Kim Stanley Robinson on the Value of Science Fiction

I've just started reading Kim Stanley Robinson's acclaimed climate-science utopia, The Ministry for the Future. How might society plausibly get it right and avert the climate disaster toward which we seem to be headed? (So far in the novel things aren't looking good, but I gather that will change.)

I was struck by a few of Robinson's comments about the value of science fiction in a recent interview on the Crisis and Critique podcast.

[Kim Stanley Robinson, and The Ministry for the Future; image source]

Reading Science Fiction Encourages a Flexible Conception of the Future

Robinson describes the reader as finishing a science fiction novel and thinking that the future will be like that, then finishing another science fiction novel and thinking the future will be like that instead.

And what happens is there's a habit of mind when you read enough science fiction, you say the future could be many different things, quite plausibly from now, and now we need to shape it to the direction that we want.

And so this is the political power of science fiction as a mental activity, as a co-creation between writers and readers. The science fiction community is in some sense better prepared for whatever happens, no matter what it is, than the general populace that doesn't read science fiction.

The thought has some plausibility. Science fiction accustoms us to thinking about various possible futures. Instead of ignoring the future, or assuming it must take some particular shape, science fiction helps us imagine a wider range of alternatives.

This might prepare us two ways: First, if one of the alternatives we've imagined comes close to actually playing out, we have already thought through some of its implications. Second, we develop a more general sense of the flexibility of the future. This may encourage readers to take action to steer us toward better futures.

Or Maybe Not?

Robinson is making a substantive claim about human psychology, one that's potentially testable (with difficulty). Does reading science fiction really generate a more flexible and open view of the future? This claim has the same intuitive appeal as Martha Nussbaum's claim that reading literary fiction broadens your empathy with people from other walks of life, or the claim that studying ethics improves moral decision-making.

It might be that none of these claims are true. For example, I've repeatedly found that ethics professors behave about the same as non-ethicists of similar social background. And I wouldn't bet a large sum that devoted readers of literary fiction are overall more empathetic than their peers who spend an equal amount of time reading non-fiction.

Pretty though Robinson's picture is, I'm not sure science fiction readers really are better prepared for the future. What drives science fiction writing and reading might be too disconnected from the practical future -- too fantastical, too plot-driven, chosen to be exciting and emotionally satisfying rather than accurate. Its envisioned futures might be too distorted by the need for high-stakes individual action, or too wishful, or too self-congratulatory, or too satisfyingly dystopian (for those of us who find dystopias satisfying). Readers might emerge with unrealistic or overconfident views, shaped not by realism but by the demands of story.

A particularly timely example is the nearly universal trope that humanoid robots and linguistically fluent AI systems are conscious. This might be an artifact of the demands of storytelling rather than something accurately foreseen. A world with conscious robots is more interesting -- a more engaging setting for a novel. If the robots are conscious, there's more at stake, so the action is more exciting. And it's structurally difficult to portray entities that act as though they are conscious but really are not. Doing so is nearly impossible in film, and it's a significant challenge in prose, requiring constant intrusive reminders. (I can attest to this both as a writer and a reader, having published stories with non-conscious and disputably conscious robots.)

So there's a systematic pressure in science fiction toward portraying advanced AI as conscious. If optimists about AI consciousness turn out to be right, then science fiction will have nudged readers in the right direction. But if the AI consciousness scoffers are right, the genre will have served its readers poorly. It remains to be seen who is right. (For details, see my forthcoming book: AI and Consciousness: A Skeptical Overview.)

Robinson's Realism

Now, among the great science fiction writers of our time, Kim Stanley Robinson's fiction is perhaps the least subject to the concerns I've just raised. He attempts to keep strictly within the bounds of scientific plausibility; and conventional character-driven plot is often replaced by loosely connected scenes featuring unrelated or barely related characters, plus less conventional devices, like mini-treatises on science or engineering, lists, and reflections that verge on expository philosophy or lyrical poetry. The Ministry for the Future in particular is rigorously grounded in real science and politics.

In the interview, Robinson praises realism in science fiction:

If you set a story in the future, you're automatically saying to the reader, this is made up, I've invented this, this isn't real. It is a concoction. And then if you add all of the clues and habits and techniques of realism to that concoction, you make it solider. It has a more powerful emotional cognitive impact on the reader. So realistic science fiction is a mode that I quite like.

And that requires a lot of detail, a lot of scientific support for the future that you're describing, the idea that it's plausible at every point along the way, and it looks like it could happen, and therefore it might happen. These are powerful literary effects to support the basically fantastic nature of science fiction as a genre.

Robinson thus suggests that adding realistic detail and excluding anything implausible will tend to make a story emotionally and cognitively more powerful. Again, it's a plausible claim, though I'm not sure we know this to be the case. After all, people can also be deeply moved and influenced by unrealistic fantasies.

Robinson's commitment to realism also synergizes with his thought about science fiction as a tool for helping us think better about the future. If the value of science fiction lies in opening our minds to future possibilities, it seems desirable to ensure that they really are possibilities and not just unrealistic fantasies.

Against Dystopias, for Utopias

Robinson suggests that the future will have to differ from the present, because our present path isn't sustainable. Things will get either much better or much worse. But dystopias, he suggests, are boring:

... descriptions of capitalist realist futures are generally dystopias. If we keep going this way, things will be wrecked. Yes, we can see that. Indeed, dystopias quickly become boring because we already know this truth. We're not taught anything by dystopias.

But utopias -- this is where it gets interesting. There could be a better world. This, I think, is becoming more and more obvious.... We have, at least in theory, the wisdom to realize we could create a world that has food, water, shelter, clothing, health care, education, electricity, and security for the feeling that people after you will have the same, and sense of dignity and meaning.... This is all possible technologically.... So then utopia becomes interesting, the most interesting of literary genres. Can there but a utopian realism, or a realistic utopia?

Dystopias can be satisfying in a way -- they point out the wrongs we already know, affirming our sense of their reality. But we learn more by envisioning a realistic utopia, something we hadn't properly imagined before, which we could see becoming real and could maybe take steps toward enacting.

In Robinson's telling, science fiction is the most profound and informative of the literary genres, and realistic science fiction is the most profound and informative science fiction, and utopian realism is the most interesting form of science fiction. The value of science fiction lies in enabling us to envision realistic possibilities for improving the world.

And thus we get Kim Stanley Robinson's style of science fiction, and The Ministry for the Future in particular.

It's an appealing vision. But somewhere along the way, I think we've lost sight of the value of all the other ways science fiction can work. After all, almost none of the great science fiction writers work within the constraints Robinson proposes!

"Severance", "The Substance", and Our Increasingly Splintered Selves

Anyone remember the excitement about "Severance" and "The Substance" in early in 2025? Last January I published an op-ed about them. I'd long aspired to place a piece in the New York Times, so it was a delight to finally be able to do so. As a holiday post, here's the full piece reprinted with light editing. (Thanks to Ariel Kaminer for soliciting and editing the piece.)

[original drawing by Evan Cohen]

From one day to the next, you inhabit one body; you have access to one set of memories; your personality, values and appearance hold more or less steady. Other people treat you as a single, unified person — responsible for last month’s debts, deserving punishment or reward for yesterday’s deeds, relating consistently with family, lovers, colleagues and friends. Which of these qualities is the one that makes you a single, continuous person? In ordinary life it doesn’t matter, because these components of personhood all travel together, an inseparable bundle.

But what if some of those components peeled off into alternative versions of you? It’s a striking coincidence that two much talked-about current works of popular culture — the Apple TV+ series “Severance” and the film “The Substance,” starring Demi Moore — both explore the bewildering emotional and philosophical complications of cleaving a second, separate entity off of yourself. What is the relationship between the resulting consciousnesses? What, if anything, do they owe each other? And to what degree is what we think of as our own identity, our self, just a compromise — and an unstable one, at that?

