Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/25/having-dinner-with-four-strangers-in-columbus/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57471

To some people, sitting at a table with several unfamiliar faces and being expected to make small talk is a nightmare scenario. The anxiety creeps in of what to say, which topics to discuss (or avoid), and if you’re going to be judged for ordering an appetizer and dessert.

Such was the situation I found myself in last night after I signed up for Timeleft, a company with the goal to help you make meaningful connections with peers from your city.

I had never heard of Timeleft before, but two weeks ago I got an ad for them on Instagram. I won’t lie, the idea of dining with complete strangers was immediately interesting to me, as I love meeting new people, getting to know others, and making friends. What are strangers but friends you have yet to meet? So I went to their website and checked it out.

To my surprise, Timeleft is available all over the world. Sixty different countries and three hundred cities, including Cincinnati, Columbus, and Cleveland. I was delighted to see that I really had my pick of Ohio cities, though I would love for Dayton to be on that list. Cleveland is a bit too far, but Cincinnati and Columbus are both about two hours, so I ended up picking Columbus as my city because I prefer the driving, parking, and dining scene over Cincinnati.

First, you take a personality test to determine who else should be at the table with you. Timeleft asks things like what field you work in, what kind of movies you like, if you’re married or have kids, if you like to talk about politics, if you’re a planner or more spontaneous, basically just some standard questions to see who you would, on paper, be compatible with.

After you take the test, Timeleft pairs you with five strangers to have dinner with, and the restaurant is a mystery to everyone until the day of the dinner. One thing I thought was really cool is that you can choose different levels of budgets for your dining experience. There’s $, $$, and $$$. Obviously I picked $$$, because if I’m going to drive to Columbus for dinner, I want to eat somewhere nice (also, I’m just bougie, so). You can also mention any dietary restrictions you have, as well.

Timeleft books the restaurant reservation for you all, and you just show up to the restaurant, meet your dining companions, and spend the next couple hours getting to know each other and sharing a meal together. Not sure what to say? Timeleft actually provides ice breaker games and questions to get the ball rolling.

After the dinner is done, every Timeleft group in the city is invited to an Afterparty. Timeleft chooses a bar for everyone to meet at to have a drink to close out the night. Once you’ve finished the evening, Timeleft asks you who you’d like to keep in contact with, and if you match you can message each other through the app. (Or you can just exchange contact info right then and there if you want. That’s pretty much what ended up happening for me, anyway.)

So that’s how it works! Pretty simple, and very stress-free since they pick and book everything for you! It was nice to have the reservation handled, and just have to show up.

Timeleft isn’t a dating site, it’s meant for platonic connections and people seeking friends in their city. It’s meant for screen-free conversations and connections with people you wouldn’t have normally met otherwise. I think it’s a really cool concept, and I was super excited to try it out.

So let’s talk about how it went.

The initial ad that I got for Timeleft was them rolling out their new Ladies Only dinner. This was what I tried to sign up for, as I have really been wanting more gal pals lately. Not that I am opposed to befriending men, obviously, but as I get older, I’ve started to really want more genuine female companionship. And not that I don’t already have some super close girlfriends currently, because I definitely do and I’m super grateful for them and our friendship, but who couldn’t use one or two more, right?

Anyways, I couldn’t figure out how to sign up for the Ladies Only one, despite clicking on the ad that was advertising them. I figured I might as well just sign up for a regular one.

I ended up dining at Z Cucina di Spirito in Dublin with four guys. There was supposed to be another girl, but she actually ended up no-showing.

In my group, our ages ranged from 25 to 32, and everyone except me lived in the Columbus area. There was one other person whose first time it was, but the other group members had done a couple of these before, and two of them had even dined with each other in a previous dinner. Between the five of us, our professions were all over the place, as well as our tastes in music, though we did seem to agree on some favorite colors. We talked about travel, movies, concerts, places previously lived, and some bad dates.

