Me, trying to explain to Spice that the reason I’m spending so much time with the foster kittens is that they have to be socialized to human contact, not because I love them more than the other cats in the house. Spice is, shall we say, unconvinced. I just pray that somehow, we will get through this moment of relationship tension. Perhaps a Churu will help.
(The foster kittens are doing great, thanks for asking.)
Many years ago, I had a dream and that I was singing “Yellow” by Coldplay while accompanying myself on guitar, and eventually a crowd surrounded me and sang along. When the song was done, I looked to the assembled crowd and said how wonderful it was that we were all singing along. And someone said, “we weren’t singing along with you. We were trying to drown you out.”
Anyway, here’s me singing “Yellow” by Coldplay. And yes, I played guitar on it. So there!
The weekend is here and that’s a fine time to catch up with a book! Here are this week’s new books and ARCs that have come to the Scalzi Compound. What’s calling to you? Share in the comments!
The other day Athena noted that kittens had shown up in the parking lot of Bryant’s apartment. Sadly, between then and now one of the kittens succumbed to the dangers of outside living, and Athena and Bryant decided it was time to snatch the remaining trio of kittens and move them to a safer environment, i.e., our basement guest room. That cat-napping took place this afternoon and now we have the three kittens in the house. Here they are:
First, this cute little calico;
Then this dilute tortie;
And also this personality-filled black kitten.
We’re isolating them from the rest of the cats in the house until we can get them to the vet next week, but they certainly seem healthy and, once they got over being snatched and transported somewhere they’ve never been before, calm and baseline-level kittenish. The calico and tortie are almost certainly girl cats, genetically speaking; the black kitten is currently of indeterminate sex but I would bet on it being a boy. The three of them get along pretty well, which considering how Athena and Bryant found them, is not entirely surprising.
The plan now is to take them to the vet, confirm that they are healthy, and then either find them new homes or surrender them to a no-kill shelter. We can maybe take one of them (likely the black cat), but we’re also all right letting the entire trio go to safe and welcoming homes. So: If any of you are looking for a kitten (or two!), and can show up to take them away, we’ve got some available for you! Drop me an email (john@scalzi.com) and we can talk. These kittens are, as the kids no longer say, totes adorbs. They would love to come home with you.
Author Jane Harrington has more in store today than a book. In her Big Idea she brings us a history lesson, one that will change how you see the entire genre of fairy tales. Follow along to see how teaching this lesson to college students led to the creation of her new book, Women of the Fairy Tale Resistance.
JANE HARRINGTON:
The desire to restore the legacies of marginalized women writers in history was the impetus for this book. And anger.
Some years ago I was called upon to teach a college literature course, and though I’m generally more comfortable teaching writing than lit, I thought, Okay, how about fairy tales? I knew my Perrault, Grimms, Andersen, and Disney, so I could put together something decent enough. It would be fun! But it wasn’t long into the first term before not-so-fun questions started poking at my brain.
One was Why do male writers overwhelmingly dominate the history of fairy tales? The only so-called classic tale with female authorship is “Beauty and the Beast.” And Why do we even call these stories fairy tales? I mean, you can count on one hand how many fairies appear in the combined works of the aforenamed fathers of the genre. Turns out the answer to both questions is the same: because the women writers who were responsible for the popularity of fairy tales—and who coined the term itself, contes de fées (because they were French)—were axed from the canon in favor of male writers. And, yes, there were fairies in every one of their seventy-plus tales.
My first glimpse of these women was in the margins of English-language folklore scholarship, which tends to focus on German, i.e., Grimm-ish, roots, and thus can lack depth in other areas. What was said about them was scant, somewhat dismissive, and (I would only learn later) often inaccurate. But they were female fairy-talers—conteuses, they called themselves—and I wanted to include them in my course.
So began my quest, which involved walls of books growing around me, thanks to an excellent university library and charming librarians who conjured up dozens of physical volumes from beyond the collection. And then there were all the electronic texts, archival and otherwise. Much of what I had to read was in French, a language I’m far from fluent in, but I wasn’t going to let that get between me and the stories of these writers. Truth is, it’s hard for even the fluent to nail down these histories, but more on that in the book.
