Author: John Knych

[00:00:00.07] – John Knych

Let me start that now. Really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me. I’ll admit now that my ignorance in your field is very, very high. I had to look up some words when I was looking at reading your bio, but I’ll still try and understand what we’re talking about.

[00:00:21.08] – Jonas Steenbrugge

Yeah. Okay. That’s fine.

[00:00:23.17] – John Knych

I’m pronouncing you right, Dr. Steenbroeche?

[00:00:26.11] – Jonas Steenbrugge

Yeah, that’s fine.

[00:00:29.08] – John Knych

I read I know that you’re a postdoctoral researcher, Laboratory of Biochemistry. Can you tell me how you arrived there, your career path?

[00:00:39.11] – Jonas Steenbrugge

Yeah, sure. I actually graduated as a Biomedical Scientist at a master degree in Leuven, Belgium here. I was strolling around to find a PhD position. I was really interested in oncology. And I got to know some people working at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine here in Ghent. And it was really… It struck me that they all were also looking into human oncology. So actually what they’re doing here, and that’s the interesting part, and what really interested me to do a PhD, is that they tried to find the bridge between the human oncology and the veterinary oncology. They actually not only work on mice as the normal gold standard model to check out new compounds or new treatments that eventually end up in the human clinic, but they also try to bring those compounds to the veter clinic. Sometimes, for example, but let’s keep it very broad, you have some childhood cancers, for example, like leukemia or lymphomas. These are very difficult to, let’s say, replicate in a mouse model, which is normally done by most scientists. In that case, we try to turn towards more pets that normally have a high incidence of lymphomas, for example.

[00:02:19.20] – Jonas Steenbrugge

They are a spontaneous patient, just like human patient. And dog owners, they are not really reluctant to test new treatments onto those patients, because otherwise, there are no real treatments available for pets. In that case, it’s like a very easy to go path to try to experiment with new compounds without harming the pet, of course. It’s always in consideration about, will it be toxic? We already test the toxicity in a way beforehand. But in looking at From that perspective, these dogs, it can also be cats, for example. They are the ideal model that you can really translate to human clinic.

[00:03:12.12] – John Knych

More ideal than mice.

[00:03:13.21] – Jonas Steenbrugge

Yeah, actually. Probably even so, because they have the same environmental exposure. They sometimes even eat the same food as we do. We’re really close to our pets, and that’s what made it interesting. You can actually make a difference not only for the humans, but also for the animals. It’s like a romantic view, maybe, but we call it the one health perspective. It’s actually a really well-known concept nowadays. With the COVID, this actually even came into a bigger picture with COVID coming from animals, keeping animals healthy will also keep humans healthy, that concept. That’s what we try to purchase here or try to, let’s say, contribute to. Coming back to the career path, I got the opportunity to do a PhD on oncology, first of all, with a human point of view, so a human endpoint. I’m specifically focusing on breast cancer because that was the real, let’s say, focus of this research group, Biochemistry Lab. We validate, let’s say, a new mouse model to study breast cancer in humans. It’s a different injection technique. We call it the introductal injection technique. Some labs do it, but it’s not easy to do. It took me a while to learn it.

[00:04:50.20] – John Knych

Why is it not easy to do?

[00:04:53.01] – Jonas Steenbrugge

What’s the difference with the golden standard fat path model, we call it? What you do is actually you inject the tumor cells through the nipple of the memory gland. In that way, the tumor cells will arrive inside the memory duct, like the ducts that also harbor from, let’s say, milk when you give breastfeeding. That’s where a tumor or a tumor, human breast tumor, normally starts. It’s the same in animals. That’s also where it starts. What other or most researchers do is inject the tumor cells just besides the ducts inside the fat tissue. And that’s actually already in a more advanced stage of breast cancer. So what usually happens is that the tumor grows inside the ducts, then it breaks through the ductal barrier inside the fat tissue, and from there on it can spread to other organs. So it’s a more advanced stage when you put it inside the fat tissue than inside the ducts. Most researchers just inject it inside the fat tissue because it’s easy to do. And most of the time they’re also just interested in a growing tumor. That’s it. Not really those early stages. But we try to replicate the whole process from early to a late time point.

[00:06:16.01] – John Knych

And if you can replicate the whole process, that gives you more power to say, We can apply this to human.

[00:06:23.15] – Jonas Steenbrugge

Yeah, exactly. Also, these early stage breast cancers are a bit like covered with this model, let’s say. But then again, it’s not easy to do. Most researchers don’t turn to that model. It also has some drawbacks. You need to have a lot of mice to have a good, let’s say, replicates pool. Sometimes some injections don’t work out the way you wanted it just because you had a bad day, for example, can happen. So towards an ethical point of view, it’s not the most ideal because you need to have more mice. But then again, looking at from a human perspective, it’s best to have the best replicate model that you can have for a human breast cancer.

[00:07:13.22] – John Knych

Dr. Stiebrug, how often do these types of studies jump to human applications?

[00:07:23.23] – Jonas Steenbrugge

We always try to have some human perspective here. We have a really great collaboration with our University Hospital, but also outside our University, we have a lot of hospital connections, let’s say. For example, in Brussels, we have a very good collaboration there with the clinic that’s really specialized in breast cancer. What they have there is human breast cancer samples. They also treat the patients there. We get first-hand, most of the time blood from those patients, where we can check new biomarkers that we found in our mice models. Then again, it’s not coming directly to the patient already, but it gives a new perspective. It gives new leads, where we then try to find new fundings to eventually come to clinical trials. It’s very difficult to push towards those clinical trials because you need to have a very strong foundation for that. It takes a lot of years.

[00:08:29.10] – John Knych

So I was going to ask, have you witnessed that process of the jump from mice, cats?

[00:08:36.02] – Jonas Steenbrugge

We are witnessing it right now, more or less, with other kinds of treatments, not the chitin. But for example, we have now a trial, let’s say, towards childhood cancers. So looking into lymphomas, where they try to treat now first dogs as a first model, spontaneous model, if you can call it like that. It’s not really a model, but we call it a model. And that’s the first lead towards going to the patients afterwards in, let’s say, 2-3 years. So that will be in very short time, going towards the first patient. Yeah, maybe going towards the chitin, right?

[00:09:22.17] – John Knych

Yeah, so how did you first hear of chitin and get involved with this substance?

[00:09:27.14] – Jonas Steenbrugge

Yeah, so it’s actually We were not directly interested into chitin, but we were interested into the, let’s say, proteins that bind it. So the proteins that bind it, these are the chitinase-like proteins. That’s the first part of the family. And the other part is the chitinases. So it’s the chitinase family, we call it. And you have, on the one hand, enzymatically active members of the family and enzymatic or non-enzymetically active. So what’s the difference is actually the possibility to cleave or to cut the chitin into smaller pieces. So from an evolutionary perspective, what’s happened or what happens is actually that in an infectious disease, for example, you get infected with any bacteria or a fungal disease. These fungis have on their cell wall, so the outer wall of the fungis, these harbor chitin. So the chitin is recognized by our bodies through these enzymes and these non-enzymatically family members. So the chitinases will cut the chitin into smaller pieces, and then the chitinase-like proteins, they recognize these chitin particles, and then they start to stimulate an immune response against this fungai. So you need to look at it from an infectious point of view. That’s the way we started also.

[00:11:06.24] – Jonas Steenbrugge

We got to know these chitinase-like proteins in a kidney situation, so a chronic or an acute kidney disease, first of all in dogs. So that’s where we validated chitinase 3,1 as a really strong member when having an infectious disease that leads to kidney disease. We picked up this protein, and then we thought, maybe we can put it in a broader perspective to other kinds of infectious diseases and maybe into cancer. We looked into literature, and this was actually a field that was booming at the time. People picked up the chitinase-like family as an inflammation-associated protein in different kinds of diseases, not only cancer, infectious diseases, you name it. You can see it from a really broad perspective.

[00:12:05.14] – John Knych

When did you look at the literature? What’s the timeline here?

[00:12:08.01] – Jonas Steenbrugge

When did you- Let’s say mid my PhD. That’s already, I mean- Four years ago? Yeah, five to six years ago.

[00:12:20.16] – John Knych

And you saw that the field was looking at chitinase?

[00:12:24.04] – Jonas Steenbrugge

You had this one big group, from the cancer perspective, you have one big group that really focusing into chitinase 3-like one. That’s a main family member of the chitinase-like proteins. It was the Jack Elias group from Brown University in US. They were the ones that were really going into that topic, specifically cancer-related also. They saw that it was really upregulated when mice got melanoma. They We also found that the source was mainly from macrophages, macrophages inside the melanoma lung metastases. So these macrophages secreted the chitinase 3-like protein in a response to the growing lung tumors or the lung metastases from the melanoma. So this was really interesting to see that there was indeed a clear link towards cancer. So we started to look at that protein in our mouse models for breast cancer, and specifically, triple-negative breast cancer. We’re mostly focusing on those really aggressive ones that’s mostly found in the younger women. What we found is also that the chitinase 3,1 protein was clearly enhancedly expressed when the tumor was growing, and in an advanced stage, you had a higher level than in an early stage. Then we were also looking into, let’s say, the source of this protein.

[00:14:07.17] – Jonas Steenbrugge

In our models, it was not clearly to be macrophages. It was more like towards neutrophils. You have different immune cells that can produce this protein. It’s very ubiquitously expressed. Not only immune cells, but also like fat tissue can produce or even muscle tissue. But in a cancer context, or at least in our models, we found it to be highly expressed by the neutrophils. And neutrophils are really highly present in breast tumors in our models, but also in a normal human breast TMBC, so triple negative breast tumor, when you look at it, you also have a lot of neutrophils there. And even when you give chemo, you get an even enhanced infiltration of neutrophils as a response to the chemo, apart from that. So we also checked the protein and human tissue. We found also a high expression of neutrophils there. So our model is more or less really comparable with the human situation, let’s say. That was the idea about, Okay, how can we maybe, let’s say, manipulate this protein in a way that we can destroy the tumor. What this protein normally does is it heals the tissue. Looking from an infectious point of view, the body starts to produce this chitinase-like protein in a response to the infection, so it wants to heal the body.

[00:15:50.06] – Jonas Steenbrugge

But looking at or when taking that perspective to a cancer context, it actually stimulates the tumor because it In the healing process that it tries to stimulate, it actually stimulates the growth of the tumor. That’s what it does. It stimulates, let’s say, cellular growth. And in an infectious context, that’s okay because you try to heal the wound, right? But in a cancer context, you’re actually stimulating the growth of the tumor even further. So we wanted to tackle that process.

[00:16:25.08] – John Knych

And does this happen across all tumors?

[00:16:29.01] – Jonas Steenbrugge

Yeah, this is Really, this is pretty much, let’s say, a straightforward process that you can see in different solid tumors, like colon tumors, for example, lung tumors. It’s the same process. These kinase-like proteins, they stimulate the growth of the tumor, even though they don’t want to do that. It’s an evolutionary process to heal the body. But in a cancer context, the tumor actually hijacks that process to stimulate its growth. And that’s why cancer is such a complex disease. You’re tackling evolutionary processes in a way that this is how nature works, but in a way, you try to prevent that. That’s very difficult. And that’s why cancer remains such a huge burden to treat. So what we try to do is, first of all, look into the literature. How can we maybe, I don’t know, block this protein from doing this healing process in a tumor context? That’s where we found the chitin. So there was one publication from 2012. It was from a group in, if I’m not mistaken, Miami US. It’s a paper from Estefania Librero. She’s now an associate professor, I think, in Yale. Never got to meet her, but I would really like to meet her one day.

[00:18:01.03] – Jonas Steenbrugge

She was the first to use chitin in a mouse model for triple negative breast cancer. And she found that it could, in a way, block the chitinase 3,1 protein. So this is the main family member And that’s where most people are focusing because it also is expressed in humans. So it’s the same protein in humans and mice.

[00:18:22.14] – John Knych

When you say use chitin, do you mean manipulate the chitin that’s already there or artificially inject chitin?

[00:18:29.22] – Jonas Steenbrugge

Because Yeah, this is a thing about… I don’t know how much you know about the chitin, but in a way, chitin itself, it’s easy to isolate. You can find it in shrimp cells or from the exoskeleton from insects. So in a way, you can think about it like eating box, you get already chitin into your bud, or even eating shrimp shells, although we never eat the shell, but it’s inside the shell. But it’s more It’s not that easy to really target the protein with just a normal chitin. You need to have a specific size in order to block it. This is where the libreros paper was really focusing into the size. They found that you need a chitin particle size of about 1-10 micrometers. It’s pretty small in order to have this anti-tumorogenic effect. Once they give these a small chitin particles in a solution, this was just a a PPS solution. That’s the normal physiological fluid that we use. And you inject the mice with that. And that’s in We call it intrapyritonially. So that’s inside the fat tissue of the abdomen. That’s the normal way we inject it. In humans, you can even drink it or inject it through the vein.

[00:19:59.07] – Jonas Steenbrugge

That’s also That’s fine. But in a mouse, it’s easier to inject it into the abdomen for easy uptake. When you do that and you give it like one milligram every three days, that was their treatment schedule, you get a real clear growth reduction of the tumor. That’s what we first wanted to replicate. Can we replicate this growth reduction into our models? We actually found the same thing.

[00:20:28.19] – Speaker 3

So We saw that giving this one milligram, but specifically the one to 10 micrometer size, that’s important.

[00:20:37.06] – Jonas Steenbrugge

You get this same growth reduction and also we’re clearly blocking the kinase quant protein. That’s also inside the paper.

[00:20:48.15] – John Knych

Congratulations on your paper, too. I didn’t say that yet, but it’s inspiring.

[00:20:55.10] – Jonas Steenbrugge

Yeah, this was actually main part of my post-hoc.

[00:20:58.16] – Speaker 3

So Yeah, it was a real interesting topic also for human clinicians because now they have an idea about, okay, if we maybe provide this simple natural product to our patients on beforehand as a early treatment, we can maybe prevent tumors from going really big or even metastasizing or even help our immunotherapy that’s now really booming.

[00:21:27.23] – Jonas Steenbrugge

So yeah, That’s what we also aimed for, combine it with immunotherapy, because that’s now becoming more or less the standard of care treatment for these triple-negative breast cancers. But the main problem there is that a lot of these triple-negative breast cancers, they’re resistant to it. When you have a metastatic triple-negative breast cancer, this is more or less a death sentence for these patients. You can just give chemo and maybe in combination with the immunotherapy as a new treatment. But then again, only 10 to 20% of the patients respond to it. We need to get that percentage higher because these are really young women. Most of the time, they only have a very young child. So devastating for those families. So giving this simple natural product can already boost a bit the percentages. Or that’s what at least we find from the mouse studies. So it really works in collaboration with immunotherapy. You get rid of the resistance towards the immunotherapy. That’s what we found in the mouse. And you can also boost the immune system. So instead of healing the wounds, you actually boost the immune system to fight cancer. That’s what chitin does. Now, always take into mind that these mouse models are a real exaggerated situation.

[00:22:58.00] – Jonas Steenbrugge

You never We need to see this immense immune cell burden and tumor growth into a human patient. Most of the times, these patients are already treated with other kinds of treatments on beforehand before they get the immunotherapy and so on. Whether it will work the same way as we see in the mouse and humans, that’s still a big question. But I’m pretty sure that it can work, at least in part, to stimulate the immune with or without immunotherapy. And this is an interesting thing to know because this chitin suspension, as we call it, has actually already been used way earlier than we think. We We had to see the first reports in Japan. So the Japanese government actually stimulated universities there to do research on this chitin suspension because they found that when people drank the suspension, you can even buy it in the pharmacy there. It’s already available on the market for a long time. They found that, specifically, cancer patients in an early stage, you get a way better response to therapy and even a reduction of the growth of the tumor. We’re talking about early ’90s here when they saw this. This field is actually already a long time ongoing and evolving nowadays towards the chitinase-like proteins, because at that time, they didn’t even know what is the target that we are really pinpointing with this chitin.

[00:24:40.21] – Jonas Steenbrugge

It was just, drink the chitin and you will get a better healing towards cancer or even stomach aches, let’s say. It was for all kinds of aches that you felt. And nowadays, there are still companies that sell this chitin suspension in a way for treating the older people in our society against arthritis or arthritis, sorry, muscle aches. You get a better healthiness. It’s a very romantic image to sell the product. In a way, it’s correct, but they don’t really know what they’re selling because they don’t have the molecular insight into that.

[00:25:28.21] – John Knych

Yes. Even a chitin society in Japan that I emailed. Yeah. I and talk to them about their- It’s a huge thing there, right?

[00:25:36.15] – Jonas Steenbrugge

Because they eat a lot of fish, too. And that’s probably where they get the Gaitan from. It’s a really booming business there. I also find an Iceland company that sells it in a pill form. But the main thing there, and this is important to realize, is that there’s a huge difference difference between chitin and the more deacetylated form chitosan. So chitin, that’s the normal sacriot that you find on the cell walls and in the exoskeleton of insects. This is pretty much insoluble, right? So when you tear it down into very small particles, you still get an insoluble flake inside your flask. And that’s why Most of these companies turn it to chitosan. So they do a deacetylation when you look at it from a chemical perspective. And in that way, it turns soluble. So you can get it soluble into a drinkable version. But the main thing there, the problem there, when trying to treat cancer with this chitosan derivative, it doesn’t work the same way as it does with chitosan.

[00:26:57.13] – John Knych

Why not?

[00:26:58.12] – Jonas Steenbrugge

This is still a pretty much debated thing. There are some reports that side by side compared to chitosan with chitosan, and they say that the chitin does do an anti-tumorogenic effect, but the chituzan can even do the opposite. How it does that? No idea. I also didn’t look very much into detail on to that. I just knew, chitosan, that’s not the way to go. Way too much reports that say it doesn’t work. The chiten will have a clear lead there with the librido paper. Let’s just try it. It’s easy to do. The only thing that was difficult is to get it into the very small particle sizes because the chiten doesn’t It doesn’t easily, let’s say, break down. It doesn’t easily break down, so you need to have a very strong sonicate, we call it.

[00:27:55.19] – Speaker 3

It’s like a buzzing system where you break down those long chains of sacrolytes into smaller oligosecrolytes.

[00:28:07.17] – Jonas Steenbrugge

And then you filter the suspension through a very small filtering system that can only let through the particles of up to 10 micrometer. And then the remaining suspension that you get is up to 1 to 10 micrometer-size particles. So that’s how we produce it. And we just buy our chiton from a commercial vendor. It’s Merck. Merck is a commercial vendor, and they have these Kiten Flakes coming from shrimp shells. It’s super easy to buy and also not that expensive. We have 5 grams for, I don’t know, €50. It may look like a lot of money, but then again, it’s like a real, let’s say, aseptic product. So it’s been made into a very aseptic condition, so you can use it in a lab and so on. So bringing it to the patient, it’s going to be pretty easy, in my opinion, because it won’t be that expensive, which, again, is a really big advantage. In my opinion, it’s also not that easy to produce. It’s easy to produce, sorry. If you have this system where you can tear the sacroides down to smaller particle size in a rapid pace, I think that’s easy to do.

[00:29:41.24] – Jonas Steenbrugge

I think companies already have that stuff. And you get a filtration system that allows you to select the smaller particle sizes, you actually more or less have it. But then I checked clinical trials, right? Whether they already did some trials on the chitin. I couldn’t find any. Up until now, I think nobody is really focusing on trials towards breast cancer or cancer with small chitin particle sizes. You can find some trials about chitin on, let’s say, allergies. With respiratory problems, you can have an adverse effect of the chitin. That’s a different… That’s asthma. So it’s a different point of view. Let’s not go into detail about that. But from a cancer perspective, I cannot really find a trial for chitin. That was also really striking to me because it’s so easy, actually, and more or less straightforward to do. What we’re doing here now is we try to not directly go to patients, but we try to bring this treatment to the pets first because they’re, again, easy to make, not that costly, and that’s a huge point in the veterinary clinics. That’s the cost of the products. Don’t get any reimbursement for veterinary medical products like you have in the human setting.

[00:31:13.23] – Jonas Steenbrugge

So owners are more or less reluctant to do any treatment because of the costs. And if you have a very cheap product that still works fine and it’s non-toxic, yeah, they can already help a lot of people, right? And going down to the human clinic won’t be a big leap. That will be just not a walk in the park, but it can go pretty fast forward.

[00:31:39.14] – John Knych

So the next step for you would be to try it with cats and dogs.

[00:31:42.18] – Jonas Steenbrugge

Yeah, exactly. Trying to get funding for that is not easy. That’s another thing. We’re trying to find some ways to do it, but yeah, difficult. That’s where we’re more or less a bit stuck now. But budgetary part, not really science part, but it’s also part of the job.

[00:32:06.07] – John Knych

So Jonas, I’ll share with you how I stumbled upon Khaitan, because this may be interesting for you. So I live in Paris, and I met a woman who does research with chitin. I think she has a chemistry background. That’s what you mostly see, people working on chitin or real chemistry-wise. Yes. And I’m curious to know your opinion on this. I looked at some of… She has a video and is working on her PhD. She’s using chitin as a vehicle to transport into tumor drugs. This is the thing. But that’s not what you’ve done. What you’ve done is to take chitin in the tumor, and that prevents the tumor from growing. Am I understanding you correctly?

[00:32:54.18] – Jonas Steenbrugge

Yeah. Actually, this is an interesting thing because it’s also inside our discussion the paper, very small part. Chitin is mostly known among scientists as a carrier, a capsule, where you can put in other pharmaceuticals or other compounds. And most of the researchers don’t think about what the chitin really does. It’s just a capsule, a vehicle to transport our product. Okay, great. But haven’t you realized that maybe The effect that you see is not only the compound, but it can also be a part of the chitin effect? Yeah. So this is most of the time, just forgotten. I mean, people don’t know what the chitin does. It’s good to have it. It’s biodegradable. It’s good for transportation inside the body. And of course, it’s nontoxic. That’s the most important thing. So that’s why it’s a very interesting carrier. So we also put a small part on this in our article just to say, Hey, think about it whenever you use the chitin again, don’t only think about the effects that your compounds may have, but also the chitin may, though. It can also have anti-tumorogenic effects.

[00:34:18.16] – John Knych

Yes. And interesting, I didn’t know that in Japan it was already being sold as a supplement. Yeah.

[00:34:24.20] – Jonas Steenbrugge

I don’t know how it is right now, but at least in the ’90s and so on, ’90s, early 3 milliliters, you could just buy it. I’ve never been to Japan myself, but I would really like to see it. It’s like a chitin suspension. How much does it cost?

[00:34:41.11] – John Knych

And when you say chitin suspension, what do you mean? Is it a liquid with Is there some flakes in it?

[00:34:45.21] – Jonas Steenbrugge

I think so. I’ve never seen it, but I would say it’s like that. I think they just tear the chitin apart, put it into a flask, like a suspension with flakes, probably. How can I Can I tell how it looks? It’s like a grayish… It looks like a mold inside your bottle, but it’s like a grayish flake that you can see. It falls down to the bottom of your flask once you just let it stand for an hour. So it’s not really soluble, right? That’s what I mean with the chitin. And you don’t have that with the chitin. And it just gets into a clear solution, but it doesn’t have the same effect as the chitin has.

[00:35:41.09] – John Knych

So in your opinion, the chitin is better than chituzan, and it needs to be insuible to do its work.

[00:35:49.02] – Jonas Steenbrugge

At least, I don’t know why. Yeah, right? So I think that’s still a big question mark. But reports and literature at least tell so that it’s better to use chitin instead of the chitouzanne. On the other hand, I also find new articles, like very recent ones, that use a very deacetylated form of chitin, also chitosan called, but you have different percentages of deacetylation. So chitosan can also be a very broad family of chitoaligoseccharides. We call it oligosecorides because you have different particle sizes. You cannot They say it’s one type of sacriot. It has different sizes, so that’s why we call it the chitoaligoseccharides. And that’s where they also checked it inside the… I don’t know by a heart. Let me just check because I have it on my computer here. They also injected inside the tumor, this chytuzan, and they got a real anti-tumorogenic response. It also has something to do with immune cells being stimulated. So in a way, I don’t think it’s a black and white story. Chytuzan may work, but maybe in specific contexts and when giving it in a specific manner, injecting it inside the tumor, maybe, and not drinking it or injecting it intravenously.

[00:37:18.08] – John Knych

Yes. So Jonas, I also want to share with you the goal for this interview in our article. So my colleague, she’s in California now, so it’s 2: 00 AM. That’s why she couldn’t join the- Okay, no problem. He’s done medical articles before, and she’s the one with the connection @webmd. Do you know Webmd?

[00:37:40.14] – Jonas Steenbrugge

Well, I’ve heard about it before, but of course, it’s more American website, right?

[00:37:47.19] – John Knych

Yes. And it’s become really the go-to for people with medical questions that want a reliable source. And the working title for the piece, if it’s accepted, is how shrimp shells can help fear cancer. Yeah, great. But the questions that I sent this in the email to you that the editor needs us to answer before they give us the green light is, what’s the data showing what’s going on with chitin? So you mentioned the interesting example of it being consumed in Japan. Is that just what you’ve come across or have you seen any concrete data where the Japanese government or an organization has said, Look, we’ve analyzed people who drank kaitin or kaitosen for 10 years, and those people got tumors that grew much slower than people who- It’s very difficult to find this data.

[00:38:42.23] – Jonas Steenbrugge

You can find some, let’s say, descriptions and review papers. But it’s very difficult to find these data in a raw form. And I’ve I checked multiple times, but very difficult to find them. I can check for this piece, if I can definitely find something. But at least, it’s probably also because it’s so long ago, and some of these articles are not really internationally distributed, and it’s more like an Asian journal, probably. I don’t even know whether it’s in English, but I can check for you whether I can find this real hard data.

