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
  • RIP Science Fiction Book Club (1953-2025)

    RIP Science Fiction Book Club (1953-2025)
    Jan 31 2025
    My novelette, An Illicit Mercy, is part of a new promotion in January and February: Moral Dilemmas in Fantasy & Science Fiction.Over 40 short stories, novels, samples and excerpts, available at no cost.A marine's duty is to fight. Her curse is to remember.Get your FREE copy of The Blade Within by Dylan McFadyenCommander Sorăna Mirra has spent years leading a hand-picked team of marine special operators. Together they've taken the fight to humanity's oldest foe, the vicious Kyrans, defeating them time and again—time and again, knowing they’ll get no credit for their victories.When an audacious Kyran raid strikes deep into human territory, Mirra and her team are thrust into the heart of hostile space to retaliate. It's business as usual—until a shocking discovery in the enemy compound calls the true purpose of their mission into question, and dredges up painful memories of the Great War.Now, Mirra must battle not only the enemy, but her own buried regrets as she and her team fight for survival, retribution, and the truth. But in war, truth—like memory—can be a dangerous thing.After more than seventy years, the Science Fiction Book Club (SFBC) is shutting down.I first learned of the SFBC through Parade Magazine, delivered to my home each Sunday morning as an insert in the Wichita Eagle-Beacon newspaper. I don’t recall if the Science Fiction Book Club advertisements were full-page spreads or large additional inserts slipped into Parade, but the organization must have spent lavishly on them. Each listed many different sf books, including small cover images and brief descriptions. Before the Internet, this was one way (along with library displays and talking with friends) I stayed abreast of the latest science fiction books.Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.During my high school years, the father of one of my best friends (and a staff member with the school district) was a member of the SFBC. One day he brought a large box of science fiction books to school and told me he’d already read them. I was welcome to borrow any I wanted to read for myself. That’s how I first encountered C. J. Cherryh’s 1981 Hugo Award-winning novel Downbelow Station, part of her Company Wars series and set in her Alliance-Union universe.Nelson Doubleday, Inc., an associate entity of Doubleday, created the Science Fiction Book Club in 1953. At the time, the phrase “book club” referred to “…a subscription-based relationship between purchasers – who normally agree to buy a certain number of titles a year – and the organization which publishes or distributes these titles, usually at a very significant discount from the retail price in bookshops.”Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! This post is public so feel free to share it.According to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, the SFBC, particularly under Nelson Doubleday, “…was in its day a major force in sf publishing” releasing “…its own editions (including special hardcover editions of paperback originals)” and “…omnibuses of various sorts…especially for its members.”I own a two volume SFBC omnibus edition of E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman series, and can attest to the quality of their production.The SFBC is no longer what it once was. Following the sale of Doubleday to Bertelsmann in 1986, it became “…less active as an original publisher.” When I recently visited the site for the first time in years, I found myself dismayed to discover so many contemporary thrillers and romance novels promoted alongside science fiction. The site struck me as merely an extension of the SFBC’s current parent organization, the Book of the Month Club. Although I didn’t know the SFBC would soon shut down, this seemed like a bad sign. The appeal of science fiction, fantasy, and other speculative fiction is narrow and focused. Anything going by the name of the "'Science Fiction' Book Club" should be focused as well. The original creators of the SFBC understood this. It’s too bad the corporations that acquired the fruits of their labors didn’t.What memories do you have of the Science Fiction Book Club? Please share in the comments!In the second half of January, I’m reading Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Memory, the third book in his Hugo-Award winning Children of Time trilogy. I’m sharing my thoughts on Club Codex, where any Cosmic Codex subscriber can follow along, comment, or ask questions.From this week’s post:“There should be a difference between telling the story of characters caught in a loop and forcing the readers to go through that same loop themselves. Regrettably, in "Children of Memory," Tchaikovsky doesn't find this difference. .”Click below to participate:My latest novelette, “Fire From Heaven,” now appears in Boundary Shock Quarterly 29: First Contact.In the shadows of an alien world, terror awaits. On the radiation-blasted planet Janus, a team ...
