Anarra

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/20/view-from-a-hotel-window-3-20-26-san-diego/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59840

There is a parking lot visible in the photo, I will note. That said, this is not the usual parking lot photo from when I travel.

San Diego is lovely. But then, when is it not. We will be in it only briefly before setting sail on this year’s installment of the JoCo Cruise. Try to have fun without us for a week.

Oh, and happy equinox! Spring is here. Thank God.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/20/view-from-a-hotel-window-3-20-26-san-diego/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59840

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/19/the-big-idea-lynne-m-thomas-katy-rawdon/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59819

Like two peas in a time travel pod, archivist and author Katy Rawdon teamed up with Hugo-award winning editor Lynne M. Thomas to craft the perfect time travel narrative. Take a closer look at famous time travel stories from all across the globe in The Infinite Loop: Archives and Time Travel in the Popular Imagination, with a foreword from one such writer herself, Connie Willis.

KATY RAWDON (a.k.a. KATY JAMES):

Archives are made of time. Time is made of archives. Archives are where time gets mixed up, turned around, and pulled apart.

I have always been obsessed with time, frustrated with it, wanting to tear at it and see what’s behind and underneath it. No doubt that’s why I became an archivist some thirty years ago, so that I could look at the physical remnants of time and preserve them, see what’s missing, and organize and interpret time’s leftovers for people who, wisely, do not think about time all the… time.

When I was approached to submit an idea (a big idea!) for a book series jointly published by the American Library Association (ALA) and the Society of American Archivists (SAA) called Archival Futures – a series that tackles big ideas around the archival profession – there was only one possible topic for me to write about: time.

While the phrase “archives are like time travel” is thrown around a lot, I knew the relationship between historical records and time was far more complicated. Archives reinforce and challenge our very conceptions of time, of what has happened, of what will happen, of what is truth and what is unknowable. The evidence of archives can be used to demonstrate how the past is so much more faceted than the narrow stories of history we tend to tell ourselves and others. Archives can also be selectively wielded as propaganda, or erased to allow for falsehoods to sprout and flourish in the empty spaces. Time can be illustrated, illuminated, rendered invisible, or constructed in new ways using the material items created in the course of history. 

Unfortunately, all of this turned out to be so complicated that the series’ word limit of 50,000 was never going to cover it, as I painfully discovered while writing the book proposal.

I am forever grateful that the inimitable Lynne M. Thomas stepped into my creative mess and provided direction: Why not analyze the depiction of both archives and time travel in popular narratives (books, television, movies, etc.) and see what we could unearth? As a romance author (Katy James) as well as an archivist (Katy Rawdon), I was more than happy to spend time in fictional worlds in order to better understand my non-fictional archivist profession.

It turns out that we unearthed a lot – about cultural views regarding time and time travel, the popular perception of archives and archivists, and the ways current archival theory and practice intersect (or don’t) with ideas about time and time travel. 

How does time work? How is it understood by different people and cultures? How do archives help or hinder our understanding of the past (and future)? How can popular narratives about time travel and archives guide archivists to shift their methods to a more expansive, inclusive, transparent approach? How can archival workers apply current archival theory and practice to all of the above ideas to better serve their communities and increase the use of archives?

Researching this book and synthesizing all of the swirling concepts was a real mind-twister of an exercise, trying to write our expansive, big ideas while keeping it succinct and legible for archivists and general readers alike.

We hope we’ve succeeded.

LYNNE M. THOMAS:

Sometimes, if you’re very lucky, the right project turns up at exactly the right time. As a professional rare book librarian, twelve-time Hugo Award winning SFF editor and podcaster, and massive Doctor Who fan, I had a moment of “I was literally made for this” when Katy explained her concept for the book to me and asked me to join her. My initial contribution was more or less “but what if we add Doctor Who examples to make all this time stuff understandable,” and then … we got excited. Because when you have the chance to dive deep into a particular rabbit hole that looks perfect for you specifically, you lean hard into your personal weird. 

Time travel stories often feature archives to prove the narrative truth of characters’ experiences. The main character goes into a locked room full of dusty boxes, and immediately finds the one piece of documentary evidence they need to solve their problem, or make sense of their experiences. And yet archivists—the people tasked with organizing and running archives—are almost always invisible or nonexistent in these very same narratives. When we do show up…well, it feels like writers haven’t talked to an archivist lately.

That…bothered us. It turns out, when you have professional archivists and librarians who are also active writers and editors in science fiction, we have thoughts and opinions about how archivists and librarians are portrayed (or not) in fiction and nonfiction. But we thought, maybe we’re seeing a pattern that doesn’t exist, it’s just that “red car syndrome” thing where experts pay more attention to the areas of their expertise in the narratives than non-experts do. So… we checked. We looked at dozens of time travel stories across novels, comics, television series, and films. We discuss Doctor Who, of course, but also Loki, Star Wars, works by Connie Willis (who wrote our foreword), Octavia Butler, Jodi Taylor, Rivers Solomon, Deborah Harkness, and H.G. Wells, among many, many more. We also looked at a whole lot of archival literature—how archivists and librarians talk about themselves, their professions, and their work to one another. And because we are both academic librarians, we laid out our findings in a peer-reviewed book. 

