Cameron Cooper's Blog

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

Ridley Scott is one of my favourite directors. Most of his movies are automatic watches for me. When a new Scott film appears on the release calendar, it jumps straight to the top of the queue. No questions asked.

Well. Almost no questions.

Because Gladiator II happened. But, we’re not going there. Not much, anyway.

Scott has returned to science fiction with The Dog Stars, based on Peter Heller’s 2012 novel. The official trailer landed recently, and on the strength of those few minutes alone, I’m interested.  Very interested.

One of the things that stood out to me was the apparent emphasis on relationships. Yes, there’s the post-apocalyptic setting, the loneliness, the danger, and all the usual ingredients. But the trailer seems far more interested in the people inhabiting that world than the world itself.

That’s usually a good sign.

Scott has always been remarkably good at identifying the emotional heart of a story and bringing it to the screen. Whether it’s the crew of the Nostromo in Alien, Roy Batty’s search for meaning in Blade Runner, or Mark Watney’s determination to survive in The Martian, the human element is often what elevates his science fiction above spectacle.

And Scott understands atmosphere. His science fiction films don’t just tell stories. They create moods. The industrial grime of Alien. The rain-soaked melancholy of Blade Runner. The eerie grandeur of Prometheus. Even when the stories themselves divide audiences, the worlds linger in the imagination.

That’s a rare talent.

Which brings me back to Gladiator II.

I’m not interested in relitigating the film, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t leave me wary. What surprised me wasn’t that it departed from historical fact. Scott has always taken liberties with history. Most filmmakers do.

The issue was that it felt oddly uncharacteristic. The confidence and coherence that usually underpin a Scott production seemed absent. It wasn’t merely inaccurate. It felt uncertain of what it wanted to be.  The ending was disappointing.

As a result, The Dog Stars arrives carrying baggage that has nothing to do with Peter Heller’s novel.

And speaking of the novel, I’d somehow never heard of it until the trailer appeared, despite the book being published back in 2012—which, in movie development terms, feels like several geological eras ago.  Apparently it was very well received.  That helps.

[Since writing this, I sampled the novel on Amazon. I can see why it attracted critical attention, but the prose style didn’t immediately click with me. It’s highly fragmented and impressionistic, which some readers will undoubtedly love. Still, a film adaptation doesn’t have to reproduce a novel’s narrative voice to capture its emotional core, and that’s where Scott’s strengths as a filmmaker may prove most valuable.]

The other conversation I’ve seen recently revolves around Scott himself. Every time he announces a new project, someone marvels that he’s still directing major studio films in his late eighties.

It’s an extraordinary achievement.

But I don’t think one disappointing film is evidence that he should hang up the camera. Great directors have always made uneven movies. Scott’s own filmography has never followed a straight line from masterpiece to masterpiece. For every universally acclaimed classic, there’s usually a more divisive title sitting nearby.

That’s been true for decades.

What keeps me showing up is that even his lesser films tend to be ambitious. They aim high. They try things. Sometimes they miss, but they’re rarely dull. And if there’s one genre where Scott has earned the benefit of the doubt, it’s science fiction.

So here I am, cautiously optimistic. The trailer looks good. The source material has a strong reputation. The emphasis appears to be on character and relationships rather than endless spectacle.

All positive signs.

Still, when I eventually sit down to watch The Dog Stars, I’ll admit that a small part of me will be waiting to see whether Ridley Scott still has the magic. I hope he does. I’d like to keep auto-watching Ridley Scott movies for a few more years yet.

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

Today is National (USD) Eat Your Vegetables Day. Not exactly the sort of occasion that usually inspires a science fiction blog post.

Yet while wrestling with OneDrive recently, I stumbled across an old note from a discussion about two books that approach the same subject from completely different directions: T. Colin Campbell’s The China Study and Vaclav Smil’s Should We Eat Meat?

Campbell examines the health effects of animal-based diets. Smil looks at the broader economic, environmental, and political implications of feeding billions of people a meat-heavy diet.

One asks what meat consumption does to us.

The other asks what it does to civilization.

Science fiction, of course, asks a third question: What happens next?

The Long View

Science fiction writers have always been interested in trends. We take something happening today and ask where it might lead if it continues for decades or centuries.

The modern conversation around meat is interesting because several independent trends seem to be converging.

Health researchers continue to raise concerns about high consumption of red and processed meats.  The World Health Organization classifies processed meat as carcinogenic to humans and red meat as probably carcinogenic to humans.

Environmental studies repeatedly identify livestock production as a major consumer of land, water, and energy resources.

At the same time, the world’s population continues to grow, and many developing nations naturally aspire to the same protein-rich diets that wealthier countries have enjoyed for generations.

Those trends don’t point to a simple future. In fact, they may point to a conflict.

Science Fiction Saw This Coming

Many science fiction novels quietly assume that traditional livestock production will eventually become impractical.

In The Caves of Steel, Asimov’s future citizens eat foods that bear little resemblance to what most of us would recognize as agriculture. Other writers imagined protein vats, algae farms, synthetic foods, cultured tissues, or highly engineered substitutes.

