In this episode of Strange Horizons @ 25, producer Michael Ireland sits down with acclaimed SF author John Scalzi to discuss his 2001 story Alien Animal Encounters, which just so happens to be the only story he ever submitted anywhere, plus his long and decorated career in the SFF genres.

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Episode show notes:

• Visit John Scalzi's blog, 'Whatever'
• Read his 2001 story, Alien Animal Encounters, in our archives
• Follow John on Bluesky, @scalzi
• Preorder When The Moon Hits Your Eye, out March 2025
• Find more links to John's work, along with links to everything we talk about in this episode, as you read the transcript below.

Transcript

Michael Ireland: Hello Strangers, and welcome to Strange Horizons at 25, a 25th anniversary celebration of Strange Horizons. I'm your host, Michael Ireland, and it's my privilege today to welcome you to another episode that looks back at the history and the impact of Strange Horizons on the spectre of genres.

Today's guest is John Scalzi, first published with us in 2001, and since has gone on to win multiple awards, including a Hugo, and published many, many, many books. It's good to have you here, John.

John Scalzi: Thank you. It's good to be here.

Michael Ireland: So the purpose of having the conversation today is to understand what's been happening for you since you first published with us, cause you were one of the first to do it in that first year. And just to understand the processes that you had before Strange Horizons, and what you've taken on since then.

So, the first story that you submitted with us was a flash fiction from 2001. Was this your first short fiction that you had looked to get published? Because I know you had Agent to the Stars just a little bit before that.

John Scalzi: Right. So what had happened with Agent of the Stars, which was the first novel that I wrote, I didn't actually have any intention to ever have it published. What I was going to do with it was, I was writing it to find out whether or not I could actually write a novel. And so I took off all the pressure.

I was like, I'm not going to try to sell it. I'm not going to actually even try to make it good. What I'm going to try to do is try to write something novel length and then see what happens from there. So that was done. I put it up on my website. I was like, that's going to be where that stays forever. But then I got to the point where I was like, well, you know, maybe I should try to actually see if I can get something published, and I had been a newspaper columnist and a humor columnist with America Online, before I did anything with science fiction and fantasy.

So what I ended up writing, the Alien Animal Encounters story, which is the one that went out in 2001, was basically a humor column, but with alien creatures, right? So I was writing to my specific strengths. I knew it was going to be short. I knew it was going to be punchy and I had little bits in it so that nothing went on too long, and I could mask the fact that I was so new to writing science fiction that I couldn't even plot a story.

Michael Ireland: Okay.

John Scalzi: So yes, it was always meant to be very short. It was meant to be humorous because that was what I knew. And then, having written that thing, and it's under 2000 words, I think it's maybe even just 1500 words, I started looking around to see where I might be able to get it published.

Michael Ireland: Yeah, and with the landscape back then—because I know when it started at the end of 2000, Strange Horizons was brought to provide an extra space for those stories to be sold. How was you able to find it back then, using dial up?

John Scalzi: (laughs) It wasn't quite dial up. I think I might've been on a T-one line or something like that, but it was very, very, very close to dial up. And the way that I did it was, honestly, I just looked online for venues that were publishing science fiction that I knew. Of course there were the big three, which at the time were Asimov, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Analog, and I didn't feel the need to actually send it to there because one, I didn't see that they were publishing a lot of very short stuff or very humorous stuff, and then also—and this is going to sound ridiculous, but I want to stress that I am a lazy person and this will be a theme in my entire career—they also required you to submit by print at that time.

So you would have to print it out. You'd have to put it into an envelope. You would have to send it off. You'd have to put a cover letter on. And I was just like, honestly, I don't have stamps. I don't know if I have envelopes, I have a printer but I'm out of printer ink... So that just took the big three out of the equation entirely. So basically I was just looking around, and then I chanced upon Strange Horizons.

Now I did what you're supposed to do, before I sent them my stuff: I actually read what was in Strange Horizons and I looked at their submission guidelines and I did all of that sort of stuff so that before I submitted, I was familiar with the magazine and with what it was they were looking for. So I did all of that, but the magic thing for me really was the thing where they're like, "sure, you can send it in by email." I'm like, "Sold! This is what I'm going to do."