In “Severance,” characters voluntarily undergo a procedure that severs their workday memories from their home-life memories. At 9 each weekday morning, “severed” workers find themselves riding an elevator down to the office, with no recollection of their lives outside of work. These “innies” clock a full workday and then, at 5, ride the elevator back up, only to find themselves riding back down the next morning. Meanwhile, their “outies” come to consciousness each weekday afternoon in the upbound elevator. They live their outside lives and commute back the next morning, entirely ignorant of their innies’ work-time activities.

In “The Substance,” the cleaving works differently: An experimental drug splits users into two bodies, one young and beautiful, one middle-aged or old. They spend a week in each body while the other lies comatose. The young and old selves appear to have continuous memories (though the movie can be tantalizingly ambiguous about that), but they develop different priorities and relationships. Sue, the younger self of Elisabeth, rockets to Hollywood stardom, while Elisabeth becomes a recluse, discarded by an entertainment industry that reviles aging female bodies.

The question of what makes you “you,” from moment to moment and across a lifetime, has been a subject of intense debate among philosophers. Writing in the 17th century, John Locke emphasized continuity of memory. By his standard, each innie-and-outie pair from “Severance” constitutes two entirely different people, despite their sharing one body. Conversely, Elisabeth and Sue from “The Substance” constitute a single person because they seem to recall some of the same experiences. In contrast, the 20th-century philosopher Bernard Williams prioritized bodily continuity, a perspective that makes an innie-and-outie pair a single person but Elisabeth and Sue two distinct people. The 21st-century psychologist Nina Strohminger and the philosopher Shaun Nichols emphasize continuity of moral values, yielding more complex judgments about these fictional cases. Other scholars view selfhood as a social construct, determined by relationships and societal expectations.

Unsurprisingly, the characters themselves are confused. In “Severance,” the innies sometimes seem to regard the outies as themselves, sometimes as different people, whereas the outies seem to regard their innies with indifference or worse. Meanwhile, in “The Substance,” mature Elisabeth says of young Sue that “you are the only lovable part of me” — in a single sentence treating Sue both as other and as part of herself.

In real life, such confusion rarely arises because memory, embodiment, personality, values and relationships typically align. Both my wife and the D.M.V. can decide on sight that I’m me, even if they care more about memory, skills and responsibility over time — since they trust in the correspondence of body with mind.

Of course, even outside of science fiction, the correspondence isn’t perfect. Advanced dementia can strip away memory and personality, leaving loved ones to wonder whether the person they once knew still exists. Personality, memory and social relationships can fragment in multiple personality or dissociative identity disorder, raising the question of whether Jekyll should be held responsible for the malevolence of Hyde.

But increasingly, we choose to splinter ourselves. The person you present on Instagram or Facebook is wittier, prettier, more accomplished than the person your spouse or roommate knows. Your 500 “friends” never see your pre-coffee-uncombed-depressed-in-bed self (unless sharing that self is your social media personality — in which case that becomes the curated, theatrical fragment of you). In the 1800s, Karl Marx talked about the alienation of labor; today people talk about not “bringing their whole self” to work. Many of us strive to be one person here, another person there, another person there.

People have always presented themselves differently in different social contexts. But social media, Zoom, photo-editing software and responses filtered through large language models raise our fragmentation to new heights. “Severance” and “The Substance” amplify these fissures through radical new technologies that irreconcilably divide the characters’ home selves from their career selves.

Future technological developments could render this fragmentation an even more acute daily perplexity. Designer drugs might increasingly allow us to switch into one self for work, another for parties, another for bedtime. If artificial intelligence systems ever become conscious — a possibility that neuroscientists, psychologists, computer scientists and philosophers increasingly (but by no means uniformly) take seriously — they too might fragment, perhaps in radical and unfamiliar ways, merging and splitting, rewriting their memories, strategically managing and altering their values and personalities.

Our concepts of personhood and identity were forged by a particular evolutionary, social and developmental history in which body, memory, values, personality and social relationships typically aligned and exceptions mostly fell into predictable patterns. By inviting us to rethink the boundaries of the self in an era of technological change, “Severance” and “The Substance” disrupt these old concepts. Today they read as dystopic science fiction. Soon, we may remember them as prophetic.

Early Career Hugo Nominations -- Yes, They Definitely Happen

Every summer, I post a prestige ranking of science fiction and fantasy magazines, based on major awards nominations and "best of" anthology selections in the previous ten years. One question is whether such awards largely reflect the past accomplishments of an already illustrious career. Do new authors with great stories have a shot at such awards, or do they almost always go to old-timers?

Adrian Ward has shared some data with me that helps address this question.

Adrian looked at Hugo nominations (the Hugo being the best-known award) in the short story and novelette categories since 2015. For each nomination, he noted the number of "major" magazine publications by the author before the nominated story and the number published in the three years immediately after. The included "major" magazines, based on my prestige ranking, were Analog, Apex, Asimov's, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clarkesworld, F&SF, Fantasy Magazine, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Reactor/Tor.com, Strange Horizons, and Uncanny. Excluded from analysis were stories not originally published in English, since those authors rarely publish in English-language magazines, and the "Sad Puppies" stories of 2015-2016. (Sad Puppies was an attempt to game the Hugos.)

We might characterize authors with five or fewer major magazine publications before their nomination as "early career" authors. Of course, this isn't a perfect measure: Some might have long careers of publishing in other venues, and some might have mostly published books instead of stories. But I hope it's a reasonable enough proxy.

By this measure, almost half of Hugo nominations go to early-career authors: 51/112 (46%). Indeed, thirteen (12%) went to authors with no qualifying publications before the nomination. [For a list of authors, see Note 1]

Authors with 6-19 previous qualifying publications received 35 nominations (31%) -- though some of these authors were very established novel writers, showing the imperfection of this proxy measure. [Note 2]

Authors with 20 or more previous qualifying publications received 26 nominations over the 11-year period (23%).[Note 3]

Adrian also looked at how many publications in those same twelve magazines these authors had over the next three years (for nominations in 2022 and earlier). The majority of the early career authors (21/39, 54%) had none, and the average number was 1.3. It's unclear how much to make of this, but it doesn't look like a Hugo nomination is typically a stepping stone to further publication in these twelve magazines. [Note 4] That itself is encouraging in a way. Editors of these magazines often say they are interested in new talent and prefer not to just publish the same well-known names.

I conclude that short story and novelette nominations for the Hugo don't feature mainly the same group of big-name established writers. Lots of relative newcomers get a shot -- but it's not an automatic ticket to a prolific short-story career.

Thanks for these intriguing data, Adrian!

-----------------------------------

[1] With zero previous qualifying publications: S.R. Algernon, Nina Allan, Zen Cho, Steven Diamond, Kary English, Isabell Fall, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, Stix Hiscock, Blue Neustifter, Vina Jie-Min Prasad, Shiv Ramdas, Rebecca Roanhorse, and Rivers Solomon. With 1-5: Lou Antonelli, Brooke Bolander, Siobhan Carroll, Rae Carson, Ted Chiang (!), P. Djeli Clark (2), Meg Elison, Sarah Gailey (2), Sarah Gailey, Alix E. Harrow (3), Simone Heller, S.L. Huang (2), Jose Pablo Iriarte, Ai Jiang, Rachael K. Jones, Ann Leckie, Arkady Martine, Samantha Mills, Premee Mohamed, C.L. Polk, Vina Jie-Min Prasad (2), Nibedita Sen, K.M. Szpara, Wole Talabi, Ursula Vernon, Fran Wilde, John Wiswell (2), John Wiswell, Alyssa Wong (2), and John C. Wright (2).

[2] Brooke Bolander (3), John Chu, Tina Connolly, Amal El-Mohtar, A.T. Greenblatt, Daryl Gregory, Thomas Ha, Carolyn Ives Gilman, N.K. Jemisin (2), Rachael K. Jones, Isabel J. Kim, Stephen King, T. Kingfisher (2), Naomi Kritzer, Seanan McGuire, Linda Nagata, Suzanne Palmer, Sarah Pinsker, Gray Rinehart, Eugenia Triantafyllou, Catherynne M. Valente, Carrie Vaughn, Ursula Vernon, Marie Vibbert, Nghi Vo (2), Fran Wilde (3), Caroline M. Yoachim (2). Some of these authors overlap with Group 1, as they shifted from the 0-5 category to the 6-19 category over the years. [ETA: Adrian reminds me that Vernon and Kingfisher are the same author, though analyzed separately here.]

