There’s probably a name for design decisions that are useful or efficient in one context, or toward one audience, and hostile in/toward another. In science fiction writing, the choice to call a device an “ansible” without explaining what you mean is extraordinarily efficient if your audience is educated in the genre. Not every story with FTL comms needs to invent a new word for them (and if they did, the SFF lexicon would clog with those words, like space junk in orbit). But if your reader is new to the genre, when you say a message just came through the ansible and you don’t immediately have someone explain what that means, you’ve just put a little wall in the reader’s way. (For that matter, even a shorthand like “FTL comms,” unless immediately expanded to “faster-than-light communications devices,” can be a wall—though a lower wall.)

Now, there’s nothing wrong with obstacles. Quite the opposite. There’s a joy in overcoming them, and that joy can be the mainspring of your story. We say that the “golden age of science fiction is twelve,” and often I see this taken to mean that these stories are best read in the springtime of the eye. But ‘figuring out what grownups mean when they use words I don’t quite understand’ is also a vital survival skill for a child, and maybe, looking back, some of the joy for me in science fiction was that it recognized and prized and honed this skill. A story, possibly apocryphal, about Diana Wynne Jones: when asked why she wrote for children rather than adults, she’s supposed to have said, “If you’re writing for a child, you only have to tell them something once. If you’re writing for an adult, you have to tell them three or four times.”1 Kids are used to not knowing the full context, and take pride in being able to figure it out, while not-knowing is a socially dangerous position for a grown-up: you’re supposed to be able to hang by now. If someone’s using words you don’t know: are they making fun of you? Trying to mark you as an outsider? Just not considering your perspective? For some folks I think it presses those deep evolutionary “oh no ape-tribe will cast me out into tiger-forest” circuits.

But not for everyone. I still love the challenge of being thrown into a story and asked to figure it out. (So long as there’s something there when you’re done figuring—my reaction to a truly pointless puzzle box is basically Janelle Monae’s in Glass Onion.) But there are ebbs and flows in any genre, times when the readership solidifies to a core educated audience plus eager initiates (into which group writers almost always fall), and times when you throw a block party and a million guests show up, none of whom know any of your secret handshakes, not all of whom are yet comfortable not-knowing. This can cause some rough weather. In the last twenty years it seems to me that the genres have gone through at least three, probably four “million-guest” moments. Nor is this unique to genre: public-facing social media has made it much easier to eavesdrop on others’ conversations, which, like any eavesdropping, might sometimes lead to insight (“I’d never looked at it that way before!”) but often to insecurity and suspicion (“are all these people mad at me specifically?”). I’d be surprised if there were a subculture that hadn’t grown dramatically (from the perspective of its circa-2000s fandom) in the last twenty years—because it’s just easier to find the right bar. But in a large readership like this, simple choices—to ansible or not to ansible—can define your work, signal to your audience, and shape your community in ways you might not anticipate.

I didn’t sit down meaning to write about any of that, though. I meant to write about how hard it is for young kids to play music these days.

Let me get all Andy Rooney for a moment.2 I grew up in the era of the tape deck. My folks had racks and racks of cassette tapes, all the music you could imagine, all of it right there in our living room (and our kitchen, and our bedrooms, and). By the time I was five I knew exactly how music happened: you opened the tape deck door (satisfying thunk sound), you got the tape out of its case (slight plastic hinge creak), you put it in the deck (rattle), you closed the door (click), you pressed play (thunk, whirr). Music. I don’t remember anyone explaining this. I’d seen it (and heard it) ten thousand times.

Here’s how music happens for a child in 2025: the same way everything else happens. A grownup pulls out a piece of magic black glass—which doesn’t work for anyone but them—pokes at it for longer than seems reasonable, and then, sometimes, music. Or, half an hour later, delivery pizza. Or the lights dim. Or whatever. Who knows why the grownup is looking at the magic black glass? Sometimes they even seem to forget why they took out the magic black glass in the first place. The magic black glass doesn’t seem to make them happy but they sure seem to pick it up a lot.

So what if you’re five and you want to listen to your favorite song? Well, you ask a grownup to do the magic-black-glass thing. Or, if the grownup has decided that letting a hundred-billion-dollar corporation install an ever-listening microphone into their living room is a good idea, you order an invisible genie servant to play music.3 Maybe invisible genie servant plays the right song, maybe it doesn’t.

We have a turntable, because I was twenty in the oughts when it seemed everyone in the city was leaving a thousand-dollar vinyl collection on the curb. Our kid knows how to use the turntable, they don’t do vinyl pressings of critical Minecraft parody rap songs. (As far as I know.) (I haven’t looked.)

We’ve recently hit on a work-around. There are these little wifi-enabled speaker boxes for kids called Yoto Players, that play music and stories from pre-made RFID cards. The cards don’t actually hold the data—they just tell the Yoto Player to go online and download the music or story or whatever. Now, as of this writing, Yoto has a “roll your own” function. You can get a “blank” card, upload mp3s that you own to the Yoto website, and connect them to the RFID card. Now your child can play their own music wherever they want. Even the Minecraft parody raps. Trust me, this is a good thing. (Though you may end up knowing more than you expected about slimes.)

But still, odd to consider: we now have a system that involves two computers that would have seemed like alien artifacts in 1989 (the Yoto player and the parent’s laptop) using hyper-advanced radio magic to talk to “the global information conspiracy otherwise known as… the beast,” all to replicate the UX of… the tape deck.

A design decision—let’s make a device that lets “anyone” (who has their own piece of expensive electronics) carry all their music with them at all times—can be friendly to one community (the expensive-electronics-buyers) and lead to another community—children, say—having much less control over their own environment. I’ve seen a lot of conversation about ‘free range children’ and the show ‘Old Enough,’ kids being sent on errands at age 4 and all that… but little about how much harder it is for kids to do even basic things like commandeer the stereo.

Alright, that’s enough for me this week. We’ve got line edits to edit, magic to do (just for you). A couple links :

I found Robin Sloan’s recent miscellany a source of welling delight—ideas and book recommendations and pictures and thoughts.

I have not finished this essay on prose tactics in M. John Harrison’s Virconium, but I adore its typesetting, its presentation, as much as its interest in sentences. More pieces of writing that are themselves, please, their own pamphlets with their own mood and scheme, rather than content that fits in a box.

Take care of yourselves, friends. Work for the liberation of all sentient beings. I’ll have something fun to share next week. Watch this space.