So not only was it the first place that I submitted it to, it was honestly the only place that I ever submitted it to. And if Strange Horizons had rejected it, I don't know that I would have submitted it to anywhere else because again, who was taking submissions by email at that time? The answer was almost nobody.

Michael Ireland: Yeah, so quite revolutionary then in terms of the approach. I've got a very similar approach as well, if anything requires me to print something off even today I'm just like, it's not getting sent.

John Scalzi: Yeah, no, I don't even have a printer. I think the last printer I had was when I was president of SFWA ,and I bought it because I was like, "I'm president of SFWA, I will probably have to print something out." And I didn't have to print a single thing out when I was President of SFWA. And, uh, that was more than 12 years ago now. So, you know, since then, people are like, "can you print this out?" I'm like, "no, no, I can sign it for you electronically, but if it needs to be printed, you're going to have to print it and send it to me."

Michael Ireland: Yeah. Obviously you've got your blog, which is where you post most of your things, where I think you posted Agent to the Stars first of all. Is that right? Yeah. And it seems like you've just always had that online presence. So going from the start of the millennium, you really found your niche especially with the "Where can I do this in the way that suits me?"

I don't know what the landscape was back then with Strange Horizons, was there much in the way of editing when it came to your story at that point? Like how was the back and forth?

John Scalzi: It was actually—my memory of it was—basically, they were like, "yep, this works, we'll take it." Which made me happy because I'd come from journalism, and one of the things that you try to do when you are a journalist or as you work in newspapers and you write a column or something like that is, you're used to trying to get it right basically the first time so that when it goes in, the copy is clean, they don't have to do too much in terms of copy editing.

And then also, you know, quite frankly, if there are issues with the story, that they're easy to resolve as opposed to, you know, this is going to be a massive rehaul. So that was part of it and part of it was, I worked at America Online from 1996 to 1998 and I was an editor of a humor area there. And so I had been an editor myself, and one of the things that I always say to writers is if you actually want to become better writer and you have the option to do it, do a stint as being an editor. Because you have to look at other people's writing. You have to say, why is this working? Why is this not working? If it's almost there, but not quite, how do you communicate to them? That this is a thing, how they can fix it and to make it better, and you got to work with that. And so when you come back to your own writing, one, you have a completely new perspective. You have the editor's perspective, to look from. And it also, in my particular case, at least, made me much less precious about my writing. Before I had been an editor, I was like, "every single thing I write is gold." And then when I got done being an editor and looked at the stuff that I had written before that, I was like, "Oh my God, who told this person that they could write?"

And so I started writing science fiction after I had been an editor. So when I was writing, that editor brain was part of my tool set as it were, so I think basically when I submitted it, having read again, the submission requirements and what they were looking for and everything else like that, I wrote to the submission requirements and I wrote something that I knew was kind of what they were looking for, so that when they saw it, they were like, yes, this is actually exactly what we wanted, and I think came back without too many notes because also it was very short, and it was very, like I said, structured. So, there wasn't too much to fix.

I remember the response was just really, really good. This is when Mary Anne Mohanraj was still the main editor for the site, and it was just really exciting to be able to see that submission and have them say, "yes, you read the assignment. You did the job. Well done. We're going to print it."

So it made me as someone who was literally just starting out, very first submission, very first short story ever in a professional milieu, it made me feel extremely happy. I was like, "Oh, okay. I can, in fact, do this thing."

Michael Ireland: How did that lead on to, then, your next project? Because I think it was about four years before Old Man's War came out. What happened in that period between?

John Scalzi: I was writing Old Man's War in 2001. It was being written concurrently with the short story, the Alien Animal Encounters. So what had happened to that was, I had written Old Man's War specifically to be something that I could sell as a novel, and then—remember again, I'm lazy—I finished the novel, and I was like, oh, because now I have to submit it, now I will have to print it out, and all that sort of stuff.