What we learned is that there’s a massive divide between what pop culture thinks we do, and what we actually do, and the even greater divide between the level of resources pop culture thinks we have, and what we actually have…and we posit multiple ways to close those gaps.

The Infinite Loop is where archives and pop culture’s image of archives meet and have a long overdue chat. Our hope is that these conversations will lead to archivists being better able to explain what we do, and have that knowledge spread far and wide across popular culture. Ideally, with some time travel stories that feature archivists as main characters. It’s well past time.

The Infinite Loop: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Powell’s|Inkwood Books

Author socials: Katy’s Bluesky|Katy’s Instagram|Katy’s Website|Lynne’s Bluesky|Lynne’s Instagram|Lynne’s Website

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/19/the-big-idea-lynne-m-thomas-katy-rawdon/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59819

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/18/here-have-a-nice-little-sunset/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59806

Spring will be here soon! I can tell by the sun!

(No, seriously, I can)

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/18/here-have-a-nice-little-sunset/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59806

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/17/the-big-idea-j-m-sidorova/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59799

How is it that fairy tales persist? In the Big Idea for The Witch of Prague, author J.M. Sidorova suggests that it might be because they are malleable and can be made to fit more times and places than just their own. To what use has the author put them here? Read on.

J. M. SIDOROVA:

When I think about a Big Idea of a novel, what comes to my mind first is more of a premise, an inceptive sprout from which the novel had grown. In this regard, The Witch of Prague grew out of a common fairy-tale archetype: an old hag gives a magic gift/poison apple to a young girl; think Sleeping beauty, forests, and castles. Except in this case, the archetype was invoked by true stories my Mom had told me about her young adulthood.

Thus, forests became the Cold War era Eastern European bureaucracies, castles became government departments, and the relationship between the hag and the young girl became complicated, as I, in the act of reimagining the fairy tale, subverted the heck out of it.

That said, this novel took a long time to become what it is now; it evolved in fits and starts while a sizeable chunk of my life was going by and the world was changing, and as a result it became a repository of symbolic representations for the ideas that are not new but have been important for me to unpack and highlight.

There is the Hunt of a Unicorn that, historically, fronts a host of contradictory ideas about power asymmetries between women and men; and then there is a Stag Hunt, which, as an example of a game of trust (or, more broadly, public goods game theory, like it’s better known cousin, the prisoner’s dilemma), stands for a balance of trust/cooperation vs. predation/competition in a given society.

There is also the Orwellian idea that authoritarian regimes not just restrict speech and writing, but, far more insidiously, they warp the very meaning, usage, and purpose of words, of the language itself. My main character, Alica, who’s grown up with mild dyslexia, is primed against such shenanigans because she’s always thought words were treacherous and out to get her, and one of her ways of fighting back was to invent an imaginary friend, a live typewriter with spider legs and word-swatting pincers.

So many different symbols, in other words, that at some point even I, their compulsive collector, felt that it was too much. And my awesome editors, Rachel Sobel and Huw Evans of Homeward Books, were of the same opinion: wait, is the Stag the same as the Unicorn or not? Author, explain thyself! So I went on an editing rampage, and I think I fixed things, and now all symbols are there to serve the story. 

But the big — or at any rate the permeating — idea that I would like to foreground since we are talking speculative fiction here, is what constitutes magic in this book. I think if one creates an alternative, fully magic-enabled reality for one’s tales, one can give a reader an escape, a full-on suspension of disbelief and all that, and that is fine. But if one instead injects bits of fantastical or magical into our viscerally recognizable reality, one gives a yearning, gives flickering moments of disassociation, of belief, “what if it were real?” It’s like magic comes to you, instead of you taking a vacation to go see magic.

And of course, so many works of speculative fiction do one approach or the other or anything in between. I personally, prefer the latter end of the spectrum over the former. So, what I was trying to do in The Witch of Prague was to have seemingly small, tenuous even amounts of magic within a historically accurate reality, and I was interested to work with this premise: what if magic was generated from scratch under certain unique constellations of circumstances and human lived experiences and emotional states, for instance, extreme trauma or enduring hope or devotion?

It wouldn’t be by anyone’s design, and it would be hard to predict what or who would become the magic’s “carrier” once it was produced. It would be a sort of undomesticated, involuntary magic for which no one really knows the rules or capabilities, though one could make assumptions or jump to conclusions according to one’s beliefs or character, in trying to harness it to one’s own benefit.

If we agree that as humanity, we have always been “producing” magic in our stories, histories, and self-narratives (“it was a miracle that I survived!”) as a matter of belief or metaphor, to help us parse reality or even just to communicate it — then my premise in this novel simply takes this fact and implements it. Literally and physically.

The Witch of Prague: Asterism|Homeward Books

Author socials: Website|Blog

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/17/the-big-idea-j-m-sidorova/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59799