[00:39:34.10] – John Knych

If you come across it or if it’s convenient.

[00:39:38.05] – Jonas Steenbrugge

Yeah, sure.

[00:39:39.24] – John Knych

Because you mentioned, and I’m going to watch this interview again, you mentioned the Stefani- Stefania Libreros.

[00:39:47.12] – Jonas Steenbrugge

Yeah.

[00:39:47.16] – John Knych

And someone at Brown University.

[00:39:50.03] – Jonas Steenbrugge

Yeah, that’s Jack Elias. You will find a lot of stuff about the kite in these three like one. He’s still working on that a lot. And what they do is also So not really work with chitin as a natural product, but they use antibodies against the protein. That’s more a specific way of targeting the chitinase-3-like one protein. But this is a difference with the chitin. What we do with the chitin is actually we target the whole family and not only one specific protein. And this may also be a beneficial thing because we actually, in the paper, compared this this antibody treatments for this specific protein with the chitin treatment. And the chitin treatment was even more efficacious. So you get a better growth reduction with the chitin than with the antibody treatment. So it’s better to actually target the whole family. But it’s difficult to tell how it works on each family member. That’s a whole different story. We specifically focused on this chitinase 3-like one because that’s the main, I mean, investigated We know a lot about it in cancer already, mainly through the Elias group, and it’s another way of targeting it.

[00:41:08.20] – John Knych

I see. So there’s still a lot of mystery about exactly what’s going on.

[00:41:13.10] – Jonas Steenbrugge

Yeah, we even don’t really know the function of the protein. So we’re actually still totally in the mist. We find a lot of leads, let’s say, and we find that it’s an interesting therapeutic target, but the exact function is still pretty unclear, even after all these years. It’s even strange that us humans still produce this protein, even though we don’t have a chitin in the skin or something.

[00:41:43.19] – Speaker 3

It’s like, in a way, We lost the chitin throughout the evolution.

[00:41:48.21] – Jonas Steenbrugge

We don’t have this exoskeleton or something, but we kept the proteins that degraded, probably because of a, I don’t know, protective mechanism to boost the immune system once you have an infection. But in the cancer context, this is not a good thing, right?

[00:42:09.16] – John Knych

Could you clarify a little bit more about it’s not a good thing that we have chitin when there’s cancer or tumor because it helps heal the-Yeah.

[00:42:22.04] – Jonas Steenbrugge

So the chitinase 3, like one or the family of chitinases and chitinase-like proteins, they have a healing function. So once you have a wound and an infection going on, the body will respond to that the way they want to clear the infection, and then they want to heal the wound. And these chitinases and chitinase-like proteins, they help in this healing process. So looking at that from a cancer perspective, the healing process is actually stimulating cellular growth. That’s what you do in a healing process.

[00:42:56.03] – John Knych

But then what do you do externally that either prevents that or encourages another process from occurring?

[00:43:04.16] – Jonas Steenbrugge

So that’s where the chitin can turn up in a cancer context. You can use the chitin to block these chitinase-like proteins.

[00:43:13.16] – John Knych

I see.

[00:43:14.17] – Jonas Steenbrugge

And what’s normally going on in an infectious disease is that the chitin from the cell wall of the fungai or whatever bacteria is entering into your body, it gets degraded by the chitinase. Chitanases. And here we have an already degraded version of the chitin that we inject and that blocks the proteins.

[00:43:37.18] – John Knych

I see.

[00:43:38.07] – Jonas Steenbrugge

So it’s- It’s a difficult way of understanding, I know. But think about it as an evolutionary process that’s normally going on when having an infection. And it’s a good thing that we have these chitanase-like proteins to boost our immune system and heal the wounds. But think about that in a cancer context, healing the cancer that actually stimulates the growth. So we need to reverse that process, which is evolutionary and not difficult to do.

[00:44:07.16] – John Knych

Yeah, and you can only use the process using the same substance.

[00:44:11.01] – Jonas Steenbrugge

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

[00:44:13.16] – John Knych

Okay. You’ve definitely clearly answered question two of the editor, which is what is chitin’s potential?

[00:44:19.23] – Jonas Steenbrugge

Yeah.

[00:44:20.09] – John Knych

Out of this- He has an anti-cancer potential. But the last part that he asked us is how far off is chitin from being used fight cancer. So you mentioned that dogs and cats, but if you, let’s say, have all the pieces fall into place, you get funding, you do more studies, if you had to say, when would human trials occur? When would they?

[00:44:44.12] – Jonas Steenbrugge

I think it can go pretty straightforward or even fast forward because, first of all, the chitin suspension has actually already been used in people, just willingly. People just buy it in Japan already in the ’90s. But then again, you need to have this specific particle size to be anti-cancer efficacious. So whenever being able to produce these small particles in a large volume, because that’s what we will need to do to give it to humans. The amount that we give in mice will be much higher in humans. We also don’t know how many times you need to provide it to the people. We think it’s non-toxic, but then again, are we sure, specifically with these small chitin particle sizes? So these are processes or phases, let’s say, that we first need to go through in order to really go to the clinical trial. But I think it will be, let’s say, if we start today, you can maybe already do the trial within 3-5 years, I think. Excellent. That’s just a broad estimation. But yeah, the main, let’s say, reluctancy that most scientists have is that it’s probably not or you will not be able to patent the product because it’s a natural product and there’s already a lot of patents around regarding the chitin.

[00:46:29.03] – Jonas Steenbrugge

So that’s why most Most research are like, okay, man, I’m not going to stick too much time into that because we will probably not get a lot of money out of it. And also the same with companies.

[00:46:43.06] – John Knych

Very interesting.

[00:46:43.20] – Jonas Steenbrugge

If you don’t get a lot of money out of natural product that’s already been used for a long time ago in Asia. So I think that’s the main thing why you don’t see a lot of clinical trials going on. That’s fascinating. But I don’t have any There’s really solid data on that. It’s just like an opinion. That’s always a thing.

[00:47:07.11] – John Knych

Because I never knew this in the cancer research field. Do people express that, look, we’re not going to put tons of time and energy into a path that we couldn’t have a lucrative endpoint, right?

[00:47:26.13] – Jonas Steenbrugge

Yeah, of course. We always try to go towards or go towards advantages for the patients. That’s our main goal, right? But then again, in the setting of the scientific field, also with all the institutions wanting more money and so on, you need to have a I mean, like an end goal of any patents where a return of investment can be the case.

[00:47:54.05] – John Knych

And do companies or funding ever put that pressure on you and say, Look, we’ll give you money, but you need to tell us that you have a patent at some certain time?

[00:48:04.06] – Jonas Steenbrugge

You don’t get pressure from companies. That’s not the case. But we get requests from companies to test compounds because we have good models. We have expertise in the field. And that’s when we, from a total… We’re totally not involved into the research of those compounds. So we’re like outsiders, We’re looking at it with it from a clear view, like no prejudices or whatsoever. Then we try to test these compounds into our mouse models. We give our results to them and let them know whether it does or does not work and what maybe the molecular mechanism is behind the compound action. That’s what we sometimes do. That also helps the patients forward because And those compounds are already mostly into clinical trials and so on. And yet there’s a clear patent perspective there because they develop the compound. And sometimes we’re also involved as an inventor because we unraveled the mechanism of action of that compound. That can happen.

[00:49:19.09] – John Knych

I see. But you’re not lucky, but you’re in a good place being part of Ghent University’s Crigg organization. Can you talk a little bit about how you work with people there and your research with Kaya? Are there a lot of other people working with you? What’s the atmosphere there that allows you to do your research Creeg is a great collaborative, let’s say, team of different research groups here in Ghenn University.

[00:49:56.05] – Jonas Steenbrugge

We have people working in the hospital on specific cancer types or specific topics in their field, like immunotherapy, cell death, the microenvironment and how to manipulate it, radiotherapy, you name it. You have a lot of expertise there. We also have connections with other institutions, of course. But Krieg is becoming a pretty well-known name inside Belgium and also outside of Europe. Relationship, even. It’s a great atmosphere for collaboration. You have a lot of collaborating teams. We also have a coordinator of the whole Krieg. It has a board with a lot of members. We also have connections with the industry who know Creech.

[00:50:52.04] – Speaker 3

Whenever they have a request for additional testing of compounds or something or ideas, They first come to the chairperson or people involved in the board, and then they send it out to different labs that may have the tools or the expertise to help those companies.

[00:51:15.01] – Jonas Steenbrugge

We also sometimes have a spin-off from Krieg that even happens. If we find new compounds or new treatment candidates, it can happen that we eventually develop or some spin-offs develop from Krieg.

[00:51:31.12] – John Knych

Excellent. Is everyone who you’ve interacted with that Krieg on board with chitin, meaning they’re aware of your research, they think you’re going down the right path, or are there some people who go, Look, you’re wasting your time. There are other things to be- No.

[00:51:46.09] – Jonas Steenbrugge

People know the products, and they were really interested in the research, specifically the clinicians, really. They were really interested because they were like, This is an interesting way to treat our patients in a non-toxic way. It can be cheap, can be easy to make. This may be a really good way to go forward, even in different kinds of cancers. It doesn’t necessarily need to be used in breast cancer alone. It can also be used in endometrial cancer or ovarian cancer, which has still a huge burden towards treatment. So yeah, there was a lot of interest in the research. We presented it also in our yearly meetings. A lot of input from other groups that want to go forward with it, too.

[00:52:43.23] – John Knych

And this was recent, right? You must have presented it to me.

[00:52:47.11] – Jonas Steenbrugge

Yeah. So I also went to the US with a collaborating group in University of Colorado, where we specifically also focused on the chitinase 3. 1. As the family member that is the most important one, let’s say, or as far as we know, or the one that is mostly done research on. And that’s where We checked how this protein is also involved into the metastatic process of breast tumors. We found that the chitin can block the protein. That’s what we already knew. But blocking this protein also prevents It connects the tumor from metastases into the lymph nodes, specifically lymph nodes. It’s like the first process that the breast tumor is going through once it wants to go to distant organs. It first spreads to the lymph nodes, and from there on, it can spread to different parts of the body. And you can actually prevent or reduce that process by giving a chitin or blocking that chitin is three-like-one protein. That’s where I specifically focused on there in the US. I also presented my results on chitin there at the University of Colorado. We’re also some people from the University of Texas there, MD Anderson, and they were like, Wow, man, this can be really interesting because you can tell people in an easy way that eating box can help them in preventing getting breast cancer in a way that you can look at it from that It’s true, but it’s not that easy.

[00:54:32.21] – Jonas Steenbrugge

You have the small particle size, the necessity of having those 1-10 micrometer sizes with the chitin. And also, you still need to get it digested. If it’s still a complete buck, your body needs to digest it into those small parts. It’s never going to happen. So you need to produce those small particle sizes and digest that.

[00:54:55.20] – John Knych

What’s the word you’re saying? Complete buck? Yeah, like a complete buck.

[00:55:00.11] – Jonas Steenbrugge

I mean, like an insect that you- Oh, bug.

[00:55:02.15] – John Knych

Okay.

[00:55:03.07] – Jonas Steenbrugge

Yeah. This is like the thing, right? Like a lot of proteins inside the box. You can fry it and you can eat them. So in that way, yeah, chitin is like a booming business. I mean, a lot of people start to eat this bug fruit, and it’s also a lot inside the new pet foods. So probably the pet foods nowadays also contain a bit of chitin. Cannot prove that, but I guess that it is the case.

[00:55:32.22] – John Knych

Yes. So it can be preventative by just consuming it, but then also there is a cancer and you can treat it.

[00:55:41.09] – Jonas Steenbrugge

So they specifically told this with the a collective of treating women that get pregnancy-associated breast cancer. This is a specific breast cancer that a group in the US is working on. So these are patients that pretty much quickly after the breastfeeding, they develop a breast tumor because when stopping the breastfeeding, it involutes, so the memory gland is becoming smaller. Because the milk doesn’t need to flow through again. So you get a tearing down of the breast tissue. That’s a normal evolutionary process.. Yeah, in that evolutionary process, you can also get cancer because it’s a huge inflammatory process going on. And sometimes things go wrong. You can also have a more genetic predisposition for that cancers. But when having that cancer, most of the time you’re a young female, and you have a bad prognosis because those cancers, they are pretty aggressive. That’s where they say, maybe we can give the people that are genetically predisposed already and have depressed feeling, you maybe already give the chitin as a preventive measure to prevent tumors or tumors developing into those involuting breasts. And nowadays, they already give anti-inflammatory agents like ibuprofen, I don’t know, the NSAIDs, as we call them.

[00:57:27.07] – Jonas Steenbrugge

This is what they sometimes already use to prevent it’s the growth of these tumors. But again, NSAIDs, they’re not good for the kidneys and so on, so they have a bit of a toxicity when being exposed to them for a longer period. So chitin may be a good alternative, a natural product. I mean, yeah, that’s where they were really interested in.

[00:57:53.18] – John Knych

Yes. Natural biodegradable.

[00:57:55.24] – Jonas Steenbrugge

Yeah, exactly. Non-toxic.

[00:57:59.01] – John Knych

Excellent. Well, Jonas, those are all the questions that I have, and I’m going to keep researching to try and find even more concrete data, because when you present it at Colorado, Were there any other people there presenting about chitin, or were you the only one? In the field right now, what’s the state of the field?

[00:58:27.05] – Jonas Steenbrugge

With the chitin, you mean? Yeah. It’s still It’s difficult to find a lot of new papers. Whenever finding stuff about chitin, it’s always in a carrier way, using it as a carrier, as you said, too. And it always turns out to be focused on the compound inside the carrier and never about the chitin. Chitin is just, Okay, we use chitin as a carrier because it’s easy to use, it’s biodegradable, and it transports our product pretty well. That’s it. End of story. But having real in-depth studies on the chitin, difficult to find. I’m also constantly on the look out. But even before our study, the only concrete study on chitin that we found was the libreros paper from 2012. So that’s already more than 10 years ago. And before this paper, we also published a paper on the use of chitin also, but in a mastitis context. I can also send you that paper if you’re interested. So that’s actually like a memory gland infection. So you can also reduce that infection in a way by giving chitin. Again, blocking the proteins. It’s like an immunomodulation. You cannot really prevent the growth of the bacteria. That’s not what you’re doing, but you’re reducing the immune stimulation so that it doesn’t get too exaggerated.

[01:00:05.23] – Jonas Steenbrugge

Different kinds of contexts. But I think you were mostly focusing on cancer, right? That was your main topic. Yeah, that’s why I didn’t I don’t know if you want to go into detail about that.

[01:00:16.22] – John Knych

Yes. No, but it’s all about what the editor is interested in us exploring. And if WebMD decides that we don’t have enough information, I’m going to pitch to other American magazines like New Scientist, Smithsonian, are publications interested in cutting-edge medicine?

[01:00:38.06] – Jonas Steenbrugge

Yeah. Great. Okay. Will you need to have more input from me? Do I need to check some articles, or how do we proceed here?

[01:00:52.04] – John Knych

It all depends on just what you’re interested in. With your view, I’m going to share it with my colleague. We’re going rewrite up our, rewrite our pitch to her editor at WebMD and see what he says. Him or another editor may say, We need even more, in which case I may reach out to you again and say, either Can we have another conversation or can we find me on where we can find certain information? But I’m optimistic. I really enjoyed this talk and you opened my eyes to really what’s going on in this field. So I’m optimistic that this is enough.

[01:01:31.17] – Jonas Steenbrugge

Okay. But I’ll be- Never think about shrimp the same way. Whenever you will eat shrimp, you’re going to think about, Okay, if I eat the shell, I may be able to prevent some cancer here. Yeah.

[01:01:44.21] – John Knych

And that’s the interesting element is that this combination of it being just this simple, right, shrimp shell versus something that could change how we treat cancer.

[01:01:58.07] – Jonas Steenbrugge

Yeah, exactly.

[01:02:00.22] – John Knych

Yeah. So again, I’m optimistic that this will be enough for the editor, but I’m not the one with the connection. It’s my colleague who’s worked at WebMD before.

[01:02:11.15] – Jonas Steenbrugge

I think there’s one additional US group, but I don’t think it’s on the context of cancer, who was also focusing on like, shrimp shells and turning into chitin. I can look that up for you. So maybe that’s another connection that you can put inside the I will send you the details if I can find it back, but I don’t know by heart what’s the topic about with the use of chitin. It was not cancer as far as I know. And also a press release and stuff like…

[01:02:48.24] – John Knych

When I originally wanted to work on this with my colleague, I wanted to explore things that you talked about. It’s anti-inflammatory concepts, like all the broad applications, but usually the editors, they want you to narrow it down to bite size. So someone on WebMD-Easy to read. Easy to read and just go, Oh, what’s a new cancer thing? Our shrimp shells can help cure cancer. But that being said, if I reach out to a different news organization or journal and magazine in the US, they might say, Oh, we want you to do more. Yeah. But one more question, Jonas. So you said earlier on in the conversation that you’d love to talk to Stephanie at Yau, who did the 2012 piece. Even though you haven’t talked with them before, do you have- We emailed a couple of times.

[01:03:44.22] – Jonas Steenbrugge

That’s already a long time ago.

[01:03:47.04] – John Knych

Why did they stop if they published this good article on chitinism?

[01:03:51.05] – Jonas Steenbrugge

I think they’re focusing on… They went through with the chit in a while, focusing on this chitinism, like one proie I’m looking into. But now they’re looking into different topics, not specifically cancer-related. She also left the group and went to another institute because of a post-hoc and so on. I don’t know. Also the chitin for us, it’s a part of projects, so it will probably return someday. But we’re also not really looking into that now very specifically with other projects. We’re more looking into more targeted approaches now, for example, antibody treatments, because most of the time, it’s like I said, you need to have a patentable product. It needs to be very specific with chitin. It’s a really broad blockade that you’re doing. And that again, specifically for granting agents, funding agencies. They really want to have this very pinpointed approach. And that’s where you need to use antibodies instead of broad blocking, chitin natural products. But We’ll always use it as a a positive control because it has a better anti-cancer effect than targeting one specific family member. The thing that we’re focusing now on is actually, again, to reduce this inflammatory process in cancer and stimulate the immune system and also having a synergy with immunotherapy, where not only blocking this chitinase 3-like one family member is the main member of the chitinases, but also combining it with other protein targets, also stimulating the immune system.

[01:05:58.08] – Jonas Steenbrugge

So have a triple targeting blocking approach. The more members you’re blocking, the better. But always in a very specific manner.

[01:06:10.05] – John Knych

Okay. No, thank you for that. Now, you’ve also expanded my knowledge just on how cancer is fought, generally.

[01:06:16.11] – Jonas Steenbrugge

Yeah, I always try to tell students, because cancer is such a complex disease. You can never say, Oh, there’s a tumor growing, and your body starts to react to it, and that’s it. You always need to think It’s not about it in a way like it’s an evolutionary process. It’s like an infection going the wrong way. Your body tries to tackle the infection, tackle the protein, or tackle the tumor, sorry. But the tumor uses evolutionary processes to hamper that effect.

[01:06:50.22] – John Knych

Yes.

[01:06:51.22] – Jonas Steenbrugge

And that’s why it’s so difficult to treat it. You’re targeting evolution. So nature will always find different ways to I mean, find other paths to still stimulate the growth of tumor.

[01:07:05.06] – John Knych

Yes. Yeah. No, it’s a complicated, difficult disease. Well, Jonas, I have to run because I got to work. I teach at one o’clock. Okay. No problem. I really enjoyed this conversation. I’ll be in touch about how this progresses. And thank you for your research and what you’re doing.

[01:07:29.16] – Jonas Steenbrugge

Yeah. No, thank you for this interview. It was very nice talking to you.

[01:07:33.20] – John Knych

Yes. No, I’ll be in touch.

[01:07:35.24] – Jonas Steenbrugge

Okay. Perfect.

[00:00:00.17] – John Knych – Intro

Okay, here we go. So thank you, Adrian, for being here. For those of you that don’t know, because I’ll share this later with our reading group, Adrian was the first speaker for this science fiction book talk, and we talked about Children of Time last time. And one of the questions that we asked you, Adrian, was, how are you so prolific? And your response was, poor work-life balance.

[00:00:32.16] – Adrian Tchaikovsky – Process

Yeah, that has not changed, honestly. I can expand that in a less…less spurious manner. Having spoken to a lot of other authors, and I get the prolific thing a lot, I I enjoy writing. There are a surprising number of authors for whom it is a bit tooth pulling still, and they enjoy having written, but not the writing itself. I genuinely love the writing process. I can’t think of anything else I would rather do with chunks of my day. I think that helps. But also, because I do so much world-based prep, and this is purely… I’m not necessarily saying this I’m not the universal panacea for this sort of thing, but this is purely what works for me. Everything I put into a book in that first draft, ideally, if I’ve done it properly, fits with everything else. So all of these ideas are coming from the same place. I don’t have a long, drawn out second or third or whatever draft where I’m having to retcon loads of stuff and change loads of stuff around and so forth. It all goes in so that my first draft and my submission draft are very, very very similar, usually barring a certain amount of cutting because I do overwrite.

[00:02:05.21] – Adrian Tchaikovsky – Process

And that helps. So it’s not necessarily that I’m writing more per day, but I am keeping more of what I write.

[00:02:15.10] – John Knych – Worldbuilding

Yes. And those of you who just arrived, I’m bringing up the first conversation that Adrian had with us on Children of Time. You also mentioned, Adrian, that you love world building, that you could just world build and just do that. For you, the struggle is narrative after the world building. Was that the same with Shroud, in that you built this world, this alien, and then after the world building, you put the narrative in, or was it in tandem?

[00:02:48.24] – Adrian Tchaikovsky – worldbuilding

Sorry. First of all, could I just ask, Jen, would you be able to mute your mic because I’m getting feedback off you. Thank you. So I love world building. I’m also very reliant on it. Again, this is purely a me thing, but when I’m writing a book, I am almost always explicitly writing to show people the world I have thought up. In order to do that, you do need a plot and characters and things like that. But displaying the world and taking people through the world and showing all the clever things I put into it is very much my starting point. The characters and the plot generally arise quite organically out of the world I want to show. It is very much looking at, all right, what are the events that this world is brewing? Because obviously, one of the things about creating a world is a world is not a static thing. It is a thing that you’re starting off with a snapshot of that world as it progresses from one state to another, because that’s how everything works. Usually, you’ll want to focus in on a particular crisis point or something exciting happening because that is the best way of showing the interesting bits of the world.

[00:04:06.15] – Adrian Tchaikovsky – Worldbuilding

And so that’s where your plot comes from, your character comes from. You just look at that point, so, right, who are the interesting people here? Who are the people who display these various different aspects of the setting? So a lot of writers will start with that plot, or they will start with a character they want to write about. Well, I will start with the world and the characters and the plot, hopefully, organically arise out of that world. It’s all working together. But with me, the world is very definitely the driving force for it all. The fascinating thing with this thing and listening to other writers talk about their very different processes is: At the end of all of these very different processes, you are converging on the same endpoint, which is a book, which has all of these things. To a certain extent, it doesn’t necessarily matter which you are focusing on, on which order you’re doing, because they should all kind of end up there, and you should end up with this seamless hole, which is the book.

[00:05:06.23] – John Knych – Alien Conception – Distributed Minds

I see. Thank you, Adrian. All right, for those of you who are new to this roundtable discussion, I just did a brief introduction, and then we’ll move on to the roundtable. This is my last question, then I’ll stop monopolizing this. But Adrian, my question actually is related to Noémie’s review. She posted a couple of days ago because she finished it before me and I watched the review. And my question is, the shrouded aliens are so compelling. We all agree. I mean, no one writes aliens better than you. And we talked a little bit about this in the last discussion with how you constructed the spider civilization. But especially on pages 180 to 185, that transition from the shrouded, like distant shard that then becomes part of the sea, the coastal version of it. It was just brilliant. And my question to you is, since Children of Time, of A. Kern, you’ve played with this scattered, Shard-like self, or scattered minds. Have you always just been obsessed with this idea? And then, just like with Mern and Children of Memory as well, where you explored fragmented consciousness, how purpose and self changes when it’s scattered. Did you always want to do this alien in this book, or did it grow from your previous explorations of this concept?

[00:06:48.05] – Adrian Tchaikovsky – Hive Mind Conception

You’re right that I do keep going back to it, but I think the reason I do keep going back to it is not that it’s necessarily a thing that’s always fascinated me, but just because having touched on it the once, you realize it is a kind of perfect thought experiment you can replay in multiple different ways. Because people tend to think, Oh, hive mind. And then they have a very a fuzzy idea of what would that be like. But having looked at it in… I mean, I must have had a good half a dozen separate goes at it now. You have Kern, you have Bees in Dogs of War, arguably Alien Clay, although you never see from the perspective of the hive mind in that. I think it’s just if you want to do aliens and you want to alien modes of thought, it’s a very obvious thing that we as humans can conceive of, but we don’t do. It is remarkably fertile ground because there are so many takes you can have on it. I’ve got a few others kicking about in the back of my mind, really, as how one could do it. It’s fascinating because obviously, it’s also a very science-fictional thing because it’s not something we can really observe on Earth.

[00:08:10.20] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

I mean, if you look at ants, ants have a a pheromonal communication and they have this what appears to be an aggregate decision-making process between individuals. That’s certainly the closest we come in the animal kingdom. There is also some argument to say that there are interesting things going on when plants and fungai and things like that to do with linking of organisms into a larger network. But it’s that sweet spot. It’s something that we don’t have, but we can really explore the idea space from where we are. It doesn’t go into that just completely inconceivable alien territory.

