infryq

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/07/23/the-big-idea-jason-sanford-2/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56542

More important than writing for an audience, is writing for yourself. Author Jason Sanford has chosen to write true to himself above all else, not holding anything back in this Big Idea for his newest novel, We Who Hunt Alexanders. Come along and see how being neurodiverse helped shape this story, as well as his own story.

JASON SANFORD:

In fiction, the mask comes off.

Which, yeah, not a revelation for most authors and readers. After all, fiction has long lifted the veil on reality and explored topics, ideas, and dreams that are seen as too difficult, unsettling, or daring to discuss in our everyday lives. Fiction is also a window for seeing life from different perspectives – a way to escape from our individually limited viewpoints and experience the world through the eyes of other people. 

But that’s not what I mean when I say that with fiction, the mask comes off. For me, that statement is instead extremely personal and extremely direct. Because as someone on the autistic spectrum, when I write my stories the mask I normally wear has indeed been removed.

If you’re not familiar with masking, it’s a strategy used by some people on the autistic spectrum as a survival mechanism. A way to live, work and be somewhat accepted in a world where how we see and experience life is not only not welcomed but frequently shunned.

I once discussed being on the spectrum during a convention panel. After the moderator listened to me describe how I masked, she retorted “It’s the science fiction genre – we’re all a little bit autistic.” She then added that masking was nothing more than learning to fit in with others, which everyone must do in life.

I wish it was that simple.

When I was young, well before I started kindergarten, my family knew there was something different about how I interacted with the world. I had trouble understanding what other people wanted. I preferred being alone. I’d hyperfocus on whatever caught my attention. And my words – well, instead of modeling my speech on how others spoke, I crafted my own words and ways of talking.

My parents put me through years of speech therapy to try and teach me to speak like the other kids. They also made the decision, based on the recommendation of a close relative who worked in special education, to hide that I was on the spectrum. We lived in rural Alabama and my relative feared if people found out I’d be redlined out of regular schools and classes. As my relative explained to my parents, in our state that outcome would be very bad for me.

My family also hid from me the knowledge that I was on the spectrum. I only learned about this long after I’d become an adult. I’d spent a lifetime wondering what was wrong with how I saw the world. And suddenly BAM!, it all made sense.

Because of all that, I was taught to heavily mask. To hide who I was inside. I basically underwent what is now called behavioral management therapy. And once I started school, I taught myself both consciously and unconsciously to mask even harder. After all, how many times does a kid need to be beat up or told there’s something wrong with them before they hide who they truly are?

My family made the best choices they could and I don’t blame them. But yeah, those years were rough. What saved me was the science fiction and fantasy genre. By reading fiction, I not only escaped from my day-to-day reality but also the pain of wondering what was wrong with me. And as an added bonus, fiction helped me understand the world and the people around me. I still remember reading certain stories and going, “Oh, that’s why people act like that.” Or realizing “That’s what normal people do in those situations.”

Eventually, that love of reading turned into a desire to write my own stories. And that’s when I discovered that by writing my own fiction, I could drop the mask. Through stories, I could show the world who I always was and always will be.

The SF/F stories I write have always been neurodiverse, even when I don’t blatantly write about being on the spectrum. Because of that I’ve been frequently called a writer of strange science fiction stories, or placed in the weird SF/F subgenre. So many times I wanted to tell people that one of my stories wasn’t weird – it was merely neurodiverse. But it’s hard to take off the mask in public even when I unmask with my writing.

But with my new novella We Who Hunt Alexanders, I decided to name it. To say, this is a story about neurodiversity. That this is a story about being on the spectrum. 

Of course, that’s not all We Who Hunt Alexanders is about. It’s also a gothic dark fantasy focused on a young neurodiverse monster dealing with both her mom’s wrong expectations for her life and the religious extremists hunting them down. It’s a story about the anger and hatred we’re experiencing in today’s politics. It’s about the people harmed by the powerful fighting back to save those they love. It’s about having hope even when everyone wants you to forsake that emotion.

But for me, the story will always be about lifting my mask and saying, “This is my life. This is who I am.”

