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The Shattering Peace Now Out in Trade Paperback

Posted on August 11, 2026    Posted by John Scalzi      5 Comments

That’s it; that’s the post!

Well, also that it’s a New York Times best seller and also nominated for the Dragon Award (by itself) and the Hugo Award (as part of the Old Man’s War series), got great reviews and also I was very happy with it as a novel. If you’ve not read it before, now is a great time to do so. Get it wherever you buy books, but your local bookstore especially if there’s one you particularly like and want to support.

— JS

I Ate a Large Meal of Indian Food and Foolishly Assumed I Would Then Be Able to Function in the Afternoon, So Here is Saja and Charlie to Cover For Me While I Recover

Posted on August 10, 2026    Posted by John Scalzi      24 Comments

The Indian food was delicious and also literally all my blood went to my stomach, causing my cognitive abilities to throttle to maybe, like, 30%, so, uh, yeah, not a lot of work done after lunch. I did take a nap, though. Which was important, I think.

Anyway, Saja and Charlie are pals. Isn’t that nice?

How are you?

— JS

New Cover: “So Alive”

Posted on August 8, 2026    Posted by John Scalzi      4 Comments

Yes, I’m slowly working my way through the 80s on KROQ. This one is from Love & Rockets, a spin-off of Bauhaus, but a lot more commercially accessible. This is their biggest hit (it went to #3 in the US and #1 in some other countries). My version is slightly more upbeat than the original, and also features a guitar part that’s probably more at home in New Order than either Bauhaus or L&R. And yes, it’s me playing the guitar; I have so many, I should really start playing them more. I’m also singing; this song is square in my range, and also, covers about four notes. Super easy.

Enjoy!

— JS

Generative “AI”: The Guitar Hero of Creativity

Posted on August 6, 2026    Posted by John Scalzi      49 Comments

So, you’re a person who has decided to embark on a creative journey of self-expression — to make art, in other words. First off, this is awesome! The universe needs more people making art, whether that art is writing, painting, music or any other form that humans are capable of creating. You have the drive, now all you need is to find an instrument. Will it be a guitar? A pen? A paint brush? A camera? Yarn for fiber art? What will you choose to take those first steps into a larger creative world?

What? You say you’re just going to type prompts into a generative “AI” interface? After all, with a single sentence, generative “AI” can plop out something that seems passably like human-created music, or writing, or illustration, or whatever. It’s super-easy to use and results, at least at first glance, look… pretty good! It seems like an effective way to jump into a creative life, no?

Well… there are lots of counter-arguments creative people might make to this (not the least of which is that prompting a generative “AI” makes one an artist exactly as much as pushing a button on an automated hotel pancake maker makes one a chef), but let me attempt a metaphor that I think works pretty well:

Remember Guitar Hero? It was a really cool rhythm video game where a player, armed with a special guitar-shaped button controller, would pick a song, and then press the buttons, singly or in combination, in time to visual cues on a screen. You got points for hitting buttons at the correct time, and for doing that lots of times in a row. It was fun and at higher levels you could absolutely give your fingers a workout — let’s face it, if you could get through the entire of “Through the Fire and Flames” on expert level, you were a friggin’ god.

What you weren’t was a guitar player.

That’s because nothing about Guitar Hero taught you how to play guitar — what it taught you was how to use the guitar-shaped controller for the game. Was it a skill pressing the buttons at the right time? Yes! But it was a non-transferrable skill that had no application for the actual musical instrument. The game’s gameplay mechanic doesn’t map to the mechanics of a guitar in any meaningful sense; it doesn’t teach you scales or chords or how to put them together in new and unexpected ways to create something original. All you could do with Guitar Hero was use the controller in the way the game-makers wanted you to, in time with the songs they chose, to accrue points and achievements that they specified.

Sure, it’s all gamified and fun and even addictive, but at the end of the day no outside, transferable skill accrues to the player. To do that, you have to set the controller down, pick up an actual guitar, and start another, entirely different journey. And perhaps some Guitar Hero player did or will, which is awesome. It means at some point they were not satisfied with pretending to play the guitar, following someone else’s rules and set-up. They still started, effectively, at zero. There was a whole new skill tree to be learned that had very little to do with the game, outside of the shape of the controller.

Being a Guitar Hero player did not — and does not! — equal being a guitar player.