Some broad strokes of what I learned: The conteuses wrote not only fairy tales but novels, historical fiction, plays, essays, and poetry. Their works were wildly popular, as were the writers themselves, who hosted literary salons in Paris. There they crafted the contes de fées that would usher in the first fairy tale vogue. Charles Perrault attended these salons, too, writing his “Mother Goose” tales from the prompts offered by these women. He produced one slim book, which came out at the same time as the women’s voluminous output, and yet he is the one history remembers from that birth of a genre.
Why were the women left out of the fairy tale canon? Well, all I’ll say here is that it mostly had to do with the misogynistic, homophobic, and ultra-conservative religiosity of Louis XIV’s reign. The conteuses were always under threat of not only losing their pens but their physical freedom. Exiles from Paris were common, as were lengthy stints in convents for mauvaise conduite—being an unruly woman.
Examples of unruliness: writing poems that insulted the king, trying to stop the abuse of a husband (with no recourse in the law), gambling, cussing, engaging in same-sex relationships. For the latter, one of the women was imprisoned in a cell in a medieval castle-turned-prison. Yes, in a tower. And yes, she’d written tales of young women trapped in towers. Only in her tales—and unlike her—the characters eventually prevailed over despotic forces.
So, anger. Probably no surprise here, but the more I learned about these women, the more incensed I became over how men of the patriarchy had disrupted their livelihoods and their lives, some even chipping away at their legacies long after the women were dead (think Voltaire). I kept a list, and before I’d even finished Women of the Fairy Tale Resistance I had a plan: The conteuses would get vengeance on their oppressors in a salon in the afterlife—a quirky novel of the speculative-historical-literary variety. My working title: Women of the Fairy Tale Revenge.
And who better to enjoy them than Charlie? Honestly, this is a master class right here in making the most of a waning summer season. Get to it, Charlie!
Thirty-five years ago, the Voyager 1 space probe turned its camera toward Earth and snapped a photograph from 3.7 billion miles away. The now-iconic image, dubbed the “Pale Blue Dot” by the author and astrophysicist Carl Sagan, shows our home planet as the faintest pixel against a vast black canvas, a stark reminder of how little space we occupy in the Universe.
This logarithmic graph does something similar, but for perception. It displays scales of space and time, ranging from subatomic sizes to cosmic distances, from fleeting instants to timespans of millions of years. Tucked within this sweeping range is a box labeled “human experience” — the sliver of space and time we can directly perceive.
The graph comes from EUREKA! Physics of Particles, Matter and the Universe (1997) by the late theoretical physicist Roger Blin-Stoyle. He described the graph not as a perfect scientific representation of the limits of human perception but as an approximation, one that highlights just how much of space and time lies outside our natural grasp.
For millennia, we could barely speculate about the extreme phenomena beyond our perception — what the cosmos looks like on the tiniest and grandest of scales. It’s only recently that we began to map it.
Don’t be fooled by the apparent size of the “human experience” box. Each tick on the graph represents a tenfold increase, allowing it to compress enormous differences into a manageable frame. The time axis spans 40 orders of magnitude, from fleeting quantum events (10-23 seconds) to cosmic epochs (1017 seconds). The space axis also covers a wide range, from subatomic distances (10-15 meters) to a scale suitable for measuring the observable universe (1026 meters). If it were drawn to scale linearly, the “human experience” box would be far smaller.
Beyond the barriers of human experience
Evolution tuned our senses for survival. We can effortlessly hear the crack of a tree branch, perceive the slither of a snake in the grass, or catch the flash of doubt in a friend’s eyes. But phenomena like the flitting of electrons and the birth of black holes lie far outside our natural perception.
Only through our curiosity, reason, and invention have we stretched our inherited limitations to explore the edges of space and time. Blin-Stoyle’s graph provides a rough perspective on those boundaries.
Let’s start with its Y-axis, which shows a timescale ranging from 10-23 to 1017 seconds. The former is an infinitesimal unit of time. It’s shorter than a zeptosecond (10-21 seconds) but longer than a yoctosecond (10-24 seconds) and represents the temporal realm of transient quantum interactions.