[00:08:55.19] – John Knych

Yes. Thank you. It was riveting. It never feels. It feels authentic.

[00:09:01.20] – Adrian Tchaikovsky – Hive Mind Conception

I suppose, yeah. The other thing is just purely speaking as disgruntled student of biology, the common concept of hive mind and say, social insect and things like that is the idea, well, you have a king or queen type creature, and then all of the other are just drones that are doing what they told, which is not how ants or bees or anything of that work. It’s this enormous misunderstanding something that is very much based on because that’s how we organize our societies with people at the top, kings and things, telling people what to do. That’s how we assume it must work, but more so in insects. It’s completely different. They’re actually almost a fundamental democracy of ideas because all of the individual units are contributing to the decision process. I quite like to write high mind scenarios that challenge that kind of top-down dictatorial picture that science fiction often portrays.

[00:10:05.11] – John Knych

Thank you. Brandon, we’ll move on to you for the roundtable, and then we’ll just go, Brandon, Noémie, Brian, Jen, and John, and Chris.

[00:10:15.12] – Brandon – Writing Humans vs. Aliens

Yeah, Adrian, thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate you taking the time out of your day. So I did read Shroud. I really enjoyed it. You have characters that are both human and alien. So do you find it more difficult to write from the alien perspective or the human perspective?

Adrian Tchaikovsky:

It varies from book to book. I am generally quite comfortable writing from an alien perspective. In Shroud, it’s a particular challenge because the alien, it doesn’t have… I’ll say it doesn’t have a single perspective, and I don’t mean in that that there are multiples of them. It means that what it is to write the alien varies depending on how many aliens you have in the room, basically. That was actually quite a challenge because that’s not a natural way to write. The fact that you always have to have this intellectual grasp of, what level of reasoning are they working at? Obviously, it goes from very, very basic instinctual all the way up to a super genius broad global picture. That was the big challenge, or one of the big challenges with this book was getting the alien voice. But I went in with open eyes.

[00:11:38.14] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

It was definitely something I knew I wanted to do. One of the early scenes I conceived of was that bit where you just end up down with one of them, and it’s just got that stream of single-syllable words, which is all it’s capable of thinking on its own. I knew I wanted to head towards that point as a revelation moment in the book. In In broader terms, usually once I’ve got a handle on what it is like to be, the thing I’m writing from, which is just that interface point between the thing and its world based on its senses and its priorities and its evolutionary path and all that thing. Once I’ve got that, I’m generally fairly comfortable in that. And honestly, sometimes human characters are harder. Thank you.

[00:12:28.18] – Noémie – Other Alien Drafts?

Sure. First of all, thank you for taking the time to put this together, John. And thank you, Adrian, for being there. I’m a huge fan. And just you being here is a lot to take in, I have to say. Thank you. I love Shroud, and I think I have all of your books to say. I think I missed two that I can’t find in France. I can’t find them to get to me. What I want to ask is, obviously, John said that you have a big thing for Hive Minds, five months. I’m using the term a bit lousily, but have you had any other ideas for alien minds that you couldn’t really put into words or you couldn’t really integrate into a story before? Is there some alien draft somewhere that you can’t really pinpoint now?

[00:13:16.03] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

I think there are probably some stories on the back burner, which I’m still working on how to bring it over, but I’ve not had anything where I’ve actually started on something and not known what to do with it. Usually, again, because of my process, because of the amount of world prep, I’ll work out pretty quickly if I can’t do a thing that I need to be able to do. So I’ve had a few. The big bug bear, usually, is because I’m generally involved within human characters, it is a communication thing. It’s just like, All right, well, I do need these things to be able to communicate. And I’ve written several entire books that are based around, Right, how are these things going to communicate? But if you don’t want to base the book around that, then you’ve I’ve got a bit of a logistical problem if you just want the human and the alien to just start having a conversation, because if you’re doing hard sci-fi, that’s not actually something that’s ever going to happen. Or at least you probably have to string together a pretty unlikely series of events before that can really be the case.

[00:14:20.13] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

I have had at least one entire book basically collapse because I realized there was no reason why the things I needed to be able to talk to one the other could actually do so, and I couldn’t work out a way around it.

[00:14:32.24] – john Knych

All right. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you, Noémie. Before we move to Brian, speaking of… I got to interrupt real quick. But, Adrian, in the first talk, This was in June 28, 2023. Do you remember if you were working on Shroud? Because when we asked you, all you said was radio. I’m trying to

Adrian Tchaikovsky:

If I said radio, then I must have had the idea by then, because certainly this is the…

Sorry. Can I just give a second? Someone’s hoovering. Hi there. Sorry, I’m on a call at the moment. Can we ask you to get to another room? Thank you. Sorry about that. Noémie, can I ask, what are the books you can’t get in France, if I could ask?

[00:15:29.21] – Noémie

Well, to put away childish things, cannot find them in English, at least. In French, they don’t exist, but cannot find them in English. And the other one, I think it’s your very first fantasy book.

[00:15:43.24] – Noémie

The name is out of my mind right now, but- Empire in Black and Gold? Exactly.

[00:15:49.09] – Noémie

This one, impossible to find it anywhere.

[00:15:52.22] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

Okay. Well, look, when I’m done, I’ll have a look through my backstocks and see if I’ve got any spare copies. Oh, well, thank you so much. If John can get me an address, I’ll post them off.

[00:16:04.08] – Noémie

Thank you so much.

[00:16:09.10] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

Okay, sorry. Next.

[00:16:10.11] – Brian

Let’s see. Volume is working, yeah?

[00:16:19.02] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

Just about. You’re a bit robot-y, but okay.

[00:16:22.10] – Brian – Long Time Spans

Okay, sorry. I might be on a bad connection here. Yeah, thank you very much for doing this. I was not able to get a copy of Shroud. I’m actually in Taiwan, they’re a little bit slow on the imports, I think. So my question is, I guess, more geared towards the Children of Time, if that’s okay, and maybe some more general writing process. So I was wondering, in Children of Time, obviously, you span a very large historical period. You’re going across so much time, so many years. Do you find it easier to work with large spans of time and space as you did in that work? Or do you more enjoy to work in a more confined, constrained? Which one of those do you enjoy more? Which one do you found easier?

[00:17:14.23] – Adrian Tchaikovsky – Long Time Spans

I mean, honestly, it was logistically, it was a colossal pain in the neck having to work at those time periods. The whole inclusion of the nanovirus as a plot device started off purely as a way of shrinking time period I would need to tell the book in. Because otherwise, if you’re looking at evolution, you’re looking at hundreds of millions of years rather than just the thousands of years the book takes place over. I will certainly do. In fact, I’m currently working on the idea of a book where, again, the journey through very long periods of time is an inherent part of the plot, more so, honestly, than in Children of Time. Because I’m going into that with as the key part of the idea rather than a problem to be overcome, that’s going to be much easier to work with. This is a weird thing that happens in a lot of books. There are an awful lot of books where if you look back on the actual amount of time experienced by the characters over the course of the book, you realize the whole thing took place in like a day and a half. They did so much, and they went all of these It’s just like, actually, almost no time has passed for them.

[00:18:32.24] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

It is very difficult to write long-term things. I don’t mean necessarily thousands of years. I mean just like having a series of events that takes place over two or three years, as often in the real world often happens, is narratively very difficult to do because you feel, Well, I need my character to be doing stuff all the time. It’s very difficult to basically say, Yes, dear reader, and then basically they just sat on their hands for three months because they didn’t know what to do or because they didn’t realize they were pressing concerns or anything like that. So managing time in books is generally a very difficult thing. Obviously, because it was such a central thing for children of time, it meant I had to structure the entire book around it. And so it became easier once I had that loop. Good Lord, sorry. I will just give me a second. I don’t know who that is. You’ll just deliver the phone until they bring off. So once I had that loop of the humans going in and out of suspension and discovering the ship deteriorating whilst the spiders were going from societal state to societal state.

[00:19:47.04] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

That worked out fairly nicely, but it took a lot of logistical messing around. Hello, sorry, I can’t speak right now. Could you call that later? I mean, originally, I was trying to do the human part of children’s time with them traveling very close to light speed and just doing it with relativity. But which would actually not have worked out as good a book because the waking and sleeping and finding everything changed each time that Holston wakes up turned out to be a major point of how the human side of the work worked. But the reason I didn’t do that was actually, logistically, there’s no way that society could have had the technology to get up to the near light speeds you would need to make any significant difference in time frame. Well, certainly the level of significant difference. You’ve got to get so close to the speed of light to get a really big relativity difference going on.

[00:20:56.13] – John Knych

Thank you, Brian. Jen, you’re on to you.

[00:21:03.08] – Jenn

Sure. Hi. Thanks for talking with us again. Shroud was fantastic.

[00:21:08.20] – jenn – Get in the minds of Aliens

I really enjoy how you really get into the minds of I want to say alien, but I don’t necessarily mean extraterrestrial. Just alien isn’t completely different than our own. And how do you go about creating these personalities and just how do you get into the minds of something so different when you’re doing the point of view chapters from the other beings?

[00:21:41.24] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

A very big part of it is the sensorium. As soon as you have a creature that is experiencing the world in a different way to human, it’s that what does it like to be a bat question. Once you work on that and work out how you are going to How are you going to bring that over and how that creature is experiencing the world, it instantly gives you something that’s very alien because different senses is a different description of the world from that creature’s point of view. But it’s also a different set of priorities, it’s a different set of capabilities and abilities. It instantly puts you well outside that standard human viewpoint, even if you’re writing for something as similar to us as the dog, for example, because a dog’s sense are very different to human centers. Beyond with that, it’s a matter of looking at the priorities of what the creature is or what priorities it might have and how those might drive it. Whether they are artificial priorities like Rex’s relationship with his master in Dogs of War, or whether they are evolutionary or societal priorities like the spiders and children of time or the shrouded, again, once you’re working in that non-human setup, or rather just that non-us setup, as long as you’re committing to it, really.

[00:23:16.09] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

As long as you’re committing to the bit, you’re sitting behind the eyes or whatever sense organs the thing has got of that thing and just playing that character, really. I mean, possibly this is something I’m getting from my role-playing background, which is honestly a bit of a gift that keeps on giving as far as writing goes. But the idea is you need to commit to that character. You don’t go beyond what it would understand. You don’t admit to the limits that a human character would admit to. Because frequently I’m working with creatures that are better than human at various things rather than that traditional alien that is less good at most things than people, which is a standpoint of action, sci-fi from the ’80s and ’70s and ’80s, I guess. I mean, beyond that, it appears to be something that comes relatively naturally to me as a writer, which is obviously why I’m making a living out of it. But I think it’s coming from that character-playing standpoint and that just the logical thought experiment of what it is like to be a… I know the whole point of the bat, the philosophical idea with what it’s like to be a bat is that we can’t know.

[00:24:34.15] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

But my pushback on that is we can actually… That’s what imagination is for. Obviously, yes, we can never know, but we can still make a logically sound working hypothesis as to what it is like to be a bat or a spider or whatever, anything else.

[00:24:57.03] – John – Bees Development

Thank you. Thanks again for taking the time to talk with us today. I’m in the same situation as Brian, unfortunately, where I wasn’t able to get Shroud, also in Taiwan, like Brian. But I’ve been reading the bioform books. I had more or less the same question that Jen just asked you, but I was wondering maybe if you could talk a little more about how you developed the character of bees, because I found that character really fascinating how it’s a distributed intelligence, but it It still has a very distinct personality, sending memes of the dead birds. That’s this really interesting way of communicating.

[00:25:39.20] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

Yeah. Obviously, I knew I wanted bees in the squad for Dogs of War at the start. That book develops quite organically. There were definitely chunks of that book that I didn’t plan. Then obviously, I wasn’t thinking of it as having a sequel. So all the stuff in Bear Head was completely unforeseen at the time. So the way bees develops over those two books, and of course, in the third one, which is coming out next month, which is Bee Speaker, which is a lot of bees, goes into this in much more detail than I can really now. And certainly you get there, you see a lot of how bees constructs itself, constructs themselves in different instances. Bees, I think certainly in Dogs of War itself, bees is one of those characters that developed while I wasn’t looking, in a sense. I didn’t necessarily think that bees would be as major a role in the series. I didn’t realize it was going to be a series when I was writing the first book. But bees just turned out to be a character with this enormous potential that I hadn’t particularly foreseen. I just ran with whatever my imagination suggested Bs would become.

[00:27:11.17] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

Appropriately enough for a character that is really a constant renegotiation of what they are and what they’re doing at any given time. They are a character that I’m really not particularly in control of as to what they’re going to be. But yes, for The major answer to that question is honestly B-Speaker and the various events that take place in that because that has a lot of Bs material.

[00:27:41.07] – John and John (i.e. Hive Mind John)

Fair enough. I’m really looking forward to B-Speaker. Thank you. Thank you, John. We can move on to Chris. Chris, are you there? Do you have a question you’d like to ask? Chris might not be here. Oh, no questions. Okay, that’s fine. I should have said earlier that if you don’t have questions, you can just… That’s fine. Adrian, another element of Shroud, which I really enjoyed, was the bleak corporate environment of the ship. And especially, I don’t want to give away the end for people that don’t know, but the ending was very much the corporate structure, really…It’s bleak. And my question is, for those of you that don’t know, Adrian started writing when he was 17 and 18 and then spent, I think, 10 years submitting a book a year before being published? And during that time-

Adrian Tchaikovsky:

Honestly, 15.

John Knych – Galactic Corporate Element:

And during that time, you were working in the legal profession, correct? My question is, did you experience…you’ve experienced a lot of corporate bullshit and hierarchy in your work career that then you’ve been able to… Because it feels very, very real from someone who’s worked in a corporate setting. You really understand the roles really well.

[00:29:18.07] – John Knych

So do you pull from your past for that?

[00:29:21.02] – Adrian Tchaikovsky – Galactic Corporate ELement:

Honestly, not particularly. I’ve only ever worked in relatively small firms and also at a fairly low level. I’ve always been quite junior in law when I was in it. I didn’t really get involved in that high-flying, high-pressure corporate law stuff. But I don’t… I mean, honestly, right now, and certainly in the last 20 years, you don’t need to be in the profession for that. It is a mindset and an attitude that is being aggressively exported from certain quarters globally. The idea that you’re only as good as what you’re worth and there’s no such thing as a free lunch and your only really real role is to basically work until you die. I mean, the media outlets that wish to popularize the idea of quiet quitting for people who are doing what they are contracted to do is absolutely sociopathic. It’s not a matter of that being a particular section of high-flying, high-value work life. It’s a matter of that just being the air that we breathe in the water we swim in at the moment.

[00:30:47.24] – John Knych

Thank you. On to Brandon.

[00:30:52.22] – Brandon – Evolutionary History outside of the Novel?

In Shroud, you created this alien ecosystem, and then you have in the interludes an evolutionary history. So how much world building did you do that we don’t see in the novel? Is there a whole… Is there so much more than we just get a narrow view? And also, do you put any reels like scientific research in?

[00:31:18.02] – Brandon

How much science goes into this?

[00:31:21.21] – Adrian Tchaikovsky – Science Idea origin

Oh, good. Well, so the basic idea of Shroud was very little more than a few paragraphs on my notes until I ran into… I cannot immediately think of his name [William Bains], but he’s the first person who’s in the acknowledgments in the book. He was doing a talk at a convention I was at about basically non-standard biology on potential exoplanets. It was amazing. It just really opened my eyes. Now, that’s the missing ingredient for the idea. It needs to be on this very weird planet where I can start playing with this very… Because But pretty much everything I’ve worked with up to that point has been Earth-adjacent, whether it is an alien world that just happens to have a compatible biochemistry, as in it’s got an… Like Nod, it’s got an oxygen atmosphere it’s got a comparable gravity, all of that thing, or whether it’s an actively terraformed world. It’s all been the place you can literally take off your space helmet and walk around on, possibly, and then die of horrible plagues. But still. So I thought, right, it’s about time I did a proper, very non-Earth-like alien world. I was able to get together with this chap, and we had quite a long talk at the next year’s convention, and we just hammered out.

[00:32:41.11] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

I said, Right, I need the world to be able to do… I need life to be able to do this, this, and this. What can we do with it? We just worked out this very, very complex, very intricate way. You’ve got it on a moon, and the moon and the moon is tidally locked. It’s working this way with the gas giant. Then I wrote up several pages of just this and basically what was the biochemistry and what molecules are involved and what are the energy pathways and all of that thing. I sent it to him and he said, Well, this doesn’t work and that doesn’t work and so forth. This is probably the most scientific relatively complicated thing I’ve ever written. But when I’m doing hard science fiction, I want to be able to do hard science fiction. I want to be able to do something that is not breaking physical laws. In general, there’s this idea of the one big lie, which I do expulse in that you can frequently have one thing that you are using as just a narrative convenience that is complete nonsense. Then everything else should work solidly. In Children of Time, the nanovirus is the one big lie.

[00:33:49.21] – Adrian Tchaikovsky – PLausibility of SCIFI

It is entirely a convenient plot device, but then became an absolute cornerstone of the plot because I realized how it could give me the understandings, which is something I needed. But the absolutely crucial thing about Children of Time is that the spiders are not the big lie. The spiders are everything that the spiders do is, or should be, scientifically plausible, because that’s actually where the book gets its impact from. It’s the idea these are not magic fairy tale spiders, they’re actually a thing that has plausibly evolved, even if that evolution has been accelerated, which is really the only thing that the nano virus is doing. But in Shroud, everything there has a scientific background, and there are almost certainly bits and bits all over the book which don’t really work the way I think they do, which is entirely me hitting the limits of my own scientific understanding. But I worked really. It’s going to be very, very hard to make it all as solid as possible, because I think that’s where a lot of that science fiction gets its impact from, is the idea, well, actually, this is a thing that could potentially happen.

[00:34:57.14] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

It’s not magic, it’s not psychic powers. This is actually entirely based on how we understand the universe to work. Did you build way more of the world that we don’t see in the book? Or is it just- There’s a fair amount. The evolution chapters mean I can showcase a lot of stuff that you’re not getting actively to see, and that is pretty much the entire reason those chapters are in there is so I can show off. Certainly, there are ecosystems systems I thought up that I couldn’t work out why they would need to go through. There’s all sorts of interesting stuff. I mean, one of the big problems with Shroud, of course, is from the human point of view, you do not get to see much of Shroud because it is very dark. Therefore, in all of those scenes where all you’re seeing are whatever the lamplight touches, I do know what is out there. I know the wider picture of what is around them. But I mean, weirdly, I think it’s a pretty good rule of thumb as a writer. If there is a thing you know a lot about, whether it is the thing that you made up or whether it is the thing that you have researched, the skill is in tearing it down to the minimum possible amount of information your reader actually needs, because otherwise things will start to drag.

[00:36:17.10] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

I mean, this is one thing I do. There’s also always stuff that I write that gets taken out by my editors because I do overwrite and I get far too carried away with world building detail that the book doesn’t really we need. And obviously at that point it becomes a catalog and it becomes quite dry and slow. And so there are definitely chunks that end up on the cutting room floor. I didn’t think Shra dragged it all. So he did a good job. And as did my editors in that case. Thank you.

[00:36:51.14] – Noémie – Influences

I hope you know that you are a big inspiration for aspiring writers right now. I hope you know that. But what are your inspirations? If you have any, maybe just you have a fantastic brain and everything sprouts out super easily. But do you have any inspirations that maybe you go back to sometimes to regenerate or find new ideas, maybe if you do that?

[00:37:17.06] – Adrian Tchaikovsky – Influences

Yeah. There are always writers who do things that to date I’ve not been able to do in their prose. I have a little list of I would like to write a book like this at some point. Frequently, it’s the case, I want to write a book that will give a particular emotional response that I have felt as a reader, that I know I haven’t really been able to produce yet as a writer. Those are the goals. I would like to write a book, for example, that has the deep sense of the numinus that Mythago Wood or Piranesi has, for example. Those are amazing books. They do something, and it’s one of those I cannot quite see how they do it. I go back to them and I reread them and I try and work out, what is it that is conjuring this effect? I would like to write a book that has the very complex deep layering that Gene Wolfe often gives to his books, for example. Again, it’s not something I’ve got particularly close to, but each time I try and use an element of that, I’m adding to my toolbox, I’m broadening the thing that I’m That I can do.

[00:38:32.17] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

Yes, there are always… And there are other writers, there are writers whose style I really like, like Peter Beagle, for example. I mean, a recent current writer, if you don’t know her, she is amazing, is Anna Smith Spark. Yes, these are writers who write in ways that I absolutely don’t. And that’s why I value their writing, because it’s so, so beautiful. And hopefully, the more of that thing I read, the better my own style is going to become through osmosis.

[00:39:02.24] – Brian – Double Hugo Nomination

Thank you so much. You can hear me. I believe, was it Brian or Brian was after? Let’s see. So this one’s not a specific book-related question, but speaking of how I build on that view being an inspiration for a lot of authors and doing a lot of pretty cool stuff the last few years. How does it feel to be a double feature on the Hugo’s this year?

[00:39:35.15] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

Oh, that’s all a bit mad. I think I am absolutely riding a a hometown advantage wave of voting for the shortlist because, of course, everyone who was at Glasgow got to vote, and so there’s a lot of UK voting in there. But yes, that is lovely. It is absolutely amazing. I’ve never been on the novel list before. To hit there with two books is just frankly insane, to be honest. I don’t think I’ll get it. I’ll say flat out. But getting on a Hugo shortlist, assuming it’s a Hugo shortlist that’s has it been properly put together, is always an enormous privilege. Getting on any award shortlist is, to be honest. But yes, knowing that I am on the radar to that degree with the Worldcon crowd, really, which also means with the US crowd, because it’s been relatively recently that I’ve had any footprint in the US as a writer. So the fact that I’ve got that far that quickly is incredible.

[00:40:50.09] – Jenn

Thank you. Thank you, Brian. Back to Jenn. Thanks. I wanted to ask about Juna as a character. I thought it was interesting that she was a great point of view character, and that she wasn’t like the typical hero.

[00:41:10.07] – Jenn

She wasn’t the captain, the scientist, the engineer.

[00:41:13.06] – Jenn

She was the admin essentially. What made you choose her? Did that just come about as the story was coming?

[00:41:19.18] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

It came about very quickly at the beginning of the book when I was considering, literally, who do I want as my point of view? Because I think I identified quite quickly that it wanted to be a first-person story. I think I just wanted to specifically steer things away from your traditional high hyper competent science fiction protagonist. If you go back to the golden age of sci-fi, every protagonist is this hyper competent, usually engineer. Scientist or engineer, but engineer is most common. So Mai St. Étienne is that character. When you have her and Juna at the beginning in the pod, it’s very obvious, which of these two characters is going to be doing any of the useful stuff. It’s obviously going to be Mai, and Juna is dead weight. Except that one of the things that science fiction doesn’t tend to look at per se, and one of the things that I think we massively undervalue culturally is that social work that is Juna’s speciality. She is the grease between the parts of the machine that keep everything running. She is the person, she is the flex, basically, in their social system.

[00:42:49.12] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

You can see that’s obviously not a role that the concerns are explicitly requiring when they’re setting their teams, but you can absolutely see that the reason Special Projects works at all as a team is because Juna is there to absorb all of the the shocks that everyone else, all of these other rigid characters are creating. What it turns out is when you’ve got that dynamic with the two of them in the pod is actually, yes, they get places because Mai is an incredibly good engineer. But the only reason Mai can function is she has Juna who is able to basically keep her sane and keep her going. It’s a side of things that certainly I don’t think I’ve particularly looked at before and that science fiction doesn’t particularly look at. I thought that’s going to be just a different perspective and a different skill set for a character to have. And I mean, honestly, I am generally, I’m always after trying to do something I’ve not done before.

[00:43:57.23] – John Knych

Thank you, Jen. Moving back to John.

[00:44:06.08] – John

I love process because a few people have already mentioned how vivid your characters are.

[00:44:12.10] – John

I was wondering, when you have inspiration for a story, that you then decide to develop into a full novel? Do you tend to start by developing the characters first or by the plot first, or does it depend on what the story is?

[00:44:26.15] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

Although this is what we’re talking about at the beginning. What I start with is a world. The world is always the focus of the story I write, and I will work out the details of the world, depending on where it is on the the continuum, it’s magic or it’s technology, it’s factions, it’s politics, it’s axioms, really. From that, the characters and the plot will arise. Well, as I said before, this is explicitly, this is a me thing. Most writers are not working this way. In fact, every writer has a different way of going about things. There is absolutely no right and wrong way of doing things. But for me, the world always comes first, and the world is always the thing I am writing about. But in order to present it as a novel, you have to write about the world through the lens of character and the plot. Otherwise, I would just be writing imaginary travelogs and encyclopedias and outlets and things.

[00:45:33.15] – John Knych

Thank you, John. Chris, we’ll move past you unless you have a question. Adrian, this is a very narrow question, but there’s a quote I love on page 330, which was, “Inside you is a multitude, all the different selves you might ever have been, many of which you kept locked in the oubliette of your mind because they weren’t fit for public consumption.” My question to you is, do you think that an individual, like humans have, is actually a rare, an extremely rare case of evolution? Meaning, if you could speculate on all the different forms of life in the universe, this individual construct that we use, from your speculative opinion, do you think it’s rare in that there would be more life in the universe, like the Shrouded That’s collective, hive-mind-esque rather than individual?

