Cameron Cooper's Blog

There are plenty of large problems in Rogue Star.

Someone is interfering with Lyonesse, the city where Danny Hammer lives. There are rogue AIs, old enemies, political consequences, and eventually the sort of problem that could affect considerably more people than Danny would prefer.

But one of my favourite stretches in the book is much smaller.

Danny is broke.

Not inconveniently short of cash. Broke enough that finding somewhere to sleep has become an immediate problem. By this point, things have been going wrong for her with suspicious regularity. Her friends Rayhel and Elizabeth have stepped in to help, despite Danny’s deep and abiding conviction that she should be able to handle her own problems.

And she has Dusk with her. Dusk is a parawolf. She’s large, intelligent, emotionally bonded to Danny, equipped with an alarming number of teeth, and at this particular moment she has decided that Danny’s complicated financial and personal problems are considerably less important than the fact that Dusk is hungry.

I chose this scene because it feels very much like Danny to me. She’s been a soldier. A revolutionary. The Imperial Hammer. She’s helped change the political structure of an entire civilization.

And none of that is particularly useful when you’re standing in the middle of a crowded tourist district, you’re hungry and hungover, every room is booked, and your parawolf would like you to stop messing around and feed her.

Here’s Danny and Dusk in Rogue Star.

EXCERPT FROM ROGUE STAR

“That’s not why we’re here,” Rayhel said shortly. He tapped the terminal. “You’ve been careless.”

That stung. He meant it to. He wanted me wounded and focusing upon my own hurts so I would leave his alone.

“I’ve been busy,” I said defensively. “Not careless. I just didn’t have time to deal with all this.” I pointed to the databall. “That is far more important.”

He picked up the terminal. “As usual, you’re operating under exactly the wrong priorities. Moral superiority is not a liquid asset. I thought you’d developed some sense, Danny.” His hands moved fast over the screen.

I ignored the jibe. He had his shield up. Rayhel’s shield was a proactive downpour of derision, cynicism and insults. “What are you doing?”

“I’m lodging an encumbrance claim.”

“You can do that?”

“Anyone can, if they have a legal interest in the debt.”

“But you don’t.”

“It will take them a long time to prove that and dismiss the claim.” He said it was some satisfaction. “Terran siege finance was my starting point. I’ve improved upon it.”

I actually believed him.

“Eventually they’ll want evidence I can’t produce,” he added. “But this will give you some time.”

“How much?”

He put the terminal down. “Fifteen…maybe twenty days.” He glared at me. “The encumbrance claim will halt the trading, but it doesn’t stop the interest from ticking upward. I clamped a lid on it. When the clamp comes off, the accumulated pressure will blow the lid through the ceiling. You need to dissolve this before then. Use the time I’m giving you and be smart. Sell assets, close ventures, restructure obligations, negotiate settlements, whatever it takes. Use the time, Danny. I know you like being the hero, but that won’t save you this time.”

I thought of Mace, Lyssa and Yoan. I kept my mouth shut.

“You’re telling Danny to not be Danny,” Elizabeth chided Rayhel.

“Idiot me,” he ground out.

Rayhel being Rayhel did not comfort me as it usually did, either. It was a sour note at the end of an uncomfortable conversation. It didn’t help smooth my feelings when Elizabeth transferred a substantial number of credits to a new account in her name and gave me access to it. “You need to sleep and eat in the meantime,” she told me when I protested. “Anything in your name will get snatched up. So take the money and shut up.”

I shut up, because she was right. But I liked it about as much as I liked standing on a planet with the wind in my hair.

Elizabeth hugged me when I left. Rayhel nodded his goodbye.

Even Dusk was unhappy. She was hungry.

I set about looking for somewhere we could stay while I figured things out. The list of places I could now afford that also came with a half-way decent AI was very short indeed.

The clock was ticking.

—18—

I had forgotten it was festival season.

I stood at a public terminal in the Bright, trying to find accommodation of any sort, while Dusk whined and grew increasingly more insistent about food being non-optional. The harsh sunlights on my back made my neck ache—I could feel the skin burning. I had a headache from the scotch and I was hungry, too. The longer I stood there, the thirstier I got.

The Bright was formally called Vesper Cross, where the two major routes through the dome met. It was informally called the Bright because of the massive displays of light, sound and motion that lined it, hanging off buildings and enticing tourists into spending more money. The tourists loved it. They jammed the Bright, taking pictures. The screens and holographic displays competed for their attention with brighter, louder and sexier imagery. Hawkers selling everything from single dose barbiturates, to donkey rides (no, I don’t know that one either) to standing room only tickets quartered the Bright, calling out their deals.

It was cacophonic, and the public terminal didn’t have a sound shield.

It was mid-afternoon, which was bad. Any permanent accommodations would have already rented themselves out as transient one-night pillows. They wouldn’t risk losing a night’s revenue by waiting too long.

Dusk whined and bumped my thigh.

“I know,” I said automatically, swiping through listing after sold-out listing.

She pawed at me.

I sighed and looked down at her. “I’m trying to figure it out.”

She really wanted food. And water. Now.

I shut down the terminal and crouched down in front of her. “That bad, huh?”

She pushed her nose against my neck. I scratched her ears. “Walking somewhere is going to take too long, now.” I was telling myself that, not just her.

Dusk just panted. She’d already spoken.

One of the things I particularly like about Danny is that being extremely competent doesn’t prevent her from being extremely human.

She can deal with crises most people would run from. She can make impossible decisions when there’s no good choice available. She has survived wars, death, politics and more than one attempt to kill her.

But she can still get herself into a situation where she’s hot, thirsty, broke, tired, irritated with the universe and being nagged by a hungry parawolf.