The largest unit on the graph’s timescale is equally mind-bending. It’s longer than a petasecond (1015 seconds), which already rounds out to 31.7 million years. The Universe is approximately 435 petaseconds old. That doesn’t sound like much until you express it in more conventional units: 13.8 billion years.
The X-axis relates to physical distances. At the lower bound is a femtometer (10⁻¹⁵ meters), or about the diameter of a single proton. At the upper end lies a unit of length longer than a yottameter (1024 meters). Yottameters are large enough to measure the observable Universe, which is approximately 8.8 yottameters in diameter.
As extraordinary as the upper and lower bounds of this graph are, they don’t push the extent of what we can measure in the Universe. The Planck length, named after the German physicist Max Planck, is the smallest unit of length currently used by physicists. It comes in at an astonishingly tiny 1.6 x 10-35 meters. The graph also simplifies things by placing space and time on their own axes. This matches how we intuitively experience them. Yet Albert Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity reveal that space and time are linked into a four-dimensional metric called spacetime. The two intertwine in ways our senses can’t detect, further complicating the reality of the Universe beyond our perception.
“Pale Blue Dot” (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Living life a millisecond at a time
We live in Einstein’s Universe, but our everyday experience is more like how Issac Newton saw the physical world. Space and time seem fixed and separate, objects have absolute positions, and causes reliably lead to effects. Our senses are confined to this more instinctive view of reality. While this blinds us to the weirdness playing out on the cosmic and quantum scales, it also helps simplify reality.
Just consider how we perceive time. Our brains can process visual information in as little as 50 milliseconds. We process sounds much faster and can distinguish between two sounds occurring just about a millisecond apart. (That’s pretty quick, but nowhere near the speed of a zeptosecond.)
These varying perceptual speed limits concerned engineers during the early days of television. What if, they wondered, people couldn’t adequately synchronize the picture with the audio? “Then they accidentally discovered that they had around a hundred milliseconds of slop,” the neuroscientist David Eagleman wrote in his 2009 book What’s Next? Dispatches on the Future of Science. “As long as the signals arrived within this window, viewers’ brains would automatically resynchronize the signals.”
Today’s video games run significantly faster than yesterday’s TV programs. With the proper setup, a video game can easily reach a frame rate of 120 frames per second or more (most movies, for comparison, are shot at 24 frames per second, meaning 24 individual images flash past your eye every second). However, research suggests that people can’t discern differences much beyond 60 frames per second, which we can think of as the lower limit of the temporal “human experience” on Blin-Stoyle’s graph.
The upper limit to our temporal experience is less precise. It extends to a lifetime — maybe 100 years, “if we are lucky,” Blin-Stoyle writes in EUREKA! But how we perceive that lifetime depends largely on memory, external cues, and situational context. In 1962, geologist Michel Siffre spent just over two months in an Alpine cave to test the effects isolation had on time perception. When he emerged, he estimated 35 days had passed. Siffre’s self-experiment highlights how perception isn’t a passive recording of time; it’s a story the brain constructs.
When you strip away clocks, sunlight, and human contact, the scaffolding we use to mark time’s passing crumbles. Even what we think of as the present is slightly behind, delayed by the split seconds it takes for our brains to process and unify sensory signals arriving at different speeds. Awareness is always a beat too late — our minds stitching together a rough approximation of what exactly happened.
Our perception of space is just as narrow. Blin-Stoyle suggests that if we’re “being generous,” humans have a sense for things as small as 0.1 millimeters (10⁻⁴ meters). That’s roughly the width of a strand of hair or the thickness of a piece of paper. The edges of our spatial perception could be argued to expand to the diameter of the Earth (12,756 kilometers), but now we’re being extra generous since our intuition falls sharply once distances stretch beyond the horizon.
From a human perspective, space and time are baffling and can be utterly frightening. They flatten us with the sheerness of their dimensions. So perhaps it’s cosmic justice — or rather, cosmic mercy — that we don’t directly perceive the scale of existence all the way to its extremities.
But while evolution tuned us to the scale of the everyday — the objects we can hold and the danger and rewards within sight — our curiosity and reason have allowed us to develop the tools necessary to broaden that scale.
Microscopes have revealed cells and microbes. Particle accelerators have cracked open the strange world of bosons and quarks. Telescopes have mapped planets and galaxies. Even though our senses evolved to operate in the narrow band of space and time we call the prehistoric savannah, our minds have pushed far beyond it, building bridges from the tangible to the infinite.