[00:46:34.20] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

So I mean, complex answer. Obviously, first off, it’s incredibly hard to speculate on the real universe because our data set I know how evolution works is literally one. So until we encounter a second point in that data set, we really can’t know. My gut feeling is that individual dualistic organisms are probably going to be more common and may well be a stage you move through because in general, once you have evolution giving you life, life tends towards greater complexity, and a composite creature like the Shrouded is essentially more complicated than individual entities. You I had another point, and I now can’t think what it was. I’ll let you know if it returns to me.

[00:47:36.09] – John Knych

Because it just seemed the Shrouded were just so… It just felt like it made more sense that they would exist than humans would. That’s when I was reading it.

[00:47:46.24] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

That speaks highly of my ability to bring them over, I guess. The shrouded are a special case because of the evolution of radio waves that give them a continuous functioning brain across individuals. I mean, interestingly, one of the things I’m bouncing off here is, do people know Wernhering’s Deepness in the Sky? No, sorry, a fire upon the Deep, the first one. In there, it works out quite differently, but you also have a composite minded creature. In that case, it works in small clusters. If you get too many, the noise outweighs the and they go mad. But he’s got them doing it as sound. I love that book, and it is an incredibly good book for bringing the logical solutions of, right, your aliens are like this, what is their Society, what do they think and believe? And all that thing. It’s an incredibly good book, but the basic mechanic of it, scientifically, doesn’t really hold water because you cannot work with sound quickly enough to maintain the consciousness. So I just reading that, eventually I thought, But if you were doing it with electromagnetic waves, then they are going as quickly as the neural impulses go in our brains, which sound does not.

[00:49:16.15] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

And then that was what set me on that path. But yeah, I think when I’m dealing with this distributed intelligence in whatever way, it’s either because it’s been artificially created or it’s because there are some particular conditions in the environment that favor it, really. I genuinely think that it’s probably not something you’d encounter necessarily in the real universe without those conditions or without a very long and complex evolutionary history without, say, the interruption of mass extinctions and things like that, where you just got to build complexity on complexity, which is absolutely an idea that I’m getting from… There’s a web cartoon that’s called Dresdon Kodak, which is amazing stuff. But one of the things he has, just like a brief sideline comic at one point where it’s an old history where the permian extinction didn’t happen. So the life you’ve got around at our equivalent time is vastly more complicated in the way it interrelates to each other because you didn’t get that setback where you lost 90% of biodiversity, which I thought was just such a fascinating idea.

[00:50:51.02] – John Knych

Yes. Thank you, Adrian. Now, Brandon, back to you.

[00:50:56.16] – Brandon

Okay. I will say, if you wanted to write an encyclopedia about an imaginary world, I’d read it. But aside from that, so I don’t want to spoil the ending of Shroud, but let’s just say there are more opportunities for conflict between the Shrouders and humanity. Will we ever see a sequel of Shroud?

Adrian Tchaikovsky:

I was just asked this on Blue Sky earlier today. I am not planning a sequel. I don’t ever close the door on sequels. It very much depends on if I get a good enough idea. One of the problems, though, Shroud‘s ending is relatively open as to what happens next. I could probably quite easily write three novellas with three completely different what happens next going on. I don’t think any of them would be that interesting. I think given the novelty of the scenario is explored in that first book, I’m not sure what a second book would do or how it would justify its existence. So essentially it needs another idea to come in and then play well with the concept of the shrouded and how they work.

[00:52:13.12] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

And at that point, that might be where a sequel takes place, but that other idea hasn’t turned up yet. Thank you.

[00:52:24.18] – Noémie – Hyper-Capitalism To Go To Space?

In the last few books that you wrote, I couldn’t help but notice as an economic worker that a lot of the world that you write are about capitalistic hyper economics healthscapes, basically, that are not very nice, almost this dictatorship and ideas. Do you think it is genuinely the optimal political and economic environment to go to space? Do you think it is optimal in stories that it is based on reality, essentially, that it is the good way, the good way, quote, unquote, to go and go?

[00:53:03.09] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

I hope the way the concerns turn out shows I do not think that it is the optimal way to go to space. I think it’s a terrible way of going to space. I think that letting some tech pro-billionaire build a company town on Mars where you’re dependent on your employer for your oxygen is a dreadful situation. I think it’s going to happen, but I don’t think it’s a good way of happening. I think there are certainly much, much better ways of doing it. It’s just at the moment, I am writing to a certain extent cautionary tales about what we’ve got going on on Earth at the moment. I call it as I see it to a certain extent.

[00:53:46.16] – John Knych

Makes sense. Thank you. Back to Brian. I actually don’t have any more questions at the moment. And we’ll go to Jen. I don’t either. I’ll pass it along. Adrian, the…

[00:54:13.15] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

I don’t know if John had another one.

[00:54:15.06] – John Hive Mind

Oh, yes. I was going to say the same. I’m drawing a blank at the moment. Okay. Our identities are merging right now. It’s back to me? Okay. Adrian, I told you this in the first talk, but your novella, Elder Race, was the door for me to your work, and I’ve been steadily moving through your books. My question is, do you ever plan to link some of the universes and worlds? Is that in the back of your mind where what happened on the planet in Elder Race has a connection to Shroud or another book?

[00:54:57.05] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

No. We were meant…I was talking earlier about the world-building stuff that you don’t get to see in the book. There’s a question for Chris after this, just in the chat. There is almost always stuff in the nuts and bolts of how the setup came to be, which precludes any two books sharing a timeline or a universe. There are arguably The Elder Race and the Expert System’s Brother or the Expert System’s Books could actually happen in the same universe, but there is zero benefit to either of them in that being the case. If I was to do that and put in an Easter egg like that, it would purely be grandstanding. Much as happens in films when people do that, all it does is really detract from both. Having said that, I absolutely did that in my current fantasy series. There is a fairly deeply buried Easter egg in that where you can hypothesize that there is a connection between Days of Shattered Faith and the Shadows of the Apt books, but it is purely there to amuse me, and you don’t need it for anything. But I’ve got to say, I know the whole multiverse thing is terribly fashionable.

[00:56:18.23] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

I really feel… I mean, there’s that line from Fellowship of the Ring, the film, is like butter spread over too much bread. I think that’s what happens. You just dilute when you start making all of these things share a larger universe. You lose the interesting bits of all of them in an effort to make them all fit together, and you don’t gain anything. Honestly, if I get to the point of deciding, yes, all of my books are obviously in the same universe, and this is why, then I should probably have my word processor taken away from me at that point. Excellent.

[00:57:01.00] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

What was the question? Chris had a question about whether Blindsight by Peter Watts inspired- Oh.

[00:57:07.04] – Speaker 1

I mean, so Blindsight was one of the two books, along with A Demandess in the Sky by Vinge, that people were talking about when they read Children of Time. And I hadn’t read either of them then, but I went off and read them very quickly thereafter. I suspect probably, yes, purely because that’s such a phenomenally transformational book. So it’s one of those once you’ve read it, I think it would be very hard to say when you’re working in the area of weird alien stuff that you’re not being influenced by Blindsight because it’s such an amazing book.

[00:57:46.00] – John Knych

Thank you. All right, I have one more question, but I’ll let anyone else ask their final question before Adrian goes. Anyone have a final question?

[00:57:59.06] – Brandon

Sure. I’ll ask one. I’ll make it quick here. So do you prefer writing fantasy or sci-fi?

Adrian Tchaikovsky

What I really like is the fact that I can currently commercially do both. There’s a very particular joy to writing a well-constructed science fiction book that fits with how we know things work, and it’s still doing interesting different stuff. But at the same time, writing a full on secondary world fantasy, you You have such an unlimited reign for creating, and you’re only bound by your own decisions, and that is also an enormous joy. They both give different kinds of rewards, I think.

[00:58:50.14] – Noémie

Noémie, Ken, John, Brian, Chris. I have one very quick question. If you had one advice, one sentence to authors that are maybe among us, I know I am one, what would it be?

[00:59:03.00] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

It would be that there is no one advice. It would be that if you’re able to take constructive criticism, then that’s got to be a bonus. It was not a thing I was able to do when I was coming up through the ranks, trying to get published. I was very, very defensive of everything I wrote. If I had been able to step back from things a bit more, and and get other people’s perspectives on stuff, I might well have shaved some of those 15 years off.

[00:59:36.13] – John Knych

Very good advice. Thank you. Thank you, Noémie. Then, Adrian, one last final question. Spoiler alert, so if you haven’t read it, turn your sound off. At the end of Shroud, as the power of the Shroud increases, you do this very subtle thing that I’m asking if it was conscious or not, which is in the human chapters, there was a subtle melting of human cells. On page 337, it turned out I, too, was slow to process signals and reply. On page, before, 30 pages later, they’re screaming, merged together. Was that conscious of you to have the human’s identities start to mix in a way?

[01:00:27.01] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

I would love to say yes, but no, I think that that’s probably my subconscious working at that point, but especially towards the end of the book. I’m very reliant on my subconscious steering me as to precisely how it should go. You get to that point and you make these little thematic connections between things you wrote, but they’re certainly very spur-of-the-moment decisions with that thing.

[01:00:51.23] – John Knych

Okay. Because I thought it was just well done.

[01:00:55.14] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

The next person will ask me that. I’m going to say yes.

[01:01:00.08] – John Knych

All right. Well, thank you very much, Adrian. This has been a pleasure. It feels like it’s come full circle because you were our first speaker, and now we have a recorded wonderful interview of you and talking about Shroud. Thank you, everyone, for coming today. Great questions. Enjoyed it.

[01:01:17.24] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

Thank you very much for inviting me.

[01:01:19.07] – John Knych

Yes. Bye-bye. Thank you. Have a good day.

[01:01:22.11] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

Thank you. I’ll look at those books.

[01:01:26.05] – Noémie

Thank you so much. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. See you. Thank you. I’ll share with you. I’ll do an AI transcript of this and share it with you all. And Noémie, for Adrian to send you books, I can maybe email address. Sure. All right. Have a good day. Bye-bye.

Question 1 [Not in the video – to see a full introduction of Alastair Reynolds, scroll to the bottom]: You once said that you think of fiction as requiring the intersection of a minimum set of nonobvious ideas. Short stories need at least two, while novels are like stirring stews.

My guess is that for Revelation Space, two of the ideas were: the constraint of non-faster-than-light travel, which hadn’t been really explored in Scifi before, + the existence of the inhibitors being your response to the Fermi Paradox, but can you share with us more about what ideas when into the origin of this book, and when you went back to revising it in 1997, how did you change it to make it ready for publication?

[00:00:03.18] – Alastair Reynolds

…the way that book [Revelation Space] developed was… There wasn’t really much of a plan, and I didn’t really have all my big intellectual ideas about science fiction lined up in my head when I started writing it. So the way I think about writing now is, in a way that’s the end product of having written that novel and a few books after it and a few short stories. So I didn’t really have a clear sense. I didn’t really know what I was doing is the short answer. I knew I wanted to write a science fiction book, and I guess I’d read a lot of science fiction at that point. I had a pretty good understanding of where the field was in terms of the new stuff. And I don’t even know if it’s possible now, but back in the late ’80s, mid to late ’80s, which is when I really started thinking seriously about writing a novel, you could keep up with the field. You could read all the stuff that people were getting excited about. So you could have an overview of what was happening in the genre. I’m not really sure that’s possible now because the field is so diverse, so many more publishing outlets.

[00:01:30.09] – Alastair Reynolds

I can’t imagine that any one person could, say, read all the significant science fiction books that come out in a year, let alone the short fiction. But back then, it felt like you could. There weren’t that many magazines, so you could keep abreast of the short fiction field, and you can see the trends that were developing. I’d been very much excited by, I suppose, the American movement of cyberpunk. So that something that was happening in the early ’80s. So you had the early short stories of William Gibson, and then there’s a bunch of other writers. It was really fresh and exciting science fiction, and it was really about the the world present day, if you like, or the very near future. It wasn’t science fantasy. It wasn’t about space travel. It was about artificial intelligence and genetic engineering and computer networks and things like that. So it felt way more immediate than a lot of the other science fiction that was around at the time. And I really responded to it, and I really felt excited about the possibilities of cyberpunk. But I guess at the same time, I was also deeply in love with big Galactic scale science fiction because I’d grown up reading, apart from Arthur C.

[00:02:51.24] – Alastair Reynolds

Clarke, the other big influence of me growing up was probably Asimov. And I read all these Galactic Empire books and the foundation sequence and all that, and a bunch of other writers who were playing on the same canvas. And I loved that big, expansive scale that you could get from that stuff. And there were some significant, so of space operatic SF novels that came out towards the end of the ’80s that were an important part of the conversation. David Brin was publishing stuff around that as well. But the The big ones for me that really made me think that you could still do something exciting with the form was, first of all, it was Hyperion, which came out right at the end of the ’80s. I think I got hold of a copy in 1990. And then there was Neverness, which is a big science fiction novel by David Zindal, which some of you may have heard of. And that was also round about then. And I remember reading a review of it in Interzone, which was the magazine where I was first published. And it was the review that made me want to go and order the book.

[00:04:03.13] – Alastair Reynolds

I went to my bookshop and I put an order in it, and then they got hold of it. Otherwise, it probably wouldn’t have appeared on the shelves, but I got hold of an issue of it as soon as it was published. And then there was also The first science fiction, first venture into science fiction of Ian Banks with Consider Phlebas. That was 1987. Then I think he followed it up with a sequel, Player of Games, also in the ’80s. Then there was use of in the ’90s. There was a lot of stuff going on, but I felt I could see a niche where no one was operating. And that was like, as I think you alluded, there was space opera and there was cyber punk, and there wasn’t an awful lot of crossover between the two. And there certainly wasn’t… No one seemed to be trying to do space opera with slow and the light framework. So I thought maybe there was something I could do in that area of science fiction that hadn’t been done before. So that was really all I had. I didn’t really have a clear strategy, like a five-year plan.

[00:05:10.03] – Alastair Reynolds

I just thought, Hey, I could… It’s more like I’d really like to read a book, and I had a book in my imagination. And seeing as I wasn’t aware that anyone had written such a book, I thought I’d better have a go at writing it myself. And I think a lot of what drives me as a writer is just seeing having that sense of an itch, that, Oh, I’d really like to read something like that, but I’m not aware that anyone’s doing it, therefore I’ll have a go at writing it myself. And that was pretty much the roots of Revelation Space.

[00:05:43.01] – John Knych

And so before… Sorry to jump in, Brandon, before your question, do you remember if you… Because I know this is almost 30 years ago. Did you start writing the space opera aspect, and then when you revised it in 1997, you made it more cyberpunky, or was it just 1997, bringing everything that you would read together to create something new?

[00:06:06.08] – Alastair Reynolds

Well, the origin of that book is messy even for me, because I’d started writing a novella way back in about 1986, so when I was still a student, so I was living in New Castle, and I started writing a novella, and many of the ideas in that novella actually ended up being transplanted into Revelation space. All the stuff about Neutron star supercomputer, that’s all in that novella, and a dead alien race, and space archeologists, and things like that. The roots of it are a little bit muddled. What it was, there was a competition being run by Writers of the Future, which is like an organization that’s affiliated with Scientology and all that. I didn’t really care. I just thought, Well, they’re offering money. It was like $1,000 if you won this novella competition. So that was a lot of money, potentially a lot of money for a student. So I thought I’ll enter it and I’ll maybe have a chance at it, but I overshot. So I wrote this thing that became way too long to submit, and it was heading in the direction of being a novel, but I never finished it. And then I relocated to Scotland at the end of the ’80s, and I had a I have a go at writing a novel, which again incorporates some of the ideas that found a way into a revelation space.

[00:07:36.23] – Alastair Reynolds

But again, that one I never finished. And I went to a publisher’s party just after I’d sold my first short story. So it was in 1990, maybe even 1989. I went to a party, and I met an editor there, and I was introduced to the editor by the editor of the magazine, and he said, Oh, this is Al, and we bought I have a couple of stories off him. He’s showing promise. And this editor said to me, Well, are you working on a novel? I said, Well, yeah, I’ve got a novel I’ve been working on over the summer. She said, Well, send me some sample chapters. And I said, Oh, it’s not ready yet. She said, Oh, send me them. And so I printed off three chapters of this thing, sent it to her, and then she read it and the synopsis, and then came back to me and said, You’ve got potential, but you’re not there There’s a lot of development needed before you got the chops to sell a novel. I took it on the chin. I thought, Yeah, she’s probably right. I didn’t even feel I was ready to be a writer at that point.

[00:08:44.14] – Alastair Reynolds

I could It was quite a short story, but a novel was a much bigger undertaking. So again, I sat on that early prototype of Revelation Space. I abandoned it, knowing that I needed more time to find myself as a writer. And then I moved abroad. So there was another reset. So in 1991, I went to live in the Netherlands. And moving to another country, there was a lot of stuff I had to take care of in my personal life before I could think about writing, when it was my first proper job, and I had to adjust to living in a foreign country. I had to start taking language lessons. Couldn’t even drive, so I had to start taking driving lessons and cook for myself for the first time and just generally take care of lots of lots of aspects of life. So again, there was a period, probably about a year before I felt sufficiently settled to begin to think about writing again. And that’s when I really started work on what I would say is properly the first draft of a revelation space. I didn’t bother trying to make use of anything I’d written up until that point.

[00:09:55.00] – Alastair Reynolds

I just said, Well, I know the ideas are all in my head, and I know what I’ve tried to write, and I know where it went, where it I didn’t go. So I’m just going to sit down with a blank piece of paper. And it was literally… I didn’t have access to a computer, even though I’d used a computer before, I didn’t have access to one then. So it was back to using a manual typewriter. And I thought, Well, this is good in a way because it’s like a fresh break. It’s like a clean break. I’m not referring back to old word processor files. I’m just starting afresh. Let’s just see where it goes. So I really started writing what became Revelation Space in about 1992. And I put as much effort as I could into it over about 18 months in the evenings. And then I finished a draft of it in early ’94, printed it out, got a few friends to read it. And then I, I don’t know, I knew it wasn’t there yet, and I lost interest in it and fiddled around with a few other projects. And as you said, in 1997, I had a renewed desire to make something of it.

[00:11:07.17] – Alastair Reynolds

So I had a period of unemployment which helped as well. So I had the time to, first of all, get this typed manuscript onto a computer, tighten it up a bit more, and then prepare three sample chapters. So again, I did that thing of sending it to an editor. And then there was a period of two years, really mostly because the publishing company was going through a bit of a turmoil itself. So they were being taken over and they weren’t allowed to acquire any material. But it actually worked to my advantage because it meant I could just get on with other stuff in that two years. So when they finally came back to me at the start of 1999 and said, We’re interested in talking to you about publishing this book, even though it needs work, the next question was, Have you written anything else? I said, Well, yeah, I wrote another novel last summer, which is in the same universe. And that’s when they got really interested because I think they could see, I’m not a one-trick pony, because I think they probably deal with a lot of writers who’ve only… They’ve got one novel in them, and maybe that’s their baby, but they haven’t really got big plans beyond that.

[00:12:16.07] – Alastair Reynolds

Whereas I had ideas for other books, so they were interested. So that helped. Everything just worked to my advantage, that delay, and off it went.

[00:12:28.06] – John Knych

Thank you. Now, thank you for sharing that backstory. I mean, it’s just a masterpiece. And what’s surprising is it’s considered a science fiction masterwork classic. When I saw this, I thought, wait, he’s still alive.

[00:12:49.17] – Alastair Reynolds

I know. Obviously, it’s not going to be a big secret if I say I can see some flaws in that book because I’ve lived with it, I wrote the thing, I’ve seen it from both sides. And to me, I’m very proud of it in the sense that it was my first novel, and it did well and it’s still in print, and it developed a readership for me that meant I could have some success as a writer over time. But at the same time, I know it’s not… I could point to 20 other books from 1999 or 2000, I think, a better than Revelation Space. But I’m not going to shoot myself in the foot by denying the advantages that come with having a Masterworks edition or something like that. So I’m very happy that it has that afterlife. And it’s been in print ever since, which is really something not to be taken for granted at all. But it does blow my mind slightly. To me, it feels like yesterday when I was working on it.

[00:13:58.00] – John Knych

Excellent, Brandon. I’ve monopolized this. You’re good to ask a question.

[00:14:02.23] – Brandon

First of all, I want to say I’m a huge fan. Thanks. It really means a lot when you take time out of your day to speak with us.

[00:14:11.11] – Alastair Reynolds

It’s a pleasure. I really appreciate that. Believe me. Like most writers, I’m pretty much a hermit. So when I get a chance to speak to people, I jump at the opportunity.

[00:14:21.16] – Brandon

So I guess my question is, I’ve heard in other interviews that you’ve said you’re either taking a break or moving on from the Revelation Space Universe. So after all the novels and stories you’ve written, do you feel like you accomplished what you wanted to in the series?

[00:14:43.03] – Alastair Reynolds

Again, I see it from I can only see it from my side of the creative process. And to me, it’s like a big, messy thing, that inconsistent, sprawling thing that didn’t have a plan. And as Jack said, When people started talking about it as a series, I resisted that a little bit because I think when you talk about something like Game of Thrones, where you have a narrative arc that’s proceeding towards some conclusion, people think there’s always going to be a book that rounds everything off. That was never part of the plan. It was just like, I’ve got this future history in my head, bits of it anyway, and I’d like to write a story here and a story there and a story There’s a lot of things that are there, and they might have some connective tissue between them. They might not. But it’s not going to be a linear thing that develops in a way that it’s like a multi-arc TV series, a multi-season TV series. There’s not going to be a clear beginning and a clear I went into it. I always felt I could step away from it at any point.

[00:15:50.22] – Alastair Reynolds

I think it was just before COVID, I can’t… I wrote Machine Vendetta sorry, not Machine Vendetta, Inhibitor Phase, which is returns to the core story of the nostalgia for the infinity and all that. And that had been on the back burner for a long time, that book. And I thought, Well, to me, that provided some closure to some of the narrative threads that I’ve been developing over those books. And then I’ve written the book that rounds off the narrative timeline of the Prefect subseries within that universe. And it’s not It’s not so much that I hate it and don’t want to write it again. It’s just I felt I’ve done enough of it lately. And I never wanted to be… When I first started setting out in science fiction, I had this idea that I’d write loads of different books that would all be different from each other and try loads of different sub-genres and different narrative modes. And I still want to be like that. I don’t want to be defined by one thing. So I’m very grateful for the fact that the series is there, and I’ve been able to dip in and out But I had a sense, particularly over the last few years, that I wanted to concentrate on shorter, more independent novels because they can provide a challenge to me as a writer.

[00:17:12.19] – Alastair Reynolds

I’ve got to do something different and self-contained with them. So for me, it felt like a good point to just step away from the Revelation space stuff for a while. But I’ve tried to say it’s not like I’ll never write another story in that universe, but I’ve got no plans for the next I never think more than a year ahead anyway, so I just know that right now I’m not thinking about anything in that universe.

[00:17:36.13] – Brandon

Well, I’m excited for anything you write, so I’m eagerly awaiting your next- Oh, thank you.

[00:17:42.17] – Alastair Reynolds

Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. At the end of the day, a lot of what I write is space opera. And I think when I’m in that mode, I have the same amount of fun as when I’m writing the Revelation Spacebooks. So I get the similar kicks out of writing other stuff that I do from writing the Revelation Space stuff. But I also want to write things that are maybe set on Earth or in the near future, or maybe shade a little bit into fantasy things I couldn’t do within the framework of the Revelation spacebooks. The other thing is it just gets bloody hard. When you’ve got a future history, you’re looking for little, I think it was narrative airspace where you can slot in another story, but it gets more and more challenging just finding a place where you can do that without tangling over yourself with things you’ve set up or foreshadowed in other stories. So it does get a little bit harder as time goes on to find that possibility to slot in a new story. And I’ve never felt the need to go back and explain every single part of the world building or the backstory.

[00:18:57.22] – Alastair Reynolds

I like to leave a lot of it unresolved and implied rather than concretized.

[00:19:05.24] – Alastair Reynolds

Thank you, Brandon. I actually got an advanced copy of your novel that’s from Subpress, The Dagger.

[00:19:14.06] – Alastair Reynolds

Dagger, yeah. Yeah, okay.

[00:19:15.15] – Brandon

I did read that a couple of weeks ago. I loved it.

[00:19:19.18] – Alastair Reynolds

Oh, cool. Thank you. Well, that was a… I’m really happy you say that. What happened was, so I finished about this time last year, I finished Halsey & Years, which is my next proper novel. And I took a little break after that, and then I started working on what I thought was going to be my next book, which was going to be a standalone a bass opera, and I had a title for it and a plot and everything like that. And I was struggling to find my way into it a little bit. And then various things happened. I went to the World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow, and that was a bit of a break away from writing, and then we had another trip. And when I came back from all that, I couldn’t reconnect with the thing I was trying to write, and I thought, I really need to reset myself. And I thought, I’ve got to be writing something. I can’t just sit faffing around all day. So I’d had this idea for a medieval thing with a medieval vibe, which was really just going to be a short story. I thought I’ll write that because I’m at least I’m writing something.

[00:20:27.00] – Alastair Reynolds

So that’s where that came from. And once I’d finished that, then I had a bit of enough distance so I could look at the thing I’d been working on or trying to work on. I thought, actually, that’s just not going to happen now. So I need to think of working on something else. So I switched my plans over once I’d written.

[00:20:47.23] – Brandon

Yeah, I really enjoyed it. Do you know when the official release date is for that?

[00:20:53.17] – Alastair Reynolds

I thought it was August, possibly September, but I’ve seen October. I would say it’s a little bit up in the air at the moment. All I know is I’m doing a number of signature sheets for it, and they’re on their way to me. It certainly won’t happen until they’ve signed them, but the wheels, that’s already happening, so they’re on their way from subpress. Normally, when I’ve signed them and sent, they ship them back, then there’s not much else to do other than they go printer and they get composited into the book. But I think they got… I don’t think it’ll be earlier than August.