The details varied, but the underlying assumption remained remarkably consistent: as populations grow and resources become constrained, efficiency wins.

Whether those predictions prove accurate is another matter. Science fiction is better at identifying pressures than predicting outcomes. But the pressure is certainly there.

A cow requires enormous amounts of land, water, feed, and energy compared to many alternative protein sources. From a purely engineering perspective, future societies may eventually decide there are better ways to produce food.

Engineers tend to love efficiency.

Humans, however, are rarely that simple.

The Tobacco Question

The more I think about it, the more I wonder if the future of meat resembles the history of tobacco.  Not because the products are equivalent, but because of the cultural shift.

Smoking was once considered normal, sophisticated, and widespread. Over time, health concerns accumulated. Regulations increased. Taxes rose. Public attitudes changed.

Smoking wasn’t banned. It became something different.

Could meat follow a similar path? Not disappear, or become illegal, but simply become less normal.

Perhaps future generations will eat meat occasionally rather than daily. Perhaps it becomes a luxury product. Perhaps cultured meat eventually becomes cheaper than raising livestock. Perhaps traditional meat acquires the same kind of niche status that cigars or vintage wines occupy today.

Or perhaps none of that happens. Human beings have a remarkable ability to cling to traditions they enjoy.

The More Interesting Trend

What I find especially intriguing is that the biggest shift may not be toward veganism. It may be toward flexibility.

Many people are already reducing meat consumption without eliminating it entirely. They are experimenting with alternatives, eating meat less frequently, or treating it as one option among many rather than the centerpiece of every meal.

That sort of gradual change rarely makes headlines, but history suggests that social transformations often occur exactly that way. I was taught in high school that a well-balanced meal consisted of “meat and three veg.” At the time, that seemed self-evident. Today, the idea of what constitutes a normal meal has already shifted. How much further might our food expectations change?

A Question for Science Fiction Readers

If Campbell is broadly right about the health impacts of heavy meat consumption, and Smil is broadly right about the sustainability challenges of feeding a growing planet, then science fiction may once again be pointing toward an uncomfortable question.

Not whether people will stop eating meat, but whether future societies will eventually decide that raising billions of animals for food is an expensive habit they can no longer justify.

Science fiction has imagined synthetic foods for decades. Perhaps the surprise won’t be that our descendants eat cultured protein grown in bioreactors. Perhaps the surprise will be that, on some future National Eat Vegetables Day, nobody quite remembers why eating vegetables was ever considered unusual enough to deserve a special day.

What do you think?

Will meat remain a permanent feature of human civilization, or is it destined to become one of those practices future generations view with curiosity and disbelief?

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

Last year I wrote about using your cellphone to navigate the night sky. Star-mapping apps have become astonishingly good, making it possible to identify planets, constellations, satellites, and deep-sky objects with nothing more than a phone and a few minutes outside.

But something else has changed dramatically over the last decade: smartphones have become surprisingly capable astronomy cameras.

Not too long ago, taking photographs of the night sky with a phone was more of an experiment than a practical hobby. You might capture the Moon if you were patient. A bright planet, perhaps. Anything dimmer was usually a blurry collection of pixels and wishful thinking.

Today, modern phones can capture stars, meteor showers, aurorae, and even sections of the Milky Way. Some can automatically combine dozens of images into a single photograph, pulling details from darkness that are invisible to the naked eye.

The technology is impressive.

The experience is even better.

If you’d like to try it yourself, there are now plenty of excellent guides available online. The basic advice is surprisingly straightforward: find a dark location away from city lights, steady your phone on a tripod or solid surface, activate your phone’s Night Mode or Astrophotography Mode if it has one, and let the software do its work.

Modern phones achieve results that would have seemed impossible a decade ago by taking multiple long exposures and combining them into a single image.

Even if your phone doesn’t include a dedicated astrophotography mode, many phones offer manual controls for exposure, focus, and ISO settings that can dramatically improve night-sky photos. The learning curve is much gentler than most people imagine.

For beginners, the best targets are often the easiest ones: the Moon, bright planets such as Venus and Mars, familiar constellations, and the Milky Way if you’re fortunate enough to live near dark skies. A simple phone tripod costing less than a paperback novel can make a remarkable difference.

What I enjoy most about stargazing isn’t the photography itself. It’s the feeling that comes with looking up.

As a science fiction writer, I spend a great deal of time imagining distant worlds, alien civilizations, and futures that may never exist. Most science fiction readers do something similar. Even if we aren’t amateur astronomers, we tend to have a natural curiosity about what’s out there.

And there is something profoundly different about seeing a real celestial object with your own eyes.

Mars has always been a favourite of mine. Through binoculars or a small telescope, it ceases to be a point of light and becomes a tiny world. You can perceive its shape. It becomes unmistakably a planet.

There is no equivalent sensation like the one you feel when you look up and see planets for yourself.

Photographs in books are wonderful. Space agency images are spectacular. But neither produces quite the same feeling as looking at an actual extraterrestrial object and realizing that the light entering your eyes left that world minutes ago and has crossed millions of kilometres to reach you.

The first time you photograph it with a phone feels almost magical.

You aren’t just looking anymore. You’re bringing home evidence.

