Category: Uncategorized

[00:00:01.18] – John Knych

Hello Hiron Ennes, thank you for being here. Today we will be discussing The Works of Vermin, doing a round table discussion, and will start with Noémie, with your first question.

[00:00:13.09] – Noémie

Yes! Sure. So my first question was: Did some of the ideas that you had for your first book didn’t really find their place in the first book, in Leech, and then they found their final ways into this one, was it something that you had to work with?

[00:00:28.13] – Hiron Ennes

So there were some parts of Leech, that made it into Works of Vermin, but the parts of Leech that actually did make their way into Vermin, were very minor parts of Leech, so for instance: one of the characters in Leech, Helen, in an earlier draft, like her back story was that she was actually really famous cellist from the city, and that got me sort of rolling into: I wonder what music is like in a world like this that has like ended over and over and over again? And like what changes have taken place to music theory and performance and art in general and I sort of like that really small part of Leech; I sort of followed down this bizarre tunnel all the way to the Vermin, and which art is basically just a huge part of life, in their part it; the world.

[00:01:35.00] – John Knych

Thank you now and to Brandon.

[00:01:39.19] – Brandon

Thank you so much for being here really appreciate this.

[00:01:44.15] – Hiron Ennes

Yeah, thanks for having me.

[00:01:46.01] – Brandon

So I guess can you explain like how your world building process a little bit…did you…I mean you have this incredibly imaginative unique world that you’ve built up. So did you build the world first, and then write your story, or did you kind of do it as you were writing the story? You just add more and more of the world? I mean how was your whole process of world building?

[00:02:10.23] – Hiron Ennes

You are so it was sort of intergrated processes. I came up with the general bones of the story of Vermin first. I knew it was going to be in this war of Lush hot wet disgusting city, but that’s all that I really know when I went in and started writing the first chapter and the first chapter the first of chapter of Vermin, changed considerably over a period of three months. I just wrote the beginning over and over and over again because something wasn’t right like originally some of the creatures that the exterminator would go after word of ghost like etherial things that want it all and you know that was two broad I needed to know it down. What sort of what sort of creatures would terrorize the city built in two and three stump. Oh you know, but I’m just gonna I’m gonna keep it the boys. I’m gonna keep it the past and then from there the sort of mafioso like world of computing extermination company of integrated from that idea downward and it was as far as like world building on the over city side to like what happens at the opera ?

[00:03:41.08] – Hiron Ennes

Is it ? You know Is it gladiatorial or not do people make it on the outcome of the story that they see. Those to be sort of arrived at me in the same way where I Something what happened to be like all ? That’s not quite right. And then I leave it for a while I think about it. And then that element the world building with sort of present itself as a solution to do whatever the character were stuck doing. So it was a very very integrated process.

[00:04:16.02] – John Knych

Interesting great, thank you to Jane and also I need to say it loud that doing the roundtable discussion. Anyone does not have a question or if it’s very bad and you can just pass so and.

[00:04:29.23] – Jenn

Thanks for being here. I’ve enjoyed both of your books, so. Environmental collapse is really embedded in English in Vermin, and I was wondering to feel like the environment is kind of a caractère in your books and not just the backdrop.

[00:04:47.03] – Hiron Ennes

Absolutely I think that the environment, whether or not, it’s a Géographique. Or ecological as it was in Nietzsche and I mean and in Vermin to but whether or not. It’s like the natural environment or the natural environment like the system that people build like from the rebels of worlds that comes before are really really integrated into how I like to tell my stories and the the environment itself sort of play the role as a team like in which you know isolation and loneliness was huge. So why would it take place in in in your way ? The same way Vermin is where where is Vermin is about excess and life and arts and culture and and all of these things sort of Evolve with the caractères and because of the caractère. So yeah I think I love to integrate, whatever is happening in the environment. Whether it socio-politico economiques or natural. I’d love to incorporate that into the story and have it with caractère pretty directly.

[00:06:14.17] – Jenn

Thank you.

[00:06:17.00] – John Knych

Thank you and.

[00:06:23.12] – Brian

Thank you both both here because we’re all right when it came out and I think I think about it. Yeah, which is good for a while so my first question on this one, just to go on the world building and so how do you ? How do you decide like when you are going to use it a little bit, but when you’re building the setting. How do you decide which elements too much together because some of the things really felt like in both books that they wouldn’t fit for most stories, because you have this, you know technology of like this kind of world that you can have been discovered even even in Vermin, they said you know they talk about the discovery of the camera like even things like that our technology has been lost and come back there there building their society on top of the ruins of something that used to be there, but then you have you know the culture being built on this, you have you know environment and you have been built into the stump of this great tree and you have this river and you know the past and everything Obviously, how do you decide, which actually will fit for your stories.

[00:07:38.19] – Hiron Ennes

All that’s hard. I think my process I can I think with Sofia Samatar who said that like the way I write a book is I write a book and then delete the person of it and that that was kind of at least in the case for vermine is that I like first draft totally overstuff there were footnotes. There were long rambling acid Victor Hugo about like the like there is all sort of shit in there that I found I was quite delighted in what I was told by my editor today. I got it so half of it half of the things that stay and half of things that got the things that got at first got because they might be contrary to where I want the story to go like I really love and elements, but I’ll be like this exists in this world than it presence like two years Easy of a solution for something is find some situation my caractère find themselves in or if it, if it is contradictoire to the story not necessarily like and celery to the stories because there’s a lot of environment and that’s just sort of like meandering Worldbuilding that I love and I love saying that in books a lot of the time, but there’s a lot that doesn’t necessarily people the story, but it’s not like countries indicated in this in this process, so usually by the time, I give a first draft to someone all of the worldbuilding elements that are included are the one that are not necessarily like totally countries and then from there it becomes like.

[00:09:39.10] – Hiron Ennes

Kill your darlings one by one brutally and over a long period of time. And there have been many darlings that have been cut from this but a lot of things that have said.

[00:09:54.04] – Brian

It’s awesome. Thank you.

[00:09:56.00] – John Knych

Typekit. Brian continue with the worldbuilding theme.

[00:10:00.23] – Hiron Ennes

And go for ever.

[00:10:02.12] – John Knych

Before it before I do after sometimes ask how we discovered them. So I need to shoot out. Peter Watts who is an author we had before you when we ask him. He should we read here immediately said Nietzsche and then Jeanne and Brian had already read and so we were super happy to read your book before it’s related to the public, so that that’s how I guess.

[00:10:27.22] – Hiron Ennes

I love this writing. I I think he’s great, Yes.

[00:10:33.16] – John Knych

We have a question related to the similarity and and and style, but continue with worldbuilding with maybe we get back to that later. So it’s just now how you decide what to keep and that many darlings are killed. When you’re digging for digging and building the world Do you ? Do you read history and people from history ? And I ask because when I came across like a margrave, which I have hereditary title for some prince of roman empire and then soon after a silver writing which has a drinking vessel from Greece. So are you I mean that you study history and this is just there. Or are you reading history ? So like when you’re digging where you find in all this information.

[00:11:19.23] – Hiron Ennes

So when I’m digging, it’s an interesting process particularly for veerman. I mean I guess and it’s because both of these both of these stories takes place like thousands of thousands of years and the future like on sort of like layers of dead society, the same way we live it up layers of. Heroes of Geological time and my goal for putting little bit and pieces of history is to make it sort of delightful incongruous. There are some like I never studied history formally, but there are some factors and some things that I love about the society that have comes before and that are still going on. And. I like to get them in a way that is not historically accurate or in a way that like sometimes like when we look at history from an archaeological perspective. WE can’t really know what these people were using this object for or what significant other things are like WE don’t we can make our best guess, but we don’t really know. So my goal girl in integrating some like anachronistic historical things in Vermin was sort of from that I would like to like maybe they found this or they saw this in a picture that they dug up and they’re like all we want to recreate it because we think it’s beautiful.

[00:13:01.17] – Hiron Ennes

But we don’t know we don’t know what it’s for or you know why why they used to use it so like in the case of the right and it’s something that you like this is the type of your CB in during gladiatorial Oprah battle. You know you don’t you don’t drink from it like it’s just you all of my historical references are anachronistic in the city and they don’t come from like necessarily a deep understanding of history. Because that’s not like my goal is not to accurately recreate historical society, but just like pick and choose from the same way that that we sometimes pick and choose meaning from the past that we don’t necessarily know is through.

[00:13:49.10] – John Knych

Thank you right back. Back to the top. Noémie.

[00:13:53.07] – Noémie

Alright. Thank you. I am very curious about your inspiration. It’s something. I’m very curious. I think with all the authors that we’ve meet when I read Leeds and this book I really thought about China miéville for example with the beat of the fucked-up society that he’s building on top of each other that makes sense. I don’t know if it was something that you thought about but to me gave me this. I thought that with all about Nausicaa as well the Ghibli movie and I thought about Oliver twist and I don’t know if you, you know had inspiration that you draw from when writing the book.

[00:14:28.22] – Hiron Ennes

I think those are good inspiration actually China Miéville definitely someone that I read in my things that was super for me. So pretty the street station is definitely like a very very blatant inspiration for this, I would say. And it also gets compared to it a lot. I have this horrible habits of being inspired by things that I’ve never seen or red. So the reason why I started with Jeff Vandermeer who my love by the way is because someone said that Jeff or someone said that he was like and celery justice meets Jeff Vandermeer and I hadn’t red idea of those things and that I read them and I’m like us. This is great. Similarly I’ve never seen it like I just watch the thing like a couple of months ago. And I’m like Oh, I see I see you, but yeah. I think that a lot of my inspiration, especially for Vermin comes from a very weird Place Perdido Street Station. Definitely one kind of monte Cristo is definitely in inspiration for it as well. And then I would say Jeff vandermeer again.

[00:15:55.24] – Hiron Ennes

But I did it again where I had not red is ambergris trilogy until I was like halfway through Vermin, and then I read it and I’m like. This is also it’s very similar to this as well. So I could I would say that those those inspirations are definitely there, whether or not there are some of like osmose from the environment. So if anyone wants to come perdido street station, definitely and then the ambergris trilogy by Jeff Vandermeer as well just about these super weird city where just how it takes place all the time those are those ten to be like my favourite kinds of books.

