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Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/01/08/the-big-idea-lance-rubin/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59066

Many people wish they could return to a specific age in their life and live it all over again. But what if that person didn’t know they were reliving the same year over and over again? New York Times best-selling author Lance Rubin explores the idea of being a teenager seemingly indefinitely in his new novel 16 Forever. Follow along in his Big Idea to see a fresh take on the beloved time-loop trope.

LANCE RUBIN:

It’s no secret that we live in a culture that’s afraid of aging. Thousands of products exist to keep us looking as if we’re frozen in time. “Forever Young” is the name of not one, but two, classic songs. Forever 21 was a popular clothing store for decades. 

But it occurred to me at some point that, if you could find a way to stay eternally young, it would actually be a complete nightmare. (Cue creepy, echo-saturated horror movie trailer version of Alphaville’s “Forever Young.”) 

I said it occurred to me at some point, but I know exactly when it was. 

I was five years old, watching a VHS tape of the 1960 televised Peter Pan musical starring Mary Martin. At the end, Peter comes back to the Darling home, and Wendy…has become an adult. They can’t hang out anymore. So instead, Peter flies off with Wendy’s daughter, Jane. Um, I thought, is this supposed to be a HAPPY ending? Seeing the playful bond between Peter and Wendy SHATTERED because of time? With Jane easily replacing Wendy simply because she’s YOUNG?  

Around the same age, I saw the 1986 Disney film Flight of the Navigator, in which 12-year-old David falls in the woods and wakes up eight years in the future. His younger brother Jeff has become his older brother. Good god, it chilled me to the bone. The jarring role reversal. The visceral terror of time moving on without you. 

And so, I decided to explore these ideas in a novel, with poor Carter Cohen stuck forever at age 16, literally unable to grow up. I’ve always loved a time-loop story, but the idea of a year-long loop, where every character knows the loop is happening except the person it’s happening to, rather than vice versa, seemed unique and intriguing. 

I quickly realized that Carter’s perspective was an inherently disoriented one, seeing as his memory wipes clean every time he leaps back to the beginning of sixteen. It felt like the story wanted to be grounded in another POV too, to better understand the way Carter’s looping—which feels almost like a mysterious medical disorder—affects the people around him. 

So the story is also told by Maggie Spear, the 17-year-old girl who Carter dated and fell in love with during his most recent loop. Once Maggie sees that the boy she loves now has no idea who she is, she decides it’s too painful to start over. 

The experience of writing the first draft started pleasantly enough, as the premise gave me a lot to explore. It was fun to work through what a mess it would be to wake up thinking you were sixteen and then seeing your family had all aged six years without you. It was similarly compelling to think about the devastation of having your boyfriend walk right past you in the high school hallway because he has no idea who you are. 

But when it came to cleaning up the mess these characters were in, I was pretty clueless. 

As my editor David Linker said after reading my first draft, it “really falls apart in the second half.” The worst part about that note was that I knew he was completely correct. 

I had two main struggles with this book. One was accounting for the six years of looping that happens before the novel even begins. Kind of an unwieldy amount of time to work with. I decided to write several chapters from the POV of Carter’s younger-now-older brother, Lincoln, since as a sibling he would have been there for every previous loop. That said, it was still hard to determine what had happened during that time and what was worth sharing with the reader.  

The other struggle involved, well, THE LOOPING. Like, um, why was it happening? And would Carter get out of it? If so, how would he get out of it? How would that connect to the theme of growing up? Would a solution, if there was one, be clear or ambiguous? Literal or figurative? 

Unlike a Groundhog Day loop of twenty-four hours, Carter had to make it through at least an entire year for the reader to see if he was going to make it out of the loop or not. Again, I’d boxed myself into a cumbersome duration of time. Which led to other questions too, like if Carter and Maggie were going to get back together, when in the year should that happen? How could I maintain the necessary tension when the ticking clock was A YEAR LONG? 

So, yeah, imagine the above two paragraphs looping through my brain for months and months, as I paced around my apartment, as I walked to get groceries, as I talked through ideas with my wife Katie. I was, of course, as stuck as my protagonist—draft after draft after draft, unsure if I’d ever be able to write a version of this book I felt good about. 

Ultimately, there were no quick solutions. No lightning bolt moment that solved everything. Instead, there were a series of tiny discoveries and changes that slowly made the book into something better. When my editor read the second draft, he felt it had improved, but it still fell apart in the last third. When he read the third draft, he felt like it was almost there, but not quite. 

And so on and so on. There’s probably a reason writers are so attracted to the time-loop trope—in many ways, it so aptly represents the creative process: living something over and over and over again, trying to make it a little better each time. 

Until finally: you stop looping. And it feels amazing, like you’ve done something impossible. I’m so happy with where the book finally landed and proud of the journey it took to get there. And, just as importantly: I have a deeper understanding of why Peter Pan and Flight of the Navigator made me feel so damn sad when I was five. 