Dusk helps.

Or, depending upon your definition of helps, she makes absolutely certain Danny cannot wallow in her problems for too long because there are more immediate matters to attend to.

Like dinner.

About Rogue StarA hero in disgrace. A city that has turned its back. A darkness waiting in the void.

Danny Andela saved Lyonesse—or so the galaxy believes. Branded unstable, disgraced, and quietly abandoned by the people she fought to protect, Danny has lost everything: her reputation, her allies, even the Bai worlds she once helped unite. With nowhere left to go, she retreats to an old, broken ship and prepares to disappear.

But the galaxy won’t leave her alone.

Strange disappearances and whispered rumors of something moving in the shadows convince Danny that the nightmare she uncovered in Lyonesse is far from over. No one believes her.

To keep what remains of her life together, Danny will have to become exactly what everyone fears she already is: paranoid, relentless…and very dangerous.

Rogue Star is the second book in the Hammer Down space opera science fiction series by award-winning SF author Cameron Cooper. Hammer Down is a spin off from the acclaimed Imperial Hammer series and the Iron Hammer series, and features many of the characters and situations from both series.

The Hammer Down series:
1.0 Solar Whisper
2.0 Rogue Star
3.0 Total Eclipse
4.0 Dawn’s Crucible
5.0 Hypernova

Also (only from Stories Rule Press):
Cameron Cooper’s Super-Bundle

Space Opera Science Fiction Novel
__

Praise for Cam’s Hammer Down series:

Lots of trouble, drama, surprises and questions that kept me entertained.

I have been waiting with great anticipation for this series.

A new Danny Andela story that immediately threw me back into Danny’s universe.

Everything I liked about Danny is still there. What a joy to read another story about her. She is still one of my all time favorite characters in books I have read.

It’s so exciting to start another arc in the story of Andela and all the other characters that feel like old friends. Such a great universe, and a delightful series.

I really cannot wait for the next books in this series and more stories about Danny and her new adventures.

A stunning world that will pull you in.

I highly recommend Danny’s latest adventure and, as Cam Cooper stated at the start of the book, this story is much richer in detail if you have already read (or re-read) the Imperial Hammer & Iron Hammer series too.

If you are new to the universe of Danny Andela, welcome! You are going to have a real rock-’em, sock-’em experience with “Solar Whisper.”

I am so excited about this new series.

Loved it! It’s a brilliant start to the next Hammer series and Danny’s adventures. It’s as intricate and complex as I have come to expect from the two previous Hammer series’ and Danny’s worlds of experience.

I was on the edge of my seat trying to figure out what was causing all the problems for Danny.
Cooper’s universe is intense, and well thought out in great and exacting detail. The reader feels the cold of space and the rancid smell of dirty socks, the complexities of alien-race relations, memories from a long life, and the emotions that accompany that long and varied life.

___

Rogue Star is the next Hammer Down novel, returning to Danny Hammer and the known worlds.

If you like character-driven science fiction, sprawling future civilizations, political intrigue, artificial intelligence, found family, dry humour, and protagonists who keep going long after sensible people would have stopped, Rogue Star may be for you.

Also, there is a parawolf.

That should probably be mentioned.

Pre-order Rogue Star

Now available for pre-order:
Rogue Star
Latest releases:
The Woman Who Remembered Yesterday
Quiet Like Fire — Aurealis Award Finalist for Best SF Novella!
Solar Whisper

Rogue Star, Book 2.0 of the Hammer Down series, is coming—and you can now preorder it from your favourite ebook retailer.

The funny thing about this book is that I’ve known it was coming for a very long time.

Before I wrote a word of Solar Whisper, the first Hammer Down book, I knew where this series was going. In fact, Danny Andela’s story has already stretched across two previous series, so by now she has a lot of history behind her.

And a reputation.

Danny is the Iron Hammer. She’s spent decades being the person who spots trouble, figures out what has to be done, and does it—usually while everyone else is still trying to work out what the hell is going on.

But at the end of Solar Whisper, something went very badly wrong. Danny is convinced it wasn’t an accident. The problem is, she’s having an increasingly difficult time convincing anyone else.

And in Rogue Star, the consequences begin to pile up.

Danny’s reputation, her money, her relationships and even her confidence in her own judgment start coming apart. The woman who has always been able to trust herself is forced to confront a much nastier question:

What if she’s wrong?

And if she isn’t wrong…then someone is doing a very good job of making it look as though she is.

A hero in disgrace. A city that has turned its back. A darkness waiting in the void.

Danny Andela saved Lyonesse—or so the galaxy believes. Branded unstable, disgraced, and quietly abandoned by the people she fought to protect, Danny has lost everything: her reputation, her allies, even the Bai worlds she once helped unite. With nowhere left to go, she retreats to an old, broken ship and prepares to disappear.

But the galaxy won’t leave her alone.

Strange disappearances and whispered rumors of something moving in the shadows convince Danny that the nightmare she uncovered in Lyonesse is far from over. No one believes her.

To keep what remains of her life together, Danny will have to become exactly what everyone fears she already is: paranoid, relentless…and very dangerous.

Rogue Star is the second book in the Hammer Down space opera science fiction series by award-winning SF author Cameron Cooper. Hammer Down is a spin off from the acclaimed Imperial Hammer series and the Iron Hammer series, and features many of the characters and situations from both series.

The Hammer Down series:
1.0 Solar Whisper
2.0 Rogue Star
3.0 Total Eclipse
4.0 Dawn’s Crucible
5.0 Hypernova

Also (only from Stories Rule Press):
Cameron Cooper’s Super-Bundle

Space Opera Science Fiction Novel
__

Praise for Cam’s Hammer Down series:

Lots of trouble, drama, surprises and questions that kept me entertained.