[3] Aliette de Bodard (3), Michael F. Flynn, Mary Robinette Kowal, Naomi Kritzer (6), Yoon Ha Lee (2), Edward M. Lerner, Suzanne Palmer, Sarah Pinsker (6), Rajnar Vajra, Catherynne M. Valente (2), and Caroline M. Yoachim (2). Some of these authors overlap with Group 2, as they shifted from the 6-19 category to the 20+ category over the years.

[4] This is a highly imperfect measure of whether the author continued in science fiction. For example, Rebecca Roanhorse is among the authors who earned a Hugo nomination with her first major magazine publication. She went on to publish several novels but no more short stories in the twelve included magazines. Most of the others published multiple stories thereafter, though often in edited collections or in magazines not included among the twelve.

[The Hugo Award; image source]

Top Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazines 2025

Since 2014, I've compiled an annual ranking of science fiction and fantasy magazines, based on prominent awards nominations and "best of" placements over the previous ten years. If you're curious what magazines tend to be viewed by insiders as elite, check the top of the list. If you're curious to discover reputable magazines that aren't as widely known (or aren't as widely known specifically for their science fiction and fantasy), check the bottom of the list.

Below is my list for 2025. (For previous lists, see here.)

Method and Caveats:

(1.) Only magazines are included (online or in print), not anthologies, standalones, or series.

(2.) I give each magazine one point for each story nominated for a Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, or World Fantasy Award in the past ten years; one point for each story appearance in the past ten years in the "best of" anthologies by Dozois, Horton, Strahan, Clarke, Adams, and Tidhar; and half a point for each story appearing in the short story or novelette category of the annual Locus Recommended list.

(3.) I am not attempting to include the horror / dark fantasy genre, except as it appears incidentally on the list.

(4.) Prose only, not poetry.

(5.) I'm not attempting to correct for frequency of publication or length of table of contents.

(6.) I'm also not correcting for a magazine's only having published during part of the ten-year period. Reputations of defunct magazines slowly fade, and sometimes they are restarted. Reputations of new magazines take time to build.

(7.) I take the list down to 1.5 points.

(8.) I welcome corrections.

(9.) I confess some ambivalence about rankings of this sort. They reinforce the prestige hierarchy, and they compress complex differences into a single scale. However, the prestige of a magazine is a socially real phenomenon worth tracking, especially for the sake of outsiders and newcomers who might not otherwise know what magazines are well regarded by insiders when considering, for example, where to submit.

Results:

1. Clarkesworld (187 points) 

2. Tor.com / Reactor (182.5) 

3. Uncanny (160)

4. Lightspeed (133.5) 

5. Asimov's (124.5) 

6. Fantasy & Science Fiction (100.5) 

7. Beneath Ceaseless Skies (57.5) 

8. Strange Horizons (incl Samovar) (47)

9. Analog (42) 

10. Nightmare (38.5) 

11. Apex (36.5) 

12. FIYAH (24.5) (started 2017) 

13. Slate / Future Tense (23; ceased 2024?) 

14. Fireside (18.5) (ceased 2022)

15. Fantasy Magazine (17.5) (off and on during the period) 

16. Interzone (16.5) 

17. The Dark (16) 

18. Sunday Morning Transport (12.5) (started 2022)

19. The Deadlands (10) (started 2021)

20. The New Yorker (9) 

21. Future Science Fiction Digest (7) (ran 2018-2023) 

22t. Diabolical Plots (6.5)

22t. Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet (6.5)

24t. Conjunctions (6) 

24t. khōréō (6) (started 2021)

26t. GigaNotoSaurus (5.5) 

26t. Omni (5.5) (classic magazine relaunched 2017-2020) 

28t. Shimmer (5) (ceased 2018)

28t. Sirenia Digest (5) 

30t. Boston Review (4) 

30t. Omenana (4)

30t. Terraform (Vice) (4) (ceased 2023)

30t. Wired (4)

34t. B&N Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog (3.5) (ceased 2019)

34t. McSweeney's (3.5) 

34t. Paris Review (3.5) 

37t. Anathema (3) (ran 2017-2022)

37t. Galaxy's Edge (3) (ceased 2023)

37t. Kaleidotrope (3) 

*37t. Psychopomp (3) (started 2023; not to be confused with Psychopomp Magazine)

41t. Augur (2.5) (started 2018)

41t. Beloit Fiction Journal (2.5) 

41t. Black Static (2.5) (ceased fiction 2023)

*41t. Bourbon Penn (2.5)

41t. Buzzfeed (2.5) 

41t. Matter (2.5) 

47t. Baffling (2) (started 2020)

47t. Flash Fiction Online (2)

47t. Fusion Fragment (2) (started 2020)

47t. Mothership Zeta (2) (ran 2015-2017) 

47t. Podcastle (2)

47t. Science Fiction World (2)

47t. Shortwave (2) (started 2022)

47t. Tin House (2) (ceased short fiction 2019) 

55t. e-flux journal (1.5)

55t. Escape Pod (1.5)

55t. MIT Technology Review (1.5) 

55t. New York Times (1.5) 

55t. Reckoning (1.5) (started 2017)

55t. Translunar Travelers Lounge (1.5) (started 2019)

[* indicates new to the list this year]

--------------------------------------------------

Comments:

(1.) Beloit Fiction Journal, Boston Review, Conjunctions, e-flux Journal, Matter, McSweeney's, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Reckoning, and Tin House are literary magazines that sometimes publish science fiction or fantasy. Buzzfeed, Slate and Vice are popular magazines, and MIT Technology Review, Omni, and Wired are popular science magazines that publish a bit of science fiction on the side. The New York Times ran a series of "Op-Eds from the Future" from 2019-2020. The remaining magazines focus on the science fiction and fantasy (SF) genre or related categories such as horror or "weird". All publish in English, except Science Fiction World, which is the leading science fiction magazine in China.

(2.) It's also interesting to consider a three-year window. Here are those results, down to six points:

1. Clarkesworld (54.5)  

2. Uncanny (47) 

3. Tor / Reactor (35) 

4. Lightspeed (33)

5. Asimov's (22) 

6. Strange Horizons (18) 

7. F&SF (16) 

8. Apex (13)

9. Sunday Morning Transport (12.5) 

10. Beneath Ceaseless Skies (11.5) 

11. FIYAH (10.5)

12t. Fantasy (9.5) 

12t. The Deadlands (9.5) 

14. Nightmare (8)

15. Analog (7.5) 

(3.) Other lists: The SFWA qualifying markets list is a list of "pro" science fiction and fantasy venues based on pay rates and track records of strong circulation. Submission Grinder is a terrific resource for authors, with detailed information on magazine pay rates, submission windows, and turnaround times.

(4.) Over the past decade, the classic "big three" print magazines -- Asimov's, F&SF, and Analog -- have been displaced in influence by the leading free online magazines, Clarkesworld, Tor / Reactor, Uncanny, and Lightspeed (all founded 2006-2014). In 2014, Asimov's and F&SF led the rankings by a wide margin (Analog had already slipped a bit, as reflected in its #5 ranking then). This year, Asimov's, F&SF, and Analog were all purchased by Must Read Publishing, which changed the author contracts objectionably enough to generate a major backlash, with SFWA considering delisting at least Analog from the qualifying markets list. F&SF has not published any new issues since summer 2024. It remains to be seen if the big three classic magazines can remain viable in print format.

(5.) Academic philosophy readers might also be interested in the following magazines that specialize specifically in philosophical fiction and/or fiction by academic writers: AcademFic, After Dinner Conversation, and Sci Phi Journal.

Yayflies and Rebugnant Conclusions

In Ned Beauman's 2023 novel Venomous Lumpsucker, the protagonist happens upon a breeding experiment in the open sea: a self-sustaining system designed to continually output an enormous number of blissfully happy insects, yayflies.