And at the time, I was writing nonfiction books. I was working as a freelance writer. I'd already had books out. So the ego portion of I am a published author was not something that was riding on Old Man's War going out or anything like that. And so literally, I finished it in, I believe October of 2001. And I literally just put it in a virtual shelf, in a virtual drawer for a year. I was just like, "I'll get to it later. I'll figure out what I'm going to do with it later."

So basically just a year went by before I was finally like, "I should do something with this actual novel that I wrote." And I'd had pretty good success, with Agent of the Stars, just putting it up on my website. So I was just like, "fine, I will do that again". And so in December of 2002, I just serialized it, one chapter a day, and was telling people, "if you want it before the serialization is done, send me like $1.50," because PayPal had just become a thing. So they could PayPal me money. And I would just literally send them a Word document with the full manuscript.

So at the end of that, Patrick Nielsen Hayden from Tor was like, "can I buy that from you?" Which was great because then I didn't have to submit it. Again, the lazy thing. Once they formally accepted it, it was a couple of years before it was published. The informal offer was December 28th, 2002. The formal offer was made January 2nd of 2003, and it finally came out on January 1st, 2005. So I had been writing during this time. It was just like, basically there was a space that it just took for publishing to happen and me to get over my hump of laziness. And then once that happened, everything else started coming fairly quickly because I had another book for us and then Old Man's War came out and it had been a success. And so I just started getting on the publishing treadmill, and I've been on that ever since. Which is great because, you know, it beats working.

Michael Ireland: So it was literally just the short story you submitted, you had Old Man's War written, and there was the non fiction and things like that in between. But, is there any short fiction that you've done between that or is it just one to the other?

John Scalzi: No, I mostly hadn't done any short fiction after that. It was kind of weird because, the way that I explained it to people was honestly, bluntly, Strange Horizons is the one and only place that I've ever submitted a short story to. That was it. Because after that, Old Man's War came out, it was a hit, and every short story that I've written since has either been something that I've just put up on my own website because I can't be bothered to submit, or someone has come to me and they have solicited a short story from me. In which case the sale was already agreed to, and all I had to do was write it.

So, it makes Strange Horizons absolutely unique in my publishing history. It is the only place where I have ever said, in science fiction, "will you please publish this thing?" And I had to wait to find out if they said yes. Everything since then, like I said, has either been solicited or I put it up on my own website or, in the case of novels, I just write them and Tor takes them.

So, I have never in science fiction, had a piece of work rejected.

Michael Ireland: Because it's the one and only piece.

John Scalzi: Because it's the one and only piece. And I mentioned that to people and they're like, "okay, I'm going to stab you in the face now, and then later, I'm going to push you out of the building." And I totally, totally, 100% get it. But it is just one of those things that, the combination of just circumstances and me being incredibly lucky and privileged, and also again, the laziness of "oh, I could submit."

When I was up for the Astounding award, back when it was still called the Campbell award, and Stanley Schmidt, who was the editor of Analog at the time, came up to me at the Worldcon in Los Angeles. He's like, "you know, you should submit a story to us. We would love to see something." And I remember saying to him, "well, I would, but then I would have to print it out and then have stamps. And I just, I can't." And he just like looked at me like I was an alien creature. It's like, "don't you understand, I'm from Analog." And I'm like, "no, I get it. You would be lovely to actually be published in, but stamps. But stamps."

Michael Ireland: I have a very similar approach when it comes to anything. I look for the way that I can do it in the format that I'm comfortable with, and it's probably beneficial to you as well because you were so early in adapting the digital approach, I think you were ahead of the curve on that.

John Scalzi: I would agree with it. I mean, I do think that the digital format was really advantageous to me in a lot of ways. I worked in newspaper and that was lovely and I had a wonderful time with it. But being able to come in on the early part of the blogosphere wave, back before they even called them blogs, they were online diaries at the time, and just be able to stake a claim there, in the format that, you know, Whatever, my website, what I was doing, that was just sort of very congenial. I was very fortunate to catch that particular wave at that particular time.