While this post isn’t meant to be a restaurant review of Z Cucina, I will say I did like it. The atmosphere was nice, it was a very pretty place, and the food and drinks were quite good. I was the only person to order an appetizer (I did share, because I think food is best enjoyed that way), but everyone did order dessert, so that’s a green flag in my eyes.

I got two cocktails; a Basil-Gin Smash and an Empress, and both were really nice. The bread for the table came with this super yummy red sauce that was surprisingly flavorful. My main was their Bucatini Al Nero Di Seppia, which was squid ink pasta with mussels, clams, shrimp, and scallops, and that was so good. I thought the shrimp and scallops were really excellent, and I’m happy I finally got to try squid ink pasta! I’ve wanted to for so long. Plus, the tiramisu was a huge slice, and I have no complaints about it.

I would say the thing I was the least impressed with was the appetizer. I ordered the Stuffed Risotto Fritters and they were fine but nothing amazing. I will say they were piping hot, though, and it came with four of them.

So, all in all, I really liked the dining location Timeleft picked, and I think they did a good job with my budget choice. Since it was Wednesday, the restaurant was not crowded at all. There was really only a few other people, so it was nice that it wasn’t too loud and no one in my group had to shout across the table.

We all decided to go to the second location, The Pint House in the Short North. My group only ended up finding one other Timeleft group, which was a really friendly group of older ladies and gents. One of them had thirteen grandkids! It was really cool to see that Timeleft isn’t just for young whippersnappers, it’s seriously for anyone and everyone, and proof that you can find people your age and with your interests that also want to make friends! It just felt really wholesome.

I felt really comfortable the whole time, I wasn’t worried about anyone being a weirdo, and we all exchanged numbers at the end. It was so nice to meet people that I would’ve never come across without Timeleft, and it’s honestly just awesome to see how many other people out there are looking to go and meet new people and make friends.

All in all, I really liked dining and talking with everyone I met, and I can’t wait to attend another Timeleft dinner.

Would you give Timeleft a try? Does the idea of dining with strangers scare you, or does it sound super exciting and fun? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!

-AMS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/25/having-dinner-with-four-strangers-in-columbus/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57471

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/25/view-from-a-hotel-window-9-25-25-richmond-va/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57458

And the parking lot is in the sky! Amazing.

Hello, I am in Richmond, Virginia and I will be seeing at least some of you tonight at 6pm at Fountain Books! Then tomorrow I am off to Winston-Salem, and the Bookmarks Festival of Books! Here is my schedule for that.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/25/view-from-a-hotel-window-9-25-25-richmond-va/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57458

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/24/view-from-a-hotel-window-9-24-25-shepardstown-wv/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57446

The parking lot isn’t for the hotel, and it isn’t even really a parking lot, it’s a car wash. Also, there’s this big damn pine in my view. West Virginia is going hard, y’all.

Tonight: Four Seasons Books at 6 pm, which is an hour earlier than I usually start. You should be on your way now!

Tomorrow: Richmond, Virginia! At Fountain Bookstore! Also at 6pm! The Virginias do things early, I suppose.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/24/view-from-a-hotel-window-9-24-25-shepardstown-wv/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57446

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/22/the-big-idea-delilah-s-dawson-5/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57434

Writing a book is like riding a bike: once you’ve got it down, you never have to learn how to do it again, right? Such may not be the case. In her Big Idea, author Delilah S. Dawson delves into the writing process and learning curves she faced, even after numerous novels. Follow along to see what challenges and changes came with creating her newest book, Thor & Loki: Epic Tales From Marvel Mythology.

DELILAH S. DAWSON:

The Big Idea: Sometimes Your Process Changes, and That’s Okay

I’ve written over forty books and had thirty-two of them—the good ones—published, so you’d think that I know how to write a book.

As it turns out, you would be wrong.

At least partially.

Because the thing about writing books is that just because you know how to write one book does not mean you know how to write another. Books are like fingerprints in that each one is wholly individual, unique in all the world. Books are unlike fingerprints in that they cannot be easily compared to koala bears. 

Except—

Well, koala bears are notoriously single-minded and stubborn, and writers can be like that, too. Hopefully, I will convince you otherwise.