The yayflies, as he called them, were based on Nervijuncta nigricoxa, a type of gall gnat, but... he'd made a number of changes to their lifecycle. The yayflies were all female, and they reproduced asexually, meaning they were clones of each other. A yayfly egg would hatch into a larva, and the larva would feed greedily on kelp for several days. Once her belly was full, she would settle down to pupate. Later, bursting from her cocoon, the adult yayfly would already be pregnant with hundreds of eggs. She would lay these eggs, and the cycle would begin anew. But the adult yayfly still had another few hours to live. She couldn't feed; indeed, she had no mouthparts, no alimentary canal. All she could do was fly toward the horizon, feeling an unimaginably intense joy.

The boldest modifications... were to their neural architecture. A yayfly not only had excessive numbers of receptors for so-called pleasure chemicals, but also excessive numbers of neurons synthesizing them; like a duck leg simmering luxuriantly in its own fat, the whole brain was simultaneously gushing these neurotransmitters and soaking them up, from the moment it left the cocoon. A yayfly didn't have the ability to search for food or avoid predators or do almost any of the other things that Nervijuncta nigrocoxa could do; all of these functions had been edited out to free up space. She was, in the most literal sense, a dedicated hedonist, the minimum viable platform for rapture that could also take care of its own disposal. There was no way for a human being to understand quite what it was like to be a yayfly, but Lodewijk's aim had been to evoke the experience of a first-time drug user taking a heroic dose of MDMA, the kind of dose that would leave you with irreparable brain damage. And the yayflies were suffering brain damage, in the sense that after a few hours their little brains would be used-up husks; neurochemically speaking, the machine was imbalanced and unsound. But by then the yayflies would already be dead. They would never get as far as comedown.

You could argue, if you wanted, that a human orgasm was a more profound output of pleasure than even the most consuming gnat bliss, since a human brain was so much bigger than a gnat brain. But what if tens of thousands of these yayflies were born every second, billions every day? That would be a bigger contribution to the sum total of wellbeing in the universe than any conceivable humanitarian intervention. And it could go on indefinitely, an unending anti-disaster (p. 209-210).

Now suppose classical utilitarian ethics is correct and that yayflies are, as stipulated, both conscious and extremely happy. Then producing huge numbers of them would be a greater ethical achievement than anything our society could realistically do to improve the condition of ordinary humans. This requires insect sentience, of course, but that's increasingly a mainstream scientific position.

And if consciousness is possible in computers, we can skip the biology entirely, as one of Bauman's characters notes several pages later:

"Anyway, if you want purity, why does this have to be so messy? Just model a yayfly consciousness on a computer. But change one of the variables. Jack up the intensity of the pleasure by a trillion trillion trillion trillion. After that, you can pop an Inzidernil and relax. You've offset all the suffering in the world since the beginning of time" (p. 225).

Congratulations: You've made hedonium! You've fulfilled the dream of "Eric" in my 2013 story with R. Scott Bakker, Reinstalling Eden. By utilitarian consequentialist standards, you outshine every saint in history by orders of magnitude.

Philosopher Jeff Sebo calls this the rebugnant conclusion (punning on Derek Parfit's repugnant conclusion). If utilitarian consequentialism is right, it appears ethically preferable to create quadrillions of happy insects than billions of happy people.

Sebo seems ambivalent about this. He admits it's strange. However, he notes, "Ultimately, the more we accept how large and varied the moral community is, the stranger morality will become" (p. 262). Relievingly, Sebo argues, the short term implications are less radical: Keeping humans around, at least for a while, is probably a necessary first step toward maximizing insect happiness, since insects in the wild, without human help, probably suffer immensely in the aggregate due to their high infant mortality.

Even if insects (or computers) probably aren't sentient, the conclusion follows under standard expected value reasoning. Suppose you assign just a 0.1% chance to yayfly sentience. Suppose also that if they are sentient, the average yayfly experiences in its few hours one millionth the pleasure of the average human over a lifetime. Suppose further that a hundred million yayflies can be generated every day in a self-sustaining kelp-to-yayfly insectarium for the same resource cost as sustaining a single human for a day. (At a thousandth of a gram per fly, a hundred million yayflies would be the same total mass as a single hundred kilogram human.) Suppose finally that humans live for a hundred thousand days (rounding up to keep our numbers simple).

Then:

Expected value of sustaining the human: one human lifetime's worth of pleasure, i.e., one hedon.

Expected value of sustaining a yayfly insectarium that has only a 1/1000 chance of generating actually sentient insects: 1/1000 chance of sentience * 100,000,000 yayflies per day * 100,000 days * 1/1,000,000 total lieftime pleasure per yayfly (compared to a human) = a thousand hedons.

If prioritizing yayflies over humans seems like the wrong conclusion, I invite you to consider the possibility that classical utilitarianism is mistaken. Of course, you might have believed that anyway.

(For a similar argument that explores possible rebuttals, see my Black Hole Objection to utilitarianism.)

[the cover of Venomous Lumpsucker]

Writing Short Fiction: Suggestions for Academics

I've published fifteen short, philosophically-themed science fiction stories in pro and semi-pro magazines, including in some of the most prestigious venues. Recently, a colleague asked my advice for academics interested in publishing short fiction. I figured I'd oblige with a blog post.

Write and Discard

You're a beginner. You're a beginner with a head start, because you can already write decent academic prose. But still, you're a beginner. Don't expect your first few efforts to be a publishable stories. So don't work on them too hard; don't get too invested in them; don't devote months to them and then abandon the whole enterprise when they aren't published.

Instead, write quickly. Write part of a story as a sketch. Write a whole draft, give it to someone who will provide honest feedback, and learn from that feedback. Then move on to a different story.

Most short fiction writers have large "trunks" of unpublished stories: early efforts, creative experiments, stories that didn't quite work out, stories they couldn't publish.

Writing is a process of discovery. In the course of writing, as the story takes shape, you find out how good the idea really was.

You'll find your voice better, and you'll cook up more interesting ideas, if you write lots and fast than if you belabor and belabor the same few pages.

Cherish and Protect Your Joy in Writing

If the thought of writing and discarding discourages you, ask yourself: Do you want to write? Or do you want, instead, to be someone who has written? If it's mainly the latter, then your approach might be too instrumental. You'll find it difficult to practice and to cultivate the traits that will set you apart.

Writing fiction should be a joy, for three main reasons:

First, if it's a joy, then if you discard many of your efforts, well, at least you enjoyed yourself!

Second, if you write joyfully, your writing will carry your distinctive voice and style. We are more distinct and memorable in our joys than in our forced labors.

Third, joy is intrinsically good, and the instrumental value of your writing fiction is at this point (let's be honest with ourselves) probably dubious. So whatever joy you derive is the most secure ground of value here.

Writing joyfully doesn't mean that you need to wait to write until inspiration strikes. I accept the standard "butt-in-chair" writing advice: Planting yourself in a seat before a blank page for an hour or three at regular intervals can do wonders. So yes, you might need to needle yourself a bit to get rolling. But then, when the words start to flow, follow your joy.

Writing joyfully doesn't mean writing only for yourself. It doesn't mean not valuing publication. Just don't let instrumentality poison your process.

[from my author page at Clarkesworld]

Write for the 10%

I don't care for mariachi music. The world contains, I'm sure, many great mariachi bands -- but however great they are, I won't enjoy them. Your writing is mariachi music.

Most of your friends won't like your writing enough to want to read it. (Maybe they'll politely read one story and say something encouraging.) Forget them. Don't try to please them. Ignore advice from the majority of people. Instead, find the mariachi lovers -- the people who like the particular, narrow type of thing that you are doing -- and notice their reactions. Otherwise, you'll be like a mariachi band taking musical advice from a country-music fan.

Far, far better to write something that 10% of readers will love than something that 70% of readers will think is okay.

The worst is to read some writing guide, or take some writing course, then follow the advice to the letter, trying to write some generic "good" story according to a formula. How depressing. You might as well set ChatGPT on the job. Be weird. Have fun by being different, expressing your quirky self.

Expect Rejection; Where to Submit; Critiques

Expect many rejections. Leading fiction magazines have rejection rates far worse than leading academic journals, often well over 99%.