[00:16:41.24] – Noémie

When I was describing the book to my husband. I was saying it’s basically Jeff vandermeer made China Miéville. It was like Oh so that’s exactly what you love the most. It was like Yes exactly the book. I was talking to him about this like the last few few days when I was reading it and I was trying to try to understand how it would meet in the middle basically. It was like that’s it. That’s the total opposite of what you’re saying and he was very beautiful, the conversation with absolutely nowhere and it was beautiful, but I’m happy to see that it was the inspiration that I kind of guests. Thank you so much for that I want I want the one. Thank you.

[00:17:24.08] – John Knych

Noemi. How do culture step into us right ? That’s it.

[00:17:28.19] – Hiron Ennes

Yeah yeah. And I would say that is inspired by the thing. Even though. I had seen the thing because I feel like just the idea of it is through so many different like other piece of art that by the time. You get back to like the age which I guess itself is a remake of something, which is best of who is there ? So it’s you know. They’re all floating out. There are not and culture. Culture is our minds and always that we don’t necessarily. We’re not necessarily aware of.

[00:18:06.13] – John Knych

All of you and before moving on the brand. I’m happy that you said to Christo was the inspiration because spoilers for anyone listening. I’m gonna say the end, but ending on the boat. I was like you. This is because you sprinkle little French. There’s little french fries and there’s two and so I hear that was happy I enjoyed.

[00:18:24.22] – Hiron Ennes

Et I want I wanted the running off on the boat think I’m like, ok ? That’s coming straight from Dumas.

[00:18:32.17] – John Knych

It’s timeless until brandon.

[00:18:38.03] – Brandon

I thought the relationship between down and guy was really interesting. There’s this kind of unrequited love going on down seems infatuation would be kind of in the toxique way. I can you took a little bit about how you came up with that.

[00:18:55.16] – Hiron Ennes

I think I think just saying. I guess like some of my personal experience going into this novel inspired that things that I’ve seen between like close friends or not to go into any of details about that, but it’s like it’s kind of a very common experiment experience to I’d like by someone or close friendship where you’re not like quite sure if it’s gonna sort of another into something else if both partie are involved, there were Are saying that happen to different people and evolve and sometimes very interesting and sometimes kind of tragique ways. Automatically I think I wanted a really fucking weird love triangle cause the. This book is basically just like a huge piece of baroque theater of spread over for Android pages and so I took some like obviously like you know it’s very theatrical and a lot of things are lifted from you know classique opera and I love triangle is pretty much and necessity, but I wanted I love trying all that wasn’t between that wasn’t necessarily romantic and wasn’t between like usually it’s between two men and women. The love triangle I guess in between a dude his bunk might and his sister and day and it’s not necessarily romantic love between the three of them.

[00:20:45.03] – Hiron Ennes

But the way that they interact with each other and they are a-changin or not necessarily. Recommended and their needs are not necessarily might and I think that was a fun and interesting thing to explore. And I think that’s that is the source of the the sort of unrequited love between guys and down.

[00:21:11.09] – Brandon

Thank you. I think I read a lot of science-fiction mostly so I don’t see that very often. So that was interesting. Thank you.

[00:21:20.24] – John Knych

Thank you. Brandon. Moving on to if you have a question.

[00:21:25.15] – Jenn

I am so I watch and interview you did about leech and the interview or this question and I’m stealing. It was there is there something you wanted to fit into this book that it didn’t make it and you want readers to know or just something that you really love that just couldn’t fit.

[00:21:45.11] – Hiron Ennes

So many things so many tiny things are used to be a lot more manual entry and they would have like a little footnote for each of them and there were like so many weird bugs that did weird things there was like and and that by you that would make you seen. There was there were just like so many little box that couldn’t quite make it in, but that still leave in your us. And then this one almost well, it’s sort of his halfway there, but headcannon is that the magical girl actually survived ten different apocalypse and it’s a very popular author. Joanna. Now with it stuck around in the form of a little orphan of the details of which I don’t actually go into you, but it’s a magical girl enemy opera and I wish I could have gone into that a little more.

[00:22:59.19] – Jenn

Oh, that’s awesome. Thank you.

[00:23:04.05] – John Knych

Before you got the Brian was that removed the hand that makes you seen. What was the editor’s reason.

[00:23:10.07] – Hiron Ennes

That was that was on me. It was. It was okay, okay. There’s a lot of that are that are derived from these creatures in this world. And I think it was it ended up being when aster and Mallory, and elspeth are in that sort of a Aix-en-Provence nightclub and they’re doing they’re doing the third eye that it was originally seen it like this, but I thought that there might be too many drugs in this world. Cause we already have like that we already have like regular cocaïne, we already have. A lot of different stuff and I’m like there are just too many drugs. I’m gonna narrow this down. Just the third eye that so the sun and sorry man. You got booted. You got it in favour of the mouth.

[00:24:18.09] – John Knych

Thank you on the Brian.

[00:24:22.21] – Brian

A all right so my next one is about the role of violence and the story violence and also potentially that some overlap there. So we have talked about how the story of the very hard heavy world. There’s a lot of you know. There’s a lot of painting. There’s sculpture. There’s the performing is like you know another art form as well. And it seems like the way the people view violence in this world is through almost one hundred pour 100 artistique perspective like they discuss constantly. How beautiful is where you know the persons or even the dead body and things like that. And I was all about that. And then this can be kind of a follow-up or maybe I said I don’t know, but the dictator that they’re extracted from the new the new blog to me. It really seems like that one thing was like that, it was the symbol of like the violence in the world itself with the way, the shape, the shape, the city changed really everything I came in the contact with the left scare it like changed how they were the people who did all of different things and I guess what it was that perfectly just commentary on the role of violence play and society or something like that.

[00:25:52.02] – Hiron Ennes

Yeah so. Yeah about this question of linked together. I think that the. The role of violence, the role of violence. Play in your head is a hundred person spot on it like everything in this world is viewed from the artistic art esthétique land. And I don’t think I don’t think that is too far removed from our own world, because I think that I mean. Not to not to go. So she has to say this. This world is literally about the theatre of war and optics are a thing. And we can also see the beauty in violence sport like Mama Marshall are boxing. There is a strange elegance to really well fought fight and I wanted to sort of extra-plate that this about that we have already have. But don’t aknowledge that a lot of a lot of violence in our our world is esthétique. It is performative. It is like not to go into detail, but what we’re seeing right now the brutality and violence in the United States, right ? Right now that is being perpetual and the city is is it is performed.

[00:27:44.07] – Hiron Ennes

It is a message. It’s not it’s not to any purpose. Besides cruelty itself and to send a message and so that that aspect of violence as an esthétique as a message as something that is performed already exists in our world. But we. When I want it like when I was making the world of Vermin. I wanted it to be acknowledged like here like we the people we lives. WE think about optic sometimes but in you are when you kill people and you are always thinking about optic and how how this ? This action that has very real consequences for human life is sort of secondary of how it looks like. For instance like chanceler gosselin tells his marshals to you no kill a few of that he thinks are you but like don’t don’t be heavy handed about it. I don’t want my rain associated with tastes like that was very useful and I just wanted to see how violence would be Acknowledged and reacted to in a world that that value over material condition or not saying that we don’t value in this world over material condition, but.

[00:29:38.14] – Hiron Ennes

It was sort of like just taking to like the rococo extreme. You know and I think to that and yeah, that’s the way it change people the way it leaves scars the way it is used as essentially explosives and a fumigant and and all these different all these different aspects of what could arguably be Chemical Warfare. Yeah ! I think that exotoxine is very very indicative of like that the distillation of violence itself in this world that makes any sense sorry that was a kind of a rambling answers.

[00:30:21.01] – Brian

Great. Thank you.

[00:30:23.02] – John Knych

Thank you very good question. The. Question is what you want to ask before in relation to the Peter was before I say that this just piggy back off of Brian and your response. It’s a very bleak view of the world. Maybe if we keep stacking society for hundreds of years violence. We’ll just be like that is in your book, right ? Where it’s it’s it’s glorified And it’s not only. That’s not where we’re going.

[00:30:57.10] – Hiron Ennes

To end up somewhere better. I don’t have a lot of hope that we will be and you know that will end up somewhere weird her. I think that however, our society and it’s gonna be weird and stupid that’s all I want to say.

[00:31:12.19] – John Knych

Yes, it’s speaking of weird. So you’re your style hearing. Head Peter Watts its his voice is is like no other. This is very bizarre. There is no cliché and was the same experience with with you. And that there is no cliché that like the first thing I wrote in my notes was that every sentence just feels out of him out of someplace new and there there are a lot of this next to the brand said about like Syfy like a lot of sci-fi novels. Just you see the same same things and I thought you’re still remind me a bit of Emile Zola, except that was Emile Zola like Noemie probably talk more about this. She is actually read him in French like it’s like a suffocating atmosphere years was extravagant like there is this twisted dark right things are grappling and knowing and and it’s and it’s just there’s no clichés so much to you is when your Formulate sentences because with a lot of creators that are in this group and that will hopefully watch this when you creating sentences. Are you consciously crafting each sentence to be cliché or is it a natural unintended process where you you have this world, You have this vision and this sentence just come out unique.

[00:32:39.06] – Hiron Ennes

Oh my god, I wish now it’s it’s very deliberate process. I can spend the entire day on the single sentence. It’s actually quite frustrating. You all I can say is like sometimes all right and look at it and say now I’ve heard that sentences before. But it becomes a balancing act between like not being cliché and not being completely incomprehensible. Cause I think there are a lot of sentences that I’ve never been said. But most of them are junk. And yeah, it’s it’s a process for sure and it’s very very pretty agonizing on my part. So I don’t know if I would recommend it, but it is how you get up and at the end of the day.

[00:33:34.09] – John Knych

So you can’t because something we have something we’ve had some authors that they don’t really revise like I just you know, but you always.

[00:33:46.12] – Hiron Ennes

Pathological in fact. I have a type writer now so that I can not revise well, I’m writing a first draft I. I got it for practical purposes. So I can like actually get through something before I decide I hate it and I want to change and in the end I still do the thing where I write a book and the person of it, but at least having like having the strength of physical piece of paper that like I got to get through it before I go back later with the pen and make things up has been immensely helpful in helping me get something out to begin with because on the computer. I’m just two tempted to write a paragraph and then read it over a thousand times. Delete. Delete. Delete and then we write it from scratch. Meanwhile, it’s been at work day. I have three hundred words on my word document so at least with the writer, I get something out and then I can do that light in the editing process.