So, let’s come back to “AI,” which in this case is “generative ‘AI,'” the sort which powers most consumer-facing “AI” like ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude or Grok. Like Guitar Hero, generative “AI” has a vast database of artist’s work to draw from (but unlike Guitar Hero, whose makers licensed that work and compensated the musicians and songwriters, most generative “AI” training data is pirated and uncompensated). Like Guitar Hero, generative “AI” is programmed by its makers; its outputs are to a greater or lesser extent shaped by those makers through algorithms and weights, which is why Anthropic’s Claude “AI” has a different “personality” than say, “Grok,” and why “AI” text and images have a particular tone and texture which is easy enough to clock when you see enough of it. Like Guitar Hero, “AI” is fun to play with and the results, again, at least superficially, can be pretty cool. A well-tuned prompt can create some initially impressive results.

But, like Guitar Hero, no outside creative skill has been acquired or developed. Every result is self-contained within the domain of a program whose owners have their own goals and agenda, and to whom nearly every benefit accrues. Material generated by “AI” can’t be owned by the prompter if it is purely generated by the “AI,” and even partial “AI” generation in a work raises legal concerns regarding rights and ownership. In a very real sense “AI” can’t even be directly controlled — prompting is an interface with the underlying weights and algorithms of the “AI,” chosen and directed by others. The more granular the prompting, the more the underlying “AI” can use its weights and algorithms to fulfill the request, but at the end of the day, you still get what you get. If it’s not exactly what you wanted you have to hope another prompt will get it closer. You keep pressing the button on the automated pancake maker, hoping it will make exactly the pancake you want.

Prompting, like playing with the Guitar Hero controller, doesn’t teach you how to do anything else. Prompting doesn’t give one the eventual skill to sit at a keyboard and write a short story or a novel. It doesn’t give one the ability to play a musical instrument. It doesn’t let you pick up a pen and create a drawing. The skill required for all of those — not to mention the life experience to create meaning with them — lives somewhere else. When you’re using “AI,” you can’t get there from here. You have to start again from zero. The time you spent in “AI” doesn’t count for this, except in the very limited sense of showing you what you don’t want.

Just like being good at Guitar Hero does not make one a guitar player, being able to prompt doesn’t easily make one a creator. At best, it tells what is essentially a statistical engine what you want it to output based on the vast database of other people’s work that it is drawing from. Nothing it cobbles together gives you the experience of creation; the only benefit of that crank of the “AI” flywheel is to the company that owns the “AI.” The image or music or video or text is not from you, it’s just something you asked for. You’re not the creator. You are, perhaps, the creator’s manager.

And, look, for some people that’s enough! There is a reason why legions of Facebookers flood their feeds with images and video of “AI” cats (and why, rather less adorably, legions of bots flood those same feeds with fake images of people their prompters want you to hate). Lots of people don’t want to be “creative” in any meaningful sense of the world, they just want those images of cats having coffee or whatever. Not everyone who played Guitar Hero wanted to actually play guitar, either. That’s fine (well, for Guitar Hero. “AI” has resource and rights issues to deal with no matter how it’s used. But I trust we all understand where I’m going here).

But if you want to create, it helps to create. You can’t just prompt your way into it. You have to do it. You have to learn and work and build skills and ability. You have to be bad at it before you can be good at it. Your creativity has to be inherent and portable, something you carry with you wherever you go, not contingent on a service provided by billionaires who have their finger on the scale of how that service does its thing.

Because, among any other thing, who is to say how long any of these “AI” are going to be around? The last installment of Guitar Hero came out more than a decade ago. The online version of the game shut down in 2020. Everyone who ever had mad skills on Guitar Hero has had those skills out to pasture for a while now. Now, apparently there’s going to be an updated version of the Guitar Hero concept later this year, which is cool and I hope is as much fun as the previous version. We’ll see how long it lasts. Meanwhile, as long as their fingers and shoulders hold out, everyone who ever learned guitar still has those skills and the ability to use them.

So, keep that in mind as your start your journey of self-expression. You have a whole bunch of paths you can go down here. Some will be harder and take more time than others. But those are the ones that are more likely to get you to where you want to go, to develop the skills and abilities to let you say what you want to say, how you want to say it, without having to rely on anyone or anything else, to make it happen. Your choice! Pick well.

— JS

Saja Wants You To Think About What You Did

Posted on August 5, 2026    Posted by John Scalzi      21 Comments

Did you think you’d get away with it? Did you think he wouldn’t find out? Saja always finds out. And now you’ll just have to live with him knowing.

