The Cosmic Codex

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

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    Brian Scott Pauls
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Living in a science fiction universe...

www.thecosmiccodex.com
Brian Scott Pauls
SF アート 文学史・文学批評
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  • From the depths of the sea to the depths of space

    From the depths of the sea to the depths of space
    2025/01/09
    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 分
  • "Fire From Heaven"

    "Fire From Heaven"
    2025/01/02
    My novelette, An Illicit Mercy, is part of a new promotion in January: Strong Women.80 short stories and novels, available at no cost.When we encounter alien life among the stars, will they have made the same mistakes we have? Worse? Will we even be able to understand them? And what will they understand about us?My new novelette, “Fire From Heaven,” the sequel to “Nasty, Brutish, and Short," appears in Boundary Shock Quarterly 29: First Contact.Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.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.Here’s an excerpt:“Fire From Heaven”by Brian Scott Pauls“Then the LORD rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven; And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.”—Genesis 19:24-25I can’t say exactly what happened. I didn’t have a good view when the trouble started.Delvalle took point when we went into the mountain, followed by Kuna and de Cries, then Pagnol and Laing with their instrument pack. I came next, while Keahi and Ashishishe brought up the rear—eyes, ears, and nose peeled for threats.Not that we expected trouble. We all “knew” the desolate half of Janus was unoccupied. The wildly chaotic menagerie of organisms Lieutenant Keahi, Ash, and I had discovered on the other side of the planet gave way to an entire hemisphere devoid of life.Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! This post is public so feel free to share it.Of course, by the time you read this, you’ll probably know what we found—or, to be more accurate, what found us. I’m sure our report will make quite a stir when it reaches Earth. The implications of what we encountered still keep me up at night. Of course, it's a lot more recent to me than it will be to you, relatively speaking.Beacon is an artificial black hole accompanying Janus in geostationary orbit. You’d think it would have evaporated by now, but ice balls arriving from the outer system continually feed it mass. Apparently, the Janusians used it as a power generator before they destroyed themselves—and Beacon played a major role in that.To function as a generator, the black hole must have once been contained. But that containment is gone. Now it just revolves about Janus, eating ice and belching gamma rays. Nothing unshielded can live on the side of the planet facing it. Even viruses are absent—if not because of the radiation itself, then because there’s nothing to serve as a host.Meanwhile, an increased mutation rate in organisms living close to the irradiated hemisphere has resulted in a greatly accelerated evolutionary pace.At least one intelligent species inhabited Janus. Diamond buildings remain in hundreds of cities spread around the world. Some appear to be fully intact, while the ruins of others surround giant blast craters. Whoever lived on Janus had fun tossing fusion bombs around before something wrecked Beacon’s containment, wiping out civilization. The cities in the verdant hemisphere are overgrown with life. Those on the ravaged side are as dead as everything around them.Abbadon appears to have been the receiving station for power beamed from Beacon. The Janusians scooped off the mountain’s peak, then set the dish of a large microwave antenna into the rock.We dropped to the surface in one of the Zheng He's aeros, each of us except Ash strapped into a seat modified to fit the extra bulk of our armored suits. The synth wore the lynx body it had developed especially for Janus, and made do with a cargo net.The standard Zheng He pressure suits wouldn’t protect against gamma radiation. Our excursion into the dead zone required the Physics and Engineering sections to fabricate tungsten carbide exoskeletons, so heavy they included powered augmentation to allow us to move. Instead of transparent faceplates, the fully enclosed helmets used cameras and other sensors to transmit details of the external environment directly into the sensoriums maintained by our cerebral implants.Each suit could reduce gamma exposure enough to allow 36 hours on the surface. We estimated twelve hours to get from the Zheng He, in geostationary orbit on the opposite side of the planet, to the surface, and then to the entrance. Getting back to the ship would require an equal amount of time. Technically that left a mere twelve hours in the mountain, but the rock would provide additional shielding against the radiation. We wouldn’t know how much extra time we’d gain until we were inside.Pagnol and Laing, a ...
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    7 分
  • Pioneers in an alien sky