It's hard to tell people who are digital natives, who have basically only been alive or cognizant in a world where there have been blogs and social media and Facebook and all of that sort of stuff, how new all of this was and how all of us were just sort of making it up as we were going along. Like that Wallace and Gromit thing where Gromit is putting down the rail just before the train rolls over it, you know, that's what we were doing.

And that's what Strange Horizons was doing actually back at that time. I mean, the idea that a science fiction magazine would be basically digital native, that everything would be there, that could be something that not only was viable, but would actually be sort of pioneering. I don't think people thought of Strange Horizons as being a serious competitor at that particular time. And I think they really underestimated what Mary Anne and the other editors there, were doing at the time, because so much of what Strange Horizons was doing at the time, being a digital native, doing the thing where fundraising was part of their business plan, all of these things, looking for the type of writers that you wouldn't typically see in Analog or Fantasy & Science Fiction or Asimov's, and building that generation of writers into something, that was really successful.

Again, nobody knew at the time that that's what they were doing and that that would be a business model that would not only be successful immediately, but would persist for now, two and a half decades. We all made it up as we went along.

Michael Ireland: It's still the same ethos that comes with it, looking for those new writers, looking for voices that haven't got a voice, and being able to still have that foundational ethos, 25 years later. It's very impressive. I'm quite new to the journey, but was immediately welcomed.

But even with your writing, the humor was in there immediately and you seem to have carried that on throughout. There's some books where it's not as heavy, but the ones that I tend to go for are more the popcorn sci-fi books that I enjoy. The story—usually quite a simple plot—I usually listen by audiobook, because I love audio. So it's how I get a lot of my things done, and I know Wil (Wheaton, actor and narrator of almost all of Scalzi's books) does most of those more light hearted approaches. But with the humour, has the humour changed at all for you in the writing, as it's gone on?

Because again, I can read this, I can read Starter Villain, and there is that silliness to it.

John Scalzi: I will tell you what has changed over 25 years, which is that humor used to be radioactive in science fiction and fantasy. Cause I had always written with humor, you're absolutely right. If you read Old Man's War, there's humor in it. If you read the short stories, there's usually humor in it. Humor has always been an aspect of it. But they were—Tor was and a lot of other places—I think were absolutely terrified with the idea of marketing science fiction as having kind of a humorous edge. And part of that was because, my theory is at least, in the wake out of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which was just sort of an epochal event—like the same way that Star Wars was an epochal event for cinematic science fiction—it so set the template, that it kind of ruined the humor in science fiction for a couple of generations. Because nobody else could write British farce like Douglas Adams could. As I'm fond of saying, he's the only person besides the Monty Python people and Neil Ennis, who is their songwriter, he's the only other person who's got a writing credit for Monty Python's Flying Circus. So he was a farcicist before he was a science fiction writer.

And so people were like, well, this is what humor is in science fiction now. And they just kept not doing it because it's hard to do British farce when you're not British or a farcicist. So for a long time, people were like, humor doesn't sell. Humor doesn't sell. We don't want to lead with humor because we're worried that people won't pick it up. So it took me until Redshirts, which was eight or nine novels in, before Tor would even say, "yes, this is a funny book, and it's supposed to be funny, and you're supposed to laugh at it." Everything up to that, the humor was there, but it wasn't what we were leaning forward.

And this was what, another thing that I really sort of liked about Strange Horizons is that they weren't scared of the fact that I was submitting a humorous piece to them, or that other people did humorous pieces for them, because I certainly wasn't the only one who did it. But I would look at a lot of the submission requirements for various other places that I was looking at, and some of them really were like, "uh, we don't really want. humorous science fiction," right? And so that was already kind of a block. Whereas, Strange Horizons was much more open. They were like, what do you got? Let's see how it works. So the fact that they were open to that, and the fact that I got to have Alien Animal Encounters basically as my calling card for science fiction up till Old Man's War came out, was actually kind of useful to me.