I have been waiting with great anticipation for this series.

A new Danny Andela story that immediately threw me back into Danny’s universe.

Everything I liked about Danny is still there. What a joy to read another story about her. She is still one of my all time favorite characters in books I have read.

It’s so exciting to start another arc in the story of Andela and all the other characters that feel like old friends. Such a great universe, and a delightful series.

I really cannot wait for the next books in this series and more stories about Danny and her new adventures.

A stunning world that will pull you in.

I highly recommend Danny’s latest adventure and, as Cam Cooper stated at the start of the book, this story is much richer in detail if you have already read (or re-read) the Imperial Hammer & Iron Hammer series too.

If you are new to the universe of Danny Andela, welcome! You are going to have a real rock-’em, sock-’em experience with “Solar Whisper.”

I am so excited about this new series.

Loved it! It’s a brilliant start to the next Hammer series and Danny’s adventures. It’s as intricate and complex as I have come to expect from the two previous Hammer series’ and Danny’s worlds of experience.

I was on the edge of my seat trying to figure out what was causing all the problems for Danny.
Cooper’s universe is intense, and well thought out in great and exacting detail. The reader feels the cold of space and the rancid smell of dirty socks, the complexities of alien-race relations, memories from a long life, and the emotions that accompany that long and varied life.

Check out Rogue Star, and read the excerpt here.

Now available for pre-order:
Rogue Star
Latest releases:
The Woman Who Remembered Yesterday
Quiet Like Fire — Aurealis Award Finalist for Best SF Novella!
Solar Whisper

We have made a terrible mistake.

We taught machines to write novels before we taught them to fold fitted sheets.

Artificial intelligence can write computer code, translate languages, analyze medical images, summarize enormous documents, compose music and produce a perfectly respectable explanation of quantum mechanics for a twelve-year-old.

Meanwhile, if I want the laundry folded, somebody in this house still has to fold the laundry.

I would like to lodge a complaint with the future.

This Is Not What Science Fiction Promised Me

Science fiction has been promising us domestic robots for decades.

Robots were supposed to handle the tedious stuff. Cleaning. Cooking. Carrying things. Fetching things. Putting things away. All the endless maintenance required to stop a house gradually reverting to its natural state of chaos.

The humans, meanwhile, would be freed for more interesting pursuits.

Instead, we seem to have automated the interesting pursuits first.

I don’t want AI to write my books. I want AI to do everything else so I can write my books.

Give me a machine that cleans the bathroom. Changes the sheets. Folds the laundry. Empties the dishwasher. Vacuums under the furniture without choking to death on cat hair. Clears out the junk drawer and makes an executive decision about the three mystery cables we’ve been keeping since 2009.

I’ll write the books, thanks.

And what makes this particularly galling is that the robots are already out there.

Have You Seen What Industrial Robots Can Do?

Figure, (that’s the actual name of the company, not me falling asleep at the keyboard!) one of the companies developing humanoid robots, recently demonstrated its Figure 03 robot autonomously sorting parcels.

This isn’t an old-fashioned industrial robot arm performing exactly the same movement over and over again.

The robot has hands. It picks up soft, deformable packages in different orientations, manipulates them and places them correctly for a scanner. It has to see what it is holding and adjust what it does accordingly.

You can see a video of Figure 03 sorting packages here.

It’s fascinating. It’s also infuriating. Because if you can do that, why can’t you come to my house and put away the groceries?

There are legitimate technical reasons.

A factory or sorting facility is a relatively controlled environment. The robot knows where it is. The workspace has been designed for the job. The range of objects it encounters is limited. Even when the parcels differ wildly, they’re still parcels.

A house is anarchy.

There is a coffee cup on the desk, a sock half under the bed, a book on the sofa and a cat sitting precisely where you need to put your foot.

The robot has to understand that the cup goes to the kitchen, the sock goes into the laundry, the book probably belongs on a shelf and the cat emphatically does not belong in a cupboard.

And then there are the things it must learn about one particular household.

That’s an important document. That’s recycling. That’s not recycling even though it looks like it should be. Those books are waiting to be shelved. Those books are deliberately stacked there. Don’t throw out that scrap of paper because somebody wrote a phone number on it.

And for the love of all that’s holy, don’t “tidy” the author’s notes.

A domestic robot needs much more than dexterous hands.

It needs judgment.

Oddly enough, we may finally have invented that part.

Perhaps We Built the Brain First

For years, the obstacle to the general-purpose household robot wasn’t merely mechanical.

We have been building remarkably capable robot arms for industry for decades. What we couldn’t easily build was a machine that could look at the glorious disorder of an ordinary human environment and understand what it was seeing.

That is precisely where modern AI becomes interesting.

Machine vision can identify objects. AI systems can interpret instructions and context. Robots are getting better at manipulating unfamiliar objects rather than merely repeating programmed movements.

Perhaps science fiction wasn’t wrong about the robot maid.

Perhaps it simply got the order of invention wrong.

We couldn’t build Rosie until we’d built Rosie’s brain.

But there’s another reason the really impressive robots appeared in factories before they appeared in our kitchens.

Money.

Nobody Puts Unpaid Work on the Balance Sheet

If a company buys an expensive robot, it can calculate the return.

The robot costs this much. It can work this many hours. It will increase production by this amount or eliminate this many paid labour hours. It will pay for itself in four years.

Easy.

Domestic labour is different.

Someone has to wash the dishes, clean the bathroom, change the sheets, shop for groceries, cook meals, wash clothes, fold clothes, put clothes away, vacuum, mop, tidy, sort, organize and perform the approximately nine million other tiny jobs involved in maintaining a household.

