The Cosmic Codex

By: Brian Scott Pauls
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  • Living in a science fiction universe...

    www.thecosmiccodex.com
    Brian Scott Pauls
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Art Literary History & Criticism Science Fiction
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Episodes
  • Speaking for the dead

    Speaking for the dead
    Oct 18 2024
    My novelette, An Illicit Mercy, is part of a new promotion in October: Fantasy & SciFi October Freebies.Seventy science fiction and fantasy books, available at no cost.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!For many decades, multiple Hugo, Nebula, and Locus award-winning author Harlan Ellison was the charismatic “bad boy” of science fiction. He could be antagonistic and uncompromising. He described himself as a “troublemaker, malcontent, desperado.” He readily resorted to legal action if he felt others had violated his rights. He is alleged to have assaulted fellow author Charles Pratt at a Nebula Awards banquet. He groped longtime friend Connie Willis onstage in front of the 2006 Hugo Awards audience.Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.Ellison also played an undeniably influential role in science fiction’s New Wave, beginning in the 1960s. While his many short stories may stand as his greatest contribution to the genre, a case can also be made for his editing of the anthologies Dangerous Visions, and Again, Dangerous Visions.Published in 1967, Dangerous Visions included over thirty stories, many by past and future Hugo and Nebula winners, including Ellison himself. It “…helped define the New Wave science fiction movement, particularly in its depiction of sex…” Science fiction author and critic Algis Budrys wrote of Dangerous Visions, "You should buy this book immediately, because this is a book that knows perfectly well that you are seething inside.” As editor, “Ellison received a special citation at the 26th World SF Convention for editing ‘the most significant and controversial SF book published in 1967.’”A second volume followed Dangerous Visions in 1972. Again Dangerous Visions won Ellison another special award for editing at the World Science Fiction Convention.Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! This post is public so feel free to share it.A third volume, The Last Dangerous Visions, was “…announced for publication in 1973…” Ellison solicited stories from many authors, but never published the anthology in his lifetime. He died in 2018.Before Ellison’s death, J. Michael Straczynski, Babylon 5 creator and Ellison’s friend, agreed to serve as his literary executor. This responsibility included overseeing the long-delayed publication of The Last Dangerous Visions. After a further wait of over six years, more than a half-century since the release of Again, Dangerous Visions, the third volume finally shipped. My copy arrived in September.So far, the only short story I’ve read in The Last Dangerous Visions is A.E. van Vogt’s “The Time of the Skin,” because one does not simply ignore a previously unpublished van Vogt story.But the first thing I read was “Ellison Exegesis,” Straczynski’s interpretation of Ellison’s life in light of decades of undiagnosed and untreated mental illness. He doesn’t excuse his friend for what he acknowledges as inappropriate and outrageous behavior—but like a grown-up Ender Wiggin, the title character of Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead, he wants to give the reader a portrait of the whole man. As someone who also suffered from decades of undiagnosed and untreated mental illness, I found Straczynski’s account illuminating and deeply moving. I recommend it to anyone interested in Harlan Ellison or the history of science fiction, even those who were there, and think they know all they need to know about Ellison.You may be surprised.Questions or comments? Please share your thoughts!Club Codex is reading and discussing The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith through the end of October.Follow along with my thoughts on this novel and contribute your own in the following thread:Click here for more details about Club Codex in 2024. Please join us! 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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    4 mins
  • "Nasty, Brutish, and Short"

    "Nasty, Brutish, and Short"
    Oct 7 2024
    My novelette, An Illicit Mercy, is part of a new promotion in October: Fantasy & SciFi October Freebies.Seventy science fiction and fantasy books, available at no cost.As we have learned more about the difficulties of interstellar travel, writing believable stories set around other suns has become more challenging. This problem is a key part of the background in my new novelette, “Nasty, Brutish, and Short,” now appearing in Boundary Shock Quarterly 28: SF Horror, just in time for Halloween.Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.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!Here’s an excerpt:“Nasty, Brutish, and Short”by Brian Scott Pauls“In such condition, there is…continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”—Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, i. xiii. 9Our team took an aero down to the surface. Janus possesses the sort of thick atmosphere a planet (or in this case, half of one) needs to host a lush ecology. Or fly a plane.Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! This post is public so feel free to share it.What it doesn’t have is a moon. It’s got something a lot more exotic and terrifying—a micro black hole. This singularity occupies a geostationary orbit, circling its planet once every 38 hours, the length of a Janusian day. As it revolves, it spews out Hawking radiation—gamma rays, for the most part.Beacon played no role in the choice of our first target. We didn’t know it existed until we arrived in-system. The Ibn Battuta only discovered it because one of their astronomers decided to point a gamma ray telescope at Keid Ab, the exoplanet we had come to investigate.Even without an unidentified gamma source, standard operating procedure suggested only one ship approach the new world at first. “Suggested,” because you don’t write hard-and-fast rules for explorers 16 light years away and 182 years in the future. Still, the precaution made sense.But which ship? The two captains worked it out between themselves. Maybe they played Rock Paper Scissors. In any case, the Zheng He drove in toward Janus while the Ibn Battuta stayed in the outer system, refining deuterium for the ships’ depleted tanks.After reaching Keid Ab, we made it our priority to investigate Beacon. It didn’t take long to determine someone had constructed it.First, no one has ever discovered a natural microscopic black hole.Second, thousands of minuscule, identically sized, perfectly spherical comets fed mass to Beacon on a regular basis.The Zheng He’s astronomers determined each micro comet—just the right size, spaced just far enough apart—added the same amount of mass to the black hole as it would lose to Hawking radiation before the next comet arrived. Their orbits all intersected the local kuiper belt. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble making sure the tiny black hole would be around for a long, long time.Our physicists’ best guess as to the purpose of Beacon saw it as a power generator—an elaborate machine for converting ice from the fringes of the Keid A system into high-energy gamma rays for the Janusians.Only it seemed there were no Janusians. At least, no intelligent Janusians. Not any more. Not for perhaps twelve thousand Earth years.Our satellites and probes had no trouble locating the surface-based receiving station—a large dish antenna embedded in what used to be a mountain peak. It lay directly below Beacon, right where it should have been.But whatever orbital infrastructure had originally harnessed the gamma rays to generate power and transmit it to the surface had vanished. The black hole orbited alone, undetectable except for its lethal output.That’s how “Keid Ab” became “Janus.” Due to the hellish amount of radiation pouring out of Beacon, Janus was half dead, half alive. The side drenched in gamma rays appeared sterile. The opposite side teamed with life. Janus, the two-faced Roman god of duality, seemed like a good match.We didn’t know for sure what had happened to the orbital station that must have existed. But the surface of Janus offered clues. Both hemispheres showed the remains of blast craters.The aero swooped in.As soon as we’d dropped low enough to get a good look, Nabih grunted,“Looks like the bio team was right, Martin. The place is a jungle.”“‘Jungle...
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    8 mins
  • The next question