Heaven in a wildflower
Where perception and technology end, imagination pushes forward. Einstein famously imagined what it would be like to ride alongside a beam of light — a physical impossibility, but a mental leap that helped him develop the theory of relativity and transform our understanding of space and time. He couldn’t perceive such a thing, but he could imagine it.
Herein lies the difference between the Pale Blue Dot picture and this graph of our perceptual horizon. The darkness separating Voyager from its home planet in that famous image feels cold and deadly. But on the spacetime graph, the hatched area outside our tiny experiential box is beckoning. Our minds can travel freely where our bodies can’t and ascend from the zone we can perceive to the one we can only conceive. Time and space can be joyful playgrounds.
The Romantic poet William Blake understood this well when he wrote:
To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
As humans, we paint small strokes on the vast canvas of existence. Our eyes cannot pierce the subatomic veil nor trace the farthest threads of the cosmic web. For all the efforts of scientists and poets to elicit truth from those strange, most obscure corners of the Universe, there remains much more to learn and experience.
But even if we cannot live between distant stars or among the nanoscopic particles, we can still imagine ourselves there. We are the brevity that seeks the eternal. And perhaps this is our place: not to encompass the whole but to reflect it.
A few days ago, I got a text from Bryant saying that he had kittens under his car, and that I simply must come see them immediately. So I booked it over and lo and behold there were two kittens underneath his car! There was a calico and a tuxedo, and both were very shy and very hungry. It was so hot outside, and Bryant’s car was one of the few spots of shade in the area, so I can see why they’d hide under there.
I had a sneaking suspicion that there were more around. Where there’s two kittens there’s five, or something like that, anyway. Sure enough, it wasn’t long after feeding the two skinny kitties that another came running, seemingly appearing out of thin air. This one was a diluted tortie, and she parked herself right next to her siblings underneath the car. I could hardly believe three kittens had spontaneously appeared, but I was so thankful that it happened to be under the car of one of the biggest animal lovers I know.
We weren’t really sure how best to handle this situation, and while we were thinking it over, the tuxedo ventured out from beneath the car and ran behind the apartment into the woods. We decided to follow him and see if we could catch him now that he was out from underneath the car.
While we followed him down the trails of the forest, getting eaten alive by bugs, wouldn’t you know it, a black kitten appeared:
Had the three from under the car originated from the forest? Or had the black one been under the car with the other three originally and ventured to the woods like the tuxedo ended up doing, too? Either way, I was shocked to see another one, and thought surely that this was the last one of the litter.
This new one was different from the other three. While the calico and diluted tortie were absolutely terrified and skittish as hell, and the tuxedo wasn’t much better, the black one was incredibly friendly in comparison. In no time at all, the black one was following us around like a shadow, and was even willing to be pet and purred the whole time. Shortly after, he was even okay with being picked up and petted like any normal household cat. It was like he wasn’t even a stray, really.
We had the food set out by the car still, and wanted the black one to come get food, so we had him follow us back around to the front side of the apartment, where he reunited with his siblings under the car.
In the couple days that they have been at the apartment, we’ve been working on figuring out a rescue plan. I called multiple rescues in the area and asked if they can send someone out to collect them, as we are not certified kitten wranglers and don’t want to hurt or scare them, but none of the rescues offered that type of service.
For now, they are being fed and watered consistently, and there have been pretty impressive strides with how close the kittens have started to get. Still, the only one that enjoys being pet and actively seeks out affection is the black one, but the calico and tuxedo are becoming much more acclimated to human presence, it seems. The diluted tortie is without a doubt the worst case, still extremely skittish and frightened.
Even though it would be super easy to catch the black one, and even the tuxedo, the other two still seem uncapturable for the time being, and we don’t want to separate them. We figure the best course of action is to keep trying to get them comfortable enough until all of them are snatch-able.