I write my stories so anyone can read them, including those who are not neurodiverse. But I also write them for myself.

My mask is always off when I write.

We Who Hunt Alexanders: Apex Book Company|Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Powell’s Books

Jason Sanford: Website|Bluesky|Threads|Instagram

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/07/23/the-big-idea-jason-sanford-2/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56542

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/07/22/the-big-idea-kate-heartfield-3/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56524

For her novel The Tapestry of Time, author Kate Heartfield took a real moment in time, involving a real object, and gave it just a little twist, threading a needle between fantasy and reality. What time? What object? Read on!

KATE HEARTFIELD:

On July 14, 1944, the New Yorker ran a brilliant cover to celebrate the Allied invasion of Normandy almost six weeks before. The design, by Rea S. Irvin, was an homage to the 11th century Bayeux Tapestry, which chronicled Duke William of Normandy’s conquest of England.

It seemed fitting. Bayeux was the first town liberated, and where the exiled leader of the Free French Forces, Charles de Gaulle, chose to make his first speech after the invasion, on June 14.

But when he made that speech in Bayeux, the tapestry wasn’t there. In fact, even a month later when the New Yorker ran that cover, very few people on Earth knew where the tapestry was.

The tapestry (actually a kind of embroidery, but everyone calls it a tapestry) is massive: about 70 metres long. It was made sometime around 1070 C.E. and is basically a long comic strip, missing its final panels. When the Second World War began, it was put into a storage cellar in Bayeux.

Like many fascists, the Nazis were obsessed with trying to fit historical facts into their twisted narrative. Heinrich Himmler and many of his gang of archaeologists, historians and occultists saw the Bayeux Tapestry as a Germanic artifact showing the glorious past and future of their master race (because Duke William had Norse ancestry). Groups of Nazi officers and scholars started “inspecting” the tapestry (and at least one cut a piece off). Himmler was renovating a castle in Germany (using the forced labour of prisoners from two concentration camps) and stuffing it with looted medieval artifacts, to serve as the centre of the SS cult. In another timeline, that could have been the fate of the Bayeux Tapestry.

We often talk these days about the importance of putting grit in the gears of fascism, about the weaponization of paperwork. That’s what kept the Bayeux Tapestry in France, although some of the people putting grit in the gears were from other branches of the fascist project who just didn’t share Himmler’s particular brand of weird. In 1941, one of those branches managed to get the tapestry moved (in a truck running on an engine converted to charcoal because of the lack of gasoline) to a more remote storage facility, the Château de Sourches, where it stayed until 1944.

There, it would be safer against bombing – and also, not coincidentally, less subject to gangs of Nazi historians, amateur and otherwise, wielding scissors.

With the tide turning against Germany in 1944, Himmler decided he’d been stymied by bureaucracy long enough. He hatched a secret operation to take the tapestry first to Paris, and then to Berlin. They did manage to move the tapestry (in extremely hazardous conditions) to the Louvre, a few weeks after D-Day. But by the time Himmler managed to send two SS men to retrieve it in August, the people of Paris had risen up and liberated the city before the Allies got there. The Nazi commander of the city had to tell Himmler’s goons that the Resistance had just taken the Louvre, where the tapestry was being stored; they were welcome to try to get it.

(My main source for this part of the story is The Bayeux Tapestry: The Life Story of a Masterpiece by Carola Hicks, which is great.)

The story of the tapestry’s movements in the summer of 1944 is the inspiration and framework for my novel The Tapestry of Time, which is about four clairvoyant sisters racing against the Nazis to prevent them from using it for their nefarious ends. Think Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark, except the tapestry instead of the ark, and instead of an American professor, the protagonist is an English lesbian who works at the Louvre.

I wove clairvoyance into the story because I was interested in exploring how we learn things about our past and dream about our future – and how fascism would like us to believe that we know things about our past, and can dream about our future. I often use fantastical elements to literalize metaphors and help us see the past in new ways, and this one helped me raise questions about how we can trust information, and the manipulation of gut feelings. Also, it was fun.