[00:21:37.16] – Brandon

I’ll definitely be purchasing one of those.

[00:21:40.21] – Alastair Reynolds

Where are you based, Brandon?

[00:21:42.22] – Brandon

I’m actually in Missouri, which is Okay. The United States.

[00:21:47.01] – Alastair Reynolds

Okay. Because Subpressed are based in Michigan. Okay. And I did visit… There was a convention that was in Minneapolis, Not Minneapolis, sorry. I’ve been there as well. It was near Detroit, but I can’t quite remember whether… But anyway, they, Subpress, hosted me at that convention for a few days, and it was really cold as well. I remember that. But they’re really great people, and they’ve been really supportive of me over easily a decade. It’s Bill Schafer and everyone at Subterránea.

[00:22:26.22] – Brandon

Yeah, I’ve got their additions of your Revelation Yeah.

[00:22:31.03] – Alastair Reynolds

Well, it’s really… I’m really happy that they’re doing those, and then they keep pushing forward with them. So for me, it’s a very enjoyable, mutually profitable relationship with Subterránea. So I’m happy that that exists, and I’m happy that we can keep working with each other.

[00:22:55.17] – John Knych

Alastair, do you prefer Al?

[00:22:57.13] – Alastair Reynolds

Yeah, to my friends. Yeah, you’re my friends. So on the topic since Brandon is in Missouri, what do you think- Where are you, Jack?

[00:23:05.19] – JOhn Knych

I’m in Paris.

[00:23:07.15] – Alastair Reynolds

Okay, cool. All right. Okay. So it’s not terribly… I mean, Brandon, Christ, man, you must be getting up really early today.

[00:23:15.24] – BrANDON

8: 00 AM.

[00:23:16.24] – Alastair Reynolds

8: 00 AM. Oh, no. Sorry about that.

[00:23:20.04] – JOHN KNYCH

I think that’s why we have lower 10 is not expected because a lot of Americans in the chat, but this is recorded, so I’ll share it with them later. Yes. But even though I’m in Paris, Al, I’m American. I’ve been here for the last year.

[00:23:36.18] – Alastair Reynolds

Where are you from originally in the States?

[00:23:39.02] – JOHN KNYCH

Syracuse, New York.

[00:23:40.24] – Alastair Reynolds

Okay.

[00:23:42.21] – JOHN KNYCH

Average city in New York. But what do you think of European versus American Sci-Fi? Meaning American Sci-Fi like Andy Weir, Ann Leckie, Ted Chiang. I don’t know if you read them versus Adrian Tchaikovsky. I was recently wondering whether there’s an essay to write, like looking at the two worldviews of European Sci-Fi and American Sci-Fi. Have you thought of that, or have any opinions on?

[00:24:13.11] – Alastair Reynolds

Well, I thought of it, but only in a very shallow context, in that when I was reading science fiction, I just read omniverously, and I wasn’t really that bothered. I I would say a lot of the science fiction I was reading, even if it was written by people from the British Isles, was written in an American idiom. When I was growing up, there was Clark, and his stuff was internationalist and outlook, and often had American protagonists. Then I liked James White, who was a Northern Irish writer. But again, they were writing… They had a view on the American magazine markets as well. I think they were Just to earn their bread and butter, they were often writing broadly in an American idiom. And the writers who emerge in the ’60s with a distinct British voice like J. G. Ballard and Michael Mohawk, and all the other significant writers of the British New Wave. I didn’t really connect with them until way later in my reading. Probably later than I should have, but I wasn’t really reading that distinctly British strain of science fiction until my own tastes and habits as a writer and a reader were already fully formed.

[00:25:39.14] – Alastair Reynolds

My first couple of stories were in a British science fiction magazine, Interzone, as you mentioned, and I had a long association with Interzone, and to some extent, I still feel that that association is in place. But the next thing for me, obviously, I felt in order to prove myself as a writer, I wanted to get Americans interested in what I was writing, because to me, that was the hallmark of success. You’ve made it if you can sell stories to the States. So I put a lot of energy into breaking into the American market in the ’90s, and And my main target was an editor called Garden of the Zouar, who unfortunately passed away a few years ago. But he was the editor of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, which I’d seen on New Stand, so I knew it existed. And he was also the guy who compiled the year’s best science fiction. And when I started taking real interest in contemporary science fiction, again in the mid ’80s, it was his curating of that collection that shaped my tastes as a writer, as a reader. So a lot of the writers that I connected with in the ’80s, of that newer generation of writers were filtered through Garner’s tastes.

[00:26:58.05] – Speaker 1

So I Whatever he liked, I liked, basically. I came to regard him as a reliable barometer of what was good in science fiction. So I really wanted to impress him. It took a while, but eventually, he did buy some of my stories. And then I had a And there’s a race association with the American market after that. I’ve never really, consciously or not, I’ve never thought of myself as a particularly British writer, because I’ve lived abroad for a very long time anyway. I lived in the Netherlands. So my outlook is on that level, it’s European rather than Anglo-centric. But I’ve also always felt quite comfortable in the American idiom as a writer. I mean, a lot of my favorite science fiction writers were American. So I feel, speaking for myself, I’m quite happy to swim in both seas, if you and not be overly concerned about where my roots are as a writer.

[00:28:10.08] – Speaker 2

Alister, it’s a platitude to say that Sci-Fi is prophetic and predicts the future. But in your Revelation Space series, you have beta simulations, AI, neural links, all these things that we’re seeing happen. Do you follow AI progress now, and the science and what’s being published? And I recently read two days ago, there’s a New York Times technology writer who said, We will achieve AGI by 2027. Do you think we’re on the cusp of an AI revolution? Are you fearful of AI? What’s your current opinion on that?

[00:28:54.23] – Alastair Reynolds

Well, it’s an interesting question. Question to, how do I position myself? Because I wrote a bunch of, as you say, there’s a load of ideas in Revelation space that touch on ideas about artificial intelligence, uploaded consciousness, and how we might differentiate between different grades of consciousness. But none of it was based on any real scholarly thinking. Over 20 years since I wrote that, I kept an eye on what was going on in artificial intelligence research through the lens of popular science. Nothing more deep than that. I was very interested in, shall we say, We’ve progressed towards AI in the classical sense, in that people were focused on neural networks for learning and the idea that we were moving towards, how 9000 version of AI, where you have a computer or a network that is actually emulating consciousness on some level. But the discourse around AI now is, to me, it’s been hijacked by the debate around large language models, which are really… I mean, as sophisticated as they are, they’re really just a very, very amped up predictive text generator, aren’t they? I mean, I see it as interesting. It’s technically impressive, but it’s not what I would have called AI at any point over the last 20 or 30 years if you’d pin me down.

[00:30:48.04] – Alastair Reynolds

But perhaps that’s perhaps what, as you say, when we get AGI, if we get it, will it emerge from just further developments in large language models, or is it going to come from some completely different direction? I don’t have enough sense of what’s going on in the real world. I’m only an amateur, and I only read about AI developments on a popular science level. And I’ve had to be really frank with people about this because I think just this year I’ve been invited to give speeches and panels at three different AI conferences. And I said, I don’t know shit about this stuff. I’m just making it up. And to me, AI is In the sense that I’ve been using it in my books, it’s an interesting set of narrative ideas that can generate stories and can create moral conflicts with the characters that generate narrative possibility. But there’s no deeper thinking to it than that. I would feel like a bit of a fraud if I was to put myself in a public space and claim that I had some There was some deeper authority to my thinking than that. I’ve always been resistant to the…

[00:32:21.11] – Alastair Reynolds

I mean, generally speaking, I think a lot of science fiction writers fall into the… They’re too easily lured into becoming guru gurus on a particular topic. And I’m never going to be a guru about anything. What I know is probably no deeper than the average reader who just consumes a bit of popular science. I think I can refract it through fiction, and I can play with those ideas in a way that is fertile and creates interesting storytelling possibilities. But that doesn’t mean I have any basis to speak authoritatively on these topics. And AI is the current one. I’ve had to just say, look, sorry, but I’m vaguely interested in AI, but I don’t have anything really useful to contribute to the conversation at the moment. And there’s so much noise. There’s so much heat around the discussion. I think the last thing you need is yet another uninformed opinion, which was just what my opinion would be at this point.

[00:33:23.23] – John Knych

So you’re not going to pull a Ron Hubbard and create a Scientology cult around your books?

[00:33:30.07] – Alastair Reynolds

No. Just on a pragmatic level, I could point to a few dozen science fiction writers whose careers I looked at from a distance, and they had a lot of success, and then they got sucked into this, the guru thing, where you’re more talking about science fiction ideas than actually writing science fiction. And if you’re not careful, that just takes over and you fall silent as a writer. And I thought, I don’t want that. I still feel like I’ve got a lot of energy in myself as a writer, and I’ve got lots of ideas I want to play with. So I just want to… I’m very interested in these ideas, but all I can do is play with them through the lens of fiction rather than just stand up and prognosticate about AI. It’s not just that. It’s also like space travel or climate change or genetic engineering. I have nothing really useful to say as an individual. Everything that I might have of worth is what I put into my fiction. Where do you stand on it? Do you think we’re heading? Do you think that the AGI is something that will happen in that time frame?

[00:34:39.04] – John Knych

There’s an essay I recommend to both of you called your Your Romantic AI Lover Will Change You. It’s published a week ago, New Yorker by Jaron Lanier. A very interesting man who works for Safari. It felt like he has his finger on the pulse right now. But I think, and actually, I was around, I wanted to say this to you at some point in this conversation that I read a book of your short stories, and there’s one of them. The title it’s escaping me now, but it’s where you have the giant machine on Mars that does work. And then there is a girl that gets lost, or she ends up on the machine. Anyway, there’s just a little detail on that, which is a sign of a great writer, as it gives me ideas to explore on my own. And she was doing a journal with her sister, who I think was back on Earth, in that they would both upload to the journal and be able to stay in touch, because the time lag with Mars would prevent the relationship from deteriorating, but uploading to the journal allow them to stay in touch. And I thought that’s what’s going to happen very soon, where people create these journals, AIs that will be We like friends or will just be helpers.

[00:36:05.00] – Alastair Reynolds

I think that’s the- I love the New Yorker, and I had a subscription to it, but after a while, I just couldn’t keep up with it.

[00:36:11.16] – Alastair Reynolds

But I keep thinking I should resubscribe. But you’re probably aware of this article. I think it was in The Atlantic a few weeks ago where there’s a library of pirated material that Metta had been using to scraping to train its AI. This is not in dispute. What the Atlantic have done is provide you a portal so you can search that library now to see what is in there. It doesn’t unambiguously mean that material was in there at the point it was scraped. They can’t say that for sure. But 20 of my novels are in there, these 20 of my titles, I think maybe more. And I’m really infuriated by this. And I mean, just this morning. So I have a very hands-off approach to social media. I try not to use it any more than I absolutely need to. So I don’t have a Facebook account, don’t use Twitter. But I have been forced into using WhatsApp for, I would say, community organization. So my running group, all the coordination is done on WhatsApp. So if I took myself off WhatsApp, I wouldn’t be able to get involved on the volunteering side of that. I’m in a community theater group, all our coordination is done on WhatsApp.

[00:37:42.24] – Alastair Reynolds

And there’s other groups that I’m involved in that there’ll be some social cost to me from disengaging with WhatsApp. And I’ve accepted it like, Okay, so it’s part of meta, but it’s not Facebook, and it’s just a messaging tool. But this morning when I I was a bit puzzled. I hadn’t had any WhatsApp notifications for 24 hours, so I was fiddling around with it. And it immediately put into the top of my WhatsApp timeline Meta’s AI tool. I was really annoyed by this because I thought it was like, it’s really in my face now. This utility that I use to communicate with my friends is now innerts, strictly linked into this other aspect of Metai that has been meta, that has been scraping my intellectual content to train its AI. So I had a real spasm, and if I could get off it, I would, but the personal cost to me would be too high. And I was looking around other alternatives to WhatsApp that aren’t meta, and of course, Signal came up straight away, and we all know about that now. But the trouble is, it’s no good me being on Signal if everybody else has to be on as well or it’s useless.

[00:39:05.17] – Alastair Reynolds

So I can’t suddenly say to all my people in the running community, Hey, guys, I know you don’t personally have a problem with Facebook and Zuckerberg and Metta, but would you mind coming off that platform and joining me on Signal or whatever else? It’s just not going to happen. So I just have to suck it up for now and just take it. But it really annoys me on a profound level. There It’s like some movement towards some legal action against Metta for the scraping of this content. There’s a number of high-profile writers in the UK who are calling on the government to take action. But I’m just a low-level nobody in this whole thing. There’s nothing I can say or do that would have any influence on it. All I can do is just feel deep moral outrage.

[00:39:54.24] – John Knych

Brandon, I’ll bring it back to you. Sometimes it’s all we can do is just be pissed off and just move Yeah, I agree.

[00:40:01.20] – Brandon

It’s just a language model.

[00:40:08.13] – Alastair Reynolds

I’m not an absolute. Where I see AI will have genuine utility, and there are beginning to be steps in that direction is in looking at, say, large scale medical databases and picking out correlations that maybe no human could ever detect, and that might lead to different therapeutic approaches. And I think there’s already been some little advances in that direction that we can attribute to AI. So I’m not against the LLM model of AI in its entirety. I think there are good social applications, but where I am obviously against it is where it begins to erode the creative process we get between the human creator and the human consumer. I have this perception that if you look at, say, Amazon unlimited, Kindle unlimited, there’s a substantial market out there for fiction that is just at the basic level, the most basic landfill quality fiction. There are people out there who just want to read anything, and they don’t care if it’s… It just has to meet some minimum criteria, and they’ll read it. And to me, that’s really upsetting as a creator, because you try and craft every sentence. You try and work to some aspiration of quality.

[00:41:59.14] – Alastair Reynolds

And there’s There’s a market out there for basically just churn or slop, and AI can make that 20 million times worse. So when the AI flop just takes over everything, whether there’s still enough… Still an economic model that allows actual creators to produce actual content and have it met by a consumer, I don’t know. It probably worries me more than it would have a few years ago. I used to think that the one career that was basically safe from automation was anything in the creative arts. But AI can generate stuff that’s passable, whether it’s art or prose?

[00:42:51.21] – Brandon

There is quite a bit of backlash in the book community on AI, so I’m hopeful that it take over.

[00:43:01.22] – Alastair Reynolds

Yeah. I don’t want to read anything that’s got any AI media. I don’t want to look at AI-generated art. I don’t want to look at AI-generated movies. I don’t want to listen to AI-generated music. And I don’t care if I can’t tell the difference. I still don’t want it. I don’t want it in my life. I want a living, breathing human being in that creative process at some point.

[00:43:24.10] – Speaker 3

Yeah. I think there’s enough people out there that feel the same that hopefully will stop it from taking over.

[00:43:31.13] – Alastair Reynolds

Hopefully. We’re in a bit of a wave at the moment. There’s probably a bit of a blip and an overreaction, and we’ll be the next… We’ll all be worried about something else in a few years time.

[00:43:44.04] – John Knych

Yeah, I agree with that. And I think to a value, part of a value of a work of art is the knowledge that it came from a human, a soul that was able to arrive at these emotions that they’re sharing with you. So many people love artists because they know their story. Van Gogh’s life is infused in his art. And if you didn’t know who is his life story, the art experience with the art would be completely different. Yeah, I totally agree. Which AI has none of that.

[00:44:27.05] – Alastair Reynolds

I just hope there’s a percentage of people who feel the same way, and it’s enough to give me whatever’s left to my career. I can cruise on that percentage.

[00:44:38.08] – John Knych

Speaking of your career, Al, the movies, are there any of Some of your work optioned? Is there a film possibility? Because your work is cinematic in a way that I think it’s cinematic. And when I saw Dune, I’m not a huge fan Man of Dune. I know the Sci-Fi community, really. Dune, for me is boring. What do you mean?

[00:45:06.24] – Alastair Reynolds

The text or the adaptation?

[00:45:10.13] – John Knych

The text. That’s just my own personal opinion. But yours just has… I don’t know. Your Revelation Space, to me, just has more tension. So has there been movie options for- The way I say it, there’s a conversation.

[00:45:29.14] – Alastair Reynolds

There’s always a conversation going on about Revelation Space, the bigger universe of books, and then a lot of my other stuff as well. The particular conversation about Revelation Space has been going on for about probably way more than a decade now with the same partners. But they’re not the people who can make it happen, if you like. They’re the people who have to talk to other people, get them infused. And it’s something that it could happen at any point, but it could also not happen. I have no real traction on that conversation. There’s been a couple of times where What happened a few years ago was there was very, very strong interest in adapting one particular short story from the Revelation Space Universe by a film company. They had all the right credentials, and they also had a strong track record of whenever they had optioned anything, they would make it. There was very little doubt that it would make it, but they were only interested in that one story. And on my side of the creative conversation with my agent and other people. We didn’t want to separate it out from the Revelation Space universe because then you start fragmenting everything, and then you devalue the enterprise as a whole.

[00:46:55.18] – Alastair Reynolds

So you make it harder for anyone else to take an interest in it. So we backed away from that. So there’s been things we’ve not done where we could have, but I think they’ve been smart strategic decisions in the long run. For myself, I’m pessimistic about the chances of it ever happening. I think I’ve just been around the block too many times. I’ve had too many conversations, and I know that no matter how well meaning the people you work with, it doesn’t mean that they can push the or over the hill. And it depends how other science fiction properties are doing at the same time. If science fiction is having a boom, then obviously it makes it more likely that someone might take an interest in Revelation Space. But if these big, expensive productions are struggling to find an audience, then they’re not necessarily going to be looking for another one. And it is expensive. No matter how you look at it, Revelation Space would be quite an expensive production to do. But there is still a conversation. The conversation is still going on. From my point of view, it’s pretty positive because I get the renewal money, the option money is very nice.

[00:48:13.15] – Alastair Reynolds

So just the fact that there are people out there who remain interested is a source of income for me, hopefully in a non-cynical way. But I’m perfectly happy with that status quo.

[00:48:25.21] – John Knych

Yeah, personally, I’d love to see Denis Villneuve make a Relevation Space because his next movie is Rendezvous with Rama.

[00:48:32.07] – Alastair Reynolds

Yes. Well, I don’t know. Occasionally, you get a nibble of interest. You hear that someone likes your stuff, but I don’t know if I’m on that guy’s radar at all.

[00:48:45.12] – John Knych

You’re the type of writer-artist that you let your agent navigate all that in that you’re not pushing your agent to say, Hey, can you find…

[00:48:57.03] – Alastair Reynolds

No, not really. No. Occasionally, I So I have a literary agent, then I have a film agent, and a film agent will… They get a lot of inquiries that are not serious, if you know what I’m talking about. So I’m not always introduced to the conversation until it’s worthwhile introducing me. But yeah, I don’t go… Maybe I should be more pushy. I don’t know. It’s just not in me to put myself out there, which is a bit of a drawback these days because I think more and more as writers, we are expected to basically be our own PR machines. But there you are, it just doesn’t fit with my outlook and my personality as a writer, it’s just what will happen will happen. The other thing is I don’t tend to talk about these things unless there’s something worth mentioning. We had the two Netflix adaptations for Love, Death, robots. And again, that deal took about seven years before they actually made the animations. It was a hell of a long time, but I never mentioned it until there was actually a trailer out there. I thought, Well, now it’s actually going to happen. But There’s been…

[00:50:16.06] – Alastair Reynolds

I mean, I had probably about eight or nine years ago, it was real interest in doing a TV series based on a short story, not Revelation Space, but it looked really likely that it would happen. And I got really excited about it. And then I had that crash where it over about a year, it just fizzled off. And I thought, I’m never getting on that emotional roller coaster again. I’m just going to be detached and disinterested about the whole process. And that’s a much healthier place to be.

[00:50:47.13] – John Knych

Yes. And to swing away from the vanity film, I want to make sure I get this last content question. The role of accident and error in your work. You just mentioned the love, death, and robots. The beyond the Achilles rift, right? Person by accident just ends up another part. And when I read the beginning of Revelation Space, Cory’s timeline, she’s separated from her husband by accident, and it’s just spent on this epic journey. Is that this idea? Have you consciously grappled with it? Or has the idea of an accident leading to these long journeys- Yeah, I don’t think I’ve really thought about that before, but I’m sure you’re right.

[00:51:43.14] – Alastair Reynolds

I’m sure it’s a theme that’s You could find it in other short stories and novels of mine. And I guess it’s a reflection of this idea that the universe just doesn’t care. It’ll do things to us, whether we’re good people or bad people. And you can’t petition it, you can’t with the universe. It’s just going to do this stuff to you, and then you just have to find a way to live with the consequences. I guess I do enjoy that as a narrative driver. And I guess I probably enjoy it in other forms of writing as well. I like that sense of the intubation of just cruel fate and how you deal with it afterwards.

[00:52:26.09] – John KNych

Yeah, because existentially, it’s a twist because you your novels and stories have such scope that these little things the universe do just lead to rabbit holes and long journey that you think, Yeah.

[00:52:47.14] – Alastair Reynolds

The danger is now, what happens is if I become aware of a trope in my writing, I think, Oh, I can’t use that again now. But I think there’s probably a lot mileage in that. I’m trying to think about what I’m writing at the moment. I think even Daga Rinvichi has got an element of that in that the protagonist stop for They make an uneventful stop along a country road because one of them needs a toilet break, and then they meet a soldier. Now, if they hadn’t stopped, they wouldn’t have met the soldier, and then the soldier has a favor for them to do, and then everything spirals from that moment. But it’s a random encounter in the night that is just driven by sheer coincidence. So I think that’s probably- Yeah.

[00:53:38.19] – John Knych

And it connects to what you said about Revelation Space, how that wasn’t really planned, you said. It Was this pulling from what you want to read with what you’ve already read.

[00:53:51.08] – Alastair Reynolds

Yeah. It’s just a sense that, oh, there’s an area of science fiction that no one’s written into, and I’d like to try and do something in that area. That governs a lot of what I do. I mean, a lot of the creative itches that propel me as a writer just come from a sense that you have a vague sense that there’s a shape of story that you’ve not seen before, or a setting, or a mood. It probably has been done before, but you’re just not aware of it. And it’s enough of a motivator. It gets you working through the creative process until you produce something. And then you will inevitably put your own original stamp on whatever you’ve produced for better or worse. You’ve created some piece of art that wouldn’t have existed before.

[00:54:33.14] – JOhn KNych

Yes. So I know I promised an hour, Al. I don’t want to take up too much of your time. You can have more time if you’d like.

[00:54:42.23] – Alastair Reynolds

Okay. Excellent.

[00:54:44.03] – John Knych

Because I know I don’t.

[00:54:45.21] – Alastair Reynolds

We had some trouble at the start as well, so I’m well aware of that. So yeah. Thank you. If you want another half hour, it’s not a problem. Okay.

[00:54:54.02] – John Knych

Super. Brandon, I have two, three more questions, or do you have a question you want to ask?

[00:55:00.12] – Brandon

Sure. You have a lot of creative characters in Revelation Space, in particular the Hyperpigs. How did you come up with the Hyperpigs? Was it inspired by something in particular? Why pigs?

[00:55:18.09] – Alastair Reynolds

Well, again, it just reflects that a lot of my stuff is just not planned. I was writing a short story. We’re going back to about 1997, and I hadn’t sold a novel at this point, but I had sold a few stories to Interzone magazine. There’d been a period where they weren’t buying anything off me. And then I loosened up as a writer, and I stopped agonizing over every word. And that was like a breakthrough. And suddenly, everything I wrote did sell. It was really weird. It’s like the less I fret over it, the more I’m saleable when my material comes. So anyway, I had to spell them where they were buying a load of stuff off me. I booked myself to go on a writing retreat. So there’s this thing called Milford, which is an American institution. It’s like a writer’s workshop where everyone meets as equals for a week or a long weekend, and you bring some material that you’re working on, and you just sit in around Robin and you critique it. There’s this complete democracy of Union, and they started a satellite of Milford in the UK. I only ever went to one Milford, but I felt it was like a rite of passage that I wanted to do as a writer.

[00:56:41.09] – Alastair Reynolds

So I signed up to go to Milford, and of course, you have to take something with you. So I had this idea that I would write a short story, but I really struggled. And eventually, I took a messy, unformed, fragmented manuscript to Milford, and it was an early draft of the story Galactic North, which I did eventually sell to Interzone. I’d read a few, should we say prototypes for that story in other types of science fiction story. And there’s a particular story by Joe Helderman, which I really loved. It’s a short story, and it’s called Tricentennial. And he wrote it in probably about 1976 because it was written for this bicentennial year. It was tricentennial. And what I loved about it is it’s a pretty short story, but it spans about 3,000 years, and it’s just like little vignettes, and you’re time jumping from one thing to another, and the scope and scale of it just gets crazy. And I thought, I really like this. And there were a bunch of other short stories that used the same structure of just a massive span of time compressed into a few thousand words, and I loved it.

[00:58:01.09] – Alastair Reynolds

So I thought, I’d really like to write one of those. So that was my attempted Galactic North. And I had to put some space pirates into this story. Everything I wrote at the time, I was trying to not do what everybody else was doing So I thought, Well, I now have space pirates, but I don’t want them to be regular space pirates. I want them to be weird. And I just said, Okay, I’ll make the main spice pirate a genetically engineered pig. So I just threw this in as a random plot in a lot of detail, that there’d been these experiments on uplifting pigs, and they’d created these genetic and engineered pigs, and one of them had gone rogue, and now he was a space pirate in the year 3000 or something. And that was it. There was no real deeper thought to it than that. But by the time I’d written my first novel, and I was starting to market it, and then I’d written the other one in the following summer, and there was a bunch of other bits of short fiction I was working on, I was starting to think about all of this stuff fitting into a future history.