I don't think now that we have a problem with science fiction and humor in the same sentence anymore. I think there are more people who have done it. Certainly Catherynne Valente did it with Space Opera and Space Oddity. And there have other been other novelists in fantasy and science fiction who are sort of taking that banner and ran with it. But, honestly, Strange Horizons was the place that I knew that I could submit where they would say, yeah, okay, we'll take a look at it. And it really helped set the tone for who I was in the science fiction and fantasy world.

Michael Ireland: Yeah. So does that help you validate you being able to use humor in your writing?

John Scalzi: Yeah. I mean, it has been a differentiator for me, right? Because for the longest time, not a lot of people were using humor or putting it in, in the sort of way that I was doing it. For a while there, at least in terms of novels, I was the only one who was basically able to put in humor. And it allowed it to be a calling card. But the thing for me was, I came in having been a person who wrote a newspaper column that was meant to be humorous. I had written and edited a humor area that was a place of knowledge and competence for me. And so I was more comfortable, honestly, when I started off, more comfortable writing humor than I was necessarily writing science fiction.

And so, the fact that Alien Animal Encounters was, that Strange Horizons took it, one validated my idea that in fact I could write as who I was, in the milieu of science fiction, and maybe be able to make a go of it rather than trying to be like, "okay, science fiction is this puzzle to be solved and I have to change who I am as a writer and as a personality", when in fact the answer was no, I could actually be who I was, be the writer that I was, and also write science fiction, at the same time.

So, for me, getting that first story in was kind of a proof of concept for me that that was something I could do. Again, there was a lot of bias and fear in the publishing community, as opposed to the reader community, about how to market humor. And that took a long time for that ship to turn. But, the fact that, that first instance was, yes, you can do this. It would be perfectly fine, convinced me that I should just do what I do, and let people worry about how to market it later.

Michael Ireland: Yeah, with the humor aspect, even looking at Old Man's War, the time from that was, you know, late 2001 that you were writing that and it's a military kind of thing. How did you feel about putting the humor in with the landscape that was going on in the US at the time?

John Scalzi: My feeling about it was, I mean, two things. Most of what I had written was written before 9/11. So the sudden post ironic age, it was too late. Written and baked in. But the other thing about it is, I don't think in times of crisis or in times where there's that sort of wrenching change, that the need for humor goes away. I think that people still want it and they still want to look for it. And they still want to have it. So for me, it was not too much of an issue.

Now, I do think one has to look around at one's environment and sort of feed off of it. The famous thing is, "science fiction is written about the future, but it's written in present time." So the concerns of the science fiction writers is going to be the same. You can see how I was handling some of that, I think, over the course of many, many novels. And also, of course, I was 35 when my first novel was published. I'm 55 now. The things that I would write today would not necessarily be the things that I would have written 20 years ago. Right? Because times change and perspectives change, and everything else.

When I started writing, there were so many people that I know now from so many different communities that I had never met before. I was a very stereotypical white guy who thought he was really clever and had perspective enough for everybody. And then learning in fact that there's a wider world and many different perspectives than what I had, has certainly made me, I think, a better writer, because it's always a better thing when you can take in that the world is in fact wider than your own perspective. But it's also been an incredibly positive thing for, I think, for science fiction and fantasy generally. And again, that goes back to what Strange Horizons' mission was, to bring in the voices that you wouldn't have otherwise heard.

Michael Ireland: Yeah, I feel like that's also been a privilege in my journey as well, is getting those perspectives from people that you wouldn't be able to figure out by yourself. Checking your privilege is the way that I do it. Some of my favourite writing and co-writers are queer women, and they helped me understand the world from a different perspective, compared to the writing that I've got.

And so we do an audio fiction show (The Secret of St Kilda), which is a cult horror. It is horrific, but it is also a sitcom. Some of the cast described it as Hot Fuzz meets The Wicker Man. So it's like you said, with things that are going on in the world, or the horrific nature of reality, gets juxtaposed with comedy to help balance that, because there's very horrific things in our show that happen, but you're laughing for 60% of the things, and then you realize, "oh, no, this, there's actually things very, very wrong here."