But when we do those jobs ourselves, nobody sends us an invoice.

That labour is economically invisible.

Historically, much of it has also fallen disproportionately on women. And although the division of domestic work has changed considerably, the difference hasn’t disappeared.

Statistics Canada’s 2015 Time Use Survey found that women aged 25 to 54 spent an average of 3.9 hours per day on unpaid work as their primary activity, compared with 2.4 hours for men.

Looking specifically at housework, women averaged 2.8 hours a day and men 1.9 hours—a difference of 6.3 hours every week.

The type of work differed, too. Women were more likely to do the routine, repetitive jobs—cooking, cleaning, laundry and shopping. Men were more likely to do episodic jobs such as repairs, mowing the lawn and gardening.

The data is older now, but the point isn’t really about who did precisely how many minutes of laundry in 2015. It’s that all those hours of domestic labour are real work. When labour doesn’t have a wage attached to it, there is less obvious economic pressure to replace it.

Factories have an immediate financial incentive to spend millions developing robots that sort parcels.

Nobody is paying me by the hour to sort the laundry.

From the household’s perspective, though, those hours are not free at all. They’re pieces of a life.

And That’s Not Even All the Work

There is another problem with counting domestic labour.

A surprising amount of it doesn’t look like work at all.

Statistics Canada pointed out that time-use surveys don’t adequately capture the mental and organizational work involved in running a household: planning meals, making appointments, arranging repairs and deliveries, keeping track of family commitments and all the other tiny acts of coordination that keep life moving.

That work is largely invisible until nobody does it. In other words, the job isn’t merely doing the laundry. It’s noticing that the laundry needs doing.

It’s realizing you’re nearly out of detergent. It’s remembering that the good shirt needs washing before Thursday. It’s knowing which clothes can’t go in the dryer.

It’s noticing that someone has left a tissue in a pocket before the entire load emerges looking as though it has been caught in a small indoor snowstorm.

That’s the robot I want. Not another appliance waiting patiently for a human being to organize the job and press Start. I want the machine that notices.

How Much of a Life Goes Into Housework?

This is the part that makes me slightly wild-eyed whenever I think about it.

Ten minutes here. Twenty minutes there. Half an hour folding laundry. Fifteen minutes unloading the dishwasher. An hour making dinner and another chunk of time cleaning up afterward.

None of the individual jobs looks enormous. But they happen again tomorrow. And the next day.

And the day after that.

Technology has certainly helped. Washing machines, dryers, dishwashers and vacuum cleaners were transformative inventions. But notice what most domestic technology does.

It automates one tightly defined task.

The washing machine washes the clothes. It doesn’t notice the hamper is full, collect the clothes, sort them, run the appropriate loads, transfer them to the dryer, fold everything and put it away.

The dishwasher washes dishes. Somebody still has to load and unload it.

The robot vacuum cleans the floor, provided the floor has first been prepared for the robot vacuum and nobody has left something lying around that will choke it.

What I want is not another appliance. I want a general-purpose domestic worker.

Domestic Maid 2027, Please

And suddenly, for the first time, that doesn’t seem completely ridiculous.

We have robots with increasingly human-like hands. We have machines that can recognize and manipulate unfamiliar objects. We have AI that can understand ordinary language and increasingly understand visual environments.

We have enormous amounts of money pouring into general-purpose robotics.

All the pieces are beginning to creep toward one another.

I’m not expecting Domestic Maid 2027 to arrive next Christmas for $299.99 with free shipping.

But I am beginning to suspect that the domestic robot may finally move from the category of “science-fiction technology” into “hideously expensive early-adopter technology” and eventually into “ordinary appliance.”

I hope so.

Because we’ve already automated a great deal of the work humans actually want to do.

Now let’s automate the drudgery.

I don’t need a machine to imagine worlds for me. I need one that notices the dishwasher is clean, empties it without being asked, and then goes upstairs and folds the towels.

Technology industry: You know where to find me.

Now available for pre-order:
Rogue Star
Latest releases:
The Woman Who Remembered Yesterday
Quiet Like Fire — Aurealis Award Finalist for Best SF Novella!
Solar Whisper

______

Sources

Statistics Canada, Time use: Total work burden, unpaid work, and leisure (2018), using data from the 2010 and 2015 General Social Surveys on Time Use:
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/89-503-x/2015001/article/54931-eng.htm

Figure 03 package-sorting demonstration:
https://www.reddit.com/r/robotics/comments/1s22tt5/new_video_of_figure_03_autonomously_sorting/

I typed “The End” on Rogue Star.

Well, no, I didn’t. I don’t actually type “The End” at the end of my manuscripts. But the first draft is finished. Rogue Star, book 2 of the Hammer Down series, will be released on November 3. And right now, I have almost nothing to show you.

No cover. No polished excerpts. No shiny finished book I can hold up and say, “Look what I made.” That will all come later. Which got me thinking about something readers don’t often get to see: what happens to a book after the author finishes writing it. Because “finished” is a surprisingly flexible word in publishing.

The Story Is Finished. The Book Isn’t.

When I finish the first draft, I have a complete story. Beginning, middle, end. All the characters have done the things they’re going to do, the explosions have exploded, the secrets have been revealed, and everyone who is going to survive has, presumably, survived. That doesn’t mean the manuscript is ready for you to read.

Now comes the stage where I stop being the person making up the story and start becoming the person responsible for figuring out whether it actually works.

There are things I already know I need to fix. There are probably things I don’t yet know I need to fix. There will be sentences that seemed perfectly reasonable when I wrote them and will cause me to stare at the screen later wondering what on earth I thought I meant. There will be continuity to check. Pacing to examine. Character moments that need another beat—or one fewer. Details planted early in the book that have to match what happens much later.