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    4 mins
  • A critique of Ned Beauman's Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning novel "Venomous Lumpsucker"

    A critique of Ned Beauman's Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning novel "Venomous Lumpsucker"
    Jan 23 2025
    My novelette, An Illicit Mercy, is part of a new promotion in January and February: Moral Dilemmas in Fantasy & Science Fiction.Over 40 short stories, novels, samples and excerpts, available at no cost."When the skies turned red and the stars fell, humanity's fight for survival began."Get your FREE copy of Defending Earth by C. S. Hawk.When a horde of slimy extraterrestrial creatures arrives on Earth with an insatiable appetite for destruction, three unlikely heroes step up to defend our planet.As they navigate the dangerous terrain of a world under siege, they face countless obstacles and setbacks but never lose their sense of humor. After all, when the fate of humanity is on the line, there's nothing like a good joke to keep your spirits up.Will they succeed in repelling the alien invasion and saving the planet? Only time will tell.In his review of Algis Budrys’ 1960 Hugo-nominated novel Rogue Moon, James Blish calls its characters “as various a pack of gravely deteriorated psychotics as has ever graced an asylum.”Ned Beauman might have writtenVenomous Lumpsucker with this statement pinned to the wall above his monitor. He tells the story of broken, deranged people living in a broken, deranged world. Climate change is breaking their world and driving it mad. The characters’ collective guilt for this existential crime is doing the same to them.Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.Venomous Lumpsucker would be depressing if Beauman wasn’t so deft with his satire. The fate of the world he’s created makes me want to cry, because it’s the fate of the world we’re creating right now. But the human foibles Beauman throws into sharp relief are so familiar, I ended up wanting to laugh—at myself and everyone else.The novel tells the story of Mark Halyard, a near-future business executive with a problem. He’s about to get caught short-selling “extinction credits” he doesn’t own.Extinction credits are financial instruments like carbon credits. Each gives the owner the legal right to drive one species into extinction, and they’re traded on an exchange. Halyard steals his company’s credits and sells them on the exchange. He plans to buy them back when the price drops, so he can replace them before his company realizes they’re gone.Halyard’s plan revolves around a coming regulatory change that will cause the price of extinction credits to crash. He sees selling short as a can't-lose proposition. But when the unthinkable happens, the value of the credits instead skyrockets. Halyard is left holding the bag for the now exorbitant price of the credits he stole.He hopes the company won’t need their credits—meaning they won’t cause the extinction of any species—before he can devise some way out of his predicament. But this hope is dashed when Halyard learns automated undersea mining equipment owned by the company has plowed through the last known habitat of an endangered species of fish—the venomous lumpsucker. Now the company will want to redeem their credits to pay for their mistake. Unless Halyard can find a surviving population of lumpsuckers to stave of his own financial and legal Armageddon.Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! This post is public so feel free to share it.This leads him to Karin Resaint, perhaps the world’s foremost living expert on venomous lumpsuckers. Together, they set off across the globe in search of survivors—she to save them, and he to save himself. Along they way, I learned about what a world facing an “extinction crisis” has done to them both, how it has driven each of them crazy in their own way. And they meet a host of characters who are just as crazy, or crazier. These include a former government minister from a country known as the “Hermit Kingdom” (which isn’t where you may think) and an entrepreneur on a city floating in the ocean who has dedicated a project to churning out clouds of flies and setting them free.Venomous Lumpsucker is a sad, humorous, and philosophical book about evolution, ecological peril, extinction, animal consciousness, capitalism, and moral culpability. It’s filled with thoughtful observations from flawed characters, such as when Halyard sums up the worldwide destruction of the “biobanks” which were supposed to save the data profiles of extinct species so humanity could someday resurrect them. “We had pawned those animals intending to buy them back one day when things were a bit less stretched, and now the pawn shop had burned to the ground with all the animals inside.”Or Resaint’s cynical take on the same topic.“‘…I never really gave a s**t about the biobanks. I never believed we were going to bring any of those species back, except maybe a few of the cuddly ones. It was always just an empty ritual.’”Beauman is at his best when he’s talking about both the brutality and the beauty of evolution.On the one hand, it’s savage ...