[00:59:01.17] – Alastair Reynolds

I realized that somehow or other, I’ve got the pigs now. The pigs are a part of that future history, so they’ve got to come up, they’ve got to show up in other stories, or it’s a bit weird. I don’t know if they’re mentioning ejapolation space. I think they’re maybe not or are best in passing.

[00:59:20.24] – Johh Knych

The redemption art.

[00:59:24.13] – Alastair Reynolds

I think maybe Chasm City as well is like a throwaway remark, mention of pigs or something like that. But Sure, the big story that really digs into the backstory is redemption art. But it was all because I just created this pig character as a throwaway in a weirdness in a short story. So again, it was just like back to front. There was no There was no deeper thinking beyond that. And then, of course, the pig character. Everybody, for some reason, people like the pig characters. Oh, yeah, Scorpio. He’s our favorite character. And then I created another one in the prefect sequence, Spava, who’s the pig prefect. And he gets lots of good reactions from readers. They like Spava. Somehow I created this thing that I wasn’t really planning on. Then the pig’s become quite a recognizable motif in the Revelation Space universe. But there was absolutely no deep thinking behind it at all. It was just a random weird detail that I thought would make one story cool for about a minute.

[01:00:32.14] – Brandon

Thank you. It worked out. It worked out great.

[01:00:35.15] – Alastair Reynolds

Thank you.

[01:00:37.05] – John Knych

Before Al, we asked you about AI. You shared that you’re not an expert. You’ve been asked to do panels, but you use it for fiction. In the same sense, can you talk to us a little bit about Mars? Because I read this interview of you in The Guardian, where you made me laugh. You called the Mars trilogy as the fuck off Mars. But what surprised me about you is that a lot of sci-fi writers and scientists, for example, the last talk we had with Kim Stanley Robinson. He’s very like, We should not go. There’s all these issues, but you’re fairly open about it, correct me if I’m wrong, that you think we can and should go if we have the ability. What are your thoughts now on humans?

[01:01:26.09] – Alastair Reynolds

Yeah, well, I know Stan pretty well because he’s a great guy and he’s very a nice figure in the science fiction community, and he’s been very kind to me, and I respect his opinions. And my own thoughts are probably not set in stone. But the way I’ve I walk myself around thinking about human activity on Mars, setting aside whether it’s SpaceX and Elon Musk that should be doing this, that’s a separate thing. That speaks to our present at the moment, but taking a more longer term view of whether we should go to Mars. I actually think it wouldn’t be a bad idea if we had a 200-year moratorium where we don’t send anything to Mars, because the risks of In my opinion, there may be a story to be learned about the early history of life in the Solar System on Mars. There may even be life still present there. At the moment, we We’ve possibly contaminated that story a little bit with the exploration we’ve done over the last 50 years, but maybe not to a huge degree, and maybe not at all. It depends how good our sterilization procedures have been. But we only knew as much as we thought we did at the time.

[01:02:47.04] – Alastair Reynolds

Now we know that some of the sterilization procedures weren’t maybe adequate for, say, Viking and things like that. I think in the grand history of the human race, not setting foot on Mars for, say, 200 years while we do a little bit more soul searching and think a little bit more deeply, wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. We’re not saying you can never go there. That’s just not rush. There doesn’t have to be this stampede to put a human presence on every body in the Solar System. I’m not so worried about the moon because by its nature, it’s a sterile surface. But Mars, I think there’s a good argument for just not doing anything for a little while. As a species, we can develop a little bit more maturity, a little bit more wisdom, and a little bit more scientific insight into what would actually be the consequences of exploring Mars. I’m probably more… I think when Stan wrote the original trilogy, I think he was actually a bit of an enthusiast for Martian colonization. I think, okay, he maybe Maybe he wanted to frame the Terraforming as an either or argument so he could have both sides of their debate in the book.

[01:04:04.24] – Alastair Reynolds

I think there was no doubt that he liked the idea of putting human witnesses into this landscape. I understand that impulse. And although I I had no personal desire to go to Mars, I always expected it would happen in my lifetime, and I was excited about that possibility. But I do think maybe it’s just a side effect of getting older, but I do think a little bit of caution wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.

[01:04:30.19] – John Knych

So you don’t feel existential threat for humanity, which is right. Spacex is big thing.

[01:04:37.09] – Alastair Reynolds

Not really, no. My slightly flippant counterargument to that. They say, It’s always this thing about the moment we have all our eggs in one basket and we need to establish a human presence off Earth. But I always think that’s something of a flawed argument because my rebuttal is that every advancement in capability that enables you to put people somewhere else also increases your capability to do harm to them. You never really escape that circle. Sure, we could put people on Mars, but there’d be no guarantee that we couldn’t You could send a nuclear strike to Mars and wipe out the Mars colony, or we could have an epidemic or a nanotechnology meltdown on Mars or something like that, very easily. As soon as you have the capability to put people somewhere else, I think you also have the capability to anihilate them. So I think that eggs in one basket thing is a bit of… It’s a little bit misleading, and I think we have to learn to… We either manage Earth properly and learn how to live on this planet peacefully, or we don’t. And I think proliferating ourselves from the universe is never going to solve that problem.

[01:05:55.06] – Alastair Reynolds

If we can’t live equibly on one planet, then it’s not going to be any better when we live on six planets or 20.

[01:06:03.18] – John knych

Thank you. Brandon, do you have any more questions?

[01:06:07.23] – Brandon

I have a question about your novel Blue-Remembered Earth.

[01:06:12.24] – Alastair Reynolds

Okay.

[01:06:13.19] – Brandon

I really like the African elephant angle.

[01:06:18.02] – Alastair Reynolds

Yeah, cool.

[01:06:19.08] – Brandon

You wonder, are we going to have African elephants in the wild 50 years from now? What What was your process behind that storyline?

[01:06:33.14] – Alastair Reynolds

Well, that book was written out of a real period of personal optimism, I think, and also a sense of the moment that we were in when I wrote it also felt like an optimistic moment. The genesis of the trilogy, broadly speaking, goes back to the first time I ever went to Kennedy Space Center. So way back, I think it was 2007, possibly 2008. But through science fiction, and this is why science fiction is sometimes a wonderful thing, I got to meet someone. We did a panel together, And there was a very nice lady, and she was involved in the shuttle program, and she was involved in crew training. So she’d work with a particular shuttle crew and get them up to speed and familiarize Asian with the ship. And she said to me at the end of the panel, we had a cup of coffee, and she said, Well, if you ever like to see a launch, tell me. I thought, That’s very kind. I’d love to see a launch one day. Well, a few years went by, and then they announced the termination of the shuttle program, which was still a few years in the future, but it was clear that it was going to end at some point.

[01:07:51.08] – Alastair Reynolds

So I wrote back to this friend and said, Well, I’m going to call you on that now because I’d love to see a launch. And there were a few other… I met an astronaut around about the same time who was also involved in the shuttle program, who was a reader. So there were a number of factors playing into my wife and I getting an invitation to go and see a shuttle launch. In fact, we went to Florida, and we didn’t see a shuttle launch because it was scrubbed. In fact, it was scrubbed before we even got on the plane and flew to Florida. We knew it wasn’t going to happen, but we booked our tickets. We thought, Yeah, to hell with it. We’ll go to Florida. So we went to Kennedy Space Center, and we did actually see a launch the year later. That’s another story. But we had a really nice time visiting the Space Center. And this was around the time of the There was a lot of optimism about returning to the Moon by 2019. I think it was the original Orion program, and it was the early… It was like Obama had just come in and There was a renewed sense of optimism about human space flight, and that all fizzled out, unfortunately.

[01:09:05.23] – Alastair Reynolds

But at that point, it felt like a really exciting time where we were going to recapitulate the achievement. The the successes of Apollo. We were going to do it all again, but bigger and better. We were going to be on the Moon by 2019, and then obviously establish some more permanent human presence on the Moon And then inevitable talk about going to Mars, and it all seemed to be happening and beginning again. And I was really excited because I’d had this dangled in front of me my whole life, the idea of a return to the moon. And it never seemed to be happening, but all of a And all of a sudden it was on the cards again. And there were mockups to the spacecraft you could see and things like that. And you go, Yeah, it’s going to happen. We’re going to go out into the solar system. And I was really excited about this. I thought, I want to write a science fiction book that takes it captured the enthusiasm and optimism and positivity I felt about that as a human challenge. I had this crazy thing that it was going to be a logarithmic timeline.

[01:10:16.12] – Alastair Reynolds

So the first book was going to be the next 100 years, and then it was going to be the next 1,000 years, and then it was going to be the next 10,000 years, and we’d go out into the universe and the galaxy and all that. And it was going to be a multi-generational family saga. And as soon as I sat down to write it, I thought, I can’t do it. If you’re going to tell a multi-generational family saga over a 1,000 years, you’re dealing with the great, great, great, great, great grandchildren, whoever was in the first book. And I thought, I just didn’t have the chops as writer to pull that off. So I compressed the whole thing. Okay, let’s make it over 300 years, not 10,000. And then I started thinking about the characters and where they were in society and what we’d achieved in society. And I wanted part of the book to be about going to the moon and Mars and human settlement in the solar system and all the possibilities of that. But I also wanted to counterpoint it by saying that doesn’t mean we’ve abandoned Earth, so there’s still a sense of custodian leadership and stewardship about Earth.

[01:11:16.02] – Alastair Reynolds

I thought, I’ll make one of the characters, he’s not really interested in all that stuff. He’s more focused on the inner space of the animal mind. My wife had worked on… She’d worked at an elephant rehabilitation Center. So she came back from that with stories about elephants, and it interested me. And I thought, well, I’ve watched a few TV programs about elephants with her. I’ve read a few books. So I’ve got the basic rudimentary understanding that I can just about pull this off. So that was where that stuff came from. But it was also… The elephants then became a motif that played through the other books, and they obviously I took them in different directions and maybe directions I hadn’t had in mind when I first started the first book. For me, I enjoyed playing with that theme, and it was a little bit polarizing. Some readers said, The Elephant books, glad you’re not writing those anymore. I’m glad you finished with that stuff. But I was like, Well, come on. The elephants were only a small… They were just a subplot. They weren’t the main part of the book. It’s not like you had to suffer thousands of pages of elephants, but I enjoyed writing them.

[01:12:27.09] – Alastair Reynolds

It just came out of that positive state of mind I was in.

[01:12:32.18] – Brandon

Yeah, I really enjoyed that story. And for anyone watching, I would recommend checking it out.

[01:12:41.01] – Alastair Reynolds

Thank you. The books So nothing ever goes to plan. And I had this idea for a trilogy, and I’d sold it to my editor, and it was going to be this big thing. And then my editor left. So the first book was slightly off And then the second book had a different editor, and then the third book had a different editor. So it would have been maybe a different thing if there had been continuity in the production process and the editorial process across all three books, but they were a struggle for me because every step, there was a big reset where I was learning to work with the new editor, and they had no real emotional involvement in the preceding book because they hadn’t edited it. So it helps when you have a long, stable relationship with an editor because they get to know your ideas, they know your working methods, they know how you think and how you plan. And we didn’t have that across those three books. So that’s why it was certainly a more tortuous process than I thought it would be at the time I started writing them. And I was bloody glad to be done with it as well, actually.

[01:13:50.05] – Alastair Reynolds

And I said, as much as I’ve enjoyed some aspects of writing that trilogy, I’m never going to do another trilogy again. And then I almost immediately started writing another trilogy. But that’s it. No more trilogies.

[01:14:07.24] – John Knych

I hear you. I was muted. A toilet is being installed in my house now. That’s why I’m muted. That’s actually the last question I want to ask you, Al, that circles back to the beginning of the conversation and the introduction in that I found it very interesting that you prefer revising and polishing to actual writing, and that contradicts other authors I’ve had for this channel. For example, like Adrian Tchaikovsky says, he hates revising. He just likes to world build and write. A lot of fantasy sci-fi authors, that tends to be the case. Can you talk with us about this? Because also people who will watch this later, there are a lot of writers and creators who I think will be interested in this. You’re also prolific, you publish a lot. Do you just pump out what you think is just garbage and then spend the majority of the time fine-tuning it? Could you just talk to us about your revision process?

[01:15:11.09] – Alastair Reynolds

Nothing I write is garbage. How can you possibly say that? No, I think it comes down to whether you’re… What do they say? Like a plotter or a panzer, this thing that some writers will spend six months mapping out the architecture of a novel before they write one I’ve learned. I’m a much more restless writer, and I need to be writing stuff, or I feel a deep sense of… I don’t feel any self-worth as an individual unless I’m writing. That’s my job. And for better or worse, if I can write a thousand words or a three thousand words a day, I can point to it and say, Well, at least I’ve done something today. So I like to be in that creative flow where I’m generating prose, but I’m not When I start writing a book, it is really just a stream of garbage, and I get to the end, and I think of it as… And it’s a metaphor I’ve used before, so I apologize to anyone who’s heard this before, but it’s like you’ve got to get across a chasm, and you need to get a bridge across the chasm. You can’t just have a bridge.

[01:16:18.16] – Alastair Reynolds

You’ve got to start with… You throw a flimsy rope, and there’s someone on the other side that catches the rope. And once you’ve got that flimsy rope across, you can then pull a more sturdy rope across, and then you can start You’re building a rope bridge, and then you build another bridge. But you don’t get anywhere until you’ve got that first flimsy rope across the chasm. And that’s how I see a first draft. It’s just get something down and get to the end. And there will be bits of that first draft that are not bad, but where it’s lacking from my point of view is in that, I don’t know what you call it, but the meta level where you You have cross-connections between aspects of the story. You have foreshadowing, the payoff of things that maybe aren’t obvious early on. I can’t plan any of that stuff. All I can do is write and let those intertextual connections arise. It’s almost like a subconscious process, but I need to have a draft complete And then I can go back and begin to do the stuff that I find fun, which is when you set up that long distance connections between parts of the story, the payoff and foreshadowing and all that.

[01:17:46.12] – Alastair Reynolds

And that’s where the real joy lies for me in writing is when you find those connections. Often it’s like your subconscious, you’ll get to a point in the story and it’s like, now I really need I really need to have set something up in chapter three that I can… And you think, ‘Oh, hang on. I did do that thing in chapter three. I don’t know why I did it, but I did it. And now I can use that. ‘Oh, wow. It’s almost like I knew I was going to have to do that later on. And that for me is the joy of writing. That’s where it is. It’s not in the first draft, and it’s not in the editing, the publication. It’s in those creative breakthroughs that you get, as I say, sometimes at 2: 00 in the morning on a cold, wet night, where you just suddenly realize that You’ve given yourself… You’ve set something up in the story, and you didn’t even realize you’d set it up, and now you can make a magnificent payoff. But that’s where I get all the pleasure, and it’s all in that creative process of rewriting and tightening.

[01:18:53.15] – Alastair Reynolds

Everyone’s going to be different, but for me, that’s where I get my worth as a writer comes at that point. I hate everything after that. I hate editing. I hate being edited.

[01:19:08.13] – John Knych

That makes sense because your books have this sense of being honed and crafted, but are also spontaneous and organic. I think you can often tell with a writer when every single thing is planned out beforehand, it just feels too formulaic, almost.

[01:19:27.18] – Alastair Reynolds

I have I enjoyed doing that, and I’ve written a couple of books where they were structured and plotted in quite a detailed way in advance, but it took some of the joy out of it for me. I didn’t enjoy it. On my level, you take That way the anxiety because you know you’ve got a story mapped out. You don’t have to worry about how the hell am I going to resolve this thing. But I also found that, actually, I like the fear. I enjoy it. And I was watching an interview with Colson Whitehead, who’s one of my favorite contemporary writers, and he was saying, he talked about the fear. When you’re writing a novel, there’s that fear at the back of your mind. Am I actually going to pull this off? And I thought it was reassuring to hear someone else talk about it, because it does get you. It’s two in the morning, you wake up in a cold sweat thinking, How the hell am I going to make this function, this story? But I wouldn’t want it any other way. I couldn’t work as an architect who plans a story months and months in advance.

[01:20:38.21] – Alastair Reynolds

And it’s no reflection on the quality. I mean, some of the best writers work that way. Peter Hamilton, who’s a friend of mine, He’s much more of a spend a year world building and planning and plotting before he actually writes a page. But I just want to get going, just dive into the thing.

[01:20:55.11] – John Knych

Any other sci-fi authors you want to shout out living who you think we should have on this channel?

[01:21:03.04] – Alastair Reynolds

Well, from this side of the pond, my oldest colleague in science fiction is Paul McCauley, who’s a wonderful writer and a very varied writer. And like me, he came up through the magazine markets. He was living in America, actually, at the time when he first started publishing science fiction. And he had an American publisher. But we met because I was He was a lecturer in St Andrews University while I was doing my PhD, and we were both published in Interzone. So the editor said, Do you realize you live next in the same little town as this Reynalds guy? So we met, and I learned a lot about the side aspects of publishing from Paul, and he’s a very good writer. What’s his name?

[01:21:51.12] – John Knych

Can you say it again, Paul?

[01:21:52.24] – Speaker 1

Paul McCauley. M-c-a-u-l-e-y. Yeah, very good writer. And His background is… He’s like a plant biologist, but he’s got a wide interest in cosmology and artificial intelligence and things like that play into his writing. And he writes He writes across a lot of different disciplines within science fiction. He does the far future stuff. Are you a fan of Gene Wolfe by any chance?

[01:22:21.24] – John Knych

I’ve read him a little bit.

[01:22:23.18] – Alastair Reynolds

Yeah. I think Paul and I are both big Jean Wolf fans, and there’s that Working in that mode. And I guess then the antecedence to Jean Wolf, like Jack Vance, and then maybe going all the way back to William Hope Hodgston, that strand is something that we both relate to a lot as writers. Stephen Baxter has been a very good friend of mine almost since I first ventured into science fiction. He collaborated with Arthur C. Clarke when Clarke was alive, he collaborated with Terry Thatcher. And then Steve and I did a collaborative novel, The Medusa Chronicles, which is we took a short story by Arthur C. Clarke and then wrote a novel-length sequel to it with the permission of the Clarke estate. So we enjoyed doing that. And Steve lives the other side of the country for me, so we don’t see each other very often, but we communicate a lot. And then obviously, Peter Hamilton is a very good friend of mine. We used to live quite near, so we maybe meet up, do a bit of hill walking once or twice a year, but he’s the other side of the country again now, so we don’t see each other quite as often as we used to, but still a very good writer, good friend.

[01:23:38.09] – John Knych

Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Al. Do you have anything else, Brandon, you want to add?

[01:23:45.04] – Brandon

Thank you. Yeah, this has been great. I guess what’s in the future for you? I know you mentioned a novel earlier. Do you have an estimated date Is it possible for that to come out?

[01:24:01.23] – Alastair Reynolds

Yeah. So the book I wrote last year, that should come out this summer. It’s called Halcyon Years, and it’s a standalone, and it’s a 1940s Raymond Chandler murder mystery set aboard a Generation starship. So it’s in my head, it’s like if you took Greater Los Angeles of the big sleep and rolled it into a tube and sent it into space, then you just told a murder mystery on that ship. That’s what it’s all about. So it’s a bit of a conscious homage to that, but also a science fiction story. It’s quite short and awful as well. It’s just over 100,000 words. So I wrote your version, which is… Jack showed the French cover of it. That was one of my shorter novels at the time. And that, for me, is the mode I want to operate in, is relatively short novels that are stand-alone and self contained. So that’s been off my desk for nearly a year, apart from edits. But what I’m working on now is, over the last 20 years, more than that now, I wrote four short stories with one protagonist called Merlin, and they’re far future space opera, not connected to anything else, but they are linked stories.

[01:25:24.10] – Alastair Reynolds

And he travels the universe looking for something, and along the he gets into mishaps and adventures. And he’s a bit of a braggadocio. He’s full of himself, but he’s got some redeeming qualities as well. So I’ve written these Merlin stories, and for at least a decade, probably more, we’ve been talking about maybe publishing them as one book. So the next thing is the Merlin Chronicles. But it’s not just four short stories It’s like the whole thing remixed into a novel with probably about 30,000 words of additional material. So that’s what I’m working on now, and that’s coming near the end now. And once that’s off my desk, I’ll have a reset and talk with my agent and my editor about what they want from me next and remind myself when the deadline for that is. But basically, I’m always working on something, and I like to be busy. And if I’m not working on a novel, then I’ll try and be working on a short story or something. I’m not very good at many things or anything, really, apart from I can just about write science fiction, so I might as well write as much of it as I can.

[01:26:47.12] – Alastair Reynolds

That’s my philosophical outlook on life. So I just generate as much stuff while you still can write a lot. Don’t taper off. So I’m still enjoying what I’m doing, and I still got, hopefully, a for more things and different modes to work in. I’m hoping not to slow down for a bit.

[01:27:08.08] – John Knych

Thank you.

[01:27:08.24] – Brandon

I’ll be looking out for those and I’ll be first in the pre-order line.

[01:27:14.22] – Speaker 1

Oh, thank you. I really appreciate it.

[01:27:17.11] – John Knych

We really appreciate this. I’ll share it with the group. I’ll send you an email with the video later as well. But this has been a pleasure. Thank you so much.

[01:27:28.16] – Alastair Reynolds

Well, thank you. My pleasure, too. Thank you.

[01:27:30.20] – Brandon

Thank you.

[01:27:31.21] – Alastair Reynolds

Have a good day. Cheers.

[01:27:33.17] – john Knych

Thank you.

Alastair Reynolds Introduction:

Born in Barry, South Wales, Alastair Reynolds started writing Scifi in his teens, received a PHD in astronomy from University of St. Andrews in Scotland, then started working for the European Space Agency as an astrophyicist in 1991.

His first publication was in Interzone in 1990, Ninivak Snowflakes. And while he thought he had cracked into the industry with a small, as he called, rash of short story sales in the early 90s, it wasn’t until 1997 that he returned to a book-in-progress to polish it for submission – Revelation Space. This book then took two years to sell, before it was published in 2000, 25 years ago.

Since then he has published 20 novels, over 70 pieces of shorter fiction, he famously received a 10 book, 1 million pound 10 year publishing deal back in 2008. He’s won Locus, Hugo, and BFSA awards. Revelation Space is part of a universe that Reynolds says isn’t really a series but rather a mosaic. With interweaving settings and characters.

Two of his short stories were adapted for Netflix animated episodes, Zima Blue and Beyond the Aquila Rift. I’m hoping more of his work will be made into film, maybe we can talk about that later.

He enjoys rewriting more than the act of first putting words down. Another topic I’m curious about. He’s a keen runner, having run the Cardiff half-marathon last year for an Alzehimer’s charity, and he is a guitar enthuastist, last year taking weekly lessons. 

But last thing I’ll say before my question is that I discovered Alastair Reynolds through House of Suns, which I thoroughly enjoyed, it’s epic, the ending is gut-punch, but when I read Revelation Space was I just blown away. The scope and language are, I believe just unprecedented, I don’t even like calling it Scifi, but rather, just high and profound literature, that I’m practically certain will stand the test of time.

Transcript Below:

Chapters/Topics:

Introduction – 00:00

Research and Writing Process for the Mars Trilogy – 02:05

Moving Towards a Dystopian Future? – 10:00

Relationship with Melville/Moby Dick – 19:00

Humanity in spite of Earth vs. Humanity for sake of Earth? – 31:00

Process for the novel: Shaman – 44:20

Have Mars’ Scientists Contacted You For Help?/Thoughts on today’s Mars’ Research and Elon Musk – 55:37

[00:00:00.00] – John Knych – Introduction

Kim Stanley Robinson, a towering figure in the Sci-Fi genre. He has published over 20 novels and won basically every Sci-Fi award there is to win in a career that spans over 40 years. Since AI is prophetically prevalent in all three Mars books, I asked ChatGPT and Deep Seek, who are the greatest living Sci-Fi authors? And Stan appears on both lists. He completed his PhD in English from the University of California in 1982, writing a dissertation on Philip K. Dick under the Marxist scholar, Frederick Jameson. He was also taught by Ursula K. Le Guin. Red Mars was his sixth novel, and the series collectively won the Nebula, BSFA, Hugo Twice, and Locus Award. Published over 30 years ago, this trilogy marked Stan as one of the leading pioneers of the hard sci-fi genre, which has been steadily gaining popularity since he blazed the path. The trilogy has resonated globally and with successive generations. As I just said to some of the people here, I live in Paris, and since I started reading the trilogy last summer, I’ve seen three strangers reading the series in public and encountered enthusiasm for the trilogy amongst this sci-fi reading group.

[00:01:11.19] 

I saw in an interview that Stan said that the Mars series was sparked by information obtained by the Viking probe in the late 1970s, along with knowledge of Terraforming, published by Carl Sagan. And Stan took the ideas and, quote, jumped off the diving board. He does all his writing outdoors on his front patio, shaded by a tarp year round. He loves to hike and backpack, and he estimates that he has spent cumulatively two years of his life in the wilderness. And lastly, let’s jump into this roundtable discussion. My first question to you Stan has to do with research, process, and writing. You mentioned in the interview that when you started working on the series, you had every Mars book that was ever written, and it was on two book shelves. I was completely blown away that you wrote this before the Internet. Did you do the majority of your research in the ’80s before writing this series? Were you writing and researching simultaneously? Can you just start with talking about your process for this series?