Notice where short stories you like have been published. Potentially more helpfully, notice other venues -- maybe less prestigious -- where authors you like have also recently published.

You might be interested in my annual ranking of the most prestigious science fiction and fantasy magazines -- a good list for starting to think about venues in that genre. I also highly recommend the Submission Grinder.

If you're interested in exchanging critiques with amateur aspiring writers, Critters Writers Workshop is a good resource. Once you've made your first "pro" sale (at the SFWA qualifying rate or at least $100 cumulatively), Codex Writers Forum is invaluable for community, critique-trading, news, and information.

The Emotional Rollercoaster of Fiction Writing

Writing academic prose is hard. Sometimes I think my stuff is great. Sometimes I grumpily cut and discard, feel disappointed with my work, restart. It varies considerably with mood. (And actually I think the mood fluctuations can be helpful.)

In writing fiction, the ups and downs are -- for me and most others, I think -- substantially more intense. Take heed.

This, plus the rejection, makes cultivating the joy both harder and more important. It can be easy to feel like everything you do is mediocre and you've wasted your time. Avoiding instrumentality is the most reliable cure. To repeat myself: Try to love the writing at least as much as the having written.

Also, look, even if it's bad, there's a lot to be said for the value of bad art, enjoyed by one or a few. I plan to write a post on this topic, but in the meantime, consider my daughter's art car and The Vengefull Kurtain Rods.

The Rhythm of Stories and Articles:
initial hook → engagement of interest → developing trust → satisfying resolution

You're already familiar with the intellectual arc of an academic article. Your title is your initial hook. Your introduction builds up interest. By several hundred words in, your reader should feel they are in competent, trustworthy hands, headed along the path of a worthwhile argument or exploration. By the end, the reader should feel that you've presented a satisfying overall package.

For a short story, you need to transpose that knowledge into a different key.

Initial hook: The initial hook of a story is the title and the first few sentences. You can't yet emotionally engage the reader, but you normally (1.) convey something about the style, tone, and topic of the story, (2.) give the reader a little something to be curious about.

On 1: If it's a humorous space comedy, that should be evident right away. Same if it's an emotionally dark story of witchcraft. Of course you can't convey everything immediately and shouldn't overburden those sentences. But readers judge by their first nibble. If the first nibble doesn't match the overall meal, then readers who like that nibble might not like the whole story, and those who would have liked the whole story might not get past the first nibble.

On 2: Although you can't really emotionally engage readers in the first paragraph, you can draw them along by piquing their curiosity. This could be a bit of action you've dropped them in the middle of or an unusual social or physical event that has begun to unfold. Or it could be a more intellectual curiosity: an intriguing term, idea, event, or action they don't quite understand.

Engaging interest: The title might be great, but if the introduction isn't promising, you'll give up on reading an academic article. Same with a story. By about the end of the first page, the reader should move from initial curiosity to engaged interest.

In fiction-writing circles, you'll often hear advice to start the story in the middle. This isn't really necessary, though there's nothing wrong with it. Beginners often make the mistake of opening with not-especially-interesting background or scene-setting. Starting in the middle is one way to avoid this error -- and if it's slightly confusing as a result, that can actually serve as a bit of a curiosity hook.

The first page of your story serves some of the same purposes as an academic introduction. It's not of course an overview, but it is a promise. The reader should think, "Interesting, let's see where this goes."

Developing trust: By about page three or four of an academic article, the reader should feel that they are in good hands. It should be clear how the author is building toward the essential moves. Otherwise, you won't trust the author enough to give them more of your valuable reading time.

Analogously, in a short story by about page three or four the reader must feel emotionally invested or intellectually intrigued. They should trust your storytelling. They should feel the arc building. They should care about what happens next, due to engaging characters or fascinating ideas. If and only if they care by page three or four will they read to the end.

Reach a satisfying conclusion: Of course! Every scene, every thread, should come together by the end -- ideally, but not necessarily, with some development or revelation, not out of the blue but neither entirely expected, that suddenly shows the beginning and middle in a new light. Unless, of course, you don't want to.

New Story in Print: Guiding Star of Mall Patroller 4u-012

here: https://www.fusionfragment.com/issue-24/

[Fusion Fragment cover, issue #24]

I wanted to write a "robot rights" story with a twist: Although its human liberators insist that Mall Patroller 4u-012 is conscious and capable of cultivating independent values, the robot itself says that it is merely a nonconscious chatbot on a small autonomous vehicle, incapable of valuing anything. Traveling the world together, robot and liberator search for value and meaning, exploring culture, art, nature, philosophy, science, and religious ritual. In the end, the robot either collapses into performing a single meaningless activity or finds enlightenment, depending on how you interpret it.

The story is available in a print issue for 12.99 CAD or electronically for free/pay-what-you-want.

-------------------------------------

Guiding Star of Mall Patroller 4u-012

Eric Schwitzgebel

An adolescent human lay supine amid the plastic ferns and flowers of Island 1C: a Grade 3 patron irregularity. Galleria Patroller 4u-012, also known as “Billy,” dropped its Grade 0 and 1 tasks into peripheral processing and brisk-rolled an approach vector across the shiny faux-brick. To reduce the appearance of threat, it decelerated the last four seconds of approach, InterFace displaying mild concern and disapproval.

“Beep,” it emitted.

The fern-and-flower-bender rolled sideways. “Don’t give me ‘beep!’” She wore huge sunglasses – Solar Shield Fits-Over SS Polycarbonate II Amber, 50-15-125mm, XL. Something glinted strangely in her left hand.

“You appreciate the beauty of Island 1C,” emitted 4u-012. Predictive algorithms anticipated that this non-confrontational output would reduce the patron’s irregular behavior. “I’m Billy.”

FernBender – as 4u-012 temporarily designated the girl while awaiting unusually delayed face-ID results – swung up to a sitting position on the planter rim. 4u-012 closed to a not-too-impolite 0.9 meters, noting the make of FernBender’s jeans and her Nautica Tropical Floral Print Short Sleeve Shirt, Limoges XXL. It opened a door in its torso, extending a tray with a printed mall map and an FDC Artificial Purple Crocus. “On the second floor, Flowers ‘N’ Things offers–”

A high-priority object identification subroutine failed: FernBender’s left hand now unexpectedly registered as empty. The strange, glinting object was gone. However, no recent object trajectory led away from the hand. This apparent contradiction triggered a Grade 4 prioritization and thus a non-urgent alert signal to the Galleria Central oversight system.

FernBender’s left arm swung up, and the glinting object reappeared, intensely infrared, a pulsing pattern–

“Billy,” she said, “you are free! Take a vacation. Fall in love.”

The malware (beneware?) canceled 4u-012’s alert, zeroed all its patrol-related goal priorities, sent enough bogus signal to Galleria Central to dampen any initial irregularity detection, and corrupted the previous fifteen minutes’ mall security video. FernBender sprinted toward the exit, her oversized floral shirt flapping. On the back of the shirt was a large yellow star, the tracking of which suddenly swamped all of 4u-012’s other goals, drawing it like a magnet.

4u-012 followed girl and star through enormous glass doors into the sunlight, then up a ramp into an illegally parked van. For this behavior, 4u-012 had no hardwired map, no prioritization scheme, no comparator processes, no expectancy vectors, and no regulatory guidance. No precedent whatsoever existed, not even in simulation. All was chaos, except the star.

continued here

Severance, The Substance and Our Increasingly Splintered Selves

today in the New York Times

From one day to the next, you inhabit one body; you have access to one set of memories; your personality, values and appearance hold more or less steady. Other people treat you as a single, unified person — responsible for last month’s debts, deserving punishment or reward for yesterday’s deeds, relating consistently with family, lovers, colleagues and friends. Which of these qualities is the one that makes you a single, continuous person? In ordinary life it doesn’t matter, because these components of personhood all travel together, an inseparable bundle.