I had an idea to try and hand feed them with tubes of food, like I’d seen so many times in cat rescue videos on Tik Tok. I figured it would help them trust us, and make it so they’re within hands-reach to make for easier snatching. Other than the black one, they preferred to eat it only when we squeezed the contents out onto the ground for them to eat at a further away from us distance:
Look how close the calico was! This was huge progress:
THEY’RE SO CUTE I LOVE THEM SO MUCH:
We want to rescue these babies so badly, while still keeping them together. We just aren’t experts, but we’re doing our best and making sure they’re fed for now, at least.
I expect some questions about logistics and whatnot, so here’s some pre-answers:
The car that they’re under is Bryant’s car, but it hasn’t moved from that spot in three years. He drives a different car, so don’t worry about him having to like, move the kittens’ shelter. It ain’t going anywhere.
Bryant is the only tenant at his apartment, there’s no neighbors to inform of these kittens, only the landlord, which he did.
I’m not sure which of the many rescues in the area would be best to take them to when they’re eventually caught, so please let me know if you have recommendations for kitten shelters in the Dayton area!
Aren’t they so cute?
Which would you love to take home with you (I want all of them)? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!
Escapism through reading fantasy is something we’re all familiar with, but is it always the best idea to ignore the rest of the world and to some extent, yourself? Author Michelle Knudsen explores this idea in the Big Idea for her newest novel, Into the Wild Magic. Come along to see how Knudsen weaves a message of morals throughout the magic.
MICHELLE KNUDSEN:
I never really know what a novel is about when I start writing it. I usually begin with a scene, a couple of characters, and the vague knowledge that something magical or horrible or supernatural will happen. Sometimes I write the scene and it goes into the metaphorical trunk. Other times, I feel that tingle of yes that makes me want to keep going. In this case, I wrote a scene between two girls in a schoolyard. I didn’t know anything about them or what their story would be, but I knew I wanted to know more.
Those two girls turned out to be Bevvy and Cat. Bevvy is lonely and bullied and longs to escape into her fantasy books. New girl Cat, we soon discover, has the ability to open portals into another world. She avoids using her power, for Reasons, but is soon forced to open one of her portals, dragging Bevvy through with her. The story has all the exciting things I love to put in my novels: magic, monsters, adventures, battles, strange creatures, complicated people, dangerous situations. It’s about the girls, their various secrets and fears, and their attempts to get back home. But underneath all of that, it’s about connection: about what it means to have a friend, and to be a friend, and how to find connection when it seems forever out of reach.
Like (I assume) many speculative fiction writers, I lived in fantasy and science fiction as a kid to escape the realities of middle school and high school life. I wasn’t Bevvy; I was lucky to have some really good friends, but I definitely also had times where I felt very alone, like there was some reason I wasn’t able to connect with others, like there was maybe something wrong with me. It was fantasy and science fiction that got me through. Not just because of the fantastic or futuristic elements (although yes, those too!), but also because of the characters who existed in those incredible worlds and the larger-than-life struggles that brought out their truest (and often best) selves.
I still believe that a lot of what I learned about being a good person came from the books I read back then. They were fun and full of adventure and magic and robots and spaceships but also they were stories of people facing danger to help or save those they loved. They contained characters who showed up for each other in extraordinary ways, who loved each other despite none of them being anything close to perfect. They brought me hope that there were lots of ways to connect with other people in the world.
I write stories for all ages, and in my picture books as well as my novels, I find myself returning to themes of friendship and unconditional love and finding a place where you belong. Sometimes that place can be a person. Or a lion. Or a group of bunnies you thought you had nothing in common with but then you all bond at the monster truck show and you realize with unexpected joy that you now have a tiny, fuzzy friend-family for life.
Part of the secret is always finding those who get you, who see you for who you are. But the other part is being able to see yourself, to accept that you are worth the love and friendship of other people (or lions, or bunnies).
Bevvy starts this story wishing for a friend: just one. I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to tell you that she finds one, but more than that, she learns to be friends with herself. The magical world she encounters is way scarier in person than in books, and she has to navigate her new relationship with dodgy, difficult Cat while running for her life, facing danger, and getting swept up in a magical war. Even more frightening, she must make some hard moral choices that could mean losing the friendship she so desperately wants.
Bevvy has to figure out who she really is and attempt to arrive at the place I hope all of us can eventually get to of deciding we are worthy of love and affection. And that we deserve to surround ourselves with others who feel the same way.