[00:02:09.14] – Kim Stanley Robinson – Writing and Research Process

Yes, and thank you for this. It’s a pleasure for me to talk about the Mars trilogy, even though it’s now almost 30 years since I finished it. It was long before then when I began thinking about it. It really was the Viking lander and orbiter of ’76 that handed Mars to us on a plate. It’s startling to think how ignorant we were of Mars before the mariner and Viking satellite missions in ’69 and ’76. There was really a dearth of information about the surface and conditions and landscape and everything. But then suddenly it was all there. I said millions of times more information, and I think that’s accurate. I was a young science fiction writer. I had fallen in love with it as an undergraduate at UC San Diego, and I was reading it as an English major in a second track. Ordinary English major, on the one hand, science fiction autodidact, and on the other hand, in writing science fiction short stories, selling them to a great science fiction editor and teacher named Damon Knight. I love Damon and his wife, Kate, he was a superb teacher. He had been in science fiction from the time of Asimov, say the so-called golden age, 1940s, although Damon himself was younger, wrote mostly social science fiction like Philip K. Dick in the 1950s…

[00:03:48.15] – Kim Stanley Robinson

…and then became an editor really prominent in the new wave in America in the 1960s and 1970s. I was by no means I mean, I was one of many of his students whom he bought and published for the first time, and then in a patron system, mentored us through the first 5 or 10 years of our careers. There’s a lot of us like me in that respect. I was already working on science fiction short stories and interested in the solar system. There was also Voyager giving us the Jupiter and Saturn, Uranus and Neptune on its way out of the solar system. It was exciting times for what became my zone of interest, which was the next couple of centuries in the solar system. So I mean, understand that science fiction is big field, big genre, and it could be far future. It can go out millions of years. It can cross galaxies, et cetera, space opera, or it can be the day after tomorrow, like cyberpunk when I was young. But in between that zone was a zone that I liked, and I wasn’t the only one writing in it. There were older writers like Frederick Poehl or contemporaries of mine like Michael Swannwick, for whom the Solar System was an interesting story space and even seemed like we could go there.

[00:05:22.01] – Kim Stanley Robinson

And then Mars, boom, the obvious space for visiting, being closest to us, and also being most like Earth. At the same time we learned everything about Mars, the idea of terraforming came about. This was, I think, a dual action. Because if you were thinking, oh, a science fiction thought, could we turn a planet somewhat like ours, but desolate? Could we give it life? Could we terraform it and make it Earth-like? Well, the reason people began to think of that was because it was clear there was frozen water on Mars. It had 37% our gravity. It was a candidate for terraforming in an example right from the start. There was a group of people called The Case for Mars. They were undergraduate students at University of Colorado, Boulder, studying planetology. Chris McKay, Penny Boston, Carol Stoker, Bob Zubrin. They were a club, and they ran a conference at Boulder, and they published gigantic casebooks out of these conferences that would include 20 articles per book, giant turquoise trade paperbacks. I read those books. I contacted those people, especially Chris McKay, and I began to think the story of Terraforming Mars would make a great novel. I thought of it as a single novel.

[00:06:46.04] – Kim Stanley Robinson

I still do, but of course, trilogies have… Sometimes they’re just a really long novel. Other times, they’re three novels with gaps in between that are significant and differences, et cetera. You see it all. In my case, I was thinking of a single novel to be called Green Mars. So not to go on too long about it in this one, but I did want to give you the backdrop. From ’76 till I started writing in 1989, so 13 years, I was always reading about Mars. I was talking to scientists like Chris McKay, reading the technical literature from their group, and even writing some short stories, exploring Castle Canyon, the novella called Green Mars, which is a climbing story that doesn’t even appear in the novel. I wanted to grab the title. The title struck me as so obvious that I realized by the time I got to it, to writing my novel because I was writing other novels at the time, and I was still trying to figure out how to do it to tell a story 200 years long. I grabbed the title, and there was maybe a couple other… No, maybe not. Those two stories represented my actual writing got my flag on the ground.

[00:08:04.08] – kim Stanley Robinson

Of course, you can’t copyright titles, but you can be the first one to use them, which is significant. That’s what I did with that story, which came out in, say, 84 or 85. In 1989, I had finished my California trilogy. I was set and ready to go. I conceived of the structure as being these chapter long chapters that were from the third-person point of view of a character in the first group on Mars, roving around. This is a style out of Philip K. Dick. You see it also in William Faulkner. It’s not unique to me by any means. Sometimes called free and direct, sometimes called third person limited, depends on which tradition you’re coming out of. But once I had the in mind, I began to write it in ’89. I finished Blue Mars in October of ’95, so it was six years, and a very, very intense and absorbing six years. I’ll leave it at that, and we can go on from that description.

[00:09:20.07] – John Knych

Thank you, Stan. Fascinating. Josh, we can move to you for your question.

[00:09:25.16] – Josh – Moving Towards a Dystopian Future?

Sure. Hi. I I had a very interesting one looking back at the Red Miles in particular, which was formational for me in terms of politics, environment, and just centering my thoughts. But I was thinking the other day, so in Red Mars, particularly, you have the growing power of big corporations, transnationals, metanats, as the main antagonist.

[00:10:00.00] – Josh

In the 30 years since the books have come out, we’ve now got global companies like Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, with over $2 trillion in worth, which is, I think, just short of the UK’s entire GDP. Are we speed running into the dystopian future that red Mars starts with back on Earth?

[00:10:24.15] – Kim Stanley RObinson

Well, I don’t know, but thank you for asking, and I appreciate this angle on it. I can say this. The ’80s were a shocking time for a young leftist literary person like myself. Recall the ’60s, the time of enormous social upheaval, and then the ’70s were an attempt to consolidate the liberatory impulses the anti-Vietnam War protests, the hippie movement. I was a young hippie and trained by Frederick Jameson, a Marxist, to regard political economy as the most important way of seeing history, what was happening at the economic level. In 1980, you can call this now the beginning of neoliberalism with the Reagan-Thatcher counterrevolution. Reagan and Thatcher between them was a seizure of government by the right, by business interests, and a dismantling of the Keynesian social state that had been dominant from the Great Depression up through 1980, somewhat falling apart with the leaving of the gold standard and the economic crisis of the gas crisis of 1973, which is maybe partly the war between the Arab States and Israel. All these things happening, and at the time in a feeling of chaos, that anything could happen. That’s a hard feeling to reproduce now, I think, or to remember well, that anything could happen next.

[00:12:12.05] – Kim Stanley Robinson

Nothing was more surprising than the anything being the return of the right and the destruction of the Keynesian social state by way of neoliberalism. By the time I began to write in 1989, that had been going on for 10 years. It was clear that if you regard history as a struggle between the state and finance, between government and business, between public and private, between private money and the public good, these various ways of describing our current moment in history as a struggle. Sometimes you could call this a class struggle, although that’s a complication that I think is confusing at this point. Class, but you still can use it. It still has power. The people who have capital and the people who don’t, they have different interests in this world as to how the world should be run. The people who have capital have definitely dominated the battle since 1980, and I feel like that fell apart only in 2020 with the pandemic, with a heavy duty precursor being the crash of 2008. But also in that time was the of the Soviet Union and the end of state socialism or communist countries, whatever you want to call it, except for in China.

[00:13:40.03] – Kim Stanley Robinson

I know you understand that all this is oversimplifying for the sake of I’m having an answer. But by the time I wrote Red Mars, it didn’t need any predictive powers on my part, which I don’t have. But it did require a good analysis of the present, which I did have that was given to me by Jameson and by other people I was learning from, like Le Guin, like Gary Snyder, the Buddhist poet, putting together out of my education a sense of what was important and then putting it into Red Mars. I can say this, writing about a whole new society on Red Mars allowed me a miniaturization or a mirror a modeling system where I could rehearse all these forces in play in a offshoot story that might illustrate what was going on back on Earth. We have described the transnationals, and then the multinationals as corporations that are more powerful than many nation states, and the states being, in my book, represented by the United Nations, and that now seems quite wrong. But on the other hand, the United Nations is still a player of some sort. On a place like Mars, which was on the Outer Space Treaty, it would have been regarded as a commons, all these things were put into play.

[00:15:16.04] – Kim Stanley Robinson

I could also bring in the role of science and scientists as being a a proto utopian space, not capitalist, not looking for profit, but looking for knowledge or increased safety and comfort for humans. That’s not really what Mars is about. Yet without the scientific world’s achievements, you couldn’t get to Mars nor survive there. Somehow science was in play. Indeed, John soon in his big speech up on Olympus Mons at the end of Chapter 5, right before his assassination. We can talk later about the structure of Red Mars It’s a temporal structure. But in his speech, I think he says, Now it is a case of democracy versus capitalism. Okay, I wrote that in 1989. This is something that people were saying in 1880, so it isn’t like I was any diagnostician, but I was expressing a particular ideological reading of what was going on in world history that was a leftist claim, a leftist diagnosis, and a defense of science, democracy, and environmentalism as being a bundled group of value systems opposed to raw capitalism. So I’ll leave it at that. But I think that gives me another step along the way as to what I was doing in that book.

[00:16:56.03] – Josh

That’s really interesting. I will have to reflect look back, especially what you said about 1880, to see that pattern. It sounds like I haven’t recognized that pattern going a lot further back than the last 50 years.

[00:17:13.23] – Kim Stanley Robinson

It’s true. Actually, Actually, and what you say is important to remember that there are analysis that talk about capitalism and democracy as opposed to autocratic fascist systems that are also collective or communists. In other words, saying a democracy and capitalism are not a match but are opponents, this is not obvious, nor is it generally agreed upon. It’s one analysis amongst others. And very often you’ll see people like, I don’t know, Martin Wolf at the Financial Times that will talk about a democracy and capitalism being a paired enterprise coming out of the the Protestant revolution in the industrial revolution. It’s not at all uncommon to say democracy and capitalism are a paired system. But then what the Marxist analysis would say is that capital rules and democracy is a false front in front of an oligarchy that really runs things. That debate goes on, and I wouldn’t want to… When I talked about 1880, I mean really the second international, that Marxism in general as something beyond Karl Marx, began to say this right from the start and advocate for proletariat control, the worker state, communism, socialism, et cetera. So again, this is all polemical and ideological diagnosis.

[00:18:47.12] – Kim Stanley Robinson

Not something that is settled at all, but just one statement amongst the rest.

[00:18:56.07] – Josh

Thank you.

[00:18:58.09] – John Knych

That’s the thing. Thank you, Stan. Virginie, would you like to ask your question now?

[00:19:01.13] – Virginie Actis – Relationship with Melville/Moby Dick

Yes, I had the first question. For the French reader who I am, reading a Ministry for the Future really made me think, and especially the way you entangle argumentation, philosophical essay and fiction made me think, and it’s not an original question, I assume, but I’m dying to ask you this question, made me feel of Herman Melville’s prose. I’d like to know, for me, if it was a creative response, a remote dialogue with Melveill. I’d like to know what is your relation to Moby Dick or Herman Melville’s work, and your definition of the art of fiction, merci, art of fiction.

[00:19:59.10] – Kim Stanley Robinson

Yeah, Well, thank you for that, Virginie. I love Melville. I noticed the Moby Dick behind John, that’s the Rockwell Kent version with woodblock prints by the great Rockwell Kent. And of course, let me just say immediately that Moby Dick is a strange and bizarre, but a work of transcendent genius and impossible to match. The skill, the sheer gift of his inventiveness in language, I reread the book on a rolling basis in our house in Maine. My wife’s mom came from the Coast of Maine. We have a little cabin there on a lake, on an island in the ocean. Moby Dick just sits there. When I live there, I read it. When I finish, I start over again. Some of those chapters, particularly The Line, they are beautiful philosophical essays sometimes. They’re crazy instructional manuals, like in how to take the blubber off a dead whale. You know Moby Dick. It’s in everything. What he did there was he showed that the novel is a really capacious and powerful genre that you can toss in big chunks, like in a stew, big chunks of non-fiction or those little dramatized passages where it’s presented as a play where the sailors are speaking as in a play.

[00:21:36.19] – Kim Stanley Robinson

All of these things, the plot of Moby Dick could be written on the back of an envelope. But here it is this vast piece of life with the archetypal ending, the spacy fantasy novel ending of Moby Dick, of nailing a Hawk to the mast as the ship goes down. I mean, this is a surrealism, along with everything else. It is highly symbolical and surreal and bold as hell and a beautiful achievement, even though it’s also a hodgepodge and a mess. I flatly disbelived that Melville had a strong sense of what he was doing. He had to just trust the material, and he’s writing in longhand and not revising hugely like we can on computers. It was inspired and beautiful. Of course, I took inspiration from it in a most general way for my whole life as a novelist is, do whatever you can think of and don’t worry. The form is going to be okay. Even if you don’t know how this book will hit readers, you can never know that. So don’t worry about that part of it. You can just do your best, throw it out there like a roll of the dice or a dropping of a bunch of Euro stocks on the floor, like in fortune telling in the Dao De Jing or the Yi Jing, and you throw it on the…

[00:23:15.10] – Kim Stanley Robinson

And then you leave it to the readers to recreate in their own minds by their own creative effort. And this is another beauty of novels. Someone assigns you Moby Dick in a class in high school, and you’re thinking, This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever read. I hate it. I’m bored. I’m never going to read a novel again. You aren’t ready for it, and you haven’t brought yourself to it. But if you come to it and you realize that the first five chapters of Moby Dick are hilarious, that they are a comedy, a deadpan comedy of accidents before they get on the ship, everything in that port town is played for comedy. Even a a gay a comedy, a comedy of a homo-sociality, you might say, that was entirely transgressive. So that in the 20 years after Moby Dick came out, the main readers of it were British sailors who read through the code and realized this was a book about them and their homosocial and homosexual lives. They would come visit Melville in his old age and say, Oh, will you sign your book? I love your book. At that point, it had out of print and forgotten in America for at least 30 years.

[00:24:33.16] – Kim Stanley RObinson

I suppose Melville probably appreciated these young British men dropping by. But to conclude, it’s been very important to me, as you can tell. I’ve loved it. It’s part of my life. Also what he teaches you is trust the reader, don’t worry, do something crazy, and it’ll either work or it won’t. But he teaches courage for the novel, and he brought it off. He’s a true poet, a true philosopher, and a true novelist. Yet, like Pierre, the book that followed, or the theory books that preceded it, they are not as good. There’s some good Melville that isn’t in Moby Dick, but it sits head and shoulders above all the rest of his production. I say that having read them all hoping for and sometimes just thinking, Okay, he made a roll of dice there, and that came up zero. That is an unreadable mess. Why did Moby Dick work? It was his life’s experiences. He knew this stuff. He put his life into a novel as well as all this philosophy and material. All these were lessons and a permanent support system in my life or a source of joy and also of courage, just like, hey, Melville did it.

[00:26:00.21] – Kim Stanley Robinson

His career crashed. He spent the whole second half of his life as a customs inspector. I actually have a novella in mind that maybe I will write called Hermann Melville, Customs Inspector, that will be about his I think quite dangerous life on the docks of New York as the only honest customs inspector. Surely his life was endangered from both sides. If I write this novella, you’ll learn more about it of my love for Melville. But what an achievement, really. He also taught me, You know what? You’ve got a story that’s going to take 200 years here, and it’s about all kinds of things. Go ahead and be patient. Explain everything. Admit that you’re in a long novel, that it’s going to be a trilogy because of how thick books can be has a limit. And don’t worry about it. It’s going to be long. Trust the material. Don’t stress. Don’t try to compress. Try to expand. So this is also like Proust. Proust is another novelist God to me who, just with his own life, again, the seven volumes, at least in English, it’s seven volumes, the three volumes, In Search of Lost Time, again, gives me courage to think that this neurotic housebound social hangar on could write one of the greatest novels ever, simply by being patient and making characters and trusting the material.

[00:27:45.07] – Kim Stanley Robinson

I bring up Proust, and maybe later we can also talk about Michel, Michel Duval, the French man who is one of the first hundreds, and one of my favorites in many ways. That was a gesture. My foreign language was French when I was an English major. Jamieson was a French professor. I had been tasked to read in particular my favorite Camus, but also Sart and Levie Strauss, and that whole tradition that Jamieson was intensely interested in. He was basically the professor that brought the French theory from start to the present to the American and English reading audiences. So all these things were tied together for me. And I think they show in the Mars trilogy, I couldn’t have written it without Jamieson and Camus and Proust and Melville. Not that I’m claiming any equivalence here because one can never know, but in terms of my own sense of courage and procedure, like what to do These were all really important.

[00:29:04.09] – Virginie Actis

Thank you for this wonderful answer for me. I also read that you were familiar with Jeunet and all this, so Barth Jeunet. Oh, yes.

[00:29:15.24] – Kim Stanley Robinson

Yeah, Gérard Genet has a book that in English is called Narrative Discourse. I think in French, it was Figures, One and Two. What he was was a structuralist of the novel. Maybe the rest of you know this, maybe Virginie already does. But I want to say it. His book is an analysis of the structures of novels that is very good on If you’re an analytical type thinker, on things like chronology and point of view, et cetera. Very technical. His examples for how these things work, every single example is out of Proust’s novel. It’s a a joke. It’s a Proust study, but it’s also, Oh, novels can do this, novels can do that. What do I mean by that? Well, let’s look at page 820 of Proust’s novel, and you’ll see what I mean here. I’ve always loved that book. I have a marked-up copy of it that I lost for a while, and I re-found it, I guess. I hope. But Jeanette was really, in terms of technical criticism, he was, for me, the critical figure and Jameson was always puzzled by this. For him, Jeannette is barely worth a page in his… Say he’s got 500 pages on French theory.

[00:30:40.11] – Kim Stanley Robinson

There’s only one page for Jeannette, but for me, that was the important theorist of all that crowd.

[00:30:49.05] – Virginie Actis

Thank you so much.

[00:30:50.06] – John Knych

Thank you, Virginie. That’s probably the best Melville tribute I’ve ever heard or read in my life. We’ll move on to John. John, for your question.

[00:31:03.06] – John HelkenN – Humanity in spite of Earth vs. Humanity For the Sake of Earth?

First of all, I’m fanboining out really hard right now. I read Red Mars when I was 13, I think it was my first introduction into hard I, a lot of it went over the head at that moment, but I’ve reread the series since, as well as a lot more of your works since then. I noticed a lot of the similarities and the between Ministry of the Future and the Mars trilogy. The Mars trilogy, or at least red Mars being humanity in spite of Earth, whereas the Ministry of the Future has become humanity for the sake of Earth. I’m curious as to the dichotomy, and I see this in a lot of your other works, of going out and exploring the massive system of systems and change that’s needed in creating worlds and societies and functioning ecosystems elsewhere versus coming home and fixing our current system and climate and how do you balance those out in your process and create a plan to tell that human experience through that vehicle?

[00:32:30.13] – Kim Stanley Robinson

Well, thank you for that. It’s been a progression. I explained to you how I got interested in Mars and the Solar System. This is the ’70s and the ’80s. Then when I finished the Mars trilogy, I almost immediately, like the next month, went to Antarctica for the first time and gathered the observations and materials that I turned into the novel Antarctica which when it was published, some people called it White Mars because it was so filled with the Mars ethos of living off the land that you have and of making a new left cooperative political organization and battling the elements. There were similarities for sure because I was still on that trajectory. But what I saw in Antarctica made me think, Mars is going to be like this. It’s not going to be like I portrayed it in my books over the next 200 years. It’s going to be a scientific station where astronauts and scientists go up there. They live for five years. They take on this enormous load of radiation, and they come back to Earth. That seems like a more likely scenario, given everything that I saw in Antarctica, that it’s an amazing place, and yet people in the North barely regard it.

[00:33:57.19] – Kim Stanley Robinson

You don’t have fan clubs for South Pole station in the rest of the world. You don’t have people tracking what people are doing in McMurdo every day as if that’s interesting, even though it is. Mars would probably turn out to be somewhat like that, like the International Space Station, nobody’s deeply tracking what happens there. We only are interested in the place we haven’t got to, not to the places where we are. I was rocked back by that experience and that impression as to what might really happen. Then the little landers landed on… The robot landers landed on Mars around 2000. They came back with the news that the surface sand is stuffed with perchlorates. These are poisonous to humans. They use perchlorates in a solution. If they want to kill your thyroid to slow down on hyperthyroidism, they give you a perchlorate mix where the perchlorates are in the parts per billion, and it does the job on a human being. In the sands of Mars, it’s in the parts per hundred. Mars is poisonous. I did not know that. Nobody knew that when I wrote the book. They didn’t know how poisonous it was.

[00:35:16.15] – Kim Stanley Robinson

Of course, they knew it’s only 7% of our atmosphere or less, 1%, and that it’s CO₂. Essentially, you’d die the moment you were exposed to the surface. We knew that. But we didn’t know that if you If you set up a little space station there, eventually, you’d be exposed to a toxic substance that is right there in the soil that you can’t get rid of. Chris McKay, holding on to the Mars terraforming dream, says, As soon as that sand gets wet, it will transform chemically to something much safer to humans. But how do you wet the whole surface of Mars? It’s a chicken and egg problem. You can’t terraform it until you’ve terraformed it, or you can’t live there until Until you’ve done something quite radical to the entire surface that we require, as the trilogy does point out, stupendous amount of time and physical energy, heat. That rock me back as well. Then everything that was happening on Earth with climate change became equally obvious in those years, end of the ’90s, beginning of the 2000s. That Earth was in trouble is in the Mars trilogy. Notice that the end of green Mars, there’s a volcanic eruption under the West and Arctic ice sheet, and suddenly sea level is 25 feet higher, everyone on Earth, and Earth is devastated and catastrophized.

[00:36:40.09] – Kim Stanley Robinson

It’s all there in the Mars trilogy. And indeed, someone, maybe it’s Anne Clayborn at some point says disgustedly, Oh, my God, they’re terraforming Earth now. They’re trying to get control of the CO₂ problem. So I had a handle on it. I did not have to say, Oh, my God, I was wrong. I just had to keep up with what was happening and adjust my stories to the new information so that it would still be… I mean, you have to understand that from my age bracket, hard science fiction is opposed to soft science fiction or literary science fiction. Hard science fiction is Heinlein and Larry Niven. Soft science fiction is me and Ursula Le Guin. But what I did was I invaded their territory, that it could be science fictional and be leftist that it could be, in other words, hard and based on the physical sciences and no, nothing made up, but still be leftist. This confused him. I believe that in America, the phrase hard science fiction was basically blown up by me because it no longer made any sense ideologically. You couldn’t position it. That’s an older reading of this term, and I realized these terms come back and I have no control over them.

[00:37:56.21] – Kim Stanley Robinson

I hated cyberpunk. I don’t I don’t like punk used as a suffix. I don’t like soler punk. They should call themselves utopians or cooperatives or leftists. But whatever I think about names doesn’t matter because I’m not choosing the names. The names get chosen by the culture and they get stuck on you like labels. They would call me when I was young, Oh, this is literary science fiction. Well, this was a double put down. It was like an oxymoron. What literary means, Oh, God, this guy writes better than everybody else, which was not true, but it was trying to gesture to characters mattered and writing mattered. Well, theater You can’t get more beautiful than the writing of the ’40s if you get away from Heinlein, Clarke, Herbert. Whatever you think of Bradbury, I mean, his fine writing is often Purple prose, and he’s not scientific, But literary science fiction was a an attack term. Feminist science fiction was a an attack term to bracket people like Joanna Russ or Elisabeth Varnerberg from Quebec. These Well, by the name, you put them in a pigeon hole that they can’t escape and you marginalize them. I always have said, it’s not literary science fiction, it’s not soft science fiction.

[00:39:28.07] – Kim Stanley Robinson

It’s definitely not hard science fiction because the hardness was right wing. It was political hardness. I always tried to spike these subcategories. I would say, I am a science fiction writer. That’s already a pigeon hole that’s a little too small. But I’ll accept it in the way that gay people had to take on this notion of being gay or being queer. It’s an insult at first. You take it on as a flag of pride, as a way of spiking opposition to your project. Yeah, I’m a gay person. Yeah, I’m queer. What’s it to you? So I would say to the world, Yeah, I’m a science fiction writer. Science fiction is the best literature of the second half of the 20th century. What are you going to do to me? And so it was a aggressiveness. Yes, of course. And indeed, in America, when I was young, people would say, What do you do? If I said, I’m a writer, and then they would say, What do you write? And then I would say, Oh, I write science fiction. They would look at me like, Oh, but I thought you said you were a writer. As if I had said I was a comic writer or a pornographer.

[00:40:32.09] – Kim Stanley Robinson

So I quickly switched. When people asked me what I did, I’d say, I’m a science fiction writer. So it was to short circuit that bad conversation that would happen I mean, this is to go back into the past. What you asked about, John, was really more productive and future-oriented. I mean, I wrote Aurora to suggests that we can’t get to the stars. It’s technically impossible, and it would be humanly like putting people in prison. I wrote New York 2140 to suggest that we need to take care of the Earth or else it’ll be a sad place. I wrote 2312 to say the solar system is still very cool, very interesting. And in 300 years, if we take care of the Earth, or even if we don’t, the rich people might go off and make little utopias all around the solar system. And I played a game in 2312 that I probably, you noticed if you read it, they never go to Mars, except in the very last chapter. But when they’re passing it by, they say, Oh, I hear that’s an interesting story, that place. But the main Martian in 2312 is a person without gender who is only about two and a half feet tall, who is the detective in the story.

