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This advertisement is for Starter Villain, a new science fiction adventure from Hugo Award–winning author John Scalzi.

Meet the new boss.

JK this cat doesn’t work for Tor. At least, we’re pretty sure, with remote work it’s hard to tell who is and isn’t a cat. The person posting this could be a cat. You’d literally never know.

But we do know you should check out Starter Villain by John Scalzi, because it does have hyper intelligent cats working for a villainous organization.

WHAT THE BOOK IS ABOUT

When divorced substitute teacher Charlie’s long-lost uncle Jake dies, he’s not expecting much. Certainly not to inherit a supervillain business, complete with an island volcano lair, giant laser death rays, lava pits, and hyper-intelligent talking spy cats.

But it gets worse.

Because his uncle wasn’t just a supervillain. He was a supervillain who was in the middle of trying to take down the other supervillains. Somewhere along the way he decided that the rich, soulless predators back by multinational corporations and venture capital were a bad idea. And they needed to be stopped.

And now they’re after Charlie.

#books #john scalzi #scalzi #booklr #starter villain #science fiction #new books #tbr #books with cats #cats #meet the new boss

That’s the seductive power of the spreadsheet: it’s a tool for asking what if? With just a little training, anyone can use a spreadsheet to build a model of some real-world phenomenon, from an ecosystem to a convenience store, from a lemonade stand to a retirement savings plan. Then, by tapping new numbers into those neat little boxes, you can change the model: what if I pay a little less here? What if I save a little more there? What if this number goes up? What if it goes down? Change a box and all the numbers dance in their gridwork of faint gray lines, and the future is revealed, with a terrible and false precision. Terrible and false because the model is a model, it’s not the world, and each of those sharp figures and formulae obscures a fuzzy, squishy set of assumptions, guesses and elisions. The model can suggest, it can guide – but it cannot predict. This is what made spreadsheets so science fictional. As we lose ourselves in a futuristic parable, it’s easy to forget the “parable” part and start to think we’re experiencing the future. To forget that sf writers have no more insight into what the future holds than any of us, and thank goodness, because if the future could be predicted, there’d be no reason to do anything or try anything. The future is up for grabs. That’s the point of science fiction: not to predict the future, but to inspire it, or ward it off. To work out our present-day anxieties and aspirations on the page, to provide a virtual fly-through of the emotional experience of this technological arrangement or that.

The seductive, science fictional power of the spreadsheet

#scalzi #red team blues #maps and territories #spreadsheets #science fiction #prediction is hard especially about the future

Discussing some billionaires:

They're "[a] bunch of dudes born into money who used that money to take advantage of other people to make even more money. It works great until they start believing that being rich makes them smart, and then they get in trouble."

- from Starter Villain by John Scalzi

#john scalzi #scalzi #starter villain #books #quote

You can't firebomb your way out of every problem.

John Scalzi, The Kaiju Preservation Society

#john scalzi #scalzi #kaiju preservation society #books #quotes

Lack of sleep feeds the voices of curiosity, so the next query goes out to @coruscantiscribbler

I am both intrigued & gratified that you seem to pay special attention in your fics to both acknowledging and providing an experience of grief over the death of a character. For you, I have a three part Ask:

1. Have you ever experienced a fictional character loss that brought you to your knees, emotionally?

2. In your own writing, have you ever written a character’s death and regretted it? (Became too attached, yourself, to the character)

3. Bonus Question: you are in a unique situation, in that you are writing a fic in which there are predetermined truths (Canon so to speak) Do you ever wrestle with wanting to change something big - something REALLY BIG? Examples: Yularen does not die on the Death Star or even more preposterous, Alderaan is not destroyed.

Thank you for indulging my sleep deprivation at this time 🥴

1. Okay, I don’t want to give away too many spoilers about my all time favorite TV show, but the final episode of Person of Interest had me bawling, I mean really ugly sobs when I lost my beloved.... I’ll say no more. In a novel I cried like a baby over a character in Scalzi’s The Ghost Brigades. Also Speaker for the Dead, but I hate to mention it because Card is such a problematic figure. 2. It’s always hard to kill a character when you have developed them, spent time with them, but I know ahead of time that “they are born to die” because I outline everything so carefully. There is a wonderful story that after Dumas killed Porthos he laid down his pen, unable to write, and walked the streets of Paris crying out “I killed Porthos!” 3. I would never change anything major in a piece of set fiction. Kanan must die. Thrawn and Ezra must be lost. Yularen must die on the Death Star. Now I am going to fiddle with the timing of when Kallus actually becomes Fulcrum. If the writer’s of the show didn’t want this confusion they should never have had him say to Sabine. “Tell Garazeb Orrelios, we’re even.” With that single line they imply he is not yet Fulcrum even though we know he is from the voice on the message. And yeah, I could grab my soapbox and give my rant about not asking readers/viewers for an emotional reaction and then telling them it doesn’t matter. Death should have consequence and not be treated as something to be shaken off or treated lightly.