And, because this is me, there will undoubtedly be commas requiring adult supervision. This is also the point at which other people are permitted to have opinions about my punctuation. Some of them have very strong opinions. They know who they are.

Then Other People Get Involved

This is one of the less visible differences between writing a manuscript and publishing a book. At some point, the author has to let other people touch it.

Editors read it with different eyes. A copyeditor notices things I’ve become incapable of seeing because I know what the sentence is supposed to say. Proofreading catches another layer of problems after the manuscript has been turned into something that actually looks like a book. And every time the manuscript changes form, there is another opportunity for something peculiar to happen.

Meanwhile, work is happening on everything that surrounds the words themselves. The cover has to be finalized. The book has to be formatted. The ebook has to be built. The print edition has to be laid out. The description has to be written. Advance copies have to go out. Retailers need information. Files need to be uploaded, checked, corrected, and sometimes uploaded again.

There are a remarkable number of steps between “I finished writing a book” and “you can buy the book.” My current production checklist that walks me through that process has over 200 tasks.

So Why November 3?

Because all of that takes time. From the outside, it can look as though a finished manuscript sits around for a few months while everyone waits for release day. It doesn’t. Between now and November 3, Rogue Star will gradually stop being a manuscript on my computer and become the book you’ll eventually see.

Somewhere along the way, I’ll be able to show you the cover. Then I’ll have more to tell you about the story itself. There will be excerpts and other bits and pieces as we get closer.

But today, it’s still mostly a manuscript. A finished manuscript. And after living with this story for as long as I have, I’m going to enjoy saying that for at least a little while.

Rogue Star is coming November 3. More soon.

Latest releases:
The Woman Who Remembered Yesterday
Quiet Like Fire — Aurealis Award Finalist for Best SF Novella!
Solar Whisper

Worldcon starts tomorrow. And I have never been to one.

This might seem a little odd for someone who has spent a substantial portion of her life reading, writing and publishing speculative fiction. Surely Worldcon is where my people are?

Well, yes. And perhaps not quite in the way you might think.

I Read Science Fiction

I grew up in the Western Australian countryside, long before the internet made geography largely irrelevant to anyone with an obsessive interest and a modem. My relationship with science fiction wasn’t social. It couldn’t be.

I read.

I read the old anthologies of classic science fiction. I read Asimov and Clarke and Heinlein and Bradbury and dozens upon dozens of writers whose names I encountered first in battered collections and fat anthologies. One story led to another writer, which led to another book, which led to another idea.

That was how I found science fiction.

There was no community attached to it, at least not one I knew about. No conventions. No panels. No late-night conversations in hotel bars. No debates about Hugo voting or convention bids or who was going to be Guest of Honor next year.

There were books. Lots and lots of books. I was a geek.

I wasn’t, in the particular sense the word has acquired within the science-fiction community, a fan. I didn’t know there was a difference.

Then There Is Fandom

I’ve brushed up against the edges of science-fiction fandom many times over the years. It’s difficult not to, when you’ve been involved with speculative fiction for long enough. But always peripherally.

And from that position, I’ve gradually realized that fandom isn’t simply a collective noun for people who enjoy science fiction. It’s a culture.

It has history. Traditions. Institutions. Vocabulary. Customs. Arguments that began long before you arrived and friendships that have lasted even longer. People have worked on conventions together, travelled to conventions together, served on committees, organized bids, voted, volunteered, debated, celebrated and occasionally fallen out spectacularly with one another.

They know one another. Or they know someone who knows someone. Or they know of one another. There are generations of relationships layered on top of relationships.

For someone encountering it for the first time, I suspect that might be one of the biggest surprises. You thought you were going to a science-fiction convention. It turns out you’ve entered a small country.

The Invisible Country

Worldcon is particularly fascinating in this respect because it has been around for a very long time. The first World Science Fiction Convention was held in New York in 1939. Think about that for a moment. People were gathering specifically as science-fiction fans before the Second World War.

The convention has moved from city to city and country to country ever since, with interruptions and transformations along the way, while generations of fans have carried its traditions forward.

Worldcon isn’t run by a permanent corporation that sweeps into a city each year with branded trucks and a professional events team. Individual Worldcons are organized by fans. Future locations are bid for and selected. Volunteers do enormous amounts of the work. The Hugo Awards themselves are tied to Worldcon membership.

There is infrastructure here, certainly. But beneath the infrastructure is community. And communities develop shorthand.

If you’ve ever married into a large, close family, you’ll know the sensation. Everyone else understands why Uncle George’s remark about the potato salad is hysterically funny. Nobody thinks to explain it because they’ve all known the story for twenty-three years. While you are sitting there wondering what on earth is wrong with the potato salad.

Fandom, viewed from the outside, can sometimes look a little like that.

Reader, Geek, Fan

This is where I’ve come to appreciate a distinction I didn’t understand when I was younger. You can love science fiction without participating in fandom.

You can know the literature. You can have strong opinions about it. You can adore particular writers, argue about books, understand the history of the genre and spend an unreasonable percentage of your disposable income acquiring more of it.

You can even write science fiction yourself.

None of that automatically makes you part of fandom in its older, more specific sense. Fandom requires participation. It is social in a way that reading fundamentally isn’t.

My own path into science fiction was intensely solitary. A book, a chair and enough time to disappear somewhere else for a few hours were all I needed. And perhaps because I began that way, that is still where science fiction lives for me most powerfully. In the story.

In the moment when a writer introduces an idea so enormous that you have to stop reading for a second. In discovering a world that didn’t exist five minutes ago and now, somehow, does. In finishing a story and realizing that the furniture inside your head has been rearranged.