It was fascinating doing the research into the training given to the saboteurs and spies who helped the Resistance (which informed the Nazi-punching, and Nazi-shooting and Nazi-stabbing, in this novel). I will admit that when it came to learning what I needed to know about Nazi institutions and individuals, I sometimes found it draining to do the research about an evil that is still so fresh, and unfortunately so familiar. But these are stories we have to keep telling, because fascism will never stop trying to abuse history for its own ends.

This summer, I’m travelling to Dunkirk, to stand on the beach where my grandfather survived the strafing and bombing from German planes overhead. I’ll go to the beaches where the Allied forces landed four years later. I’ll go to Bayeux, where the tapestry survives, and is about to go out of public view for a couple of years of renovations (and a loan to the British Museum). If there’s a lesson I take from the many near-misses in the long history of the Bayeux Tapestry, it’s that small acts of courage or even just stubbornness, with a little luck, can change the future. My novel is my small offering of thanks to those who went before us and one way, I hope, to keep their stories alive.

The Tapestry of Time: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Powell’s|Bookshop

Kate Heartfield: Website|Bluesky|Instagram 

Read an excerpt here.

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/07/22/the-big-idea-kate-heartfield-3/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56524

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/07/21/the-friend-who-isnt/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56516

First, watch this video, for the song “Brutus” by Em Beihold, which is a clever and enjoyable song about envy:

The thing I want to talk about here is not the song or its lyrics, both of which I like (and boy, who among us has not that had that same feeling at one point or another), but the final few seconds of the video, in which Beihold, at lunch with the girls, including the one who is the focus of her envy (and not coincidentally, all the attention). After watching everyone else lavish their attention on this woman, Beihold, or more accurately the character she’s playing in the video, finally gets up, goes to the woman (played by Katya Abayss), whispers to her about her envy, and leaves. And during these couple of seconds and directly afterward, we get to see the play of emotions across the enviable woman’s face.

And what are the emotions? As I see it: First, distracted as her friend comes over to say something private, pulling her away from her conversation already in progress, then confusion at the message, and then, right at the end, being upset and sad. Because the woman knows that, in this moment, she’s just lost a friend. She has no idea how, even if the now-immediately-former friend has given her the reason why. The reasons are all internal to Beihold’s character and how she feels about the other woman’s successes, personally and (apparently) professionally. This other woman is the cause of Beihold’s envy, but it’s possible and even likely that the woman had no idea that Beihold had all that going on in her head. Envy is often quiet, until it’s not.

(The other thing about envy (in the real world, at least) is that it’s often predicated on a fantasy version of someone else’s life, the part with where the fruits of their talent and/or money are evident but not the part where the human in the life still has to be a human and still has human concerns. In a world where some of the richest people in the world are very clearly desperately unhappy because (among other things) they simply don’t know how to people — and that’s in public! Imagine what it’s like in private! — there is indeed the constant reminder that money/fame/talent may solve some problems, but not all of them, and opens up a whole new set of problems that one has to deal with. High class problems! Which maybe other people think they would rather have than their own! But still problems.)

In the song and in the video, which she co-directed, Beihold the actual creative person does a fun and lively job of getting into the head of someone who has let envy finally get the best of them and stops seeing a friend as a friend and now sees them simply as a (possibly unworthy) possessor of a life they covet. But I think it’s important — and smart! — that after watching an entire video of humorous scenarios of the envying smoldering unhappiness at the envied, there are those few seconds at the end where we get to see that envy isn’t actually funny, and that it actually can hurt, not just the subject of the envy, but the object of it. Two people lose a friend in the video. Only one of them saw it coming.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/07/21/the-friend-who-isnt/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56516

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/07/18/publishers-weekly-on-the-shattering-peace-a-treat/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56500

And, well, yes! It is! The full review (here, warning, mild spoilers) also says that it is “tightly plotted” and otherwise praises the writing for catching up reader on the events of the series while still keeping things moving in the book’s here and now. And, again: Yes! I will take all that. Also, and I say this with just about every novel, it’s nice when the first trade review is a positive one. It means I can relax a little.

More news on The Shattering Peace soon. We are two months out from the release! Things are beginning to pick up momentum.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/07/18/publishers-weekly-on-the-shattering-peace-a-treat/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56500