When I write a novel, I write the story straight through from the first page to the last page. I don’t jump around chapters, reread extensively, or edit as I go. I think of it like carrying hot laundry from the dryer to the bed: you wrap it in your arms and run, and if you drop a sock, you leave it behind because we all know that one hasty squat can topple the entire basket. I do multiple revisions, lest you think I am publishing the equivalent of inside-out, cat-hair covered socks, but that initial run from page one to THE END is the skeleton on which the meat of my story rests.

This method worked for thirty-one books, and then suddenly, it didn’t.

When I was invited to write Thor and Loki: Epic Tales from Marvel Mythology, I quickly realized that my Hot Laundry Process could not serve me. Instead of weaving a story from my own brain and heart, creating a new world out of the threads crafted from my creative spinnerets, I was tasked with taking an existing mythology and retelling it for a modern audience through the well-known voices of Marvel’s Thor and Loki. The Norse myths spring from an oral tradition, and there is no one, total, mutually accepted, complete source to study. Not only that, but there is no one specific Thor or Loki. Like the myths that bore them, these two ancient gods have been depicted in multiple movies, TV shows, and comics, and each individual fan has a favorite Thor or Loki, a platonic ideal of the character that they hold in their heart.

Thus, my task was to take two well-known, beloved characters that have existed simultaneously as gods and goofs for the past twelve hundred or more years, distill them into a fine mead, and then syphon that golden sauce through the sieve of collective comic memory and Icelandic poetry.

Can’t believe I’m saying this, but it might be easier to do laundry.

I don’t generally suffer from Writer’s Block, not only because I have deadlines and a mortgage, but also because I trust in my process. And yet you must believe me when I tell you that I came to a standstill on this project and began to dread it. When I invent a world, I become its god, and every decision I make solidifies the character and story. In that realm, I am always correct, and reality conforms to my whims. But in the realm of Thor, Loki, and their shared mythology, I had to instead become the bard.

In the Norse tradition, the bard is the keeper of story and memory, a vaunted figure; Odin is considered the god of poetry, and one of the myths that has lasted through the centuries tells the tale of the first bard and the mead of poetry. The bard’s job is not to spin tales from the ether, but rather to pass down the stories from one generation to the next, to remember them in a time with no written record. Each bard carried the myths and told them in a unique fashion, reminding the tavern’s occupants how to live and worship while entertaining them.

Once I realized that my job was to take up the bard’s tankard, suddenly the book actually began to flow. Instead of telling my own story, I broke the project down into chapters, and each day, my task was to look at a particular myth from several different sources and spin my own version. Or, more accurately, to channel the voices of Loki and Thor as they each compete to woo the Avengers to their side using all the bard’s techniques of enchantment and, well, propaganda. Adding in a few famous Thor and Loki tales from the Marvel comics was even more of a challenge. From The First Avenger in 1963 to Thor, Frog of Thunder and the more recent Loki for President, it was a delight to create my own poetry from famous stories never before told in prose.

For the first time, my chapters jumped around. I wasn’t carrying laundry from point A to point B; I was putting a puzzle together. Unlike all my other books, the Norse myths don’t have a specific chronology. Although there is a very distinct beginning, which involves a very large cow licking a giant, and a very distinct ending, known as Ragnarok, what happens in between is fluid. As Loki tells the Avengers, the myths exist to entertain and teach, not help you draw up an accurate timeline. Part of the bard’s art is selecting just the right story to tell. 

Now, this is not the first time I’ve had to completely change my process. Writing my first novella, also known as ‘a book that is only 40% of a book’, had quite the learning curve, and I did such a bad job writing my first comic that I burst out crying at a hotel buffet during a Santa Claus convention. I’ve been writing professionally since 2012, and I’ve learned to always trust my process, and when that process stops working, to find a new process. There is no one way to write a book. A writer’s process may change over decades, years, projects, or chapters. Whatever gets the book done? That’s your process.