That was my science-fiction community before I knew communities existed. The writers spoke. I listened. Then I went looking for the next book.

If This Is Your First Worldcon

LAcon V, the 84th World Science Fiction Convention, begins tomorrow in Anaheim. Thousands of people will arrive carrying decades of shared history between them.

Some will have been attending Worldcons longer than other attendees have been alive. Some will know exactly how everything works. They’ll recognize names, traditions and references instantly.

And some people will be walking through the doors for the very first time. Perhaps because they love science fiction. Perhaps because they read the books. Perhaps because, somewhere along the way, they discovered that there is an entire community built around this thing they’ve loved privately for years.

If that’s you, I can’t give you advice about how to do Worldcon. I’ve never been. But I can tell you this:

If everyone appears to know everyone else, you’re probably not imagining it. If people use terms you don’t recognize, there may be decades of history behind them. If you occasionally feel as though you’ve arrived halfway through a conversation, you probably have.

That doesn’t mean the conversation isn’t for you. It means you’ve discovered that science fiction has something beyond the stories themselves: an old, complicated, interconnected culture created by people who cared enough about those stories to find one another.

I somehow missed that part. Growing up in the Western Australian countryside probably had quite a lot to do with it. Instead, I read. And read. And read some more.

I became a geek, rather than a fan.

All these years later, I’m still standing somewhere near the edges of fandom, looking in with curiosity at this strange little country that grew up around the literature I love. Which seems appropriate, really. Science fiction has always been about encountering alien cultures.

Sometimes you don’t even have to leave Earth to find one.

Latest releases:
The Woman Who Remembered Yesterday
Quiet Like Fire — Aurealis Award Finalist for Best SF Novella!
Solar Whisper

I’ve been immersed in what people are calling cozy science fiction lately. I’ve just finished Automatic Noodle, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and I’ve also been spending time with Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Wild-Built. Both left me with that satisfying feeling that comes from spending time in the company of good people trying to do the right thing.

But here’s the interesting thing: what exactly is cozy science fiction?

The answer turns out to be a little fuzzy. Unlike cozy mysteries or even cozy fantasy, cozy SF isn’t an established publishing category. You won’t find a dedicated shelf for it in most bookstores, and retailers don’t have a “Cozy Science Fiction” category to browse. At the moment, it’s less an official genre than an ongoing conversation among readers.

And that’s part of what makes it so interesting.

What Makes Science Fiction “Cozy”?

The obvious assumption is that cozy science fiction is simply science fiction with low stakes.

Sometimes that’s true. But I don’t think that’s the defining characteristic. To me, cozy SF is more about emotional focus than plot scale. These are stories that put people, relationships, community, kindness, and hope at the centre. The science fiction is still there—robots, artificial intelligence, spaceships, distant worlds—but the story is more interested in how people live than how they fight.

The conflict is often personal rather than galactic. Characters build communities instead of empires. They solve problems through cooperation rather than overwhelming force. They find purpose, belonging, and friendship.

That’s the heart of it for me.

Enter Hopepunk

Another term you’ll often encounter alongside cozy SF is hopepunk.

Hopepunk isn’t a genre so much as a storytelling philosophy. It argues that hope, compassion, and kindness aren’t signs of weakness or naïveté. They’re choices. Sometimes they’re even acts of quiet rebellion.

That philosophy seems to run through much of the best cozy science fiction. The stories acknowledge that the universe can be difficult, unfair, or lonely, but they refuse to conclude that cynicism is the only sensible response.

Instead, they suggest that people can still choose generosity. Communities can still be built. Tomorrow can still be better than today.

I find that deeply appealing.

The Grey Areas

Because cozy SF is still finding its identity, there are plenty of books that don’t fit neatly into the category.

Take Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries.

Are they cozy? Many readers would probably say no. They’re packed with danger, action, shootouts, conspiracies, and the endlessly fascinating politics of the Corporate Rim.

Yet I suspect many of us read them for exactly the same reasons we read cozy SF.

At its heart, Murderbot is about belonging. It’s about someone discovering friendship almost in spite of themselves, finding people worth protecting, and slowly building trust. Those emotional threads feel very much at home beside books like Automatic Noodle or A Psalm for the Wild-Built, even if the action level is considerably higher.

That’s one of the pleasures of exploring a genre that’s still emerging. The edges are wonderfully blurry.

Why It’s Resonating

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that cozy science fiction is becoming more visible now.

For years, science fiction has given us plenty of dystopias, collapsing civilizations, and grim futures. Those stories certainly have their place. But many readers seem to be looking for futures where humanity hasn’t lost its capacity for kindness.

Not because those futures are unrealistic. Because they’re aspirational.

Why I’m Enjoying It

My own novels aren’t cozy. I like writing big space operas with genuinely high stakes. Galaxies have a habit of getting themselves into trouble.

But what I appreciate in cozy science fiction are the qualities that have always mattered to me as a reader: optimism, capable people, enduring friendships, communities worth protecting, and the belief that even in difficult circumstances, people can choose to become better versions of themselves.

Those ideas aren’t exclusive to cozy SF. They’re simply given centre stage.

Perhaps that’s why this emerging corner of science fiction feels so refreshing. It’s reminding us that stories don’t need to be cynical to be compelling, and that hope can be every bit as powerful as fear.

I’m curious to see where the genre goes from here.

And I’d love to hear your recommendations.

What books would you put under the cozy SF umbrella? Which ones embrace the spirit of hopepunk? And which stories live in that intriguing grey area where they don’t quite fit the label, but somehow belong in the conversation anyway?

Latest releases:
The Woman Who Remembered Yesterday
Quiet Like Fire — Aurealis Award Finalist for Best SF Novella!
Solar Whisper

Today is C.S. Lewis’ birthday.