[00:41:54.23] – Kim Stanley Robinson

That person, they say, Oh, I hate that place. I was young there. I hate that place. It’s got a bunch of canals. They ruined it by terraforming it too fast, and they kicked me out. I’m in exile, so I exiled them. They zoom by Mars using it as a gravity swing. It was a way of making a joke to my Mars readers. If you’d read the Mars trilogy, you could see in 2312 that I was dodging that one in order to talk about all the rest of them and make a a joke for people who have stuck with me through all these years. So yes, it has stuck with me. I’ve tried to I’ve tried to stay true to the science. As a science fiction writer, I think one fundamental thing is trust the sciences to give you some great stories and don’t ignore the news stories that they’re telling you. If they’re telling you it’s going to be hard to become immortal, they’re right. If they’re telling you Mars is poisonous, they are right. If you continue to write in the knowledge base that we had 50 years ago, then you become a fantasy writer.

[00:43:00.21] – Kim Stanley Robinson

One thing I’ve always said to people is, I don’t like fantasy because people think science fiction, fantasy, same thing, right? Same part of the bookstore. I just say, I love fantasy. It’s like telling people your dreams. It’s just so free wheeling and bogus. I never get moved by it. I can’t get into it. It was like, wow, these guys are weird. What esthetics are that? What an ideology is that? It’s good for discussion.

[00:43:27.14] – John Knych

Thank you, Stan. Before moving on to Matt’s question, please excuse my label of you as a hard science fiction writer in the introduction. I didn’t know the background that hard was right.

[00:43:40.03] – Kim Stanley Robinson

Yeah, that’s all right. I’m used to it, and I accept everything. I’m also a cli-fi writer of all the things that make me roll my eyes. I don’t care what I’m called. Well, I do, but you see what I mean.

[00:43:51.19] – John Knych

Yes. I think we’re living through a sci-fi renaissance. I love hard sci-fi. In my definition of it, it’s just that you the writer sticks to facts and science, but I didn’t know how the label changed. But I don’t want to take up time. Matt, what’s your question for Stan?

[00:44:12.24] – Matt Bitonti

Hello.

[00:44:13.19] – Matt Bitonti

I am also a huge fan and would like to ask you about one of your early works called Shaman.

[00:44:21.13] – Matt Bitonti – Process for the novel: Shaman

This, I feel, is a beautiful underrated work. I recommend it to everyone. We were talking about categories. It’s technically not science fiction. It’s labeled as historical fiction or prehistorical fiction, if you want to go there. But the matriarchal societies, the lives of these people, for those who haven’t read it, they’re like the French cave painters, I think, from maybe 25 or 30,000 years ago. I just wanted to hear a little bit about your process for that one. That’s the one I always recommend when people ask me about your work. I appreciate that very much.

Kim Stanley Robinson

I love I love Shaman. It’s one of my favorites of my own work. It’s not early. I wrote it in 2011 or so. I guess that’s getting back there now. But it came late on in what I call the Orbit 6. I had finished my Washington DC trilogy, which was a mess and did not turn out nicely like the Mars trilogy did. Using the same format, to describe Washington DC, I lost my bearings and I got I drowned in the swamp of Washington DC, where I’d lived before I wrote that one. I was staggering around and a British editor named Tim Holman said, I’ll publish you next, and I’ll even just buy three books, and we’ll figure out later what they are, past 2312.

[00:45:50.13] – Kim Stanley Robinson

A great gesture of confidence that I totally appreciate. The second book I came to him was, I said, I’ve had this idea for a pre-historical novel, and I must say that pre-history, we don’t know what happened then except for archeology. It’s science that taught us what happened before the written record. Pre-historic fiction is a sub-genre of science fiction in in my definition, and even on the bookstore shelves. Most prehistoric novels are stuck in the science fiction section. And science fiction writers like Robert Silverberg or Michael Bishop, several others in the ’50s, would send time travelers back to the Paleolithic times to see what humans were like because we were getting a better sense of it. I mean, the Alaska cave wasn’t discovered until, I forget when, but I think it was early 20th century. Then the Chauvet Cave, which was the one that boggled my mind, was 1991 or so. So 20th century gave us prehistory as a part of Anthepology. Then the question became, why When did we evolve the way we did? When did we get language? When did we get fire? When did we get tools? When did we get hierarchy? When did we get patriarchy?

[00:47:08.23] – Kim Stanley Robinson

So it wasn’t just tools, but systems. And there it gets very science-fictional. You have to guess. And it’s like a detective story. You got a few shattered pieces of clay on the ground and a few stowing points. Oh, that was an egalitarian system. Well, there’s a lot of detective and guesswork going on in these things that I quite love. It shades into science fiction almost naturally because of the nature of the evidence not having written records and yet having at least 50,000 years of pretty clear signs on the ground of what we were doing. And that keeps getting pushed back. I was fascinated. And Tim Holman said, Go for it. I don’t care that it seems out of genre for you. You do what you want, I’ll support it. And truthfully, when Shaman came out in It must have been 2013 or so. My publisher, Hachet, the whole publishing group, one of the big five, Hachet, was in a war with amazon. Com with Jeff Bezos, just over royalty points, just over money. Who gets the most out of ebooks? The seller and distributor of Kindle or the actual publisher? They were fighting over points.

[00:48:24.12] – Kim Stanley Robinson

And in that war, Amazon for Hachet books, they began to stab them all in the back, right on Amazon. So when Shaman came out on Amazon, it said, We can deliver this book in six weeks, but you might prefer Clown of the Cave Bear instead. So this was quite bad. And Shaman had a a strangled birth, you might say, because at that point, even then, Amazon was two-thirds to three-quarters of all sales in the United States for books. So the poor book staggered around, but it has people like you for whom it’s important, for whom it speaks to how we began, about the beginnings of art, about just the adventure of living out in the world with a small band and with powerful technologies, but not that powerful compared to what we have now. I was a snow camper. I had spent a lot of time snow camping in the Sierra Nevada. That’s the only part that I could bring my own knowledge base to it was snowshoes. So naturally, there’s a big strand of snow shoe invention in Shaman, and I believe they had tremendously good gear in terms of footwear, clothing, and snow shoes.

[00:49:40.10] – Kim Stanley Robinson

But all those things rot, and we don’t have them as material traces. Except for the Iceman. The Iceman was very important to me. The guy was discovered in the ice on the border between Austria and Germany. He was called Utsi for a while. But then when the Austrians gave him back to the Italians, because he was on the Italian side of the border by about 100 yards. An amazingly civilized act, by the way, for Austria just to give him back. Now he’s in a museum in Balzano. That guy was frozen in place with all of his gear. All of his gear, except for his copper ax, was probably much like what he had for thousands of years, 50,000 years or so, of gear development and fine-tuning. His kit is about exactly the same as what I backpack with. Everything he has, we have modern equivalents for. Right down to a cigarette lighter. He had a little fire carrier where he could carry a coal through the course of a whole day on his body and then get a better lit fire that night. All this was mind boggling to me, as was the Chauvet Cave and the images inside the Chauvet Cave.

[00:50:53.23] – Kim Stanley Robinson

The French government has a website for the Chauvet Cave that shows the panel of the four horses being painted in the order they were really painted, which is the archeology that they can do, the analysis. I had such a gift of material there between my own experiences and between my interest in these ancient experiences. It struck me as part of the project, what are we and what will we become? You need to add what were we to get us to where we are now. Since our DNA is exactly the same, except for some small variants like lactose tolerance, our DNA is exactly the same as it was 30,000 years ago. You got to imagine them as just like us. The same brain, the same linguistic capacity. If we were born in the Yardesh in France 30,000 years ago, it would be IHH stuff. There would be both rhinoceroses and gigantic cave bears and lions all in Southern France in an ice age. There’s different iterations of these big creatures. But humans would be a small band of primates, like really smart technological monkeys, apes, of course. But think of them We think of ourselves as monkeys doing quite well in this context, but not by any means dominating it.

[00:52:22.10] – Kim Stanley Robinson

The art being animal-directed makes perfect sense because these animals were dominant. It was about a year in my life As I was writing, I was thinking, Okay, I just don’t want to end. I don’t want to finish writing this book. I just want to live in this book. The third wind, the narrator of the book, was just speaking through me as if I wasn’t even there. That is not a typical experience for a novelist. Usually, you’re very aware you’re there. You’re struggling, you’re trying to get out of the way, but it’s hard and it’s effortful. But with Shaman, it wasn’t anywhere near as effortful. It was Somehow I was possessed. I don’t mean to get too mystical about it. I think it’s a perfectly human thing. We often are possessed by a part of your brain or by a part of your culture that you’re not fully aware of. But also, to finish about Shaman, I realized about halfway through this culture did not have writing. They were talking. My narrator has to be talking. This has to be oral narrative. I looked up, I read a lot about the the the oral poets or shaman figures of the of the Paleolithic period that still lived on in the modern times, like in the Balkans, who would take all night to tell a story, and it was supposedly perfectly memorized.

[00:53:47.09] – Kim Stanley Robinson

But of course, it wasn’t perfectly memorized because there was nothing to check. There was no tape recorder. If someone told it different than it had been told the previous year, who was to know? So it was not memorized It was just word for word. It was a matter of technique and then the basis of a story, and then it got creative. At some point, like with the Iliad, someone wrote it down. A Homer figure wrote it down, but people had been talking it for hundreds of years at that point. In fact, the Trojan War, I think, was about a thousand years before it got written down. So these oral poets, I thought I had to go back. I threw out my first draft. I was about a third of the way through the novel when I had this which, of course, I should have had earlier, but something knocked me on the head, and I realized, I can’t write this story. I have to write down somebody talking this story. I have to take a transcript, like on one of these modern AIs that you talk into it and then you see the written record, I have to be like that AI and then just listen.

[00:54:50.05] – Kim Stanley Robinson

Well, if you look… I mean, maybe people don’t notice this like I notice this. But if you read Shaman, it does not read like the Mars trilogy. Which is a written thing or my more written book. Shaman, it seems to me, is spoken by the third wind, and therefore you can’t have expository lumps like in the Mars trilogy. You can’t have 2312. You can’t have things like in Ministry these gigantic essays. You can’t do a Melville. You need to actually go back to the Paleolithic period and talk a story like you might hear it around the fire. That was very fun. That was interesting and fun in terms of a writing process.

[00:55:37.13] – John knych

Thank you, Stan. Grant, are you there to ask a question? I know he’s in and out. I don’t think so. I have a question from someone who couldn’t be here, Sean Callahan. He wanted to ask you, Stan, have you considered that this trilogy could also be something researchers utilize in the real world when considering the challenges of colonizing Mars? I know you just said that Mars is poisonous, but the reality is, as we all, I think, no, humanity is still trying to go to Mars. Have scientists or researchers ever offered to pick your brain on the topic, and if so, what topics?

[00:56:22.09] – Kim Stanley Robinson

Well, yes, for sure, it’s well read in the space community. And I have a copy of the book, I guess it’s Blue Mars with Velcro on it because it was stuck to the wall of the International Space Station. It was read in a no-g space orbiting the Earth. The astronaut involved gave me that copy, which I’m very happy to have. I also have the Mars flag, which is red, green, and blue in vertical stripes in nylon made by the Mars Society back around 1999. For a while there, where I was obviously a luminary, and even on the board of directors for a while or board of advisors, this was not advisable for the Mars Society, which was somewhat of a mess because of the personal characteristics of the founder and leader who made it into too much of a personal club and not enough of an outreach, but also the whole Mars project, because of this, percolates and because of world history, 9/11 and other things. The day after 9/11, the Mars Society was like 100 times as interesting. So world history changed and things were not the same. And since then, Through Chris McKay, who’s always been my Mars guy, a great teacher and a friend, although we seldom have met in person, but he used to invite me down to NASA Ames, where he worked, which is in Mountainview, near Menlo Park, down in the Bay Area, near Stanford.

[00:58:04.13] – Kim Stanley Robinson

A gigantic old naval base was given to NASA, and they have a dirigible airship hangar there that they’ve stripped down to its framing, and now it’s a work of art sitting on the South Bay, and it’s still on the NASA Ames property. Conferences there, yes. Then also lunch sessions, like for Aurora. I needed to know more about orbital mechanics. And I asked Chris, he said, Come on down for lunch. And when I would get down there, there would be Mars scientists like Carol Stoker, like Larry Lemke, and John Cumbers. And they would gather for a lunchtime seminar, and I would have my laptop out, the precursor to this one, and ask them questions, and then type as fast as I could to get answers to help me as tech support. And so Mars, for all of them, is a thing from the ’90s. And And really, Elon Musk, it’s sad to talk about a person who has become crazy and dangerous and a an ugly fascist of the ADF kind in Germany, and even right now, crashing the American government for fun just as a destructo derby ego game to play with no particular plan.

[00:59:22.19] – Kim Stanley Robinson

That wasn’t true. When I met him was at the Mars Society in 1999, and he was just like a puppy with a new toy, which his McLaren car. It’s a good rocket company, SpaceX, and a good car company, Tesla. But this Mars idea of his, which I used to think of as a harmless hobby, was maybe also a symptom of delusional tendencies. He’s not going to end up on Mars. His Starship thing, if you look at the landing plan for his starship, whatever he calls it, the big fucking rocket, he called it, for going to Mars, you You wouldn’t believe how marginally safe it is and how much it has to trust everything going right, not to kill everybody on it. Because Mars is hard. The atmosphere is too thin to slow you down, but it’s thick enough to burn you up. It presents a landing problem that the Russians solved by this giant bouncing ball, which the Americans picked up on acknowledging the Russian the origin of that landing method. But you can’t land humans by dropping them onto the planet in a rubber ball where they bounce up and down 20 times. You have to have a soft landing.

[01:00:41.15] – Kim Stanley Robinson

They are harder than hell. The whole thing is now a fantasy. But now we’re realizing it’s the fantasy of a fantasist, where it’s just one of many fantasies. I thought it was just a harmless hobby, but now I think it was symptomatic of something deeper and worse, a bad I think. Even for dedicated Mars scientists like Chris McKay, the whole notion is, let’s save Earth first and Mars will still be there. It might be a beautiful place to terraform with robots in the year 4,500 AD, and it’ll still be there. If we actually get our act together on Earth, it might be a fun project. But in the meantime, at best, it’s like Antarctica. You got 10 scientists there in a station, maybe even a first hundred scientists there in stations. They won’t be having kids there. They’ll be coming back home. They’ll be radiated. They’ll have had the time of their lives, but they also may have screwed their body up big time being in 30% gravity for any length of time. Our studies of the astronauts who spent a year in near zero gravity, they’re pretty ill and damaged by that. And then they recover.

[01:02:01.18] – Kim Stanley Robinson

What Mars would do at 37%, we have no idea. Same with the moon at 16%. Meanwhile, we got a planet that we’re destroying in terms of the biosphere. Why? What is this even about? I have to say it over and over again. I like the Mars trilogy as a novel. I’m very fond of the characters. I think it’s a good novel, and novels are important. But as a plan, no, it’s not right. The plan came from 1990, and the conditions have changed.

[01:02:37.14] – John Knych

Thank you, Stan. It’s been an hour, and I know I promised you an hour. I know John John. How Ken is leaving.

[01:02:49.18] – Josh

Thank you so much, Kim. I appreciate this. Thanks, Jack. Thank you all.

[01:02:55.01] – JOhn Knych

Yeah, my name is really John, but I go by Jack. Thank you. Thank you, John. Stan, this has It’s been a pleasure. Really enjoyed this conversation. Don’t know if Matt, Josh, do you have any final questions? I don’t want to take up too much of Stan’s time.

[01:03:12.07] – Virginie Actis

No, for me, I must say that it was more It’s been a pleasure. It was an honor, and we learned so much, and it’s amazing. This interview would be in French, subtitled by me. I will do it for our French readers.

[01:03:30.06] – Kim Stanley Robinson

All good. Thank you for that. I must say, I’m not in a complete rush here, but I do want to end briefly. Just to say that in France, the Ministry for the Future came out, I guess, at the end of 2023. I lose track of time. It’s going so fast, but it’s had a wonderful response in French. I’ve always had a good career in French, a French readership that has been responsive. The translations have been mostly good. Not that my reading of French is good enough to judge style, but it’s good enough to know that it’s all there. I have some good French friends now who I keep in contact with that are mostly through the science fiction community. It’s good to hear. I’m glad if this comes out and some French readers read it, what I just said with you in this conversation, that would be great.

[01:04:26.16] – John Knych

So thank you. Yes. This is recorded. It’s going to be shared in my group. There are French readers within the Sci-Fi group as well. Side thing, I love Michel’s description of Provence when he goes home in Blue Mars. I spent some time in Provence. To me, it was perfect describing the buildings and the plazas and having a cassis, all of that was spot on. Josh, man, any other final thoughts? Thank you.

[01:04:56.04] – Josh

I just thank you so much for sharing and for for being here. As I said, I studied science at university and I left very disenfranchised with the state of events in 2013. This was the state of the world at the time and picked up Red Mars, and it really helped put into words what I was trying to say. So it’s one of those things that I’ve gone back to many times when I’m trying to formulate my thoughts. It’s all there. It’s a real honor to be chatting with you. Thank you.

[01:05:34.17] – Kim Stanley Robinson

Thank you for your time. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Have a good evening, you all, if you’re over there. It’s raining hard here, which is a blessing, but I’m going to go back to work. This has been a lovely break.

[01:05:49.24] – John knych

Awesome. Au revoir. Have a good evening. Thank you. Bye..

[01:05:52.17] – Kim Stanley Robinson

Thank you so much. Good night. Bye.

[01:06:00.21] – Josh

Thank you, John. That was really nice.

[01:06:03.04] – John Knych

Thanks, Josh. Thank you for showing up. No, I really enjoyed that. No, it’s… Yeah. Thank you for coming and asking great questions.

Science Fiction

Published in October of 2024 in

Bewildering Stories (Read here)

Chapters: Introduction – 00:00

How did you discover the archive? – 01:17

How did you sift through this enormous archive? – 03:00

Archive in 6-7 languages – 03:50

Closed-captioning? (no) – 05:30

What did your agent or editor say to cut or expand? – 06:15

Book writing more freedom – 06:40

Grim parts cut – 07:10

How was cinematic detail achieved? – 08:10

If writing is thin, get more info, S. Freedman – 10:49

Feedback from Jewish community on your book? – 12:08

Why was his story not covered? – 13:55

Talent and logic in your book – 15:30

Was he a survivor or a good man? – 17:20

Postwar years he was poor – 19:30

Need cunning to survive the camps – 20:00

Rosebery, a pure character – 23:00

How could the camps not know about the music? – 24:45

Can there be culture/art in times of immense distress? – 28:50

How much of Aleks’ music is in the archive? – 31:20

What was your historical research process? – 34:00

History relevant to characters – 35:40

Difficulty of trauma distorting history – 36:30

Aleks never got traction in Poland – 37:37

Controversial sections (being Jewish in Poland) – 38:10

Poland not a country of constant Pograms – 39:30

Writing about the violence of the camps, strategy? – 41:50

Everything was possible in the camps – 44:00

Approach was to be skeptical and verify – 45:00

Schindler’s List comparison, chip on shoulder – 46:00

Schindler profiting from saving souls – 47:10

Post-publication, did anyone reach out to you? – 48:20

Learn anything new about Aleks post-publication? – 46:15

Bad with his health – 50:15

Power of the music came through – 51:40

Must have light and air in narrative – 52:10

Impressions of sons – 53:35

Relationship with parents can be sensitive – 54:40

Did the sons believe in his mission? – 55:10

How did you organize your plan for this book? – 56:45

Explore 3 major sources – 57:42

Irony of other, competing book falling through – 59:10

Another book project? – 59:38

Hawaii! – 1:00:00

There is an interest in Hawaii – 1:01:30

Famous people from Hawaii – 1:01:50

Has music of archive been performed elsewhere? – 1:03:25

The music is unpolished, rough, gritty – 1:04:50

Books on oral tradition of displaced people? – 1:06:00

Reading anything now that you’d recommend? – 1:08:08

Chapters:

How A Dead Djinn in Cairo was published – 00:00

Clark’s Double Life – 01:17

Clark’s Bio/Background – 02:00

1) Relationship between novelette and novel – 04:30

I like world building – 05:51

2) What research influenced your world building? – 08:30

3) Alternative Cairo made only from research or experience? – 14:43

4) Challenges/awards of spec. fiction to comment on social issues? – 16:30

5) What is your perspective on historical memory/purpose of history? – 20:52

Retro-futurism – 24:30

A world where the Armenian genocide never happened – 25:30

6) Microscopic code-switching intentional or studied? – 26:55

7) Through fantasy are you liberated to discuss politics and colonialism? – 30:30

Clark’s way of pushing against Orientalism – 32:40

This is not a utopia – 33:40

8) Inspiration behind writing such strong women? – 35:50

Read books by people who are like your characters – 40:20

9) Balance/marriage between science and religion? – 41:10

Djinns arrival in the world as first contact – 44:44

10) How involved were you in the audio book? – 46:30

Sweeping world, but never bogged down – 50:50

11) Process to create rich world and details – 51:20

12) Upload academic papers? – 56:30

13) Origin and reasons for the pen name? – 57:55

A Dead Djinn in Cairo taught in college – 1:03:00

14) More stories in this universe? – 1:05:20

Liberal Arts education is good – 1:07:30

15) Will you explore more Djinn-human relationship-power-magical-influence? 1:08:20

Goblins! – 1:11:33

16) Do you hate paperwork? – 1:12:00

17) Bound version of short stories in Dead Djinn universe? – 1:14:11

18) Trashy romance novel beef? – 1:15:30

19) Is Ghostface Killah or Raekwon the better emcee out of Wu-Tang? – 1:18:10

20) Who should we read now? – 1:18:55

Questions asked by: 1) John Knych 2), 3) Melissa DellaBartolomea 4) Stephanie Sabino 5) Brian Zielenski 6) Danielle 7) Eliane Boey 8) Ina Chang Torres 9) Tricia 10) Jen Ancker 11) John Knych 12) Brian Zielenski 13) Melissa DellaBartolomea 14) Ina Chang Torres 15) John Knych 16) John Knych 17) Stephanie Sabino 18) John Knych 19) John Knych 20) General

Intro/Origin as a writer – 00:00

A Child of the 70s – 01:12

Ed’s writing hiatus – 01:51

Goodness in Ed’s books – 02:28

Publishing – 02:48

Robert Pattinson! – 04:10

Origin of Mal Goes to War – 05:34

Origin of his sense of humor – 09:12

Toning down of his humor – 11:07

Balancing humor and tragedy – 12:30

Writing is like cooking – 13:00

Constructing Mal / A.I. – 14:15

Do you think of sequels? – 16:57

Worldbuilding is hard – 19:25

Writing sequels is easier – 20:28

Tech progress resistance possible? – 21:57

A.I. structures – 24:00

Create infinite misery for A.I.s – 25:00

Shogun resistance of gunpowder – 25:45

Can’t put genie back in the bottle – 26:30

Mal’s inner-simulations – 27:00

Combat simulation innovation – 28:00

Techno-book faults – 28:25

Loved writing castle siege scene – 29:15

This book has been film optioned – 30:17

Book on film – 31:25

Enjoyed fantasy sequences – 31:51

War vs. band of friends – 32:15

Know what you know with writing – 33:05

Military Scifi – 33:37

Novel close to his heart – 34:54

Think of film while writing? – 35:22

Writing while having a job – 37:44

Founded cancer research company – 39:08

Job responsibilities – 39:50

Nothing is promised – 40:40

Grew up poor – 40:56

Write about cancer? – 41:41

Cancer therapy inspiring There Days in April – 42:30

Cancer treatment – 43:30

Energy to manage writing, job, life, how? – 46:09

My brain is weird – 46:50

Can shift focus easily – 47:30

Dialogue skill, how did you learn? – 48:30

Other writers who do dialogue well – 49:41

A.I. in daily work life – 51:10

Human personality emulators? – 52:08

Will humans gene-edit in our lifetimes? – 53:15

Scientists are playing with embryos now – 53:50

Finding neat ideas – 54:40

Reads everything – 55:30

Who do you recommend for us to read? – 55:48

New project = standalone – 57:15

The future of his career – 58:00

Chapters:

Origin as a writer – 00:00

Seed idea of the book – 00:45

Nature of plants – 01:24

Plants communicate – 02:50

Rye volunteered! – 03:56

Plants are not passive! – 04:45

Do plants think? Depends – 05:20

How to add drama to plants – 06:34

Why skip generations in the story? – 07:51

Origin of pacing – 11:15

Inspiration for Stevland – 12:30

Plants as social beings – 13:15

Stevland motive – 14:45

Pando as inspiration – 15:15

Stevland is bamboo? – 16:15

Names stuck on things – 16:35

More reasons for Stevland – 17:30

Title origin – 18:20

What is your research process? – 20:18

Scientists are easy to talk to! – 22:26

Growing plants in space? – 23:33

How moss grows in space – 24:46

Andy Weir and The Martian – 25:35

Colonizing examples from history? – 26:40

Can they live in peace? – 27:51

Mistake in the book? – 28:25

Why not use Glassmaker writing in the first encounter? – 30:13

Why did the Glassmakers leave the city? – 31:04

Decisions for plant personalities? – 32:51

Origin of Stevland name – 34:18

Work as a translator informing work – 35:14

Glassmaker origin (ants/Mayans) – 36:15

Translator pitfalls – 37:45

Process of creating Glassmakers – 38:30

Ant knowledge – 39:20

World building process – 41:26

Looking for problems – 43:02

Novel = found enough problems – 44:40

Motivation for distinct generations – 47:11

Journalism work – 48:44

Generation preference? – 49:30

Poor Higgins – 49:45

Conflicts with generations – 51:30

Writing process (plan as much as possible) – 52:35

One sentence for each chapter plan – 53:40

Novel writing is complicated – 54:45

Color of floating cactus, why? – 55:25

Recommendation – 56:46

Meet Me in Another Life – 56:52

Thank you! – 58:00