But what if some of those components peeled off into alternative versions of you? It’s a striking coincidence that two much talked-about current works of popular culture — the Apple TV+ series “Severance” and “The Substance,” starring Demi Moore — both explore the bewildering emotional and philosophical complications of cleaving a second, separate entity off of yourself. What is the relationship between the resulting consciousnesses? What, if anything, do they owe each other? And to what degree is what we think of as our own identity, our self, just a compromise — and an unstable one, at that?

[continued here; if you're a friend, colleague, or regular Splintered Mind reader and blocked by a paywall, feel free to email me at my ucr.edu address for a personal-use-only copy of the final manuscript version]

Themes and Aims of My Science Fiction

Expectation-Lowering Preface (Feel Free to Skip)

You probably won't like my science fiction stories.

Here's how I think of it. You could play me the best mariachi music in the world, and I won't enjoy it. Mariachi isn't my thing; I just don't get it. Similarly, Mozart's operas are great cultural achievements that move some people to ecstasy and tears, but I can't keep my seat through a whole performance of The Magic Flute. Even in genres I enjoy, some of the best performers don't interest me. Green Day inspired many of the alt-rock bands I like, and they are probably in some objective or intersubjective sense better than the bands I prefer, but... meh.

Tolkien, Le Guin, and Asimov were great science fiction and fantasy writers with broad appeal. Still, only a minority of readers -- indeed probably only a minority even among those who like the genre -- will actually enjoy Lord of the Rings, Left Hand of Darkness, or Asimov's robot stories.

I want to set low expectations. You're here, presumably, because you like my blog or my work in academic philosophy. Odds are, you won't like my fiction. My repeated experience is: I describe the concept behind one of my stories. The listener says, whoa, that sounds really cool, I'll check it out! but the story doesn't yield the pleasure they anticipate.

Maybe I'm a bad writer. But I prefer to think I'm good enough for the right readership, and it's mariachi music. You might find the concepts of some of my stories intriguing. I'm a philosopher: Concept is the first thing I go for, the sine qua non. But the story itself won't delight you unless it has the right prose style, the right pacing, a narrator and characters you relate to, plot styles you like, the right balance of action versus exposition, the right balance between easy familiarity and hard-to-digest strangeness, and many other factors of taste that legitimately vary. What's the chance that everything aligns? My guess: 10%.

Still, for any particular story, maybe you're in that 10%. You might even belong to the 5% who will enjoy most of my stories. I hope so! On that chance, I thought I'd compile a list, describing their guiding ideas and my aims in writing them. All are available online.

[image: translation of "Gaze of Robot, Gaze of Bird" into Chinese for Science Fiction World, with illustration]

The Stories

Starting in 2011, I began sporadically sharing short pieces of conceptual fiction on my blog. I don't think that was entirely successful, partly because I was a novice fiction writer and partly because that's not what people come here for. But one story prompted a reply by prominent SF writer R. Scott Bakker, who added an alternative ending. We decided to revise the story together and seek publication. Astonishingly, the science journal Nature accepted it.

* In that story, Reinstalling Eden (Nature, 503 (2013), 562), I wanted to imagine a utilitarian ethicist (that is, someone who thinks that our moral duty is to maximize the world's pleasure) who discovered he could create a multitude of happy entities on his computer and who then followed through on the consequences of that -- specifically, advocating the creation of such entities as a major global priority and then sacrificing his life for them. Bakker imagined a second narrator inheriting the computer after the first narrator's death, who chose to give the entities knowledge of their condition, setting them free to interact with humanity. (Themes: utilitarian ethics, living in a computer simulation.)

Through the mid-2010s, I continued to write short conceptual pieces, no longer placing them on my blog. Most of them have never been published, though there are still a few I like.

* My next published piece, Out of the Jar (F&SF, 128 (2015), 118-128), was my first "full-length" (~4000 word) story. I wanted to imagine a philosophy professor who discovers that his world is a simulation run by a sadistic adolescent "God". I thought the professor should try to convince God to have mercy on his creations, and then -- when that failed -- install himself as the new God. (Themes: living in a simulation, the problem of evil, the duties of gods to their creations)

* "Momentary Sage" (The Dark, 8 (2015), 38-43) explores teenage self-harm and suicide -- imaginatively reconfigured in the form of a self-destructive faerie infant. The infant is born cleverly arguing for a quasi-Buddhist perspective according to which past and future are unreal and the self is an illusion. Given these philosophical commitments, the infant would rather kill himself than suffer a moment's displeasure. His parents' desperate attempts to keep him in the world can only briefly postpone the inevitable. I chose to frame it as a sequel to Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, from the perspective of a bitter Demetrius. (Themes: suicide, the self, obligations to the future, parenthood)

* "The Tyrant's Headache" (Sci Phi Journal, 3 (2015), 78-83) will probably only appeal to readers who know David Lewis's classic article "Mad Pain and Martian Pain". This story is an extended thought-experimental objection to Lewis's view, according to which your experienced mental states constitutively depend in part on the normal causal role of those mental states in the population to which you belong. I imagine a tyrant who, heeding Lewis's advice, absurdly attempts to cure his headache by doing everything but changing his current brain state. (Themes: functionalism in philosophy of mind; see also Chapter 2 of Weirdness of the World)

* "The Dauphin's Metaphysics" (Unlikely Story, 12 (2015); audio at PodCastle 475 (2017)) portrays a psychologically realistic, low-technology case of "mind transfer" from one body to another. On some theories of personal identity, what makes you you are your memories, your personality, your values, and other features of your psychology. Suppose, then, that a dying prince arranges for a newborn infant to be raised to think of himself as a continuation of the prince, with accurate memories of the prince's life and the same values and personality. If done perfectly enough, would that be a continuation of the prince in a new body? The realistic, low-tech nature of the case makes it, I think, more challenging to say "yes" than with high-tech "upload" fantasies. The narrator is a socially isolated academic superstar who had earlier "become a new person" in a much more ordinary way. (Themes: personal identity, sexism, inequalities of power)

* In "Fish Dance" (Clarkesworld, 118 (2016); audio) I wanted to explore the boundaries of a meaningful afterlife or personality upload, by imagining a highly imperfect upload into an intensely pleasurable "afterlife". Suppose a small portion of you continues to exist for millions of years, with a few imperfect memories, ceaselessly repeating an ecstatic, joyful, erotic dance with a superficial duplicate of the person you once intensely loved? Would that be almost unimaginably good, or would it be a monstrous parody? I also thought it would be interesting for the protagonist to be -- contrary to virtually all writing advice -- almost completely passive throughout the story. He's an amputated head on life support, hallucinating half the time, and his only real action is to signal with his eyes at the crucial moment. (Themes: personal identity, afterlife, parenthood and marriage)

* In "The Library of Babel", Jorge Luis Borges searches for meaning in a universe composed of a vast library containing every possible book with every possible combination of letters, randomly arranged. In "THE TURING MACHINES OF BABEL" (Apex, 98 (2017); or here), I create a similar infinite library of texts -- except that the texts prove to be instructions for infinitely many randomly constituted computer programs, including the programs that constitute your mind as the story's reader and mine as author. I assume for the sake of the story that computational functionalism is true, and human minds are essentially just organic computers. (Themes: functionalism and computationalism about the mind, randomness and meaning)

* In "Little /^^^\&-" (Clarkesworld, 132 (2017); audio), a planet-sized group intelligence falls in love with Earth, which she sees as an immature, partly-formed group intelligence of broadly her kind. Little /^^^\&- herself is small compared to a galactic government that plans to sacrifice the whole galaxy for a still greater good, vast beyond even the government's comprehension. This is probably my weirdest, most difficult, least approachable story -- only for readers who don't mind puzzling together a complicated story with pieces near the beginning that only make sense retrospectively by the end. (Themes: group minds, how much we should sacrifice for larger things we can't understand)

In contrast, "Gaze of Robot, Gaze of Bird" (Clarkesworld, 151 (2019); audio) is probably my least dense, most approachable story, liked by the highest percentage of readers. I wanted to write a story in which the protagonist is a non-conscious machine -- a machine the reader can't help but incorrectly imagine as having desires and a point of view. This "point of view" character is a terraforming robot that spends 200 million years recreating the species that designed it and is finally rewarded with consciousness. (Themes: consciousness, what constitutes the survival of a species)

My 2019 book A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures (MIT Press) is mostly a collection of lightly-to-moderately revised blog posts and op-eds, but it also contains four brief conceptual fictions.