If you don’t have a process yet, I highly recommend the book Story Genius by Lisa Cron, which teaches you to outline by marrying character arc to plot using the third rail of emotion. And if you already have a process, maybe don’t cling to it too tightly. Don’t be that koala that will only eat eucalyptus if it’s on the branch. Writing is about fluidity and play and experimentation. As Charles De Mar says in Better Off Dead: Go that way, really fast. If something gets in your way, turn.

Thor & Loki: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author socials: Website|Instagram|Bluesky

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/22/the-big-idea-delilah-s-dawson-5/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57434

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/22/throwing-a-dinner-party-using-third-culture-cooking-by-zaynab-issa/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57401

If my last post over Zaynab Issa’s cookbook didn’t entice you to buy it, this one might just change your mind. After cooking a few things from, and loving, Third Culture Cooking, I decided I simply must have a dinner party using nothing but recipes from Issa’s book.

It probably would’ve been easier to make something I had already made before, but I decided to do entirely new recipes for the party and just have faith that they would turn out well.

I’m happy to report that everything turned out so much better than I could have even hoped for, and my dinner party was a total success! So let’s talk about what I made, what it cost me, how long it took, and how everything tasted.

I spent probably over an hour initially going through the book deciding on everything I wanted to make. I finally decided on Spiced Chickpea Soup, Calabrian Chili Chicken with Caper Raita, Coconutty Corn, Shawarma Spiced Carrots, Chocolate Cake with Chai Buttercream, Ginger Lime Spritz, and Slightly Salty Mango Lassi.

First thing first was to place a big ol’ Kroger pick up order, because searching up everything I needed on their website and adding it to my cart was way easier than wandering all over the actual store with a broken-wheel-cart and spending time searching the shelves and missing what was right in front of my face.

I would say, roughly, I spent $200 on ingredients. A big part of this was that I already had every single spice I needed on hand, like turmeric, coriander, cumin, and cardamom, so that certainly saved me a large chunk of change. Another factor was that there was very little meat I needed to buy, and the meat was just chicken thighs, which are pretty cheap. I wasn’t cooking nice cuts of steaks or salmon, so my protein cost was very low. So much of what I needed to buy was produce.

Besides produce, I had to buy things like coconut milk, whole milk plain yogurt, feta, labneh, just the kind of stuff I don’t normally have on hand. In fact, this was my first time buying labneh, and I was surprised I even found it. My local Kroger had literally one brand, and like, two tubs of it. So I got lucky.

The hardest thing to find, no joke, was the Calabrian chilis. I had to go to Meijer for them, and even then they only had one type. I was supposed to buy Calabrian chili paste for the recipe, but they only had whole Calabrian chilis, so I just made do.

So, with everything bought, it was time to get cooking. I cooked, nonstop, for seven hours. Here’s how I tackled everything.

Starting at 9am, I made the yogurt and Calabrian chili marinade for the chicken thighs, and put them in the fridge to marinate while I cooked everything else. Secondly, I made the soup, because I knew that could just be reheated on the stove top easily when it came time to serve. Next, I mixed up the cake batter and baked the two cakes so they’d have plenty of time to cool before applying the frosting. Following that, I prepped the carrots to be roasted and also mixed up the herb salad that’s meant to go on top when served.

While the carrots roasted, I prepped the sweet potatoes to bake at the same time as the chicken, and made up the caper raita and quick-pickled cucumbers that accompany it. In the chicken went after the carrots came out, and while the chicken was baking I made the corn on the stove top. Finally, I made the syrup for the ginger lime spritz, and while that was cooling I whipped up the chai cream for the buttercream, and made the frosting.

My guests arrived at 4pm, which is exactly when the chicken came out, the soup was reheated, the spritz had been mixed up, and everything was ready to serve all at once.

While everything was definitely a lot to make, let’s talk about how difficult each dish was individually.