Into the Wild Magic invites middle-grade readers to escape into a fantasy-world adventure, but I hope it also helps some of them think about the kind of person—and friend—they really want to be. (And also that they love the dragons and the tree magic and the kitten and the dog and the giant moths and everything else!)
To begin, Seattle 2025 was a lovely Worldcon! This year I was not up for anything at the Hugos, nor was too much expected from me otherwise — I had a couple of panels, a reading, a signing and a dance to DJ, which was all easily done over the course of five days — so most of my time was spent hanging out with friends, mostly at the Hyatt Regency bar or at restaurants. This was an optimal state of affairs. Krissy and I also got out into Seattle itself and did some of the usual touristy stuff, and that was delightful too.
Worldcon did what Worldcon does, which is to be the place where you get to see a bunch of people you only see once or twice a year, and catch up and renew those friendships until you see each other again, possibly at the next Worldcon. Plus I got to say hello to a bunch of fans of my work, and possibly make some new fans by being on panels and such. Also my dance went off very well, which makes me happy. I love this absurd thing where I have become a draw as a DJ. It is the most random of my side quests, I have to say.
Back at home this morning, as I was thinking about this Worldcon write-up, it occurred to me that this year was the 10th anniversary of the height of the “Sad/Rabid Puppy” nonsense, in which a bunch of ideologically and/or ambition-inspired persons brigaded a number of titles and people onto the Hugo finalist lists and were rewarded with literally nothing for their efforts. At the time it made a lot a noise and there was a lot of handwringing about it and what it meant, both at the Worldcon and outside of it. Ten years on, a round number anniversary and so one where it might conceivably be on the minds of people, there was… nothing. I heard no one speak about it at this year’s Worldcon, and as far as I could see there were no panels or other discussion about it. It wasn’t as if people feared to speak its name, mind you. It just literally never came up, in any context at all. I mean, I didn’t think about it the entire time I was at Worldcon. From a practical point of view, it was just not a thing.
If I were to hazard a guess about why this is, I would say it comes down to two things. One, the event was ultimately about publicity, not literature; leaving aside the few works by non-puppies that were dragged into the controversy by the organizers to be shields (or bullet sponges), very little on the Sad Puppy slates would ultimately be part of the conversation the genre has with itself. From a creative point of view, there was almost nothing anyone wanted to take out of those finalist lists. Two, as a publicity vehicle, it appears mostly to have backfired. Ten years on, among those who were at the time traditionally-published, the most commercially successful member of that cohort is the one who was already the most successful a decade ago; many of the rest appear to have chosen to explore the potential of independent publication. None of them appear to be notably better off, in terms of book sales or professional reputation, than they were a decade ago. Meanwhile, many of the writers they railed against appear to be doing quite well; this is correlative at best, rather than causative.
(There is also the fact the Hugo process was amended to disincentivize slating, and the general truism that an action plan that actively includes being raging shitheads means that you’re seen as raging shitheads whether you achieve your objective or not. But it’s mostly the two things above.)
I would note I don’t think there should have been any great discussion of the Puppies phenomenon at this year’s Worldcon; ten years on, the event and its principals had the attention and reputation among Worldcon participants that they rated. And I find it encouraging that a community confronted with bad actors who showed contempt for who that community was and what it valued were able to counteract those actors, move past them and then, essentially, leave them in the dustbin of their community history. One can hope those lessons might be applied at larger scale, sooner rather than later.
Krissy and I just got back from Worldcon and a box of these lovelies were waiting for us when we got home. In case you’re ever wondering if it gets old to get your author copies of a new book: No. No, it does not.
Soon you will have your own copies! In literally just under a month! There’s still time to pre-order from your favorite bookseller!
Although Blackstone's Downpour.com site is listing "The Adventure of the Demonic Ox" for release October 11, Audible.com apparently has it up already, since August 12. So if you want an early listen, there ya go.
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A few days ago, I got a text from Bryant saying that he had kittens under his car, and that I simply must come see them immediately. So I booked it over and lo and behold there were two kittens underneath his car! There was a calico and a tuxedo, and both were very shy and very hungry. It was so hot outside, and Bryant’s car was one of the few spots of shade in the area, so I can see why they’d hide under there.
