic downtown area, and is in a beautifully restored multi-level house. With velvet seats, marble throughout, and chandeliers to spare, its sleek, sophisticated atmosphere is the perfect accompaniment to their modern European menu and excellent cocktails.

For this event, it was located on the second floor of the restaurant, and everyone was sat at one of two large tables. I went alone, and sitting at a big table with people I’ve never met always proves to be more interesting than if I’d sat alone. I know it’d make a lot of people anxious, but I find it fun.

The tables were set with our silverware and the menu:

I had to do a double take at the menu, because the first course and third course share a name. Just a typo, but I found it amusing.

The table also had some fresh flowers in vases, and some rolls in baskets with oil to dip it in.

I was one of the very few people who chose bubbles over the red or white wine, and I was served a lovely rosé:

Soon enough, the first course came out:

I really liked the presentation of this dish, I thought it was rather striking. I must admit I’m not the biggest fan of octopus, I usually find it to be really rubbery and tough, and I generally don’t like the spectacle of the suction cups and whatnot (I have the same issue with calamari when it’s not just like, a round circle piece).

Anyways, apparently they’re a very popular choice of protein in Greece. I will say this octopus was certainly the most tender I’d ever had, and it was a pretty generous portion. I’m not sure if it’s pita or naan on the side, but it was really soft. I loved the texture of the puree, and the lemon and olive oil really added some brightness. I do feel like the octopus was like, largely unseasoned, but overall I was pretty happy with this course.

The second course came with a Greek side salad which they brought out first:

This was just a super classic Greek salad, nice and acidic from the olives and vinaigrette, plenty of feta, solid side salad.

And the real star of the show, the beef and orzo stew:

Y’all. I have been dreaming of this stew everyday for the past week. This was the most warm, comforting, delicious bowl of stew I’ve ever had. The orzo and roasted carrots were so soft, the meat was incredibly tender, it was pleasantly cinnamon-y and just tasted like a hug. I was immediately transported to a winter’s evening, sitting in front of the fireplace with a big bowl of this delectable stew. Lord have mercy, I love this stew.

Last, but certainly not least, this citrus cake:

Are you kidding me?! That’s so pretty. Classy, even. I absolutely adored this cake. It was dense and perfectly soaked with the citrus syrup, and the vanilla ice cream couldn’t have been a better accompaniment. The fresh orange flavor with the creamy vanilla was truly a treat. I left this meal totally satisfied.

I think for fifty dollars this event was worth it. Three courses plus a glass of wine and gratuity included? Pretty decent price! I’m glad I got to try some Greek food, as it’s not something I eat often (or ever, actually), and I was happy to finally revisit Manna. The people I sat next to ended up being pretty cool and a lot of fun to talk to, so that was nice, too.

Do you like Greek food? Which dish looks the best to you? Let me know in the comments, be sure to check out Manna on Instagram, and have a great day!

-AMS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/08/13/going-greek-at-manna/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56806

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/08/12/the-big-idea-tim-chawaga/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56796

Life should be a party. Author Tim Chawaga is here today to expand upon this idea, showing us that parties can come in many forms. Follow along in the Big Idea for his newest novel, Salvagia, to see just how much can be worth celebrating.

TIM CHAWAGA:

When I was in college I was briefly obsessed with something called the Emergency Party Button.

It’s exactly what it sounds like:  a metal box with a big red button on a coffee table in a sparse living room not too different from the sort of white-walled, “IKEA-showroom-post-hurricane” spaces that I would occupy for most of my 20s. When the button is pressed, there is a brief hesitation, and then the blinds close, the lamps dim and change colors, What is Love blasts at a voice-drowning volume. Laser lights, strobe lights and fog machine all activate in succession. You can imagine a party being there but of course there isn’t one… just a lone genius standing behind his phone, panning the camera around the empty room for three whole minutes. I was dumbstruck by their ingenuity. I also wondered how many party emergencies such a person could possibly have.

I was a theater major, and this was exactly the kind of theater that I loved—immersive, experimental, unexpected, delightful. I was also in college, and decided that the EPB was essential for the two-bedroom apartment I shared with five other people. 

So I tried to build one myself. Despite a technical page with detail approaching the Unabomber journal, I failed. Today, after decades of technological advancement, personal technical experience and a net worth consistently above zero, I feel I am no closer. If anything, my time in tech (particularly in IT) has taught me that anything so bespoke, with so many moving parts (especially IoT parts from different brands with different, proprietary operating systems), will simply create more problems than they could ever hope to solve. The internet is now awash with EPBs, but I have lost faith that behind these social media blips of seamless button/party bliss is anything other than days of labor, thousands of dollars in materials and installment, and the same three minutes of solitary camera panning. A Potemkin party.

The Big Idea at the root of my novel, Salvagia, (and, now that I think about it, much of my writing in general) is this: the power of the individual to build a true Emergency Party Button is a basic human right that we (read: I) have been denied, and will continue to be denied for at least another century, until our anger ossifies, and we pursue drastic action.

On the surface, Salvagia is a sci-fi mystery with all the trappings of both genres: dead bodies, mechanical alligators, a drag race to space (just to name a few).

My protagonist, Triss Mackey, was raised by a class of nomads descended from today’s “right-to-repair” movement, who roam the country “liberating” tech and IP from feds and corporations. She’s currently stuck in a dead-end government job pulling up air conditioners from a part of the flooded South Florida coast known as the “yoreshore”, the area between where the shore used to be and where it is now. 

The feds are about to abandon Florida and deregulate the coast. The yoreshore is on the cusp of a real estate boom, and all sorts of groups are about to come in and build it up again. Most of them are the familiar types, the ones responsible for ruining the coast in the first place—developers and corporate mafias, with shady crypto cults funding it all. 