For many readers, that immediately conjures images of wardrobes, lions, witches, and snowy forests. Or perhaps thoughts turn to his friendship with Tolkien and the Inklings. Lewis is, quite rightly, remembered as one of fantasy’s giants.

But that’s not how I think of him.  I think of his science fiction.

Long before I became a published science fiction author, I read Lewis’ Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength. They were unlike anything else I had encountered. They weren’t trying to predict the future or explain technology. Instead, they used science fiction to ask philosophical questions about humanity, morality, culture, and our place in the universe.

One scene has stayed with me for decades.

My memory is imperfect, and I can’t swear which novel it came from, but I remember a character who had lived away from humanity for so long that, when he finally encountered another human being, he didn’t immediately recognize them as attractive—or even particularly human. Instead, he saw an awkward creature with oddly thick legs and a peculiar shape.

Whether my memory has polished the scene over the years almost doesn’t matter. The idea certainly belongs to Lewis.

He had an extraordinary ability to shift the reader’s perspective. Instead of assuming humanity was the standard by which everything else should be judged, he asked us to imagine seeing ourselves through alien eyes. What if we weren’t the obvious model of beauty? What if our bodies, our assumptions, and even our values looked strange from another world’s perspective?

That is a profoundly science fictional question.

Lewis wrote before we had spacecraft orbiting Mars, before we had photographs from the Moon, and long before modern planetary science overturned many of the assumptions that underpin Out of the Silent Planet. By today’s scientific standards, the astronomy is wildly inaccurate.

And yet the novels remain remarkably fresh. That’s because Lewis wasn’t really writing about Mars. He was writing about us.

Good science fiction often isn’t about predicting tomorrow’s technology. It’s about finding a new angle from which to examine humanity. Lewis understood that instinctively. His planets weren’t destinations; they were mirrors.

Perhaps that’s why his science fiction still resonates. The details may date, but the questions don’t.

So while the world celebrates C.S. Lewis as a master of fantasy today, I’ll quietly raise a glass to the writer whose science fiction taught me that one of the genre’s greatest strengths is its ability to make the familiar seem wonderfully, unsettlingly alien.

Happy birthday, C.S. Lewis.

Latest releases:
The Woman Who Remembered Yesterday
Quiet Like Fire — Aurealis Award Finalist for Best SF Novella!
Solar Whisper

Every now and then, a book surprises me. I finished S.J. Morden’s One Way a couple of nights ago and immediately bought No Way.

That’s actually pretty unusual for me. My ereader has hundreds of unread books waiting patiently in line, so buying the sequel before I’ve even had time to think about the first book says something.

The interesting part is that it isn’t because I love the protagonist. Frank isn’t especially likeable. He complains. He grumbles. He has a knack for making terrible situations feel even more miserable. But Morden poses a question that I absolutely have to know the answer to.  Does Frank make it home?

And, perhaps more importantly, do the people responsible for all this eventually get what’s coming to them?

That’s a surprisingly powerful hook. It has carried me through one book and halfway through the second without letting go. Reading One Way also reminded me of something that I often come across in reading circles:  Hardboiled isn’t the same thing as noir.

People often use the terms interchangeably because both genres are gritty. Bad things happen. Good people get hurt. The world isn’t fair.

But that’s where the similarities stop.

Noir is fundamentally pessimistic. People are trapped by fate, by their flaws, or by the choices they’ve already made. The ending is often inevitable, and rarely happy.

Hardboiled stories are different. The world may be just as corrupt, but the protagonist still has a code. They may get beaten down, outnumbered, betrayed, and shot at, but they keep trying to do the right thing. The point isn’t that the world deserves saving. The point is that somebody has to try.

Frank is exactly that sort of character.  Even the crime that landed him where he is wasn’t motivated by greed. It was a selfless act and he accepted the consequences. He’s rough around the edges, stubborn, and frequently exasperating, but underneath it all he has principles. That’s what makes him compelling.

As I was thinking about this, I realized something about my own books. I’ve had readers tell me they were disappointed by the ending of the Ptolemy Lane Tales. They expected something darker. More major character deaths. More shocking betrayals. More “Red Wedding.”

Instead, they got an ending that was… hopeful.

Ptolemy Lane was never a noir protagonist. He’s hardboiled. He’s gruff. Suspicious. Frequently growling at people. If you met him in a dark alley, you’d probably cross the street.

But underneath all that, he’s basically a cinnamon bun.

He has an unshakeable moral compass. He protects people. He does the right thing even when it’s inconvenient, expensive, or dangerous. He’ll complain about it every step of the way, but he’ll still do it.

That’s not noir. That’s hardboiled.

Maybe that’s why the ending of the series turned out the way it did. I didn’t consciously decide that everyone deserved a hopeful ending. I simply followed the character I’d created to his logical conclusion.

A hardboiled hero can lose battles. They can suffer. They can fail. But if they keep hold of their principles, then hope isn’t a betrayal of the story. It’s the point.

Latest releases:
The Woman Who Remembered Yesterday
Quiet Like Fire — Aurealis Award Finalist for Best SF Novella!
Solar Whisper

I was reading Kevin Kelly’s latest essay, Quiet My Exoself, and found myself stopping every few paragraphs. Not because I disagreed with him, but because he was describing something I hadn’t quite put into words before.

Kelly’s idea isn’t another vision of android servants or holographic companions. His “exoself” isn’t a robot at all. It’s an AI that becomes such a persistent part of your life that it functions as an extension of your own mind. It remembers what you’ve forgotten, understands your habits, notices patterns, offers advice, and quietly becomes part of the way you think.