[00:35:07.12] – John Knych

The sound of painful. Thank you and.

[00:35:09.01] – Hiron Ennes

It’s all.

[00:35:11.04] – John Knych

I want to take you to write burning.

[00:35:13.24] – Hiron Ennes

Oh God, I’m so about a year and. I’m trying to think of how many hours. It would have taken me to write. Oh God, I wrote at least for for hours a day every day for a year and I’m not going to my head, but that’s it. That’s a lot of time. I hear your story about people like writing. Writing a book and five weeks or whatever and I’m like. Oh my god, I wish I’m so you.

[00:35:52.09] – John Knych

Think you back to me if you have a question.

[00:35:56.01] – Orateur 2

Yes, how does the process of.

[00:35:58.07] – Noémie

Writing a second book compared to the process writing. The first one did you have some sound of pressure because the first one was pretty successful. I guess like people did like it because it was awesome. But it was you know a book that really changed a lot of things I guess for science When you came out and did you have some of pressure or where you like people like the first one ? So I’m good to go. I can be a bit weird and I can do something about something. I wouldn’t have necessarily done in the first book. Did you have things like that going through your head and just going through it again ?

[00:36:32.06] – Hiron Ennes

I wish that I wish that I did. But what was going through my head was performance anxiety and you no fear of the sophomore syndrome where whatever it comes next. It’s invariably worse than what can before. If people hated each than they wouldn’t read my second one, which was bad have people loved which I was afraid they would like this one, which is also bad. So whatever it was, it was bad. I actually so when I signed on It was for two big deal and the second book that he was like a high fantasy sort of music by magic and astrology. Best giant creature fever, dream of high fantasy and I. Wish that I tried to write that during my research year in school and it was an other failure. It was so it was. I don’t think it was bad. But it just wasn’t the right time to write this. It’s like epic fantasy that was running me as I was trying to keep up with it. And I was that this was before the typewriter too.

[00:37:59.22] – Hiron Ennes

So this was me spending that our own words just kind of like. It was a really heartfelt book, Broke it and my soul, I gave part of it to my editor at the end of the year. And he’s like no, we can’t really run with this, So I put that one away I read more about a week and then I started German, and I think at that point having having failed something before it even came out made things a little better when it came to Vermin because I’m like you know what it can’t be worse than the last one. So it was like it was kind of a rollercoaster of like performance anxiety and some sort of like writing with the thought of thought of like. What would say about this like what he like this or like with this section need to sensitivity reader, blablabla. And you know it wasn’t really cool to Writing well and I said that you actually get something done and writing well and since that your writing something that you want to write regardless of what you might comes in the future, you know.

[00:39:20.03] – Hiron Ennes

So it was it was involved process for sure.

[00:39:24.23] – Noémie

Okay, alright. Thank you. I hope that we get to have the music best high fantasy with a fever dream into it. I mean it because it sounds very awesome. So I get it. I guess that’s sometimes we will have this. But thank you so interesting.

[00:39:38.24] – Hiron Ennes

I hope when they see the light of day, but we’ll see.

[00:39:45.02] – John Knych

If you know I’m back to brandon if you have a question.

[00:39:49.01] – Brandon

Yes, this might be a little bit of you not but when I was doing this. It wasn’t about to me that the structure right two different timeperiod that the first is that by design. There was I just not paying attention.

[00:40:07.02] – Hiron Ennes

Now it was by design, it was by design. I used to be a dancer and a lot more opaque.

[00:40:15.21] – Brandon

I just.

[00:40:19.10] – Hiron Ennes

Not know it’s it. It’s hidden.

[00:40:23.09] – Brandon

I love you. So I guess my my question about that is how I feel like they are kind of things and more. So as you go along. Did you write like an outline before the kind of pieces all these together and come as you are the things are revealed. Did you have to outline ? That are you just that’s just how you write it.

[00:40:54.09] – Hiron Ennes

It’s a bit of both like you and this is how I’ve been answering. Every question is like intergrated with each other, but I wrote and I started writing the book I delighted that outline, I wrote a different outline. I wrote a little bit more in the book, I changed that outline. So I feel like I’m learning about this about myself and real time is that everything that I write things to be of my goal was like to have people arrived at that conclusion at different point in the narrative, so I would sprinkle things here and there and make some of my early readers took a long like friends and family. They all read my stuff one of my readers who clearly we share your mind figure it out like with and like the first to chapter and I make like what ? And then like my sister didn’t figure it out and like way down so clearly there are like there are different Different time at which people arrived at that revelations and I kind of wanted to keep that because I think it’s it’s kind of cool to see like you figure it out when and whenever I got the text message.

[00:42:18.24] – Hiron Ennes

I’d be like what part of the book ? Are you And that be like I’m about you know this person of the way through and I’m like. OK ? That’s a good. That’s a good spot. I can I want to build like like a diagram of it like a history of the time. I wish people figure it out I think.

[00:42:34.18] – Brandon

I think I was about half way through it. That’s it. I feel like this will be a good book to read. So I’m sure, there’s a lot of him and there that would you could catch on a second, second Read.

[00:42:50.09] – Hiron Ennes

Here I wanted to write something that had readvalue because I encountered so few of those books like just in everyday life that I don’t know I find that meaning a book that you finish and you’re like how I am going to read. This is kind of and special thing for me. So I was hoping that.

[00:43:08.18] – Brandon

I think.

[00:43:10.12] – Hiron Ennes

Thank you.

[00:43:12.01] – Brandon

Thank you.

[00:43:13.17] – John Knych

Yes, may be here in the point. I wish people discover what’s going on is the litmus test for how they know you. Maybe you know. Yes.

[00:43:22.21] – Hiron Ennes

Yes, They are like how I know you’re all I know all the things I know what they are up to you.

[00:43:30.01] – John Knych

And I don’t share this with Brandon and everyone else, but I went dark and social media for like the last two days to make sure that I finished the book and what make me go there was I opened the good show and I saw Brandon just write the reveals and I immediately I push to the side. I was like that I was cause I could since I could since there was going on, but I think about sixty-five person take two third yeah, but not at me just jumping in alright. Thank you Brandon back to change if you have to have a question.

[00:44:02.15] – Orateur 8

I don’t have a question.

[00:44:03.11] – Jenn

But I just wanted to add to that that. I finished the book and I immediately thought I need to read this again just because I wanted to pick up those things that were sprinkle old through before I realized what was going on and I was just that was a really great feeling. So you think you think.

[00:44:24.17] – John Knych

And we’re quick before he moved to Brian head you encounter in this world for one watching this, but had you encountered this parallel type thing before is that your own construction.

[00:44:40.06] – Hiron Ennes

I have it might be a thing situation where where I’ve seen it before I wasn’t really. It doesn’t really jump out in my mind as something that I’ve seen like. I mean I’m sure, I have someone is doing it. There are a lot of different narratives or they are like to know that meet in the middle of two that meet at the end or something like that. But time is nothing.

[00:45:22.20] – John Knych

I’ve never think pretty and that’s good. But I never seen it done in the way that you did it. I’m just.

[00:45:30.15] – Hiron Ennes

A cool. I’m I’m sure it’s there. But it might just be one of those things you know.

[00:45:40.02] – John Knych

I don’t do you, Brian, if you have a question.

[00:45:45.14] – Brian

Yeah, That’s where I would say that that it felt even if it was something else like the combination of the different elements differently get it felt like something to me. I have a kind of I guess what kind of specific questions in the use of the manual. So we have the manual of this kind of us like it was like bedtime stories to extend and we have no memorizing the manual of all the different entry and how they have been new entry in a while, but then we get all of a sudden. I just a bunch of the story starts picking up. WE first get the one like you knew that they’re like using the produces all these weapons and all these things. But then the outcome of from that is that they have all of these other entry and some of them felt like they were actually potentially kind of Vermin, They were other things that seemed to fit in with what was already in the manual that we knew about, but then other words are like people infected by this people affected by this other product of this other people who worked for this specific company and the manual kind of turned into almost a form of like, I’m going to write a list of my political opponents and put them into this.

[00:47:07.12] – Brian

And now we’re going for him. I guess it’s kind of someone what you thought about you, but was this so more social commentary.

[00:47:17.00] – Hiron Ennes

Yes, it was. It was very deliberate and. Not to settle, but in a city where like extermination and funding of giants. Big things to be like in every day. One way of you know essentially the amazing and eradicate political thought that you don’t like this to just add the people who have those into the manual. So like I think at the end, they had like newspapers like something Certaines. Printing house to the manual and they just add anyone to the manual that they want to run away with so. No.

[00:48:09.05] – Orateur 9

No paroles in the world.

[00:48:11.12] – Brian

Or.

[00:48:12.05] – Hiron Ennes

Not at all.

[00:48:15.20] – John Knych

Thank you Brian before my last question. I’m. Back on the the the parallel structure. You did that we all have considered unique. I think it is presented so so well for for me. Brandon mentioned the group that you’re revealed are almost like nonchalant right ? It’s like you know like it’s like a very soul like. Yep. Yep. Here’s the Here’s what is going on. But the the way that it’s mixed with the society. That’s not only collapsed and his collapsing and it’s built on top of each other. And there are these fantastic elements, right ? These chemicals that change people it just it fits fait de make it felt very plausible for the world that that you built which I think that’s not always true with that type of parallel structures that you got almost feels like a cheesy. It can feel like a cheesy moment if the world doesn’t doesn’t work for it, but alright my my last question. We’ve had a question of authors before which is you just mentioned this talk your research here and I saw online that you.

[00:49:25.14] – John Knych

I don’t have this is true. This could just be a lie online, but that you have you to research with disease or medical stuff. Could you talk about your work outside of writing and if it inform your writing at all you so.