In other news, we’re coming right up on the one-year anniversary of Saja’s official adoption. He was clearly alive before then, so being more than one year old now, he’s officially no longer a kitten, he’s just now a teen cat. Trust me, he has the attitude to match.

I’ll probably note his anniversary when it happens, but in the meantime: Enjoy Saja judging you. As he would.

— JS

The Shattering Peace a Dragon Award Finalist + 2026 Hugo Voting Reminder

Posted on August 3, 2026    Posted by John Scalzi      4 Comments

Here’s some nice news to start the week: The Shattering Peace is a finalist for the Dragon Award this year, in the category of Science Fiction Novel. Also in the category:

The Faith of Beasts by James S.A. Corey
Radiant Star by Ann Leckie
Operation Bounce House by Matt Dinniman
Slow Gods by Claire North
God’s Junk Drawer by Peter Clines

That’s a very excellent peer group to be in this year! Also, I have lots of friends and colleagues in the other categories as well, which makes me happy. It’s lovely when lovely people get recognized for their work. The entire ballot is here, if you would like to see it.

Also, if you would like to vote for the Dragon Awards this year, well, you can: It’s free and open to anyone. Follow that link above and then click on “Register to Vote” and it will walk you through the steps to do so. If you want to vote for The Shattering Peace, awesome, but if there’s another finalist in the category you’d like to vote for, that’s awesome too.

On a similar topic, we’re down to the last few days of voting for this year’s Hugo Awards, where the Old Man’s War series (of which The Shattering Peace is a part) is finalist in the category of Best Series. If you’re a member of Los Angeles Worldcon, you are eligible to vote in the Hugos. If you’ve not already done so, now is an excellent time to get it done. Here’s a link to the informational page on how to vote for the Hugos. The nice thing about the Hugos is that they are a ranked-choice ballot, so no matter who the finalist is, you can genuinely say “I voted for you.” Which is nice when you think about it.

In any event: Thrilled that my books are finalists this year. If you feel like voting for either the Dragon or the Hugo, that would be lovely (even if it isn’t for my stuff). The more votes, the better.

— JS

New Cover Song: “Ode to Somewhere”

Posted on August 1, 2026    Posted by John Scalzi      3 Comments

This cover song has an interesting story to it, which is that it’s a song from a video game called “Deathloop.” In the video game, the singer is supposed to have been a huge star but has lately gone kind of venal around the edges, and also there’s a whole time loop thing going on which necessitates the player character needing to kill the singer (and several other people) for, you know, reasons. It all makes sense in the context of the game, and the game itself is a hell of a lot of fun. I absolutely recommend it.

The in-game singer may be a jerk, but this song (written and performed by Erich Tabla with Jeff Cummings on vocals) is really good, and in fact was one of my favorite songs of its year, with a real 60s torch-song feel to it. My version is a little more electronic-y and revved up on the drums, because apparently I do that. Nevertheless I think it’s not bad, and I hope you like it.

Also, since it’s possible you may not have ever heard this song unless you played the game, if you’re curious as to how the original sounds, here it is:

— JS

Another Reason Not to Use “AI” For Your Writing

Posted on July 31, 2026    Posted by John Scalzi      54 Comments

Back in February I did a long post about “AI” and why I wouldn’t use it for my own writing, and one of the reasons I gave was “the fact that ‘AI’-generated text is not copyrightable and I don’t want any issues of ownership clouding my work.” Well guess what? A hot and buzzy debut novel has been pulled from publishing and film/TV consideration over concerns that “AI” was used to make it. Here is one of the relevant bits from the article:

“Basically, questions were raised over whether the author used AI as a tool in the writing of the book. The problem: publishers and movie companies may not be able to register copyright and come away with a clear title chain if there are certain AI elements in the mix. That’s because AI-aided copy is an amalgamation of many other copyrighted works.

“From what I’m hearing, this will be an important teaching moment for writers with aspirations to become serious bankable authors. The lesson: stay the hell away from AI.” 

Am I feeling smug about having called this six months out? Yes, a little, but mostly not. I don’t deserve credit for noting this would be an issue because it was already a clear legal point: “AI”-generated work is not copyrightable, so if you have any “AI”-generated work in your material you open the door to legal issues. But also, the concern here is slightly different: The issue appears not to be that “AI” material isn’t copyrightable, the issue is that “AI” is trained on copyrighted material, so prose generated from it could be contested by the original copyright holders.