    Pioneers in an alien sky
    2024/12/28
    Beneath the frozen silence, a world awaits discovery.Get your FREE copy of Under the Ice by Marie-Hélène Lebeault!Beneath the frozen silence, a world awaits discoveryIn a future where the Earth's surface is uninhabitable, humanity survives under the ocean, within a protective Dome. Ryn, a unique individual unable to adapt to aquatic life like the others, faces a dire situation when the Dome's stability is compromised. As their only hope for survival lies beyond the icy barrier above, Ryn embarks on a perilous journey to the unknown.Science fiction and libertarian political philosophy have a long history together, perhaps “growing out of the 1930s and 1940s when the science-fiction pulp magazines were reaching their peak at the same time as fascism and communism…” resulting in “…speculations about societies (or sub-groups)…in direct opposition to ‘totalitarianism.’”Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.In 1979, this close association inspired sf author L. Neil Smith to create the Prometheus Award “to honor libertarian science fiction.”Dave Freer dedicates his 2023 Prometheus Award winning novel, Cloud-Castles, “[t]o the memory of the men and women of the Eureka Rebellion,” a reference I had to look up. The Eureka Rebellion started in 1851 as a series of protests by gold miners in Australia’s Colony of Victoria against its British administrators. Matters escalated over the next three years, ending with the Battle of the Eureka Stockade, in which twenty-seven people (mostly miners) died.Freer borrows a number of elements from Australia in general and the Eureka Rebellion in particular, transposing them to the gas-dwarf (mini-Neptune) world of Sybil III.The planet itself is mostly sky, punctuated by the eponymous cloud-castles (Freer never explains the hyphen) islands of “floating vegetation,” and the “trading-plate.”Freer’s describes the world he’s created in fascinating detail:Sybil III just had no land. None. Or none that any human could survive on. It was a gas dwarf world, and its solid core lay somewhere many, many miles down below at enormous temperatures and pressures. The lifezone, such as it was, was up in the outer atmosphere. It was a vast lifezone, just resource poor, and short of solid landing platforms.Two extraterrestrial, extrasybillian, and formerly imperialistic species inhabit the cloud-castles, which have been around longer than humans have been in space. Unfortunately, the Thrymi and the Zell hate each other. Their respective interstellar empires seem to have destroyed one another long ago, leaving the sybillian populations the only known (to humans, at least) examples of the two species.Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! This post is public so feel free to share it.Trade represented the one area of common interest between the two alien societies. Before their empires vanished, they built an “anti-gravity trading plate” in the skies of Sybil III to serve as neutral ground, a tradition the local aliens maintained even after their two species annihilated each other elsewhere.Humans first arrived on Sybil III aboard the failing FTL ship Botany Bay, which managed to crash on the trading plate. The survivors threw together a ramshackle settlement they named the “Big Syd”, made of scrap taken from the wrecked ship and whatever suitable native vegetation they could gather.By the time of the story, the Big Syd is a dangerous frontier town in which life reflects a Hobbesian state of nature—“poor, nasty, brutish” and often unnaturally short.Other human planets maintain embassies on the Big Syd. This is mainly due to competition over the hoped-for attentions of the Thrymi and Zell, who never-the-less tend to snub everyone equally.Enter Augustus StJohn Thistlewood III, youngest son of the wealthy Thistlewood industrial family on the planet Azure. Augustus is an idealistic university graduate. When he found working in his family’s factories as a boy had already taught him more engineering than his professors knew, he added sociology courses to his workload. As a result, he’s come to Sybil III to help “uplift” the local residents of the Big Syd out of poverty and ignorance.Augustus follows in the literary tradition of the “lucky fool.” While a brilliant, naturally gifted engineer, he has no “street smarts” at all. Time after time, this places him in perilous situations. Yet somehow everything seems to work out. He often remains blissfully ignorant of the chaos going on around him, which he himself has caused.Much of Augustus’ good luck is just that—luck. But some of it is manufactured by his local “guide,” Briz, who recognizes his wealth and naivety early and latches on to him as an easy meal ticket:“She didn’t care what he’d done to be made a remittance man here. It wasn’t something that she needed to know. There were a quite a few men and women that ...
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    9 分

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