[00:49:39.17] – Hiron Ennes

I am I’m a doctor Now, I wrote like in the the period between underground and medical school. I took that research year, I did actually research on Covid vaccination and development of antibodies after vaccination and all levels of antibodies change over time and like between demographic. And during that research here was when I wrote the the big fantasy that never saw the light of day, and then vermin I wrote during the last year of medical school and my first year of residency, which I would not recommend. I woke up it for every morning to do it. I am now a pathologie residents, so I am. I have one more year of residency and then I’m going into forensic pathology fellowship and then I’ll be a real friends before just after that so two years, Then I’ll be a real doctor. Who will.

[00:51:01.23] – Orateur 2

Not ?

[00:51:07.05] – Hiron Ennes

Be enough. I feel like the stuff that is my writing from my work is more on the story of art lab science side rather than like the death investigation and crime side. But we see that changes in the future is like a sort of shift from you know a research in hospital work and two medical examiners work. So we’ll see where it goes very interesting.

[00:51:36.06] – John Knych

Thank you. And I go out one more person who we had on this group and was also a tort author of Djèli Clark. And you know.

[00:51:45.24] – Hiron Ennes

Everything.

[00:51:47.01] – John Knych

Yes, we actually discover the master of Giants As a group but I bring them up because he works at the historian as a he has a PhD in the history with us that like none of his colleagues are students know that he published scifi. So the question is who you do your other doctors or colleagues know that you have this other life or do you keep it secret ?

[00:52:15.03] – Hiron Ennes

I keep it on the day by day. So I used to be totally secret when I thought I was gonna go into clinical medicine and like my patient can read this. They can’t be like Oh my doctor came up with that there and saying. Hum, but now that I am more in the pathologie. The sort of assumption is that you are in saying if you’re in pathologie, so it’s more socially acceptable to do right weird stuff and pathologie, so a couple of me now and a couple of my Generally like it’s not really conversation piece. Cause it’s usually not to what whatever I’m talking about with them. But if there like what would you do on your holiday ? I say well, I was my book tour. So if they ask I’ll bring it up.

[00:53:13.13] – John Knych0

Thank you.

[00:53:14.05] – John Knych

That was my last question. So any final any final question.

[00:53:20.21] – Brandon

After the recording.

[00:53:23.13] – John Knych

Okay.

[00:53:26.05] – Brandon

Okay.

[00:53:27.20] – John Knych

Noemi. Jeanne. Brian. Any any final. Question. Alright. Well, thank you very much. I’m gonna end the recording in a couple sequence. It was a pleasure hearing you talk about your your process the book. Thank you so much.

[00:53:45.05] – Hiron Ennes

Thank you so much. It’s really fun.

 

[00:00:01.13] – John Knych

Hello, everyone. This is Ness Brown. Thank you for being here, Ness Brown. Ness is an astrophysicist and also a science fiction writer. And today, we’ll be talking about her debut, The Scourge Between Stars. So my first question for you, Ness. It’s a two-parter. Number one, can you share with us the origin of the book, the idea, how you came to the idea for the story? And then number two, can you share with us a little bit about the publication path? Because I read in the Acknowledgments that you wrote it in a month. And I’m curious to know whether you did that on a deadline with an editor that said, you need to write this fast, or you wrote it and then found a publisher.

[00:00:43.12] – Ness Brown

Thank you so much for the question. I first remember considering this idea all the way back, I believe, at the beginning of my undergrad experience. I was home for the summer, and my father is a huge sci-fi horror nerd. I come by it honestly. And we were rolling through our usual roster of pitch black, Doom, revisiting all of the highlights from my childhood. The worse it performed critically, the better. And I remember briefly flirting with the idea of some scenario, where you have your usual enclosed in a spaceship, something else is on board, the very familiar sci-fi horror scenario. I was curious about adding the element of the hint of cosmic horror, something greater than what we know, something far beyond ourselves, and then the uberhuman element of horror, where we also have just the run-of-the-mill evils, that still, sadly, plague society, and just a story where all of these horrors are competing with each other. And that leads handily into your second question. Excuse me. I did nothing with the idea at the time. I just put it to the side for many years. And then in June of 2020, I found out about an event that Tor Nightfire, the horror imprint, was holding, where they were looking for submissions from Black Indigenous Writers of Colour who did not have representation.

[00:02:40.07] – Ness Brown

So if you didn’t have an agent, you were free to send in any manuscript that you had, and then they would consider it, which is a pretty special opportunity. And the deadline was July of 2020. So I was absolutely staring down the barrel of a really crazy deadline, and I had no book. I just knew I really wanted to try to take advantage of this opportunity. So for four weeks, I essentially wrote for 16 hours a day, just to see if I could meet the deadline, see if I could turn something in. I submitted the story at 3:00 AM, the day that it was due. I just made it. And even though I suspect there are…I think there’s evidence of the fact that it was written in such a short amount of time, but I still dearly, dearly love the book, and I’m so grateful for everything that Scourge has opened, the further doors that it opened up to me. It was a true delight to write.

[00:03:44.24] – John Knych

Wonderful, thank you. Well, there’s definitely an urgency in the story that the reader feels, that when I read the that you read in a month, I was like, oh, yeah, you feel that pull. Thank you. So the format for this Ness is we do just a round table. We go around to each, every one. And if people don’t have questions, I have six questions here, so everyone’s welcome to pass. But we’ll go to Brandon, since you’ve been part of these talks, we’ll go to you for your next question.

[00:04:18.24] – Brandon

Thank you, Jack, for putting together these talks, as always. And thank you, Ness, for being here today. Yeah, I didn’t realize it only took you a month to write. So, you were saying that it seems like you wrote it quickly. I thought there was a lot of world building and backstory, like we don’t see beyond the story. There’s this failed colony, there’s these unknown attacks on the ship. I feel like there’s a lot more world building to it, but maybe there wasn’t. So I guess my question to you is, how much world building did you put into this story? And Is there a lot to it that we don’t see in the story? Or is it just you wrote this as quick as you can, and what we see is what all it is?

[00:05:11.13] – Ness Brown

Thank you very much for this question. This is something that I love to talk about, because I mentioned writing this in four weeks, and I would say that the first week was actually me doing all these calculations to make sure that I got the distances, the speeds, the timing right from here to all à Alpha Centauri. I created names for 300 ships because I was envisioning the original colony effort that went over to Alpha Centauri, was something like 6,000 ships strong, and I wanted to get their structure. I wanted to understand the full detail. I’m not an exoplanetary scientist, specifically, but I did a lot of looking at what have we found out about the surface of Alpha Centauri so far. I would say that there’s definitely a ton of things that I looked at originally. And there were some other elements that had been present in the original draft, such as a little more information about the attempted coup on the ship, and so on and so forth. But part of the publishing process is making sure that on the publishing end, the book fits nicely into not just existing genres, but also existing format, so novella versus novel.

[00:06:33.14] – Ness Brown

I think the original draft was straddling the line between the two, and the publisher was like, Why don’t you slim this down, and we’ll package it that way? I think about 10,000 words got cut in the end, and not everything that I thought about for this world was able to make it on the page.

[00:06:57.08] – Brandon

Thank you.

[00:06:58.24] – John Knych

Thank you, We’ll keep going around the horn. Josh, next question.

[00:07:05.18] – Josh

Hi. Thanks Ness, for joining. It’s really cool. I am equally partial to the failed colony efforts of the futures. So that grabbed me quite quickly in the book. You mentioned about with your dad watching a lot of the… Did you say? The worse it performed, the worse the box office, the better. The three things that came to mind when I was reading was the military-civilian conflict from Stargate Universe, the cosmic horror of Event Horizon, and then a little bit of the colony efforts of Pandora, which I don’t think many people have seen. What were you thinking? Which influences were you drawing on when you were writing this and planning this?

[00:08:08.19] – Ness Brown

First of all, those are great films. I think Pandora is one of my dad’s favorites. One that was really big for me is not a film, but the video game Dead Space.

[00:08:21.06] – Brandon

Oh.

[00:08:22.03] – Ness Brown

Yeah, specifically the original. I love what the remake did, but something about the original really hits I don’t necessarily flatter myself to think I succeeded, but I really was interested in just capturing the feeling of even just walking the corridors is goosebumps-worthy. When I was younger and first starting to play Dead Space, I couldn’t get through 15 minutes playing because my heart was beating really fast. And I guess I the idea of the scenario being so nerve-inducing that… Or I guess what I’m trying to say is, I really like the atmosphere, where nothing necessarily needs to be happening immediately, but you’re in that heightened state. So that was a big influence for me. If I could recapture that feeling in a book, that would be a big milestone as a writer for me. I can’t wait to try again. Were there others? I’m trying to think. Certainly, the generic template of Alien, it’s just so classic and so pervasive, and spaceship horror that you can’t help but elicid the comparison, which is intensely flattering. That’s a great question. I’m certain that there’s a lot floating around there for me. I think the atmosphere of dead space, I think I could feel it in parts with the banging on the wall, and particularly with that bulkhead being where everything comes from and hiding in the walls.

[00:10:18.16] – Josh

So, yeah, I think that worked.

[00:10:20.17] – Ness Brown

Thank you so much. I think on the action side of things, I was also thinking a lot about, in more games, but like Mass Effect. I really love not only Sci-Fi action, but Sci-Fi horror. So I wanted to have a bit of shoot them up in there as well.

[00:10:42.12] – Josh

Good choices.

[00:10:43.03] – Jenn

Hi. Thanks for being here. So you are an astrophysicist, which I think is very cool. How did that inform your writing? It feels very realistic.

[00:11:03.06] – Ness Brown

Did you try to fit in as much scientific accuracy as possible, or did you feel extra pressure if something wasn’t right? Or was it just fun to be able to explore this world with your background ? Definitely a mix of the two, I would say. Thankfully, I had a lot of support in the astro community, from my peers, from professors, from senior scientists, that I knew. And knowing that they would read it, that they meant to support me, was extremely nerve-wracking. But I didn’t necessarily hold myself too stringently, to the need, I guess, to be perfectly scientifically accurate or to represent everything that I know on the page, in part because I’m not always a hard sci-fi fan. Sometimes I really like it. Sometimes I want the former rocket scientist to walk me through the construction of the ship in the story. Sometimes I really want it to be more of what we were speaking of previously, the atmospheric sense. I would say that I don’t think anything that I wrote in the book is anything that a non-scientist, but just really good writer and researcher could write. I think anyone could, but I do think that my expertise helped me do it faster.