John Scalzi: Well, I mean, that's one of the advantages of being able to write humor at all. The thing is, that you get to be able to put in the whole dynamic range of human experience.

Old Man's War, as an example, has scenes that will make you laugh and will have scenes that will make you cry, and I put both of them in with the full intention to have all of those. But the fact that you have the scenes that can make you laugh means that you get leavened. It's not all a downer all the time, but it's also not just "ha ha ha, everything's a laugh, ha ha ha."

And that is something that has been consistent in the way that I use humor up until, I have a book coming out in March, which is called When The Moon Hits Your Eye, and the conceit of that is, for an entire lunar cycle the moon turns to cheese. And obviously it's a ridiculous concept, and obviously it's something that can be played farcically. Absolutely can be played as farce. But for me, it was much more interesting to look at the whole perspective of how people would deal with it. Some people would treat it farcically, but some people it would be just completely upend their entire world, in a very serious way.

And to be able to get that to encompass the entire range of emotional existence is actually kind of an exciting thing to do. And if you write humor, as you say with your thing, you can put in the funny stuff and then you can put in the horrific stuff and you give that whole range, and it makes all of it much more impactful. And hopefully even more profound.

Michael Ireland: Yeah, having that approach, especially with When the Moon Hits Your Eye, first thing I thought of that was obviously the Wallace and Gromit movies. I don't know how ingrained it is in American culture, but it's really big over here. And also the Randall Munroe What If books, where it has a scientific approach to absurd questions of what would happen if this, and it usually results in everyone dying constantly, but it's quite fun where you don't think of how bleak things are or how they could be with a turn of a switch.

But I'm looking forward to reading that when it comes out. It ticks off both of those things that I enjoy. The reality of the absurd sci fi, and the humor of Wallace and Gromit going to the moon. I like that. I think the first one that I read from yourself was Redshirts. This was pre Orville days. I think the Star Trek genre was missing the humor, because it provided 'reality'. Not everything is as serious as it needs to be, just because it's sci-fi. So having Redshirts as a book that I just picked up and I was like, "Oh, I know what a redshirt is," I enjoyed it a lot. I ran a TTRPG for my friends where they were the redshirts because they didn't really have control of their fates.

When Redshirts came out, how did that get perceived for you then? Because it could be fanfiction. How did you balance the originality to existing tropes?

John Scalzi: What was interesting to me about Redshirts was, when I wrote it, everybody who was a nerd knew what a Redshirt was. Right? It was not a brand new concept. The thing was, and I remember when the book came out and there were a couple of reviews where people like, "yes, it's a redshirt thing, but this is a five minute joke. Why would you want to make a novel out of this?" And that was, I thought, kind of a really interesting way of looking at it. It's like, here was a trope that was so ingrained in the science fictional nerd psyche, that we had just incorporated it and didn't think about it anymore than, oh, no, Redshirts, they're gonna die.

I was like, "this is a horrifying tragedy for the actual people involved, right, to understand that, no, you don't have control of your fate, know that free will is an illusion, know all the things that happened in your life and all the things that you thought you were put in this universe for, are a lie. And in fact, all you are here to do is to make a main character sad for five minutes." All of these things, behind the trope, behind all of the tropes, is pathos, is existential terror, is a challenge to who you perceive yourself to be, as a human and as an agent of free will.

For me, the fun of it was not to run away from the tropes. Like I shoved all the tropes into the book. If you go to TV Tropes and look up Redshirts, the page just keeps going. You just scroll for a mile! But in addition to the tropes is all the other stuff that you are thinking about. The issues of free will, the issues of is this my life? Am I actually in control of my life? And all that sort of stuff. And this is the thing that I think is kind of the myopia of nerdery, which is that we are aware of all internet forums, and we are aware of all the tropes. But we sometimes just think about them very, very sort of a surface sort of way, as opposed to delving into what is behind those tropes. And that was the fun of Redshirts for me.