The chicken and sweet potatoes were honestly very low effort, despite being the main dish. The chicken can marinate anywhere from 15 minutes to overnight, so even if you’re in a rush to get it in the oven you’ll be all right. It helps that the chicken thighs bake right on top of the cut up sweet potatoes, so it’s sort of like a sheet-pan dinner. The quick-pickled cucumbers are literally so easy, you just slice up some mini seedless cucumbers nice and thin and put them in a bowl with lemon juice and salt. The caper raita is pretty simple too, you just mix the capers with the feta, yogurt, and some more cucumber and you’ve got yourself a delicious, creamy accompaniment to the chicken.

For the soup, you just cut up some onion, carrot, and garlic and cook it for a little bit until it’s ready to have the spices, chickpeas, and chicken broth added. Then you blend it up with an immersion blender and it’s ready to go! Doesn’t get much easier than that! (Not counting the fact that my eyes hurt so bad from cutting the onion I had to walk away for a solid ten minutes while tears streamed out of my eyes.)

The carrots were a breeze, you just mix a ton of spices into olive oil, cut the carrots in half lengthwise, cover them in the oil and roast ’em up. The herb salad that went on top of the carrots was also simple but time consuming from the produce you have to cut up for it. Red onion, dates, jalapenos, and herbs mixed with lemon juice and olive oil. The jalapenos were definitely the biggest pain, since removing the seeds is a task that requires patience. Also my fingertips burned for so long after handling the jalapenos.

The cake seriously could not have been easier, it’s just completely standard flour, cocoa powder, sugar, eggs, etc., mix it on up in a stand mixer, pour into cake pans and bake. Now, the chai cream on the other hand quickly became a true labor of love. While making the cream itself wasn’t too much trouble (just adding a bunch of spices and vanilla to heavy cream and heating it up), the real challenge came when it was time to strain it through a fine mesh sieve. The loose black tea and fresh grated ginger proved to be a huge obstacle to getting the liquid through the straining process. It took so much time to get as much cream as I could through the fine mesh. It really was an exercise in patience.

But, after I had the cream separated from the solids, the buttercream was also very easy. Just three sticks of butter, six cups of powdered sugar, and all the chai cream to make the absolute most delicious frosting I’ve ever tasted.

The corn was another easy dish, mostly because it uses bagged frozen corn. You just add the corn to a skillet and add the coconut milk and spices and you’re ready to go once it’s heated through and thickened up just a tad. Legit the easiest thing I made all day.

For the ginger spritz, the ginger syrup is homemade, and uses an absurd amount of fresh ginger for it. This part was time-consuming because I had to peel like half a pound of ginger and dice it up to cook it in the sugar and water, but letting it cook was super easy. You just have to let the sugar dissolve and the ginger flavor infuse nice and good before letting it cool and straining it. I proceeded to put the syrup in a pitcher and add a big ol’ bottle of sparkling water and ice. I completely forgot the lime, to be honest. But it was fine, okay! It was just really good homemade ginger ale pretty much.

On that note, I know this whole time you’ve been thinking to yourself, what about the mango lassi?! Well, I’m glad you asked, because it was inevitable that I would forget ONE ingredient. And it was the whole milk for the mango lassi. So while I had the mango, the honey, and the plain whole milk yogurt, it was too little too late.

Okay, so buying all the ingredients, making everything, yada yada. How did it all taste?!

Well, I’m not usually one to toot my own horn too much (especially when it comes to food, as I often think there’s multiple things I could’ve done better), but this food was literally the bomb dot com. Everything was so flavorful and fresh and straight up delicious.

The ginger spritz was spicy and had quite a bite from the ginger, but was perfectly sweetened and bubbly.

The chicken was cooked perfectly, and the sweet potatoes were soft and nicely seasoned. The caper raita was creamy and savory, and the quick-pickled cucumbers were bright and acidic to cut through that richness.

The carrots were roasted to the perfect texture, wildly flavorful from all the different spices, and the herb salad was incredibly bright and herbaceous, which paired perfectly with the creamy labneh. Plus, I especially loved the dates in the herb salad for just a touch of sweetness. It was extremely balanced.