It’s a remarkably different vision of the future.

Most discussions about AI focus on what jobs it will replace or what tasks it will automate. Kelly asks a different question: what happens when AI stops being a tool you occasionally use and starts becoming part of your cognitive process?

At first glance, it sounds like science fiction. Then I realized something.

We’re already building it.

Not the fully realized version Kelly describes, but the first twenty percent of it.

I use AI almost every day.  There’s a meme out there, somewhere, that of course now I can’t find.  But it was an author saying:  “I don’t want AI to write my stories for me.  I want AI to wash the dishes, do my banking, build the shopping list and order the groceries.  I want it to do everything I don’t want to do, so that I can spend my time writing.”

Me, too.

And in fact, I do use AI a lot in all aspects except the actual writing.  1) Because AI can’t write worth a damn (yet) and 2) because I want to write the damn stories. 

And after the last few weeks I’ve had dealing with the utterly frustrating image trolls, I’ll be using AI a lot more in the future.

Over time, the conversations I have with AI stop feeling like isolated interactions and start feeling like an ongoing relationship. The AI doesn’t replace my judgment—I still make the decisions—but it becomes another way of thinking through problems.

That’s a subtle but important distinction.

The more I thought about Kelly’s essay, the more I realized that the real breakthrough may not be intelligence at all.

It may be memory.

Today’s AI systems are already capable enough to be genuinely useful. What they’re largely missing is continuity. They forget. They lose context. Conversations become islands instead of chapters in a much longer story.

Imagine removing that limitation. Imagine an AI that remembers every project you’ve worked on, every book you’ve written, every health scare you’ve discussed, every success, every failure, every idea that seemed brilliant at two in the morning and ridiculous the following afternoon. Not because it’s spying on you, but because you asked it to remember.

That’s a very different relationship from opening an app to ask a question. It’s also where I part company slightly with Kelly.

He suggests this future may be arriving very soon, and perhaps it is. But I suspect the interesting question isn’t whether the technology will exist. Much of it already does. And the real question isn’t whether people will adopt it. I think they already are.

The question is how long it takes before we admit it.

My first instinct was that society would be slow to embrace something so personal. Then I stopped and looked around. Millions of people already talk to AI every day. Some use it as a tutor. Others use it for technical help, career advice, language learning, writing assistance, or simply as a sounding board when they’re trying to untangle a difficult decision. Most of that happens quietly.

It reminded me that public acceptance and private dependence aren’t the same thing. People often criticize new technology right up until the moment they can’t imagine living without it.

If an AI remembers your commitments, catches your mistakes, helps you navigate difficult conversations, keeps track of your health, and saves you an hour every day, social stigma starts becoming much less important than practical value.

Adoption doesn’t have to happen loudly. Sometimes it happens one useful conversation at a time.

Reading Kelly’s essay left me wondering if we’re looking in the wrong direction. We’ve spent decades imagining humanoid robots walking beside us. Perhaps the more likely future isn’t a machine that looks human.

Perhaps it’s one that simply knows us.

And if that’s true, we may already be standing on the first few steps of that journey without recognizing the staircase.

Latest releases:
The Woman Who Remembered Yesterday
Quiet Like Fire — Aurealis Award Finalist for Best SF Novella!
Solar Whisper

Canada Day has me thinking about science fiction.

Not because there is anything particularly Canadian about spaceships or distant planets, but because I’m continually surprised by just how many of my favourite science fiction writers turn out to be Canadian. It seems to happen over and over again: I discover an author whose work I admire, and only later learn they’re one of us.

Jo Walton was one of those discoveries. So was Douglas Smith. Cory Doctorow, whose Radicalized remains one of my favourite collections of speculative fiction, is another. Robert J. Sawyer has been one of the most recognizable names in Canadian science fiction for decades, while Candas Jane Dorsey has long been a respected voice in the field—and, as it happens, comes from my own city. Add writers like Peter Watts and Karl Schroeder, and it becomes clear that Canada has contributed far more to science fiction than our relatively small population might suggest.

The same is true of fandom.

Canada has hosted Worldcons, built thriving convention communities, and supported the Aurora Awards for decades. Those awards celebrate the work of Canadian writers, artists, editors, and fans, reminding us that science fiction isn’t just created by authors. It’s sustained by an entire community of readers, volunteers, publishers, reviewers, convention organizers, and enthusiasts who all contribute to the genre’s continued growth.

Science fiction has always been an international conversation. Stories cross borders with ease, and readers are just as likely to discover a favourite author from another country as from their own. That’s one of the things I love about the genre. It has always welcomed ideas from everywhere.

Even so, I think Canada has quietly punched above its weight.

Perhaps it’s our geography. Perhaps it’s our history of looking both outward and inward at the same time. Perhaps it’s simply that speculative fiction appeals to people who spend long winters asking “what if?” Whatever the reason, Canada has produced an extraordinary number of writers whose work has shaped the genre, often without making a great deal of noise about it.  All this from a country whose population is still smaller than California’s.

As someone writing science fiction from Canada today, I appreciate that legacy. Every novel I write joins a conversation that has been going on here for generations. It’s a conversation built by remarkable authors, passionate fans, dedicated editors, and organizations like the Aurora Awards that continue to celebrate Canadian speculative fiction.

That seems like something worth acknowledging on Canada Day.

So wherever you’re celebrating—or simply enjoying a quiet day with a good book—I hope you find time to appreciate the stories that inspire you. And if one of those stories happens to have been written by a Canadian, all the better.

Happy Canada Day.  And watch out for the mosquitoes. 

Latest releases:
The Woman Who Remembered Yesterday
Quiet Like Fire — Aurealis Award Finalist for Best SF Novella!
Solar Whisper