Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/08/14/the-big-idea-thomas-r-weaver/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56833

How different would the world look if humans stopped downplaying our problems, such as climate change? Author Thomas R. Weaver imagines a near-future where we hand over control to someone, or something, who won’t ignore said problems. Follow along in the Big Idea for his debut novel, Artificial Wisdom, and see if we can face our problems head on.

THOMAS R. WEAVER:

Humans love burying our heads in the sand. I adore this idiom because it stems from a wonderful misbelief about ostriches that dates back to the Romans and Greeks. Ostriches don’t bury their heads in the sand to confuse predators at all, but we’ve talked about humans doing it to avoid our problems since the 1600s. Yet if ostriches did try it, we’d all see the obvious flaw: the predator simply gets a head start.

In our daily lives, we do this all the time. We do it when we leave writing an essay to the last minute (ahem). We do it when we ignore potential warning signs about our health. We do it when we really don’t want to see how much money is left in our bank account, or the size of our credit card bill. We’ll happily trade extended pain tomorrow over a sharp jab today, like how we might tolerate a toxic relationship because we don’t want to handle the breakup. And it first dawned on me how dangerous this was for our species, and our world, during COVID.

In those early months of 2020, some countries acted swiftly on things like border controls, lockdowns, containment measures and vaccines, and others acted slowly, hoping the problem would go away without having to make hard decisions that might imperil economies. What was fascinating and terrifying was how quickly it seemed to polarize us all into one camp or another, and still does today.

I can vividly remember taking a solo walk in the local woods during lockdown, as we’d eventually been allowed to do. Walking makes my brain fire up, and on this particular stroll, despite the fresh air in my lungs and birdsong in my ears, I started to worry about the future.

If it was that easy for governments and society to bury their heads in the sand over something that challenged our daily lives, like a pandemic, wouldn’t it be the same with the upcoming societal shifts we’d almost certainly see from the rise of Artificial Intelligence? Wouldn’t it be even more so with the climate crisis, at an even bigger scale? We’d already sat on that problem too long, in denial and unwilling to make moderate changes today that would inconvenience us, but nothing like the kind of inconvenience we’ll face down the line if we don’t get a grip on it. It’s always the same old story: when we’re finally forced to pull our heads out the sand and look around, the problem is a lot closer and we have to run a lot harder to get away from it than we would have done if we’d run at the start.

And so I decided to take both of these things and write a near-future technothriller. I wanted to see what the world could look like only twenty-five years into the future, and what daily life might be like if we’ve made no interventions on, in particular, the climate, but also where we finally had superintelligence.

In the world of Artificial Wisdom, it’s taken a wet-bulb heatwave disaster that killed millions to catalyze the nations into agreeing that something needs to be done, and because it is now too late to make ‘local’ changes and the climate knows no borders, a proposal has been made to do as the Romans once did in times of crisis: give a mandate to a single leader to marshal all resources required to solve the crisis, then hand power back.

At the time, I’d been listening to some of Dan Carlin’s excellent Hardcore History podcasts, particularly his two early series on the Romans. I was fascinated with how they occasionally appointed what they called a dictator to deal with civilizational-risk events, like Hannibal crossing the Alps. What if we were left with no option but to give power to a global leader with the authority to make hard choices the nations couldn’t make for themselves? How would we even choose that? 

In Artificial Wisdom, the world has opted for the more Cromwellian title of protector for a global leader. The final two candidates emerging from global primaries are both unexpected and regarded as poor choices. One is a former US President our main character believes is responsible for geoengineering that caused the heatwave disaster. The other is the world’s first political artificial intellect, Solomon, and questions hang over the hard choices an AI would make to save humanity, and whether we’d be trading freedom for salvation.

I wasn’t sure, at the start, that the typical fiction reader would want to actually crack open a novel about any of this. Many of us are terrified about the climate and don’t want to know more. We might go out of our way to avoid scary news reports or scientific papers about it. It makes us feel helpless. Similarly, there is a swelling of justifiable concern about the progress of AI right now, and the potential impact on many different categories of jobs. We’ve somehow instantly polarized ourselves yet again, some loving the technology and becoming dependent on it, others hating it and avoiding it. Would people really read fiction about two things they maybe wanted to bury their heads in the sand about? 

I decided that if sci-fi had one real superpower, it was in telling stories about tomorrow that help make sense of today. Stories and fiction help us process things in a safe way, seeing worst case scenarios through the eyes of characters who are going through the most challenging days of their own lives. Books about the future can become a safe space to deal with those things. Our brains are primed to worry, to simulate threats before they happen, allowing us to prepare for them and avoid danger.