Now, from a practical point of view this could be a stretch to prove unless the “AI” farts out entire paragraphs of prose unaltered from its training material (which, to be clear, it can do and has done), and those end up in the finished book. But if you’re a lawyer for a publisher or a film/TV production house, even the hint of possible legal entanglement is enough to raise the shields. It’s already in contracts for both film/TV and for publishing houses that the author attests their work is wholly original, so, again, any hint that anything is other than that brings things to a screeching halt. As we have seen.

This is a situation that is now always on the table for writers, particularly newer writers with no track record and nothing available for publishers and producers to judge their work against. How do newer writers fight against an allegation of using “AI” to write their work? Publishers and producers are now trying to vet new work with “‘AI’ checkers,” but the problem with those is that they are also “AI,” and they are unreliable as fuck, so we’re back to where we started. It’s a bad situation. Not great for any writer these days! But again, especially so for newer writers without a backlog of pre-“AI” material at their disposal that can, at least, show the writer was already writing without assistance for years.

And in fact, as I note above in the attached Bluesky post, I think that for the reasonably near future, it’s possible that older works — ones written prior to, say, November 2022, when ChatGPT made its public debut — will become more desirable for film/TV optioning and adaptation, because they were clearly written without “AI” assistance, and there is a clear chain of title when it comes to copyright. Why bother with new stuff you can’t be confident about? Or, if you are going to bother with new stuff, you’re going to go to the new stuff from the writers who have lots of old stuff (i.e., could obviously write without “AI” assistance). If they have a long-standing and public “No-‘AI'” stance, so much the better. Which is great for writers like, uhhhhhh, me, and don’t think I haven’t already suggested so to my film/TV reps. But, again, it’s not great for newer writers.

Which is unfair. It’s not fair that newer writers will have to prove (to a larger extent than more established writers) that they can actually write, and that what they’ve written is actually their own work, not the result of a prompt. It’s especially unfair when the makers of the tools writers use to write — I’m looking at you, Microsoft and Google — are frantically stuffing “AI” tools into the programs writers rely on. No, Microsoft, I don’t fucking want Copilot to “help me write” in Word, and no, Google, I don’t fucking want Gemini to “help me write” in Google Docs. The very fact these “AI”s are hovering around my writing at all is bad enough from a provenance standpoint. These “AI” tools are making it harder for all writers in this regard, not easier.

I don’t think at this point in time anyone is ever going to accuse me of using “AI” to write anything; I’ve been loud about it long enough, and have a long enough publishing history, that it’s clear that I don’t and won’t. But how will a newer (or lesser-known and less publicly loud) writer prove their writing is their own? Will they have to use versioning to show progression of the manuscript? Email chapters to their editors as they go along? Revert to typewriters and handwritten drafts? At some point it’s entirely possible that publishers (or the publishers’ lawyers) will require writers to “show their work” with regard to the novels they submit — be able to present concrete evidence that everything they write came out of their brain, and not a prompt.

In any event, the Deadline article is correct: If you’re a writer who hopes to get your work into film and TV, or grab one of those big publishing deals, stay the hell away from “AI.” Don’t incorporate it into your writing process; every part of the process needs to be demonstrably free of any “AI” input because “AI” training data is full of other people’s copyrights. It didn’t have to be this way — “AI” companies could have just as easily trained their LLMs on public domain or licensed material instead of grabbing pirated works and letting God sort it out — but what they should have done and what they did do are two different things, and we have to live in the now. And in the now, “AI” inputs are inherently untrustable, from a copyright perspective.

Don’t incorporate “AI” into any part of your publishing process, either: Don’t use “AI” editing, don’t use “AI” art, don’t use “AI” translation, don’t use “AI” anything that calls into dispute whether your work is actually yours. Using “AI” cover art, for example, will immediately call into question what else in the book is “AI.” Every other aspect of the book is implicitly tarred with the same “AI” brush. When I say that I have it in my contracts that I require every aspect of my book production to be done by humans, it’s not just because I want to honor human work and input. It’s also because I’m protecting my own reputation by doing so.

Just… don’t use “AI,” okay? Take comfort in the fact that millennia of writers and authors and storytellers got along just fine without it and you can too. None of them were so special that you can’t do what they did. And this way, if a lucky break comes your way and a publisher or film/tv studio wants to throw literal millions of dollars at you, you will not have given the legal department an easy way to back out… and you will not have a reputation (deserving or otherwise) for not being able to write.

Or a reputation for wasting everybody’s time. That reputation will follow you, for sure.