And one of the things that I was absolutely stunned with, because Redshirts was such a prevalent trope, was that no one had really done a Redshirts novel before. It was literally just sitting there. It was the lowest of low hanging fruit. And I'm like, "is literally nobody going to pick this fruit? Because if you're not going to do it, then I will. And, you know, I'll pluck it and I'll make a pie out of it."

And that was the thing, that once the Redshirts novel was out, people were like," Oh yes, of course, all of this makes sense." It went on to win a Hugo. It went on to do very well. It's been optioned for film and TV a number of times. All of that. But again, it was the whole looking behind tropes. And that's something that I did with Kaiju Preservation Society, with Starter Villain as well. I mean, that's all James Bond stuff. And then, obviously with When the Moon Hits Your Eye, because the moon's turning to cheese. So prying open the tropes and finding the meat underneath them is, I think one of my core strengths as it were, as a writer of popular science fiction.

Michael Ireland: Does that come from having that background, because I think you had done philosophy at college, was it?

John Scalzi: Yeah. I think part of it is having the philosophy background. Part of it was, I was a film critic for a number of years, so I was literally looking at popular storytelling from the professional point of view. Part of that is just simply who I am as a storyteller anyway. You put it all together, all those influences, and that's kind of what comes out.

I mean, as a storyteller, I think that the things that I bring to the party, because there are so many writers who have so many spectacular talents, right? And you think of who they are and some of them, again, to go back to Strange Horizons, even got their start there. But the thing that I've always brought to the party is, an ability to do humor, an ability basically to talk about weird and sometimes really abstruse concepts, in a way that even if you are not a philosophy major or a scientist or something like that, that you can kind of pick it up and go with it for the length of a story.

I have always been an incredibly accessible writer, with the idea that it's not difficult to read my stuff and get into it. There's the flip side of that where people are like, "well, he's not particularly deep, is he?" And it's like, you got me there. But the flip side of that is, I'm bringing people into the genre. And then once they're inside, it's like, here's a whole group of other people who are really going to drill down on the weirdness, and you're going to love them because now you have some sort of initial setting and understanding to go further from that. So, in the world of science fiction, I'm the guy at the door being like, "oh, come on, come on in. Oh, it's this is easy stuff, this is stuff you can understand. You're going to have no problem with it. You like that? Well, here's some more stuff."

Michael Ireland: Yeah. And you don't always need the deep, heavy stuff, but also there's other writers for that. So you don't have to stand on their toes to do that. You can still appreciate it.

John Scalzi: But this goes to the larger point and again to something that I think that Strange Horizons did better than a lot of people early on which is, there is room in the science fiction milieu for just a huge number of perspectives and a huge number of writers and a huge number of folks and everybody is doing their particular thing in a particular way.

There is no possible way, for example, that I could write the same books that Nora Jemisin writes, just literally impossible to do. Nora is a black woman who comes from a different tradition of science fiction and fantasy than I did. She came in through a different path and she's writing things that is not possible for me to write. But that doesn't mean that the world of science fiction is not capacious enough to have both of us in it, and then to have Mary Robinette Kowal or have Emily Tesh or to have Marko Kloos or to have Adrian Tchaikovsky. Everything kind of goes in the mix. And for the longest time, I really do think that there was, up until like basically the last 25 years, particularly, that there was always "this is the mainstream of science fiction and you'll get a little bit on either ends on the periphery, but this is what science fiction is."

When I started being in science fiction in 2005, it was still kind of narrow casting in that particular way. And now you come into the world of 2024, 2025, and the world of science fiction is so much more vast than it was before. And that's exactly what science fiction and fantasy should be. It should be the place where you have the multiplicity of voices and perspectives, because science fiction is speculative. Science fiction is about getting your storytelling outside of that particular comfort zone that you've already had, and looking at it from a point of view that is not yours.

I don't want to say an alien point of view, because none of the writers are alien to the human experience. But certainly there are people for whom, a writer who has a different life experience from them, that will be an alien experience for them reading for the first time. But that's what science fiction and fantasy is about. Getting a new experience that you've literally never had before.