The corn was honestly the most subtle dish, with a very mild flavor. It mostly just tasted like sweet corn in a slightly sweet, creamy sauce. Part of this is surely due to the fact I removed the seeds from the jalapenos that cooked in the corn, so if you want more flavor and heat in this dish feel free to leave the seeds in to infuse more spicy-ness.

The chickpea soup was pretty good, too, but definitely pretty mild in flavor compared to some of the other dishes. Even though there’s no dairy in this soup, it actually turns out pretty creamy from blending everything up. The chickpeas have a lot of starch in them that thicken the soup up really nicely.

The soup was warm and comforting, but if you really want it to be the best it can be, take Issa’s advice of adding fresh lemon juice, cilantro, and chili crisp to your bowl. I had never had chili crisp before this soup, and I decided to try Fly By Jing’s chili crisp, as I had heard good things and they’re partnered with another brand I like (Fishwife). Turns out their chili crisp is seriously amazing with just the right amount of heat, and I definitely need to try their collab product with Fishwife now. If I get sick anytime soon, I’m definitely making myself a bowl of this soup loaded with lemon juice and cilantro.

Finally, the cake. I absolutely loved this cake. The olive oil and extra egg yolks make it so moist and dense, and it has a great chocolate flavor from the full cup of Dutch-process cocoa powder. The buttercream is truly decadent. So rich and buttery, sweet but wonderfully spiced from the chai mixture. I definitely recommend using a high-quality butter for your buttercream, as it’s literally in the name (I use Kerrygold). This cake is sure to be a crowd pleasure, because who doesn’t love chocolate cake and luscious buttercream?! My grandma even tried some and said it was the best cake she’s ever had, so yeah.

Everything I made was just the right amount to serve my four friends and myself. Except there was a TON of cake leftover, even though I cut them huge slices that they had to take home.

I highly recommend making everything I made, there were zero misses. I’m so glad I tried out some new recipes and was able to have my friends over to enjoy them with me. It was a nice night, even if my body was seriously sore afterwards and there was a mountain of dishes waiting for me at the end.

I didn’t take many pictures because I was so busy cooking and serving, but here’s just a couple I got.

The chicken and sweet potatoes with the caper raita:

I know it looks like the chicken thighs are burnt but they’re just uh.. extra crispy. Not burnt! Certainly just blackened, like, in the good way.

Here’s the carrots on top of the labneh with the herb salad on top:

And half the cake!

And of course, the aforementioned mountain of dishes:

Funny thing is, I did dishes constantly in between everything I made. And I still ended up with this after everything was said and done. Good thing I have a decent dishwasher!

So, there you have it! A soup, main, two sides, dessert, and beverage all from Third Culture Cooking. Even though it was a lot of cooking and a lot of cleaning up, I loved making everything and I’m so happy everything turned out great!

Which dish sounds the best to you? Would you have decked out your soup with chili crisp? Have you tried chai buttercream before? Let me know in the comments, be sure to check out Zaynab Issa on Instagram, and have a great day!

-AMS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/22/throwing-a-dinner-party-using-third-culture-cooking-by-zaynab-issa/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57401

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/22/the-big-idea-james-kakalios-2/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57385

Look, up in the sky! It’s not a bird, or a plane, it’s author James Kakalios soaring in with a brand new book. Follow along in the Big Idea for his newest release, The Physics of Superheroes Goes Hollywood, to see just how scientific some of your favorite movies can get.

JAMES KAKALIOS:

My first book The Physics of Superheroes, was published in 2005 and used examples from print comic books to illustrate physics principles. Three years later, the release of the Iron Man and The Dark Knight films would light the match that ignited the superhero explosion at the multiplex. Now, not a year goes by without the release of several superhero movies and television series. There is little doubt that future historians will refer to the early part of the 21st century as the Golden Age of Geekdom!  