[00:12:38.07] – Ness Brown

I think I was able to create this story on the timeline that I did, just because I do have the background. So that was an enormous boom. There were definitely things I was nervous about, on the robotic side, talking technology. I don’t feel the most comfortable in that sense, especially because I’m not even necessarily a theoretical or computational astrophysicist. I’m an observational astrophysicist. So I was dipping my toes in other sub-fields, which ended up being really fun, and I hope to do more of. Cool. Thanks.

[00:13:15.19] – John Knych

Thank you, Jen. We had a… Jen has her child right next to her that just asked a question. Yeah, a baby question. Net, so all right, back to the top. So my question tries to combine all three of Jen, Josh, and Brandon’s comments. We talk a lot about world building with this science fiction reading group, just because sci-fi is just known for it. So you mentioned that in the four weeks of you writing this, the first week was pretty heavy world building. And Josh mentioned that what grabbed him for the book is failed colony effort. For me, it’s arch-ship. I love reading about archips. So what grabbed me for your book was not only the cover, I like novellas, but I just love thinking about how King Mandi could survive on an Ark ship. And I thought you did a great job with sticking with… Not doing too much with details. There’s a line I love, which is, despite ventilation’s best efforts, even though every surface was practically ooozing heat sink paste, it was oppressively hot. I never heard of heat sink paste. My question to you is, in that whirlwind first week of world building, how much did you do of Arc ship research ?

[00:14:43.01] – John Knych

Because I’ve tried it, and it’s like an abyss, right? So many things interact with each other, like the ventilation system, the heat, all that, radiation. You just have so many issues. So how much did you do? How much do we not read? And then, do you plan on doing more ARC type books in the future?

[00:15:05.11] – Ness Brown

Wonderful question. I would say that beyond a critical look at the logistics of this, such as… For example, when I was thinking of these ships, I started looking up the schematics of crew-ships, just trying to see what do we have presently, what mass transportation vehicles do we have presently, and what are the considerations there? Because I feel like… I don’t like cruises. So to me, it feels very similar to being enclosed in a space with very limited resources that you’re very aware of all the time. So I would say that I put more effort in on the logistics, trying to understand the numbers, trying to understand the organization. And then, when it came time to write the generational environment, I deliberately wanted to focus more on the psychological social aspects, since that was something that I was more familiar with. At the time, I was teaching an introductory astrobiologie course at University of New York System. One of the things I talked about with my students was the the inherent issues with generation ship travel, a lot of which, beyond just the logistics of food, air, waste, etc, are intensely psychological and social. There just is not a lot of evidence right now that human psychology and human social patterns can withstand our ship travel.

[00:16:52.05] – Ness Brown

And so I wanted to play into that because something that happens on the way to the colony is, everything works à grève. Our jump tech, our work tech, our Hyperspace tech is working fine. We get there in a minimum number of years. It’s within a human lifetime, I think. But then on the way back, is when everything starts to degrade, and we have to confront the reality of this choice, and it’s not looking good. Everything falls apart. I’m sorry if I didn’t answer all of the questions.

[00:17:29.21] – John Knych

I just realized I forgot the second aspect. No, you did. You touched on this in the book, how do you get future generations to care about the mission that their ancestors started? I thought your choice of, like, rebellion, yeah, it’s going to happen. People are going to say, I don’t… And then, tough decisions have to be made. But, yeah, the one part of the question, though… So, when you were more thinking about how will people get stir-crazy rather than how will this event interact with this processor or whatever, that the social issues concerned you more than the actual functioning ?

[00:18:19.13] – Ness Brown

Yeah, I would say so. And I think the times when I do include a little bit of info about actual ship function, like when we look into the techie space or when we go down to engineering and we’re taking a look at the core or things like that, my main concern with those sceNess was, one, communicating, at least what I know of in my life, of the sense of what those spaces really feel like. So, for example, one thing that many people don’t always know about astrophysics and astronomy, is that it’s a lot of typing stuff up, letting it go, and then waiting for hours, and hoping that it works, and that it provides results that are actually worth analysis. And, while you’re doing that, you can be loaded in un office, with a ton of other grads, or you can be shut in in a space that is really hot, because the Supercomputer Cluster is doing this, or even in engineering. I certainly have not been in a spaceship engineering space, but I have definitely been to mirror labs, which are these really, really vast laboratoires, où les différents scientifiques sont créant les murs pour ces grands télescopes, les Next Generation, les étoiles de base de télescopes que nous mettons.

[00:19:40.21] – Ness Brown

À U of University of Arizona, they have a mirror lab underneath their stadium, and I was able to go there. And it was really fascinating just to see that set up. So as maybe lazy or lacking in scientific integrity as it may be, I think my primary concern was the vibes, so to speak.

[00:20:06.21] – John Knych

Thank you. Yes, in a novella, you bog the reader down with a tangent on too much of the mechanics of it. Thank you. Moving on to Brandon.

[00:20:20.19] – Brandon

Yeah, this is a little bit out there. It doesn’t have anything to do with the book, but just since you’re an astrophysicist, and I’m guessing science fiction fan as well. Do you think, and realistically, that a human being will ever leave the solar system, knowing that space travel is as hard as it is ? We’re not really going anywhere with space right now. So do you think we’ll actually ever leave the solar system ? Yeah, it’s an out there question, but…

[00:20:56.24] – Ness Brown

No, I like it. My intuitive answer is no, for a couple of reasons. One, the power draw of interstellar travel is orders of magnitude higher than interplanetary travel. Interplanetary as it is already difficult for us as it is, prohibitively expensive. So we would have to make a genuinely insane leap in technological ability to get beyond the solar system. I’m assuming, in this question that we’re actually trying to get somewhere and we’re not just going to the heliopause and being like, Oh, we touched outside, let’s go back home. If we really had the destination, the technological advancement would have to be vast. The other issue is that, usually, when we conceive of interstellar travel, it’s purely about increasing our speed, to make it to the next star system before our bodies, before our technology fails. You have to do it quickly. But I don’t know… And I guess my caveat would be, I’m not a space scientist or a rocket scientist, but I don’t know if we have really good ideas for shielding when it comes to rocket design. So once you start going at certain percentages, the speed of light, any collision with anything, even if it’s a really, really tiny meteorite or space dust or whatever, to my understanding, that’s going to punch holes in your ship, which is one of the biggest problems of space travel, any breach at all.

[00:22:39.06] – Ness Brown

I think the technological and the design aspects are too tough, and then add on to some of the psychological social aspects that we talked about before. Maybe that’s too negative, but I guess with my 2025 understanding of where we’re at and where we can go, I think it’s for me.

[00:23:01.08] – Brandon

Thank you for that. I have the same feelings that you do. So thank you.

[00:23:10.01] – John Knych

Thank you, Brandon. Moving on to Josh, or you can pass it off.

[00:23:15.07] – Josh

Between two questions, I think I’ll go with… I might be getting the name wrong. Is it Watson is the Android ? It was Watson. Watson is interesting in that he, she, it… Almost comes across as gaining sentience. Is that part of the point where you were like, I’m a little bit uncomfortable with this, or Was there more research into that ? Because it seemed like he was limited to his own computing power. And given what we’re seeing with AI or LLMs and stuff at the moment, going back to that vast amount of power required, I wondered where that fell on the hard, soft, sci-fi scale.

[00:24:27.12] – Ness Brown

This is another great question. I definitely wanted Watson to continue the underlying conversation in the book about resources. The entire reason we’re heading to Alpha Centauri is because extremely inefficient stratified and corrupt use of resources here on Earth. The cosmic punishment for that is getting to Alpha Centauri and having the situation flipped, where now we’re in a world unlike Earth, which has abundant resources. This is a planet that is nearly ressourceless. Coming from the decadence and the abundance of Earth. We’re completely unsuited, we can’t survive. Watson, I think, to me, was an extension of this conversation on how do we utilize these resources and how does the corruption that we had in resource use on Earth continue to manifest. I didn’t consider Watson as fully sentient because I personally don’t understand what an actual artificial intelligence, a sentient artificial intelligence would look like. I’m only familiar with the most basic entry-level, like neural network, version of artificial intelligence, which I don’t think it necessarily counts. But I did want to showcase a machine whose capabilities are so robust that it does look like sentience, and have that be a really uncomfortable sticking point for the other characters in the novella.

[00:26:14.00] – Ness Brown

I had Watson’s owner, Otto, literally abusing those resources. And in Jack’s case, Watson representing a reconciliation with the idea of resources. So I think maybe similar to the ARC design, I didn’t want to stress necessarily over the technology aspect, because I think we have a lot of projections and predictions about where AI will take us, or what it could look like. And that’s super hairy, and I didn’t want to get caught in the mess. So I definitely wanted to keep it down so I could explore, maybe, more of the philosophical implications of Watson’s presence on board.

[00:27:08.09] – Josh

That makes sense. That’s interesting. I hadn’t thought of it in that term of resources. Yeah, interesting. Thank you.

[00:27:20.06] – John Knych

Thank you, Josh. Moving on to Jen, if you have a question.

[00:27:25.02] – Ness Brown

No, I’m just going to pass it along.

[00:27:30.06] – John Knych

Thank you, because I just had one that popped in my head. This is question/comment in that… And that’s another reason why I’m grateful that you’re here, and that I reached out, is we’ve had a lot of old-school sci-fi authors already on this chat, and I wanted us to talk with someone who’s like, It’s your début, right ? And we could talk about this in the last 10 minutes, but I’m sure you’re working on and dreaming of other projects. But what you just said there, and Jos’ question about knowing your limitation of knowledge with AI and with our chips, and trying to respect that, it’s very different. We talked with Peter Watts and Alastair Reynolds, and both of them came from a time, like the beginning of the Internet, where they could read all the sci-fi books that were available and really get a taste of all the different science. Now, C’est impossible. As a sci-fi auteur, you have to really… Because we progress so much in the last 20 years, if you try to step too far, your ignorance vous apportera. Donc, comment vous… Il me semble que vous avez a conscious effort of being like, I don’t know a lot about that.