16 Forever: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s|Libro.fm|Community Bookstore

Author socials: Website|Substack|Instagram

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/01/08/the-big-idea-lance-rubin/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59066

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/01/07/the-big-idea-warren-tusk/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59039

Life isn’t fair. But it also isn’t unfair, it just is. As author Warren Tusk puts it in his Big Idea for The Goetist: the cosmos are indifferent. Follow along in the Big Idea for a philosophical journey through one’s sense of self and the meaning of being you.

WARREN TUSK:

The despairing man calls forth a demon, and binds it to teach him, so that he can stop feeling so empty and start finding something worthwhile in his life. And, once the formalities are done, his first question is – What is magic?

…this is weird, right? On the face of it, anyway. It’s weird because his question doesn’t obviously address his stated problem. He doesn’t lack for magic; he just summoned a demon. He lacks fulfillment and joy and meaning. He should be asking about those things.  

The trick is that – at least within the goetist’s mind – it’s all the same stuff. He experiences the hollowness of his days as an absence of magic, and his own sorcerous power doesn’t change that. When he tries to fumble his way towards an escape from his unhappiness, he instinctively reaches out towards magic. 

Which is not insane. At least, I hope it’s not insane, because I do the exact same thing. And so do lots of other people. When we look around at our world and find it bleak, and try to understand the nature of that bleakness, we call it disenchanted. We jump eagerly into the fake worlds of fantasy literature, not because they’re happier or more fun than the real world, not even necessarily because they’re more interesting – Lord knows they’re not always interesting – but because they’re magical, and that in itself is a thing for which we hunger. 

How can magic actually help?

Hard to answer that if we don’t understand what we’re talking about, if we don’t define our terms. So let’s go back to the goetist’s question. What is magic?

The old answer, the obvious answer, is that it’s about power. Doing the impossible. Magicians can accomplish things that other people can’t. 

Except that, in an age of technical wonders, the old obvious answer is no longer tenable. Doing the impossible is no longer something we associate with enchantment; people do the impossible all the time, these days, and there’s nothing remotely enchanted about it. The mighty mages of our fantasy stories use a lot of their power to replicate the effects of…cell phones, and security cameras, and airplanes, and modern medical treatments. (To say nothing of guns and bombs.) And we have all those things for real, and they’re wondrous and we wouldn’t know how to live without them, but their presence doesn’t leave us feeling like the world is filled with magic. Quite the opposite, much of the time. 

The demon has a different answer. As he explains it: magic is what you call it when the world truly, deeply cares about who you are. About you-as-a-person. About the particularities of your virtues and your vices, your talents and your interests. 

The magic sword is magic because only a true hero, pure of heart, can wield it. The magic sacrifice is magic because it works only when you give up something that genuinely matters to you. 

Technology doesn’t care about things like that, because physical reality doesn’t care. You don’t need to be a true hero to fire a machine gun; the laws of thermodynamics don’t change based on emotional salience. And as we spend more and more of our lives integrating into large impersonal systems, it becomes increasingly true that most of the social world doesn’t care about our individual particularities either.

(I could spend a long time talking about how the intricacies of the self are stripped away by jobs, by dating apps, even by the effort to market a constructed “self” as a brand. But you can fill in all of that yourself.) 

It’s easy to complain about modern anomie. The truth is, though – this modern condition is just an exaggeration, an exacerbation, of the way that things have always been. Physical reality, and social reality, have never answered to the complexities of anyone’s internal experience. The sun rises and sets, the crops grow, the village resolves its disputes, and all the elaborate patterns of your selfhood just come out in the wash.

There will be no magic unless someone cares. And the world won’t care. So you have to care. The shape of your soul has to matter to you, even if external reality will never notice. If you’re lucky, maybe you can find some other people who will also care, and you can care about the shape of their souls, and you can build some relationships in the face of the indifferent cosmos. But whether or not you’re lucky in that way – if you can believe that it matters who you are, without any feedback or validation, then you can enchant the world.   

The Goetist is a wisdom book, which is to say, a book composed entirely of Big Ideas. It has crammed as many of them as possible into a short text, by jettisoning things like “plot” and “having more than two characters.” It goes through a lot of topics, and tries to pull philosophy out of all of them. But the very first Big Idea, on which all the others are built, is: Magic is the foundation of a meaningful life, and magic consists of caring about who you are. Not instrumentally, not as a means to an end, but as something irreducibly precious. The rest of the book is really just discussing a bunch of different ways to act on that principle.

It’s a principle that matters a lot to me, personally. I hold onto it tightly, because the wider world really is indifferent, and that’s a hard thing. And if you want to know why I wrote The Goetist in the first place – well, that’s why. 

You can summon a demon with magic because the demon will see you for what you are, and you will see it for what it is, and you will matter to one another. Kind of like with a writer and a reader. 

The Goetist: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s|Apocryphile Press

You can see more of the author’s work at Paracelsus Games.

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/01/07/the-big-idea-warren-tusk/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59039