The Big Idea for my new book came a few years ago when I saw a five-year old boy walking with his mother in Antalya, Türkiye. The boy wore a tee shirt with Captain America’s face on the front, a knapsack with the MCU Avengers on his back, and a small, plastic Captain America shield on his right wrist. Captain America. Created in 1941 by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, two young men just trying to make a living writing and drawing comic books in New York City during the Great Depression, little dreaming that their character would continue to inspire all over the world eighty years later. I realized that the penetration of superheroes into the popular culture was so thorough that, even for those who’ve never read a print comic book, I could use these heroes (and the occasional villain) to explain the physics behind a wide range of phenomena that were left out of my first book.

In the All-New, All-Different The Physics of Superheroes Goes Hollywood I consider concepts and situations in superhero movies and TV shows and examine the real-world physics that underlies these fictional scenarios. While I don’t go to the movies with a pad of paper and a calculator, waiting for my physics-sense to start tingling, I’m nevertheless delighted whenever the characters on the screen, big or small, get their science right. It is just such examples, admittedly cherry-picked, that I discuss in my new book.

In this new book, you, Fearless Reader, will learn the real physics underlying the multiverse (true to its name—there are different interpretations of what “multiverse” means); if there really is a Quantum Realm (yes); why someone the size of an ant can knock someone out with one punch and yet be light-weight enough to ride atop a flying ant (it involves the Higgs boson); whether Superman really could reverse time by flying rapidly about the Earth (yes, by becoming a Tipler cylinder); whether nanotechnology can fabricate and alter Iron Man’s suit (not yet, but maybe soon); whether we can create fibers as strong as Spider-Man’s webbing (actually, scientists have made threads sixty times stronger); whether physicists put the word “quantum” in front of everything (yeah, pretty much); whether we can control devices just by thinking (yes); and the connection between the Infinity Stones and one of the greatest mathematical minds of the twentieth century (hint: she’s not Albert Einstein). This book will confirm what we all have long suspected—they couldn’t put it in a movie if it weren’t true!

With illustrations by acclaimed comic book artist and five-time Eisner Award winner Gene Ha, this book will discuss topics ranging from Artificial Intelligence to quantum computers to why your footprints look dry when walking along a wet shoreline. You’ll learn how semiconductor devices work, how information is transmitted in the brain and why an average increase in the global average temperature a few degrees is such a big deal (and what we can do about it). 

Prepare to get educated in the nerdiest way possible.

The Physics of Superheroes Goes Hollywood: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Books-A-Million|Powell’s

Author’s socials: Website|Bluesky

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/22/the-big-idea-james-kakalios-2/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57385

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/19/the-big-idea-william-alexander-2/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57373

You don’t have to fully understand something to enjoy or get value out of it. New York Times bestselling author William Alexander expands this idea to life itself in the Big Idea for his newest novel, Sunward. Read on to see how the world, though sometimes scary and incomprehensible, can also be pretty amazing.

WILLIAM ALEXANDER:

Sunward is space opera about parenting—specifically about parenting robotic kids, and more broadly about parenting kids who are wildly, gloriously, transformatively different from ourselves. 

It started as a short story that I wrote for Sunday Morning Transport, when pandemic parenting was much on my mind. My own kids were stuck at home, quarantined from the world but still trying to learn about it via disembodied classrooms. Their experience of grade school was simultaneously contracting and expanding in ways that I had no frame of reference for—except maybe in science fiction. Home was a spacecraft, isolated in the void. We lived in cramped quarters, bouncing off the walls and staring out the windows, but at least we could communicate instantaneously with every other ship and station. 

This mix of coziness, claustrophobia, catastrophe, and possibility messed with my head. I tried to squeeze the whole mess into a short story. Then the story grew into a novel—albeit a short one—about parenting juvenile bots in a turbulent solar system. 

Science fiction has lots of robotic kids. Some inhabit Pinocchio retellings, others Peter Pan retellings. Some are changelings, embodying old fears alongside newer uncanny valleys. Samuel Butler panicked about mechanical offspring in his 1863 essay “Darwin Among the Machines” (which also predicts eventual war between the machines and humanity). Osamu Tezuka’s beloved Astro Boy broke ground for so much of our science fictional landscape; his 1962 story “Robot Land” includes a robotic uprising set in an amusement park, published eleven years before the movie Westworld. 

Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects (which you can find in his second collection Exhalation) critiques the impossible shortcuts that we almost always take in our stories about mechanical people. “Science fiction is filled with artificial beings who, like Athena out of the head of Zeus, spring forth fully formed,” he says in the story notes, “but I don’t believe consciousness actually works that way.” The digients of his novella are infants raised up by the constant attention of caring adults. Intelligent life needs to be nurtured. It takes time. There are no shortcuts. 

As adults we become increasingly skilled at pretending—to ourselves, and to everyone else—that we stand on certainties. Kids know better. They are much more accustomed to moving through worlds that they don’t understand, and don’t yet expect to. They find ways to navigate incomprehension. 

Science fiction can help us remember how to do the same—not necessarily in its literal predictions of the future, or in its warnings and cautionary tales, but in the way SF fosters an intuitive sense that all of this… <flails at the world like an unhappy muppet> …could be wildly, gloriously, transformatively different. 

Sunward: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Books-A-Million|Bookshop

Author socials: Website|Bluesky

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/19/the-big-idea-william-alexander-2/

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Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/19/hello-from-santa-cruz/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57350

Forgot to post a “view from a hotel window” view today, but this interesting contraption was right down the street from me, so I thought you might like it instead. Tonight’s event was lovely and tomorrow I will be in San Diego, at Mysterious Galaxy bookstore at 7pm. You should come by and say hello to me there.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/19/hello-from-santa-cruz/

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Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/17/a-check-up-for-saja/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57322

I know, I know, you’re probably all terribly sick and tired of seeing our super adorable new kitten Saja, but I’m going to make you look at him again.

This little guy has a vet appointment today; a follow-up to his previous one when I took all three of the kittens in for shots and whatnot. This is just a second round of the necessary shots, and we’re going to see if he’s old enough to get fixed yet! So that may be scheduled, soon, as well.

I’m so thankful that Saja (and the other two kittens) were relatively healthy and that everyone is doing amazing now. It’s truly so lucky that none of them had serious health concerns or feline leukemia or anything like that.

Having Saja around has been absolutely amazing. It’s hard to express how much I love him. I don’t know if it’s because I rescued him off the street or what, but I am so attached to this baby, and I have been since I first saw him. He means so much to me, and my heart feels so full when I look at him. Cuddling him, seeing him play and be a kitten, and just seeing him be alive and well is so incredible.

I’m so excited to know he’ll be in my life for many years to come.

-AMS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/17/a-check-up-for-saja/

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Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/16/the-shattering-peace-is-out/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57316

Today is the Day! The Shattering Peace, my 19th novel, the seventh book in the Old Man’s War series, and my second novel of the 2025, is finally out in North America in print, ebook and audio (UK, you have two more days to wait for print/ebook. Be strong). It’s received rave reviews in the trades, including receiving starred reviews from Kirkus and Library Journal, and the general consensus so far is that it’s an excellent return to the Old Man’s War series. This makes me happy.

It’s important for me to note that while this is the seventh book in the series, it’s designed to be one that people who have not read the series before can get into. It’s a standalone book (so far) in the universe, and everything readers need to know to enjoy the story is laid out in the first couple of chapters. Newcomers won’t get lost, I promise. For the people who have read previous books in the series, you’ll find some old friends here, as well making some new ones.

You will find The Shattering Peace in literally every bookstore, online and offline, that carries science fiction. Remember also that for the next two weeks I am also on a book tour here in the US; come see if I’ll be near to where you are. Also! If you desire a signed book but my tour dates are not near you, remember you can call any of the bookstores where I’ll be on tour and ask them to have me sign it and then ship it to you. We’ll both be happy to do that. Subterranean Press also has signed copies available, and if you are outside the US, they ship internationally.

I’m very happy with this book and its story and I’m so thrilled that it’s finally out in the world for you all to enjoy. Welcome back to the Old Man’s War universe, and who knows? If enough of you like this one, maybe I’ll write another.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/16/the-shattering-peace-is-out/

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