[00:28:48.11] – John Knych

I know a little bit. I’m going to not go too far down the sentient conscience. That was just a me ranting comment. But my question to you, this is going down different path, creative process. In the beginning, I wrote down, Father, sister, mother, not present for the protagonist. We don’t see the father until near the end. Did you know, right in the beginning, that you wanted Jack, to just be alone, in a sense? Or did you work on the story and realize, yeah, he has nobody? That decision to not have her family members, how did that play out in your creation of the story?

[00:29:35.20] – Ness Brown

For me, that was deliberate for two reasons. The first was that I definitely wanted the to feel haunted in the sense of there are many ghosts here. And that’s because, just inherently, the idea of trying to establish an exo-colony, it means leaving countless people behind. I definitely wanted the Calypso and the entire Exo Colony fleet to feel haunted by everyone left behind. In my opinion, people who are in Jack’s position, where you understand exactly where the mission is, and it’s not looking hot, I wanted those people to be plagued by this knowledge that they were chosen They were among the privileged few who got to go on this journey. Obviously, they weren’t the oNess literally flying off Earth, but they’re the chosen privileged few on this journey, and they’ve mucked it up, patently, profoundly. Jack, experiencing all of her closest relationships in memory, to me, I really wanted that to evoke this sense of That’s just where everyone is now. Everyone’s a memory. And what you do now has to be for them or in spite of them. And I wanted Jack’s journey from feeling incredibly insecure and feeling incredibly haunted, to feeling like her own person, and like she’s brushed off the ghosts a little bit.

[00:31:22.07] – Ness Brown

That’s the feeling that I wanted to evoke.

[00:31:27.08] – John Knych

Thank you. Thank you. Now, that’s what I’d say. I was wondering how your motivations for just… To me, I just thought like, yeah, it’s a ghost town. It’s a ghost town, emotionally and surrounding. Thank you. On to Brandon. Back to Brandon, if you have a question.

[00:31:45.18] – Brandon

Yeah, sure. You said you wrote this in four weeks and then you submitted it. Can you tell us about your experience from the time you submitted it to when it got published? What was the experience like of actually getting the book published? Did you have to do edits? Was there drafts? How did the cover artwork get done? What was your whole experience of all of that process?

[00:32:14.18] – Ness Brown

Yeah, I love talking about this because it was so magical. I definitely feel incredibly lucky to have been chosen for an opportunity like this. I don’t know how many people also submitted their manuscripts, but it felt amazing to be selected and experience everything that’s happened since. So the deadline for the submission de la lettre de la lettre de mai 2020, je l’ai entendu en septembre 2020. I heard back, December 20. So it’s not a… Well, maybe for some people, that was a very quick timeline. But for me, who had never done anything in publishing before, it was quite a wait, and I was very nervous. But they reached out to me, December of the same year, and then I spent the next something week, some number of weeks, looking for representation. And that was much easier for me than I know it is for other début authors, because when you don’t have representation, you have to shop your book around. For some people, that process will take years. But fortunately, because I already had the book deal in hand, I definitely had more people interested in representing me, and it wasn’t as much of an uphill slog as I’ve heard that it can be.

[00:33:35.23] – Ness Brown

So I was extremely privileged in that sense. The next two years were a combination, first of editing. So what happens is I accepted, had my representation, I signed all these contracts, and then I ended up working with an editor. My editor is Kristen Temple at TOR, Kristen is an amazing human being, definitely go read, essentially, any other person represented by Kristen. She finds incredible talent, and they do amazing things together. For me, I was told that my original manuscript was quite clean, especially for being written in a short period of time, so I didn’t have back and forth edits. It was one big chop, essentially, and then I was mostly good to go from there. Once the draft is ready, that’s when we start bringing in the other specialists, like typesetters. We bring in people. Speaking of the cover, that was one of the most magical parts of the process, because I was asked, do I have anything in mind ? I sent over some pictures, and then I found out that they had gotten Chris McGrath to do the cover, which was insane because I’ve since moved, but I used to have my office where all my books were behind me.

[00:34:57.03] – Ness Brown

And you could see five or six books just right behind in my head that he had done covers for that were in my library. Chris is just a phenomenal artist, incredible at what he does. And that was a highlight for me, for sure. I was definitely fanning out a bit. And then, yeah, leading up to the actual publication, I had someone at TOR, essentially… The word’s coming out of my head. Marketing ?

[00:35:30.00] – John Knych

Publicis, maybe.

[00:35:30.22] – Ness Brown

Publicis. Oh, goodNess. Thank you. I’m a writer, I swear. Yeah, so the Publicis took over and was able to set up exactly events like these, where I had the immense honor and pleasure of talking to other book clubs, talking to podcasters, talking to magaziNess. It was awesome. It was really, really great. And then publication was incredible. They essentially asked me, Are there local bookstores that I like ? I told them the bookstores that I patronize, and one of them, Historia Books in Queens. Since I was living in NYC at the time, they hosted my début. So it was incredible. And now that I actually have other projects that are on the timeline to being published, I’m really excited to do the circuit again.

[00:36:25.17] – John Knych

Thank you so much. C’est awesome.

[00:36:26.24] – Brandon

Yeah. Thank you.

[00:36:28.12] – John Knych

The publishing industry is opaque, hearing you describe that whole process, I’ve never heard that before. So thank you. That was great. Josh, I have a couple questions, but we got to respect the roundtable. On to you.

[00:36:44.22] – Josh

I just have a quick follow up then to that last point about the… Particularly with the marketing. My understanding from other people in the industry been basically that once they got the book out the door, that was it, you’re on your own. So it sounds like they actually gave you quite a lot of support in terms of marketing and publicity. I don’t know that you’d necessarily have anything to compare it with, but is that, in your experience, standard ? Or was it because of this competition or open submission period, that you’d that they were doing that ? Was it related to that, that they were pushing it, or was it just standard, I guess ? If you were able to answer that, I don’t know.

[00:37:42.14] – Ness Brown

I think the things that immediately pop into my mind are that, one, I was getting published, ultimately, under the umbrella of Tor, which is such a huge publisher. They have incredible resources. I think they could afford to do that. I think that people that are getting published at maybe smaller houses, it might look very different, which was something I was aware of at the time, because my thought process, not to be self-déplicating or anything, but my thought process was… This is a lot of attention. I don’t think the book… Yes, I’m really proud of what I did, and I love Scourge, and I’m so grateful for everything it did for me, but I don’t think it’s… It’s not revolutionary. I think it was part and parcel of just being with a bigger publishing house. Then, two, to my understanding, the Imprint Nightfire was relatively new at the time that I was joining them. I think that they were interested in just getting the word out, letting people know that this horror imprint was really taking off. And at the time, if I remember, there was one other space horror book. So I think, jointly, we were two of the books that were coming out, that they were using to represent, here’s our space here’s our folk horror.

[00:39:01.12] – Ness Brown

We ended up being représentatives of that push. I can’t say, maybe, for certain. I don’t have a strong answer to your question, but I think those were factors.

[00:39:13.06] – Josh

That makes a little sense. Yeah, that’s cool.

[00:39:17.15] – John Knych

Thank you, Josh. Ken, you want to pass it off ? Got a question ?

[00:39:26.22] – Ness Brown

It’s all you.

[00:39:27.23] – John Knych

Thanks, Jen. To continue down this path of pretty interesting publishing path for this book, Ness, I know there are a couple readers who aren’t here today that are striving to publish in sci-fi, so I’ll tell them about this talk and that they should listen to this part. But you mentioned that, and this is true, to get an agent using an uphill battle. But for you, it was downhill. And my question is, to me, it seems like it should even be easier than a downhill, because you’re reaching out to agents and being like, I already have a publisher. That’s so rare. It’s basically saying, I want to give you money if you represent me. So my question is, wouldn’t the chips be on… Usually, you’re reaching out to an agent, Hey, I have this idea, but you have a publisher. Were you able to pick and choose your agent ? Or did they try and reach out to you and say, No, look, I’ll do this for you, I’ll do this for you ? What was the agent conversations like ?

[00:40:39.12] – Ness Brown

Yeah, it wasn’t quite a pick and choose situation, largely because agents are also limited resources. I did come across people who, I think, were interested in my project and very, very interested in the fact that it had sold itself. But they already had a lot of clients. Their client list was full, or they were currently representing a sci-fi horreur, and they were like, I am not in a position to double-dip at this time. And that happened to me with an agent that I really wanted to work with because, again, I had so many of her clients’ work on my book shelf, but she was really swamped, obviously. She was a very prolific agent, but she ended up me off to a junior agent at the same agency. And ultimately, it came down between this junior agent at this agency, whose clientèle list included a ton of the people I read, versus a really well-established agent at a super famous agency, lots of big names, like R. A. Salvatore and everything. And I actually ended up going with the junior agent à l’agence plus parce que je sentais que j’avais tellement de choses à l’agence, le travail de ma vie en personne.

[00:42:05.01] – Ness Brown

C’était la chose que j’aime. On a eu une bonne conversation, l’agent et moi. Et j’ai fini par rester à l’agence depuis plusieurs ans. Donc, It was the stuff I really liked. We had a good conversation, the agent and I, and I ended up staying at that agency for several years. So ultimately, it was the right choice for me. But yeah, I would say that it was a little shocking that even after having all the… Everything in my pocket, it still was a little bit of a ordeal.

[00:42:31.04] – John Knych

Thank you. Brandon, back to you.

[00:42:35.15] – Brandon

So I’m a pretty big fan of sci-fi horror, but I feel like as far as books go, there aren’t… It’s been getting better recently, but there’s not a whole lot of sci-fi horror out there. And you mentioned you have a lot of movies you like. Are there any books out there, sci-fi horreur books, that you enjoy and can recommend ?

[00:43:02.09] – Ness Brown

Excuse me. I always give a shout-out to my former agency mate, SA BarNess.

[00:43:11.07] – Brandon

I’ve read hers. Yeah, she’s good.

[00:43:13.22] – Ness Brown

Definitely a good time. I’m sorry, not agency mate, publishing me. Darcy Coates, very famous. I like Sue Burke, the Sémiosis trilogy. I love. Caitlin Starling, I like. Did you read The Luminous Dead ? I like that one because it combiNess space horror with cave horror. Cave horror is so much worse to me. So scary. So that was definitely a really nice space psychological horror. I’m trying to envision what’s on my book shelf right now because it’s not behind me anymore. Definitely those names. I’m also thinking of Casey JoNess, Another publishing mate of mine, I think his debut was Black Tide, which I think is about… It’s Earth-based, but it’s an alien invasion, if I am remembering that correctly. Those are the things that come up right now. I would have to do a little book search.