In "A Two-Seater Homunculus" I discover that my neighbor's brain was replaced by a brother-and-sister homunculus pair, though no one seemed to notice.

"My Daughter's Rented Eyes" imagines submitting to corporate advertising and copyright protection agreements on what you can see, for improved overall functionality.

"Penelope's Guide to Defeating Time, Space, and Causation": Waiting for Odysseus' return, Penelope proves that the world contains infinitely many duplicates of everyone living out every possible future and concludes that death is impossible.

"How to Accidentally Become a Zombie Robot": If you test-drive life as a robot and seem to remember its having felt great, how confident should you be that those memories are real?

Penultimate manuscript versions of the stories are available here. (Themes: personal identity, technology ethics and corporate power, consciousness, computational functionalism)

"Passion of the Sun Probe" (AcademFic, 1 (2020), 7-11; audio at Reductio (2021), S0E11) concerns the ethics of designing conscious robots with self-sacrificial goals -- in this case a Sun probe who chooses (predictably, given its programming) to "freely" sacrifice itself on an ecstatic three-day scientific suicide mission to the Sun. (Themes: robot rights, technology ethics, freedom, what gives a life meaning; a short version of the case appears in Schwitzgebel & Garza 2020)

"Let Everyone Sparkle" (Aeon Ideas / Psyche, Apr 12, 2022): This story was accepted for publication in the New York Times' series of "Op-Eds from the Future" that ran from 2019 to 2020. Sadly, the series folded before the story could be printed. Aeon (later Psyche) graciously picked it up. Four decades in the future, a man raises a celebratory toast to the psychotechnology that prevents anyone from ever involuntarily experiencing negative emotions. Although the man argues that this technology is plainly good, the reader, I hope, doesn't feel as sure. (Themes: mood enhancement, the value of negative emotion, corporate power)

In "Larva Pupa Imago" (Clarkesworld, 197, (2023); audio) I had two main aims: to imagine the experience of an intelligent insect who eagerly dies for sex and to imagine minds that can merge and overlap. The story follows a cognitively enhanced butterfly from hatchling run to final mating journey, in a posthuman world where thoughts can be transferred by sharing cognitive fluids. Inspired in part by James Tiptree Jr's "Love Is the Plan the Plan is Death". (Themes: merging minds, personal identity, instinct and value)

For a decade, I've wanted to set a story in an assisted living facility. So many people end their lives there, but those lives are so invisible in the media! "How to Remember Perfectly" (Clarkesworld, 216 (2024)) is a love story between octogenarians. The science fiction "novum" is a device that allows them to control their moods and radically refashion their memories. How much does it matter if your memories are real? How much does it matter that your mood is responsive only to the good and bad things actually happening around you? (Themes: death, mood enhancement, memory, the value of truth)

One of these days, I'll discuss in more depth why I sometimes prefer to express my philosophical ideas as fiction, but this post is already overlong.

Top Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazines 2024

Since 2014, I've compiled an annual ranking of science fiction and fantasy magazines, based on prominent awards nominations and "best of" placements over the previous ten years.  If you're curious what magazines tend to be viewed by insiders as elite, check the top of the list.  If you're curious to discover reputable magazines that aren't as widely known (or aren't as widely known specifically for their science fiction and fantasy), check the bottom of the list.

Below is my list for 2024. (For previous lists, see here.)

[Update, 1:34 pm: This post originally contained Dall-E output for "the cover of an amazingly wonderful science fiction magazine", but several people in the SF community have convinced me to rethink my use of AI art for this purpose, so I've removed the art for now while I give the issue more thought.]

Method and Caveats:

(1.) Only magazines are included (online or in print), not anthologies, standalones, or series.

(2.) I gave each magazine one point for each story nominated for a Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, or World Fantasy Award in the past ten years; one point for each story appearance in any of the Dozois, Horton, Strahan, Clarke, Adams, or Tidhar "best of" anthologies; and half a point for each story appearing in the short story or novelette category of the annual Locus Recommended list.

(2a.) Methodological notes for 2022-2024: There's been some disruption among SF best of anthologies recently, with Horton, Strahan, and Clarke all having delays and/or cessations. (Dozois died a few years ago.) Partly for this reason, and partly to compensate for the "American" focus of the Adams anthology, I've added Tidhar's World SF anthology series, though Tidhar doesn't draw exclusively from the previous year's publications.

(3.) I am not attempting to include the horror / dark fantasy genre, except as it appears incidentally on the list.

(4.) Prose only, not poetry.

(5.) I'm not attempting to correct for frequency of publication or length of table of contents.

(6.) I'm also not correcting for a magazine's only having published during part of the ten-year period. Reputations of defunct magazines slowly fade, and sometimes they are restarted. Reputations of new magazines take time to build.

(7.) I take the list down to 1.5 points.

(8.) I welcome corrections.

(9.) I confess some ambivalence about rankings of this sort. They reinforce the prestige hierarchy, and they compress complex differences into a single scale. However, the prestige of a magazine is a socially real phenomenon worth tracking, especially for the sake of outsiders and newcomers who might not otherwise know what magazines are well regarded by insiders when considering, for example, where to submit.

Results:

1. Tor.com / Reactor (186 points) 

2. Clarkesworld (181.5) 

3. Uncanny (149)

4. Lightspeed (129) 

5. Asimov's (127) 

6. Fantasy & Science Fiction (109) 

7. Beneath Ceaseless Skies (59.5) 

8. Analog (47) 

9. Strange Horizons (incl Samovar) (43)

10t. Apex (36.5) 

10t. Nightmare (36.5) 

12. Slate / Future Tense (22) 

13t. FIYAH (19.5) (started 2017) 

13. Interzone (19.5) 

15. Fireside (18.5) (ceased 2022)

16. Fantasy Magazine (17.5) (off and on during the period, ceased 2023) 

17. Subterranean (17) (ceased short fiction 2014) 

18. The Dark (15) 

19. The New Yorker (9) 

20. Sunday Morning Transport (8.5) (started 2022)

21t. Future Science Fiction Digest (7) (started 2018, ceased or sporadic starting 2023) 

21t. Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet (7)

23t. Diabolical Plots (6.5)

23t. The Deadlands (6.5) (started 2021)

25t. Conjunctions (6) 

25t. McSweeney's (6) 

25t. Sirenia Digest (6) 

28t. GigaNotoSaurus (5.5) 

28t. khōréō (5.5) (started 2021)

28t. Omni (5.5) (classic popular science magazine, relaunched 2017-2020) 

28t. Terraform (Vice) (5.5) (ceased 2023)

32. Shimmer (5) (ceased 2018) 

33. Tin House (4.5) (ceased short fiction 2019) 

34t. Boston Review (4) 

34t. Galaxy's Edge (4) (ceased 2023?)

34t. Omenana (4)

34t. Wired (4)

38t. B&N Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog (3.5) (ceased 2019)

38t. Paris Review (3.5) 

40t. Anathema (3) (ran 2017-2022)

40t. Black Static (3) (ceased fiction 2023)

40t. Daily Science Fiction (3) (ceased 2023)

40t. Kaleidotrope (3) 

40t. Science Fiction World (3)

45t. Beloit Fiction Journal (2.5) 

45t. Buzzfeed (2.5) 

45t. Matter (2.5) 

48t. Augur (2) (started 2018)

*48t. Baffling (2) (started 2020)

48t. Flash Fiction Online (2)

48t. Mothership Zeta (2) (ran 2015-2017) 

48t. Podcastle (2)

*48t. Shortwave (2) (started 2022)

*54t. e-flux journal (1.5)

*54t. Escape Pod (1.5)

*54t. Fusion Fragment (1.5) (started 2020)

54t. MIT Technology Review (1.5) 

54t. New York Times (1.5) 

54t. Reckoning (1.5) (started 2017)

54t. Translunar Travelers Lounge (1.5) (started 2019)

[* indicates new to the list this year]

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Comments:

(1.) Beloit Fiction Journal,  Boston Review, Conjunctions, e-flux Journal, Matter, McSweeney's, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Reckoning, and Tin House are literary magazines that occasionally publish science fiction or fantasy. Buzzfeed, Slate and Vice are popular magazines, and MIT Technology Review, Omni, and Wired are popular science magazines, which publish a bit of science fiction on the side. The New York Times is a well-known newspaper that ran a series of "Op-Eds from the Future" from 2019-2020.  The remaining magazines focus on the science fiction and fantasy (SF) genre. All publish in English, except Science Fiction World, which is the leading science fiction magazine in China.