— JS

My 2026 LAcon/Worldcon Schedule

Posted on July 30, 2026    Posted by John Scalzi      3 Comments

Yeah, they got me doing a lot of things this year, plus I’ll be at the Hugos because, you know, up for Best Series and all (hey, remember to vote for the Hugos, okay? You got about another week to do that. Don’t worry, I’ll remind you again soon). But the most important thing: I’m DJing a dance! Come dance with us on Friday, y’all. It’s gonna be a great time.

The image above is static but the whole public Worldcon schedule is here, and there it has drop-down information letting you know who is on what panel and what the panel is about and all that good stuff. If you want to find my stuff specifically, just put “Scalzi” into the search field (naturally, this works with other program participants as well). There is… a lot on the schedule this year so I assure you that if you are attending Worldcon you will never not have something to see or do. So come on down!

— JS

New Front Porch Furniture and a Scalzi Compound Outdoor Area Overview

Posted on July 29, 2026    Posted by John Scalzi      18 Comments

Hey wanna see our new front porch furniture?

As you’ll know, we recently redid a lot of our outdoor environs here at the Scalzi Compound — the front porch because a wind storm knocked out a substantial part of the railing, which meant redoing it, and as long as we were doing that, redoing the back deck, adding an additional seating area attached to the second garage we also built, and then getting furniture for all of it. The chairs and tables you see here represent the last of the furniture (and thus, general renovating) to come in.

Krissy decided to have the colors match the siding of the house, and I think it looks pretty nice. The furniture itself is from the same manufacturer as the one who made the tables and chairs for the back deck, all made of a high-density material designed to stay outdoors and weather the environment, and featuring a lifetime guarantee, which means it has a reasonably good chance of outliving me at this point. Which is good, this stuff wasn’t cheap. I want it to outlive me.

What are we doing with the furniture that was previously on the porch and deck? Some of it was too weathered to salvage at this point, so it went off to recycling. But the rest went to that third outdoor area I mentioned, the one attached to the new garage:

This new patio has actually become one of my favorite places to hang outdoors. I post up here a lot when Charlie wants to be outside, since it’s usually shaded and cool. Saja likes hanging out here under the loveseat as well. On the other side of that door is Krissy’s new drinks fridge, so I expect she will get a lot of use out of it too.

Krissy was in charge of all the building and renovation that we’ve done around the place recently and I have to admit I was a little bit skeptical of her initial vision, but now it’s all built out I can easily acknowledge she knew what she was doing all along, and I was the one who lacked vision. Not only does it generally look great and is also really functional, but I find that I — the original “why would I go outside, the inside has air conditioning” sun-avoider — am finding excuses to go outside and hang out on the beck, porch and patio. That was a little unexpected, I have to admit. The moral of the story: Never question Krissy.

I’m especially happy, though, that all of this is done and settled and now I have a good idea what the outdoor of my house is going to look like for the next, ohhhh, 30 years or so. It’s nice! We like it! We’ll get good use out of it!

As for Krissy, she has already moved onto the next home improvement project, this one a little less expansive: Repainting the first floor bathroom. And when she’s done with that she has other things planned. Because of course she does. I like that she does, and that I get to benefit from it.

— JS

I’m Taking the Weekend Off So Please Enjoy This Picture of Saja in the Meantime

Posted on July 25, 2026    Posted by John Scalzi      6 Comments

And look! He’s a mlem going! Truly, a quality cat photo.

Have a great weekend, y’all. See you back here on Monday.

— JS

Final Full Day of the John Scalzi Humble Bundle Benefitting World Central Kitchen

Posted on July 24, 2026    Posted by John Scalzi      12 Comments

The Humble Bundle Deal we have going with 22 of my works has been running for three weeks now, and in that time we have raised almost $35,000 for World Central Kitchen — but all good things must come to an end, and the end of this one is at around noon tomorrow. So if you live basically anywhere but the nations in the UK Commonwealth, and you want to get in on this deal: better get a move on, my friend.

Remember also that when you pick up the deal you can go over the “adjust donation” box in the sidebar and give more of your purchase price to World Central Kitchen, so feel free to do that. Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine (my slice of this particular pie comes out of the publisher cut). But do know that any amount of this deal that comes to me is going straight into the Scalzi Family Foundation, which funds local organizations, artist and creative grants and other such things. No matter what, a nice chunk of your money is going to work to help folks.

Here’s the link for the bundle. I would love to see this end with over $35k to World Central Kitchen.

— JS