The same applies to constellations.

One of the unexpected pleasures of moving between hemispheres is discovering how much of your mental map of the sky is location-dependent. Familiar landmarks shift position. Some disappear entirely. Others appear for the first time.

When I first encountered the Southern Cross, it became the centrepiece of my understanding of the night sky. When I moved to the northern hemisphere, I discovered that what had once occupied the middle of my celestial map was now pushed toward the horizon; or absent altogether.

It’s a reminder that our perspective is always local.

The universe itself doesn’t change.

We do.

Perhaps that’s why stargazing remains so compelling. It constantly challenges our assumptions about scale.

On an average day it’s easy to become absorbed by deadlines, errands, politics, social media, and all the countless concerns that demand our attention. Then you step outside on a clear night and point your phone toward the sky.

Suddenly you’re looking at objects measured not in kilometres but in astronomical units and light-years.

The stars don’t make your problems disappear.

They simply put them into perspective.

For me, that’s one of the great gifts of astronomy. It reminds us of our proper place in the universe. Not in a depressing way, but in a liberating one. We are small, certainly. But we are also part of something unimaginably vast.

And thanks to modern smartphones, it’s easier than ever to capture a small piece of that vastness and keep it with you.

If you’re already using your phone to identify what you’re seeing in the night sky, consider taking the next step and trying to photograph it.

You may not produce images worthy of a space observatory.

But you will create something arguably more valuable: your own record of an encounter with the cosmos.

If you’re looking for a place to start, I’ve included a few current resources below:

BBC Sky at Night: Smartphone Astrophotography GuideSpace.com: Best Camera Phones for AstrophotographyAstroBackyard: Smartphone Astrophotography Basics

Be warned: this may become another hobby. Science fiction readers have always had a tendency to look up at the stars and wonder what’s out there. Modern phones simply make it easier to bring a little piece of that wonder home with you.

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

Glabb/Wikimedia Commons Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge, the tallest bridge in the world.

Every now and then I stumble across a piece of engineering that looks less like reality and more like science fiction concept art.

This week it was the Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge in China, a structure so enormous and improbable-looking that my first reaction was disbelief. The bridge spans a canyon that once required a two-hour drive to navigate. The crossing time has dropped to two minutes.

Two hours to two minutes. That’s civilization-altering infrastructure.

The bridge itself is stunning. Suspended high above the canyon floor, it looks almost unreal, as though someone rendered it for a movie about a future colony world. Yet there it is, built by ordinary humans using real materials, real physics, and a tremendous amount of determination.

And that, to me, is where science fiction enters the picture.

Humanity Has a Long History of Building the Impossible

Science fiction readers are accustomed to seeing enormous feats of engineering:

orbital habitatsasteroid mining facilitiesfloating citiesplanetary transit systemsspace elevatorswormhole gates

These ideas often feel wildly distant because we instinctively compare them to what exists around us right now. But history suggests we should be careful about declaring anything impossible too quickly.

Railways crossing continents once seemed absurd. Skyscrapers once seemed dangerous and impractical. Commercial air travel once sounded like fantasy. And now they are simply part of the background infrastructure of daily life.

The same thing happens over and over again; first impossible, then difficult, then expensive, then ordinary.

Glabb/Wikimedia CommonsEarth Is the Hard Mode

What struck me while looking at this bridge was not simply the scale of the engineering, but where it was built.

Earth is not an easy environment. Gravity fights everything we do. Weather destroys structures. Mountains resist us. Rivers carve obstacles through landscapes. Logistics become nightmares. Every ton of material has to be lifted, moved, stabilized, and secured against an active planet that is constantly trying to tear things apart.

And yet we still build structures like this. Which raises an interesting science fiction question:  If humanity can construct megaprojects inside Earth’s gravity well, what becomes possible once we move beyond it?

Suddenly, concepts like Mars habitats do not feel quite so unrealistic. Asteroid mining starts looking less like fantasy and more like a future industrial problem waiting for enough investment and motivation.

Large orbital habitats begin to resemble the next step in a very long engineering tradition rather than magical technology.

In some ways, building in space may eventually become easier than building on Earth. Lower gravity, abundant solar energy, and effectively unlimited room to expand change the rules considerably.

The real challenge may not be physics. It may simply be deciding the effort is worthwhile.

Science Fiction and the Ordinary Miracle

One of the recurring themes in science fiction is that extraordinary technologies eventually become mundane. Starships become public transit. Artificial gravity becomes background machinery. Wormholes become commuter routes.

In my Hammer Down series, personal wormhole travel has made conventional space travel irrelevant for most people. Humanity no longer experiences space directly. The vastness between worlds has effectively vanished behind infrastructure. And that carries an emotional cost.

The main character, Danny Andela, is subconsciously mourning the loss of space itself. When miraculous technology becomes routine, something changes in the human relationship with wonder.

Perhaps that is the final lesson of projects like this bridge. Right now, we look at it and see the impossible made real. A generation from now, someone will drive across it while thinking about groceries, work deadlines, or what to make for dinner.

The miracle will have become infrastructure.

And if humanity continues pushing outward into space, the same thing may eventually happen there, too.

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