[00:44:18.17] – Brandon

Thank you. Yeah, I was glad to see that your book came out, and I really enjoyed it. So it was a solid addition to the sci-fi horror genre..

[00:44:32.01] – John Knych

Thank you, Rant. Thank you. And shout out to Sue Burke. She was one of the first speakers we’ve had for this group. She was super kind and interesting. And she told us all about how she came, the origin of the Plant of Simeosis. She saw her plant in her apartment, like attacking another plant, and that was the seed, no pun intended, of the idea.

[00:44:56.20] – Ness Brown

Amazing.

[00:44:57.22] – John Knych

Yeah, she’s a great book. Josh, on to you.

[00:45:03.05] – Josh

I’ll pass. I don’t have anything else on my question list, so go ahead.

[00:45:08.24] – John Knych

All right. I assume, Jen, you’re passing again, unless you… All right, good. You mentioned earlier in this talk, and we’ll wrap it up in the next 5, 5, 10 minutes, you mentioned that your dad is a big sci-fi fan, and that he… I guess I’ll pass that on to you. My two questions: one, did he read your book, and what did he think about it ? And two, did he comment on the fact that your protagonist has this pretty conflicted… Well, so spoiler alert, if anybody is watching, I mean, it’s… Yeah, it’s a rough father-daughter relationship. So can you comment on your dad’s opinion of this, if you read it, and your decision in the book to have what happened ?

[00:45:58.08] – Ness Brown

Yeah, I am I’m really lucky that both of my parents were so supportive. They were with me with every step. As soon as I messaged my dad, we got on FaceTime. He gathered all my siblings and my stepmom, we got on FaceTime, and we talked about the entire process. And then, even my mom, she started handing out the manuscripts just to anyone that came through her office. But you’re right, I was a little nervous to have my dad read it because I didn’t want him assume anything. But I don’t even think he waited for the official draft. I think he was like, Can you just send it to me ? So I sent him my word doc, and he printed it out. He sent me pictures of himself reading through it. And the one time he referenced the Jack and Noah dynamic, he was like, Does this mean anything ? I was like, No, of course not. And then we just proceeded to talk about the story, and he gave me his thoughts, which were invaluable. It was really, really lovely to talk through it with him.

[00:47:05.23] – John Knych

And does he read sci-fi horror as much as you, or is he all sci-fi ? What’s his reading taste, I guess ?

[00:47:21.00] – Ness Brown

I read way more than him, just period. He’s more of a movies guy, 100 pour cent, but he loves all horror. It happens to be that space horror is his favorite. So he was delighted and astonished when I was able to come to him with the news. But I have found that really helpful because I, especially once I went to grad school, was not in a position to really be keeping up with all of the sci-fi horror, or even juste horror en général, that I used to when I was much younger. And my dad periodically texting me, being like, You should watch this. You should check this out. That has really helped me keep pace with the genre, which has been invaluable for storywriting.

[00:48:10.09] – John Knych

Excellent. Thank you. Why am I final wrap question. Anyone else ? Brandon, Josh, Jen, anything else you want to ask Ness ?

[00:48:23.11] – Brandon

Yeah, I mean, I guess I would ask what you’re working on next. I saw you have a fantasy novel coming out ?

[00:48:33.07] – Ness Brown

I do.

[00:48:33.22] – Brandon

Are you making a shift to fantasy or are you going to go back to sci-fi ? What are your future plans ?

[00:48:42.09] – Ness Brown

Yeah, thank you. So in the first place, I am also, simultaneously, one of the great delights of my life at this time, I have been able to write a few pieces for Warhammer 40,000. So very grim dark sci-fi. It’s been so awesome, because this is a franchise that, just being mindful of time, when I got published, I turned to my husband and I said, If I could write for these three franchises, Life Complete. And then a couple of months later, Warhammer reached out and they were like, Are you interested ? I was like, Yes. So certainly not done with sci-fi, or sci-fi horror, or sci-fi, anything grim-dark in that realm. And I have two sci-fi horreur projects on my laptop right now, so I’m definitely coming back. But certainly, I think in all of my projects, space will play some element, because even in the fantasy that’s coming out, hopefully next year, that is actually about an astrologer, which I know that sounds funny for an astrophysicist to be writing about, but an astrologer who works his very corrupt master, essentially, tries to sabotage his master, and ends up unleashing something onto their plane that has been chained away for a long time, and he has to figure out how to clean up his mess.

[00:50:14.10] – Ness Brown

So whatever I write, there will probably always be some element of stars in space there.

[00:50:20.18] – Brandon

Awesome.

[00:50:22.14] – John Knych

Thank you, Brandon. Is there a title yet for that book, or a date, or no ? Is it still too far in the distance for title or date ?

[00:50:32.07] – Ness Brown

The title is The Astrologer’s Demon. It was slated to come out fall 26, but those dates often get moved around. But probably in that area.

[00:50:49.03] – John Knych

Thank you. Brandon asked the what are you working on now question. But my last question to you, Ness, and this has already been touched upon in this talk a little bit, your work as an astrophysicist, is it… Do you get… Because obviously, if you’re in the sci-fi world, And it’s just so cool to have someone who’s a saffer writer and an astrophysicist. Do you get ideas from your work, or do you, in your mind, have a partition, where it’s like, here’s the scientific grind, here’s the imaginary, creativity ? Do you get ideas from your work, or do you really divide the two ?

[00:51:44.04] – Ness Brown

I get ideas all the time. And in fact, I was at my program, because I am getting my doctorate currently. I was at my program’s Friday Lunch seminar a couple of weeks ago, and I saw something in a presentation, and I ran up to the presenter afterwards, and I was like, Can you tell me Can you show me what papers there are about that ? And that was a really productive convo. And I immediately started adding it to one of the story ideas that I have buried pretty deep. So, yeah, I would say the overlap of art and science, and this is something I’m deeply passionate about putting forth in my outreach efforts and in my inclusion efforts, even at my school and through my grad work, the overlap between art and science is way more prominent than people think. And I I think that if we were able to spread that idea broadly, I think a lot of people would find that they have a lot of the scientists and the artists in themselves as well.

[00:52:42.17] – John Knych

That’s a great positive note to end on. You mentioned authors. So we often ask, who should we talk to next ? The authors you listed, like S. A. BarNess, Darcy. What was Darcy’s last name ? Hoots.

[00:53:00.21] – Ness Brown

Hoots.

[00:53:01.12] – John Knych

Would you recommend them as authors that should be getting more attention and be read more ? Who would you… Who would you recommend them as authors that.

[00:53:16.22] – Ness Brown

Definitely those two. Definitely, Caitlin Starling. I think, I mean, obviously, Delilah Dawson is not unknown by any means, but Delilah Dawson is awesome. If you like other types of horreur, Scott Leeds, also at Night Fire, is awesome. Really, really great people that I think you would have super stimulating convos with.

[00:53:41.01] – John Knych

Excellent. Well, thank you very much, Ness. It’s been a pleasure. Great, great meeting you. I’ll send you an email when the video has been uploaded, and I’ll share it with our group.

[00:53:53.06] – Ness Brown

Yeah, thank you so much for inviting me. Thank you so much for the time.

[00:53:57.06] – John Knych

And best of luck in your future projects, Je vous remercie. Je vous remercie. C’était un plaisir. Je vous remercie. C’était un plaisir. Je vous remercie. Je vous remercie. Merci beaucoup. Merci beaucoup. C’était un plaisir. Bon rendez-vous. Je vous envoie votre email quand le vidéo a été publiée et je le partagerai avec notre groupe. Merci beaucoup. Merci beaucoup d’inviter. Merci beaucoup pour votre temps. Bon courage et bon courage à vos projets, le horror, la fantaisie et l’astrophysique.

[00:54:03.18] – Ness Brown

Bye.

[00:54:04.23] – John Knych

Bye. Have a good afternoon.

[00:54:06.09] – Ness Brown

Bye. Thank you.

(Transcript below)

[00:00:00.00] – John Knych

Peter Watts, Canadian Sci-Fi writer, who has also worked as a marine-mammal biologist. His first novel was Starfish in 1999, which was part of the Rifters Trilogy. And then Blindsight, which we’ll be talking about today, was published in 2006. So first, Peter, can you share with us the origin of the story, which has influenced so many Sci-Fi authors? It’s considered pioneering in how we think about aliens. Can you talk with us about the origin of this book?

[00:00:29.10] – Peter Watts

Well, I was doing a post-doc in Guelf, about an hour north of here. I was reading a book of Natural History essays, edited by Richard Dawkins, who I’m sure you guys all know about. I don’t even remember what the name of the volume was. It was kind of like a Robin’s egg blue, and it had a drawing of a wasp on it. I don’t remember any of the actual essays, but in the afterward, Dawkins was itemizing a list of the various mysteries, the great outstanding mysteries of biology. And one of the first things he mentioned was consciousness. He said: There’s absolutely no reason why you can’t imagine a meat robot that does all the things that we do, but is not aware of what it’s doing, because it’s all just computation. And so what is this? How does it work? What is it there for? I mean, I guess I’m pretty sure the philosophical zombie concept predated me reading Richard Dawkins, but it was indeed my introduction to it. And my reaction was: shit, that’s right. I’ve spent my whole life just taking this for granted.

[00:01:53.19] – Peter Watts

I’m supposed to be a scientist. Why haven’t I wondered about this myself? But I was like 30 years and five days old or something at that point. I had maybe two stories published in thick ass little journals that nobody had ever heard of. So I knew it was way out of my league to even address a question like that. But that’s when I first started thinking about it. And it bubbled away in the back of my mind while I wrote other, less consequential, scientific and science fiction works until, oh jeez, yeah, about 15 years later.

[00:02:32.17] – John Knych

Thank you. And also, Peter, the format for this discussion, we’ll just go around the table, and I’ve told people, if they don’t have a question, they can pass, and we’ll do a roundtable. So we’ll start with Brandon, Noémie, Jenn, Sean, Joe, then we’ll just keep going around. So Brandon, do you have a question for Peter?