But there are a couple of people who don’t work for anybody, who are just looking for a quiet little spot to dream up a new, sustainable way of living.

Building in the yoreshore, in other words, is their Emergency Party Button.

Because the power to build a true Emergency Party Button, to walk through the world and instantly partify the air around them, is the same as the power to build a filter to clean water from any source, or to generate enough energy to sustain oneself with a surplus for the community. It’s self-sufficiency, created from a subjective place of joy, in service of that all-American pursuit of happiness.

And we should be creating more examples of joyful technology in science fiction. We should depict the ways in which technology can expand our freedoms, bring us closer together and enhance what makes us human, like any good party does. 

In the world of Salvagia, just like today, technology is largely controlled by the distant and powerful, to exploit and control. Those who want to build a better way are willing to hide, fight, and steal the means to do so. 

A true Emergency Party Button is the radical future we deserve, the future we were promised. It is essential to believe this now, to envision the kinds of parties we could be having, to build the fighting spirit required to seize them.

Salvagia: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author socials: Website|Instagram|Bluesky|Goodreads

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/08/12/the-big-idea-tim-chawaga/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56796

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/08/11/poking-the-discourse-bear-re-classic-science-fiction/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56787

Over on Bluesky I got a lot of guff about the above post, but you know what? I 100% stand by it. I’m 56 now, and if you’re recommending the same science fiction books to a ten-year-old today that would have been recommended to me when I was a ten-year-old — and were old and kinda dated even then — I think you should seriously reconsider recommending science fiction books to young readers.

Why? Well, for just two things, either you are so far behind in your science fiction reading that you can’t think of a science fiction work from the two-and-half-decades of this millennium (not to mention possibly the three decades immediately preceding that time frame in the previous millennium) that you could recommend to a young reader, which is not great, or you have kept up with the last twenty-five years of science fiction writing and think none of it is worthy of recommendation to the youth of today. In which case, on behalf of every science fiction writer who first started publishing in this century (and all the ones who debuted before then, but have kept on writing): Rude. There’s been a lot of fantastic work in the last twenty-five years that stands at least equal to what was written before, that you could recommend to new and/or young readers of the genre. If you can’t acknowledge that, this is a you problem.

“But the kids should read the classics!” Well, one, as I wrote almost exactly five years ago, “the science fiction canon” is dead, so this is an arguable statement, especially for a casual reader; and two, even if one were to stipulate that there is an essential canon of classic works every science fiction fan should read, it does not necessarily follow that every young reader needs to read them to start off. Start young readers with interesting accessible contemporary work that brings them through the door and gets them curious as to what else is out there, at which point they may well wander back into the “classics” arm of the genre and delight in what they find there. But if that’s the only door you can show them into the genre, you’re doing them and the genre we all mutually love a disservice.

And anyway, it’s kind of ridiculous. As I said in a different Bluesky post:

To be clear, it’s not that the Kim Sisters aren’t cool, or unimportant to the overall history of K-Pop. They are cool, and important! But the hard swing from “Golden” to this is rough, to say the least.

And then there’s the Suck Fairy to consider, and my own complementary twist on that idea, the Sixteen Candles Problem, in which you show something you loved as a young person to a young person today, and you’re both horrified at all the problematic bullshit in the thing that your brain just plain forgot was there (seriously, don’t show Sixteen Candles to anyone born in the 21st Century without watching it first. You have forgotten how awful it actually is). So if you’re out here blithely suggesting sixty-year-old science fiction books to the youth of today, let me ask: When was the last time you read the thing you’re suggesting? Is it more than a decade? Maybe read it again? Because you may find the casual sexism/racism/other -isms are there a lot more than you remember, or the prose more wooden, or the dialogue rather more stiff, or the plots more iffy, or some combination of above.

(And if you read it and you don’t find any of those things, ask yourself: Am I a white dude who doesn’t actually have to think about racism/sexism/etc on a regular basis? Because that will maybe be a filter you need to consider. I know it’s fashionable in the current era, seeing as we now have mask-off bigots running the government, to have white dudes consider having to acknowledge that filter to be deeply unfair, but, you know. Try anyway.)

It’s all right if you love something that hasn’t aged well! Everything ages, and much of it not especially gracefully. It doesn’t mean it wasn’t important to you or that it doesn’t have value. It’s also okay to have that give you pause with regard to recommending it to someone of another, younger, generation.

But when someone asks about recommendations for their kids, you want to be helpful! Cool, here’s my suggestion: read more new stuff. And when you read it, think about from whom (and at what age) you would recommend that work. You don’t even have to buy it, just head off to the library and look through the new releases (or suggest an upcoming release for the library to acquire. Librarians like when you do that. So do authors). Then, when the question comes up, you’ll be prepared with something from this century.

If you can’t or won’t do that, then here’s another useful tip: Tell the person asking to ask a librarian for recommendations. That’s literally what librarians do! They’re really good at connecting people (and particularly kids) with books. They would be happy to do it here as well. They know what’s new, and what’s good, and what’s in the library. That kid will go home with something great (you can do this in bookstores, too, if you want to be purchasing that day).

And if you really really really really really want to recommend a decades-old book? Then reread it, have an idea of how that text and story sits right now, and when you recommend it, acknowledge and disclose it’s from another era, with all the things that come from being of that era — and then be able to articulate why you think it still has value to a young person today, beyond “well, I liked it when I was that age,” or “it’s a classic.”

Then go read some more new stuff! You deserve it.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/08/11/poking-the-discourse-bear-re-classic-science-fiction/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56787