As a debut writer, this was still a huge challenge. I wanted to avoid preaching, and certainly wanted to avoid pretending I have the right answers. Instead, I wanted to make it clear that when we bury our heads in the sand, there are no right answers anymore. I had to ensure that was a story people want to read with characters they enjoyed spending time with, and that’s the real craft of writing a novel.

So Artificial Wisdom became my attempt at that: a conspiracy thriller and murder mystery woven into a future we may still be able to dodge. If we pull our heads out of the sand in time, that is.

Artificial Wisdom: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

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https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/08/14/the-big-idea-thomas-r-weaver/

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Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/08/13/the-big-idea-fran-wilde-4/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56824

What is a story? Is it a form of time travel, where the author can speak to those in the future from the past? Is it a conversation between the reader and the author? Fran Wilde explores this idea in the Big Idea for her newest collection of short stories, A Catalog of Storms. Follow along and see how transformative of an experience a story can be.

FRAN WILDE:

A Catalog of Ideas, Transformed

The stories in A Catalog of Storms span a decade of my writing career — from my first Asimov’s stories that merge ghosts, tech, and nature, to several very recent ones that blend science, mythology, and weather. 

A collection of short stories is, by its very nature, a catalog of ideas passed from author to reader. It contains work that bridges years and forms a kind of conversation across time, both between each story, and with the readers of those stories. 

This is a very difficult thing to sort into a single big idea. So, naurally, I started a conversation in my head with my very kind blog host about the problem.

Me, while trying to write this post: “How does one write a single big idea essay about a collection of short stories, John Scalzi. They’re all different!” 

Scalzi: Smiles beatifically and devours a churro.

Me, continuing to think: “Each story exists as a moment in time —or moments: the writing moment, the reading moment — And all of them together exist as ideas across time… AND then the collection gathers all of those moments and ideas together and wraps a cover (in the case of A Catalog of Storms, a gorgeous cover) around them… presenting them as bound. But the big idea that holds them together? What is that? The author? The genre? When the author’s genre is multitudinous, (and I definitely contain multitudes), there’s got to be a more specific gravity to things than just me. What is it?”

Scalzi: Picks up his guitar and plays the smallest, saddest note. 

Me, forging ahead: This collection contains ideas that blend and merge, shift and transmutate. The title story, “A Catalog of Storms,” began as part of a set of Ovidian-inflected science fictions that started with “Only their Shining Beauty Was Left,” (which is partly about people turning into trees, and partly my attempt to sneak a zombie story into Clarkesworld (I failed; don’t try it kids, Neil doesn’t play)), …. and turned into something much more about a relationship to family, world, and weather, and weather’s relationship with us… and beyond that even, to our interconnectedness. 

A baker’s dozen more of the stories within the collection follow a similar path — they started out as simple stories, then gained layers and wings and changes: becoming ambulatory apartment buildings, sentient storms, very angry museum exhibits, people turning into trees, birds becoming human (and otherwise), and everything everywhere being connected to and impacting everything else…  

The conversational thread between the stories, and the Big Idea, I realize, is…

Scalzi: nods and smiles, as one does when one knows someone has the answer in their heart the whole time. 

… transformation/transmutation. That’s the big idea that weaves through the stories in A Catalog of Storms, (and if I’m honest, Scalzi, much of my short fiction.)  Where transformation is large-scale structural or philosophical change, and transmutation is change or alteration in nature or essence — on a molecular level. 

For me, transformation and transmutation are what I’m often aiming for as a writer. Not just in a story, or a collection, but each time I sit down to write. An alchemy of words and plot that changes not just the objects and characters in the story, but also the writer, and – hopefully – the reader.

And while it’s also true that several of these stories were inspired by Ovidian transformations, others observe and embody change through who is doing the telling. 

Scalzi raises one eyebrow as if he wonders whether I’m going to make him do the heavy lifting for this entire essay.

And most of all, the big idea of storytelling (see how I transmuted the topic from one collection to all of storytelling?) …

Scalzi raises the other eyebrow and looks at my thesis sideways. 

… is that the person experiencing the story — any story, but especially a good story — is (hopefully in a good way) transformed by the experience. 

By moving from the beginning of a story to the end, we are changed.

Each of the fourteen stories in A Catalog of Storms changed me: I learned more about language and the world each time I sat down to write, each time I engaged in the conversation. I hope you find many stories that change you too. 

A Catalog of Storms: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author socials: Website|Bluesky|Instagram|Facebook

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/08/13/the-big-idea-fran-wilde-4/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56824