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    7 mins
  • From the depths of the sea to the depths of space

    From the depths of the sea to the depths of space
    Jan 9 2025
    My novelette, An Illicit Mercy, is part of a new promotion in January: Strong Women.80 short stories and novels, available at no cost.Will humanity come together to save a dying Earth?Get your FREE copy of A Fading Star by Greg HickeyEarth is dying. Ravaged by disease, hunger, climate change and world wars. Can humanity unite to avoid extinction?In 2153, cancer was cured. In 2189, AIDS. It seemed like humanity was headed for the stars.Global population soared, surpassing 24 billion. Then came the floods, washing over Bangkok, Buenos Aires, Mumbai, Jakarta, Dhaka and New Orleans. Then a fourth world war, with 289 million casualties. Frequent droughts plague Los Angeles, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Melbourne, Mexico City, São Paulo, Stockholm, Vienna and Moscow. Now humanity teeters on the brink of extinction.A few individuals fight for our survival. A determined physicist. A brilliant oncologist. A team of daring astronauts. A small group of investors funds a desperate search for another habitable planet. But time is running out.This past July, Martin MacInnes won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for his novel In Ascension.Hailing from Scotland, MacInnes won the Manchester Fiction Prize for his first short story, “Our Disorder,” in 2014. He received the Somerset Maugham Award in 2017 for his first novel, Infinite Ground. MacInnes is a former Royal Literary Fund fellow.Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.The website for Grove Atlantic, MacInnes’ U.S. publisher, describes In Ascension as follows:Leigh grew up in Rotterdam, drawn to the waterfront as an escape from her unhappy home life and volatile father. Enchanted by the undersea world of her childhood, she excels in marine biology, travelling the globe to study ancient organisms. When a trench is discovered in the Atlantic ocean, Leigh joins the exploration team, hoping to find evidence of the earth’s first life forms – what she instead finds calls into question everything we know about our own beginnings.Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! This post is public so feel free to share it.Her discovery leads Leigh to the Mojave desert and an ambitious new space agency. Drawn deeper into the agency’s work, she learns that the Atlantic trench is only one of several related phenomena from across the world, each piece linking up to suggest a pattern beyond human understanding. Leigh knows that to continue working with the agency will mean leaving behind her declining mother and her younger sister, and faces an impossible choice: to remain with her family, or to embark on a journey across the breadth of the cosmos.Questions or comments? Please share your thoughts!This month, I’m reading Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Ruin, the second book in his Hugo-Award winning Children of Time trilogy. I’m sharing my thoughts on Club Codex, where any Cosmic Codex subscriber can follow along, comment, or ask questions.From this week’s post:“Octopuses are by far a better choice than spiders. For one, octopuses are legitimately intelligent, and appear to even possess a sentient consciousness. At the same time, they're so different, they are commonly referred to [as] aliens right here on Earth.”Click below to participate:My latest novelette, “Fire From Heaven,” now appears in Boundary Shock Quarterly 29: First Contact.In the shadows of an alien world, terror awaits. On the radiation-blasted planet Janus, a team of explorers descends into Abbadon—an ancient mountain facility hiding unimaginable secrets. As they navigate bizarre chambers filled with cryptic carvings, they unleash a nightmare. But the true horror lies not in the alien ruins, but in the chilling implications of the team’s discovery.Fire From Heaven is the sequel to my previous novelette, “Nasty, Brutish, and Short.” 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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    2 mins

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