Michael Ireland: Yeah. And that's what I find fascinating with the Strange Horizons approach, because obviously it's not a strict limit, but usually you know under 10,000 words for short fiction, but a lot of that is coming from non-Western-centric voices. So when I am reading those I'm getting a perspective on African culture (for example), as well as the interpretation of speculative genre. I get to learn the history of it, and also the future of it as well.

The stories that I do read and getting my mind open to, how things are perceived because of living in such, as you said, isolated identities that we've got in Western culture, having a place like Strange Horizons to give those voices, and to find those new writers as well.

John Scalzi: Absolutely. And the other thing is, I want to make it clear, it's not like, "oh, I'm reading all these other people and I'm getting my bran." No. These are great stories. It's actually fun to read! Which I think is the thing that a lot of people who are like, "Oh, I don't know. I don't know if I want to read that. I want to go," but like, no, dude, not only are you getting your mind cracked open, which is fine, but the simple fact of the matter is you are getting a great story out of it too. And I think that's what it boils down to is that particularly, I'm not very prescriptive about anything, but I do think that science fiction and fantasy readers of whatever perspective that they come from, should be excited to read something new and interesting and out of their own experience.

Because that goes again to the very root of what science fiction fantasy is and is capable of. And that is, speaking as a reader myself, one of the things that keeps me coming back to read Strange Horizons and other magazines that have sprung up since the 21st century and particularly online, is the stuff that I would not have been able to find anywhere else and that I found really sort of interesting and mind expanding, and all of that is fun for me.

I wouldn't read it if it wasn't fun for me to read. That's one of the things that we really should stress about all of this stuff is like, why has this been successful, part of it is simply because they're just great stories.

Michael Ireland: Yeah. And with the Hugos as well, finally getting that recognition in Glasgow, was just a really good feeling, especially hearing the crowd get behind that as well. Because even though it is in that digital age, having that instant feedback of going, "Oh, people do read, these people do enjoy these stories," it's really nice to see that it's not just me enjoying the stories, or it's not just some of my friends. It's a wider collective. It makes you appreciate that just a little bit more. Especially with the voices that are going on, people who have been published by Strange Horizons in the past that, you know, majority of them were on stage throughout the Hugos as well because of their own journeys and nominations and categories and things like that.

And you realize that it's getting broader and broader, and that's why we're looking to try and celebrate these last 25 years. Because there is so much that came out of it. There's so many voices that have been able to start their careers and continue on, like yourself, to have an output.

John Scalzi: Well, no, I mean, it's absolutely the case that I will always be eternally grateful to Strange Horizons for being the place that I got my start. It was the right place at the right time for me. I remember going to the Worldcon in 2004 in Boston and there was a Strange Horizons meetup, and I got to go and meet some of the people who were my fellow Strange Horizons writers and editors and all of that sort of stuff. Many of whom are people I'm still friends with today. Like I said, Mary Anne Mohanraj is a perfect example of that.

And just having that as one of the first steps of my journey into science fiction and fantasy, I don't take that for granted. I'll always be proud to have that association. I hope that Strange Horizons will always be proud to be associated with me. So as far as it goes, I'm thrilled that they have been around as long as I have, you know, we've seen kind of the world change in tandem, and it kind of makes me excited to see what happens next.

I mean, I know I'm going to be around for a while. I mean, unless I get hit by a bus or eaten by a bear, I have a book contract that will have me writing until I'm 70 at least. So I know that I'll be around and kind of hope that Strange Horizons will be as well.

Michael Ireland: I hope so too. No, it's been great, John. If you want to plug your upcoming book for March, that'd be great.

John Scalzi: In March, I have a book called When the Moon Hits Your Eye, it will be out March 25th. And then in September I will have another installment of the Old Man's War series coming out. I'm busy, in fact, the instant that I'm done talking here, I get back to writing that because it's due at the end of the month. So hopefully I'll get it done on time because otherwise I'm going to have an editor come and kill me. So... (laughs)

Michael Ireland: Thank you very much John, it's been a pleasure talking to you.​