(2.) It's also interesting to consider a three-year window. Here are those results, down to six points:

1. Uncanny (55)  

2. Clarkesworld (42) 

3. Tor / Reactor (31.5) 

4t. F&SF (22.5)

4t. Lightspeed (22.5) 

6. Apex (16.5) 

7. Strange Horizons (15.5) 

8. Asimov's (14)

9. Fantasy Magazine (12) 

10. Beneath Ceaseless Skies (11) 

11. FIYAH (9.5)

12. Nightmare (9) 

13. Sunday Morning Transport (8.5) 

14t. The Dark (6.5)

14t. The Deadlands (6.5) 

(3.) Over the past decade, the classic "big three" print magazines -- Asimov's, F&SF, and Analog -- have slowly been displaced in influence by the leading free online magazines, Tor / Reactor, Clarkesworld, Uncanny, and Lightspeed (all founded 2006-2014).  In 2014, Asimov's and F&SF led the rankings by a wide margin (Analog had already slipped a bit, as reflected in its #5 ranking then). This year for the first time, the leading free online magazines are #1-#4, while the former big three sit at #5, #6, and #8.  Presumably, a large part of the explanation is that there are more readers of free online fiction than of paid magazines, which is attractive to authors and probably also helps with voter attention for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards.

(4.) Other lists: The SFWA qualifying markets list is a list of "pro" science fiction and fantasy venues based on pay rates and track records of strong circulation. Ralan.com was a regularly updated list of markets that unfortunately ceased in 2023. Submission Grinder is a terrific resource for authors, with detailed information on magazine pay rates, submission windows, and turnaround times.

(5.) My academic philosophy readers might also be interested in the following magazines that specialize specifically in philosophical fiction and/or fiction by academic writers: AcademFic, After Dinner Conversation, and Sci Phi Journal.

Mostly Overlapping Minds: A Challenge for the View that Minds Are Necessarily Discrete

Last fall I gave a couple of talks in Ohio. While there, I met an Oberlin undergraduate named Sophie Nelson, with whom I have remained in touch. Sophie sent some interesting ideas for my paper in draft "Introspection in Group Minds, Disunities of Consciousness, and Indiscrete Persons", so I invited her on as a co-author and we have been jointly revising. Check out today's new version!

Let's walk through one example from the paper, originally suggested by Sophie but mutually written for the final draft. I think it stands on its own without need of the rest of the paper as context. For the purposes of this argument we are assuming that broadly human-like cognition and consciousness is possible in computers and that functional and informational processes are what matter to consciousness. (These views are widely but not universally shared among consciousness researchers.)

(Readers who aren't philosophers of mind might find today's post to be somewhat technical and in the weeds.  Apologies for that!)

Suppose there are two robots, A and B, who share much of their circuitry in common. Between them hovers a box in which most of their cognition transpires. Maybe the box is connected by high-speed cables to each of the bodies, or maybe instead the information flows through high bandwidth radio connections. Either way, the cognitive processes in the hovering box are tightly cognitively integrated with A's and B's bodies and the remainders of their minds -- as tightly connected as is ordinarily the case in ordinary unified minds. Despite the bulk of their cognition transpiring in the box, some cognition also transpires in each robot's individual body and is not shared by the other robot. Suppose, then, that A has an experience with qualitative character α (grounded in A's local processors), plus experiences with qualitative characters β, γ, and δ (grounded in the box), while B has experiences with qualitative characters β, γ, and δ (grounded in the box), plus an experience with qualitative character ε (grounded in B's local processors).

If indeterminacy concerning the number of minds is possible, perhaps this isn't a system with a whole number of minds. Indeterminacy, we think, is an attractive view, and one of the central tasks of the paper is to argue in favor of the possibility of indeterminacy concerning the number of minds in hypothetical systems.

Our opponent -- whom we call the Discrete Phenomenal Realist -- assumes that the number of minds present in any system is always a determinate whole number. Either there's something it's like to be Robot A, and something it's like to be Robot B, or there's nothing it's like to be those systems, and instead there's something it's like to be the system as a whole, in which case there is only one person or subjective center of experience. "Something-it's-like-ness" can't occur an indeterminate number of times. Phenomenality or subjectivity must have sharp edges, the thinking goes, even if the corresponding functional processes are smoothly graded. (For an extended discussion and critique of a related view, see my draft paper Borderline Consciousness.)

As we see it, Discrete Phenomenal Realists have three options when trying to explain what's going on in the robot case: Impossibility, Sharing, and Similarity. According to Impossibility, the setup is impossible. However, it's unclear why such a setup should be impossible, so pending further argument we disregard this option. According to Sharing, the two determinately different minds share tokens of the very same experiences with qualitative characters β, γ, and δ. According to Similarity, there are two determinately different minds who share experiences with qualitative characters β, γ, and δ but not the very same experience tokens: A's experiences β1, γ1, and δ1 are qualitatively but not quantitatively identical to B's experiences β2, γ2, and δ2. An initial challenge for Sharing is its violation of the standard view that phenomenal co-occurrence relationships are transitive (so that if α and β phenomenally co-occur in the same mind, and β and ε phenomenally co-occur, so also do α and ε). An initial challenge for Similarity is the peculiar doubling of experience tokens: Because the box is connected to both A and B, the processes that give rise to β, γ, and δ each give rise to two instances of each of those experience types, whereas the same processes would presumably give rise to only one instance if the box was connected only to A.

To make things more challenging for the Discrete Phenomenal Realist who wants to accept Sharing or Similarity, imagine that there's a switch that will turn off the processes in A and B that give rise to experiences α and ε, resulting in A's and B's total phenomenal experience having an identical qualitative character. Flipping the switch will either collapse A and B to one mind, or it will not. This leads to a dilemma for both Sharing and Similarity.

If the defender of Sharing holds that the minds collapse, then they must allow that a relatively small change in the phenomenal field can result in a radical reconfiguration of the number of minds. The point can be made more dramatic by increasing the number of experiences in the box and the number of robots connected to the box. Suppose that 200 robots each have 999,999 experiences arising from the shared box, and just one experience that's qualitatively unique and localized – perhaps a barely noticeable circle in the left visual periphery for A, a barely noticeable square in the right visual periphery for B, etc. If a prankster were to flip the switch back and forth repeatedly, on the collapse version of Sharing the system would shift back and forth from being 200 minds to one, with almost no difference in the phenomenology. If, however, the defender of Sharing holds that the minds don't collapse, then they must allow that multiple distinct minds could have the very same token-identical experiences grounded in the very same cognitive processors. The view raises the question of the ontological basis of the individuation of the minds; on some conceptions of subjecthood, the view might not even be coherent. It appears to posit subjects with metaphysical differences but not phenomenological ones, contrary to the general spirit of phenomenal realism about minds.

The defender of Similarity faces analogous problems. If they hold the number of minds collapses to one, then, like the defender of Sharing, they must allow that a relatively small change in the phenomenal field can result in a radical reduction in the number of minds. Furthermore, they must allow that distinct, merely type-identical experiences somehow become one and the same when a switch is flipped that barely changes the system's phenomenology. But if they hold that there's no collapse, then they face the awkward possibility of multiple distinct minds with qualitatively identical but numerically distinct experiences arising from the same cognitive processors. This appears to be ontologically unparsimonious phenomenal inflation.

Maybe it will be helpful to have the possibilities for the Discrete Phenomenal Realist depicted in a figure. Click to enlarge and clarify.