    The next question
    Sep 26 2024
    My novelette, An Illicit Mercy, is part of a new promotion in September: Free Fantasy & SciFi.Seventy science fiction and fantasy books, available at no cost.Get your FREE copy of Passageway!“Philosophically, the universe has really never made things in ones. The Earth is special and everything else is different? No, we've got seven other planets. The sun? No, the sun is one of those dots in the night sky. The Milky Way? No, it's one of a hundred billion galaxies. And the universe - maybe it's countless other universes.”—Neil deGrasse TysonChosen by mystical warriors to protect a parallel Earth from a catastrophic future, a young man must push his mental and physical abilities to the limits if he is to help save mankind. As seventeen-year-old Darwin McQuaid flees high-school bullies, he is saved by an enigmatic stranger; an indigenous teenage warrior who was born 500 years in the past.Strong and powerful, Daruk possesses an intelligence that exceeds his rugged youthful appearance, and Darwin is drawn to learn more about him. Surprisingly, the high-school junior discovers that the mysterious warrior has a connection to an old family friend—an elderly indigenous shaman called Uncle His. As the physical attraction intensifies between Darwin and Daruk, the warrior reveals a secret—that he and Uncle His are Guardians of the Passageway and are destined to protect the crossroads of three parallel universes, three Earths, each 500 years apart.Discovering worlds he never knew existed, along with an untapped power within himself, can the young man become the warrior needed to defend this ancient world from corrupt invaders?Or will the death and danger of a more primitive time prove to be too much for this 21st-century teen?For over forty years, from 1978 until 2019, the Campbell Conference, named for the long-time Astounding/Analog science fiction magazine editor John W. Campbell, “provided a setting for intelligent discussion about SF.”Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.Starting in the early 1980s, the Center for the Study of Science Fiction, directed by University of Kansas science fiction author and scholar James Gunn, hosted the conference. This included presenting, each year, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, and eventually the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for best short story, the latter in honor of celebrated science fiction author Ted Sturgeon.The Sturgeon Award takes the form of a symbol combining a question mark and an arrow. It's a version of a symbol Sturgeon recommended to his readers to remind them of what he considered an important analytical process: “Ask the next question.” Few people have been able to articulate such sound and succinct advice for writing and reading good science fiction.Several events coincided to bring the conference to a close.Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! This post is public so feel free to share it.During her acceptance speech for the 2019 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, Jeanette Ng accused Campbell of being a fascist, “[e]xalting in the ambitions of imperialists and colonizers, settlers and industrialists.” She challenged the sf community to reconsider honoring him as it had in the past. Analog subsequently announced it would rename its award to the Astounding Award for Best New Writer, and the Center for the Study of Science Fiction renamed the Campbell Conference the Gunn Center Conference.A year later, COVID-19 developed into a global pandemic, complicating in-person gatherings. But Gunn’s death the same year dealt a more significant blow to the future of the conference.In 2022, the KU faculty took over the Center for the Study of Science Fiction, which had previously been governed by a separate board of directors. Retaining the responsibility for presenting the Sturgeon Award each year, the Center replaced the Campbell Conference with the Sturgeon Symposium."Stars in Our Pockets: Celebrating Samuel R. Delany" is the topic of this year’s Sturgeon Symposium, honoring Delany’s “lasting impact on science fiction, speculative fiction, and literary criticism.” This seems appropriate, as Sturgeon is one of the sf writers Delany most recommends.The Sturgeon Symposium is scheduled for October 24-25, 2024, with both online and in person (on the KU campus) elements. The cost is only $25.00, with student and need-based fee waivers available.I plan to attend. Please join me if you can!Register here for the Sturgeon Symposium.Club Codex is reading and discussing The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith through mid-October.Follow along with my thoughts on this novel and contribute your own in the following thread:Click here for more details about Club Codex in 2024. Please join us!My latest novelette, “Long Night On the Endless City,” appears in Boundary Shock Quarterly 26: Tomorrow’s Crimes:On the vast ring habitat Ouroboros, Jel ...
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    4 mins

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