[00:02:51.24] – Brandon

Yeah. Yeah, thanks for being here, Peter. Really appreciate that. So I did, I just finished reading Echopraxia.

[00:03:01.09] – Peter Watts

Okay.

[00:03:02.06] – Brandon

At the end of this, you have all these notes and references and everything. So I guess my question is, what is your writing process when you add the science to it? Do you do a bunch of research first and then write the book, or do you write the book, add in your scientific articles as you go, or how does that… What’s your process with adding the hard science part of it?

[00:03:27.06] – Peter Watts

Well, back then, I mean, pretty much from the days of Starfish. Starfish was based to some extent on information that already… I was working on my PhD in marine biology. So there was a lot of stuff I just picked up in the course of getting my degree that inspired Starfish. Subsequent to that, I had a subscription to Science [Magazine]. When the Internet became a thing, dating myself there, but I remember the Internet waking up, I just set up an RSS feed to various science outlets, and without necessarily any goal in mind, I just tried to keep abreast of cool stuff that was happening in science. It has since become impossible to do that. But at the time, I could hang on by my finger nails. And every time I read something in science that was cool, I I would put a little sticky note on it or bookmark it if I saw it online, and I would make a note. So I just, over time, regardless of my project, I was accumulating links and articles that, Hey, this is a really cool thing to stick in a story somewhere, or, This would make a really cool theme or a point of a story.

And, of course, 90% of it turns into just world-building ambiance.

[00:04:55.19] – Peter Watts

It’s like, Well, this is something I’m not going to write a story about, but I’m certainly going to mention it in a bit of throw-away dialogue, so that people think that I’m a great world building connoisseur. So that’s the way it started. When I actually developed a theme, that this is what I want to write, there’s basically two ways that goes down. The first is that I read something, as was in the case of that Dawkins thing, that lights a fire under my ass and makes me think, wow, that’s really cool. I should write something on that. Or, and this has become, sadly, increasingly common, I think, I want to write a story about this. Now, I’m going to try and find some science to justify it. And I start looking around and see… And I mean, don’t take this the wrong way. Science is kind of like the Bible, in that there are so many publications and so many variations out there, that you can pretty much find anything to justify, certainly in terms of a science-fiction story that doesn’t have to pass peer review. You can find stuff to back up what you’re going for.

[00:06:11.13] – Peter Watts

And I mean, There’s, I think, close to 100 different theories of how consciousness works. Oh, my God. Excuse me.

Bobo. [Moves towards cat off screen]

[00:06:22.24] – Peter Watts

Bobo is doing his thing with the cicada here. Could you let this guy go?

[00:06:29.07] – Peter Watts

There you go. Sorry.

[00:06:31.24] – Peter Watts

We were promised a swarm of biblical proportions, right? Like, they were supposed to be like the 11 and the 17 years were supposed to all come out at the same time, and we were supposed to be devoured alive by cicadas. And what we’ve got instead is this weird, splotchy cat who is terrified of cicadas, but will not let that fear hold him back. So he will attack every cicada he finds, even though he’s bleeding with fear every time he does it. And we have to rescue these cicadas, which are really benign and innocuous little guys. I mean, they’re huge. They’ve got…their fronts basically look like the grill on a Buick. Anyway, sorry, where was I?

[00:07:23.01] – John Knych

Science.

[00:07:24.00] – Peter Watts

Science, yeah. If you want to write a consciousness-based novel, you can go with the idea that consciousness is a fundamental property of all matter, like the charge of an electron. You could go with the idea that consciousness is an arena to mediate conflicting commands to the to the skeletal muscles. You can go with the idea that The United States, as a geopolitical entity, is literally conscious. And you will find… You can even go with the model that not all matter is conscious, but that all matter is consciousness, that consciousness is all there is, and that what we perceive as matter is basically the universe’s mother of all multiple personality disorder cases, that bounded metabolisms and so on are, in fact, manifestations of a consciousness that’s walling itself off from itself. You can come up with all these ideas, and you will find peer-reviewed papers that back you up. And that’s okay, because the point of the exercise is not to say this is the truth. The point of the exercise is to say, suppose this was the truth. Where do you go with that? What are the consequences of that? So you can start from any starting point.

[00:08:59.18] – Peter Watts

And in that sense, the 140 references that I stick, the peer-reviewed references I stick at the back of my books, is more like something to cover my ass against nitpickers, than it is… than it is proof against…than it is actual evidence of great insight, because you can find pretty much anything you want, you can work your story around it, and you can find something in a decent peer-reviewed journal that will back you up, and the ironic thing here is that I’m covering my ass against nitpickers because my formal background is in science. So I’m used to going to seminars where the grad students sitting in the back row are always trying to ask questions of the guy who’s giving the Wednesday afternoon seminar, not because they’re curious, but because they want to make that guy look like an idiot. And hopefully this will bring them to the attention of other supervisors and deans who will give them lots of scholarship money.

[00:10:02.09] – Peter Watts

And of course, the ironic thing is that people like that wouldn’t be caught dead reading science fiction anyway, because it’s like one step up from child porn. But yes that is a very long way…that’s almost as long as one of my bibliographies…that is the explanation for why I have a bibliography.

[00:10:22.17] – Brandon

Thank you. I think that’s interesting what you say about conscience. I think we talked with Joan Slonczewski.

[00:10:32.02] – Peter Watts

Oh, yeah.

[00:10:32.22] – Brandon

And she said… You have a cat!

[00:10:35.11] – Peter Watts

You have a cat, too! Lean to one side!

[00:10:38.05] – Brandon

It’s a dog.

[00:10:39.11] – Peter Watts

Oh, never mind. Okay.

[00:10:42.17] – Brandon

Joan Slonczewski was saying that perhaps stones have consciousness.

[00:10:48.01] – Peter Watts

It’s not a… I mean, you’d be kinda amazed at how not batshit that is, both in terms of some of the other theories out there, but also in terms of… There really is nothing in physics that has any room for consciousness. Thank you, Buck. Thank you so much, ahh. There’s like, and I would argue, and I’ve read a few…there’s a bunch of theories of consciousness out there that I haven’t gotten around to yet, they’re playing a shell game on us, they describe computation, they describe that, you know you’ve got, the global work space model, essentially, you’ve got this stage, and you’ve got a bunch of different voices in the brain, some processes, that are all yelling, the one that yells the loudest gets to be on the stage and be conscious. And I mean, computationally, that makes sense. Intelligence is easy to understand in terms of natural selection. You can understand how flexible problem solving and so on is a good thing and how natural selection would promote it. But there’s never a mechanism. Ok, so you’ve got all these different sub-processes competing for attention, and one of them gets to be center stage. You’re still just talking about electricity trickling through meat. So where does that meat wake up? How does electricity… you know hooking, one of my favorite analogies, you basically take a pair of jumper cables and hook it up to a steak, and the steak starts asking questions about consciousness. Physics does not handle that. Physics can handle all the neurocorrelates, but we do not have any physical explanation, as far as I know.

[00:12:39.23] – Peter Watts

And I’m reading an essay right now, or not an essay, a thesis, from a guy called Michael Bennet. I’m going to be going out for drinks with him in a couple of weeks because he’s passing through town. He’s a real up-and-comer in the whole consciousness idea. His background is in A.I., computer science, but he’s basically talking about building conscious machines. And he claims to have solved the hard problem of consciousness. And so far I don’t see how he’s done it. It’s basically, you know another variation of the…you know

If you could model, for a social species, you have to model what the other person is thinking, what the other mind thinking. And then you have to model back, recursively, what your reaction to their reaction is going to be.

[00:13:18.11] – Peter Watts

And having done some simulation coding in my time, it’s trivial to get any computer program that does that. I mean, for fuck’s sake, a thermostat, you can say, is something that’s interacting with its environment and responding to feedback. So all of these theories basically have this step, and then a miracle occurs in the middle of it. And then, coming out the other end, it’s conscious, but there’s still no reason for it to be… There’s no explanation for how that happens.

And so, one of the… It’s reasonable to suggest: Okay, we can’t really explain it…

[00:14:04.17] – Peter Watts

So maybe it’s just a fundamental property of all matter. And there’s a few… It’s called physical panpsychism. And there’s a few theories out there that kinda riff off of that. And when I first heard it, I thought, What a cop-out. It’s just a… You’re basically brushing it under the… You might as well say, magical elves are doing it. But at the same time, when somebody talks to me about the flavor of a quark as a fundamental property, I don’t say: that’s bullshit. I mean, we accept all sorts of things counterintuitively as fundamental properties of reality. So Slonczewski is not entirely… She’s not out in left field when she suggests that rocks might be conscious in a rudimentary sense. If consciousness is, in fact, a fundamental property of matter, and we have a greater level of consciousness than a rock because our matter happens to be arranged in a more complex and emergent way. I’m not going to call bullshit on that because I don’t have a better solution. I hope that’s not the case because I don’t like the idea that every time I kick a rock, I’m causing it pain or whatever. But really, who knows ?

[00:15:25.10] – Peter Watts

I mean, that’s what makes it such a cool thing to write about. Nobody can really say you’re wrong.

[00:15:32.14] – BrandoN

That’s very interesting. Thank you.

[00:15:34.15] – John Knych

Fascinating. Thank you, Peter. All right, moving on to Noémie.

[00:15:40.18] – Noémie

Yes. In both Blindsight and Echopraxia, so you have a range of different characters. Very different mindsets and origins. I just wanted to know, is the story influencing the characters? Or do you, when you start writing, have always like, this character is going to be in this book? What is your process of writing the characters and how they integrate into the story?

[00:16:03.07] – Peter Watts

Ok, well, there’s a couple of ways of doing that. First, you are very kind to not point out that character development is not one of my strongest suits. So thank you for that.

[00:16:16.08] – Noémie

It is. It absolutely is. It is what is so interesting in the story.

[00:16:20.08] – Peter Watts

But my character, I tend to come at these things in a puzzle-solving sense. I want to write a book about the dynamics of a civilization based on its outcast. I want to write a book about the possibility that consciousness is maladaptive. I want to write a book about the logistics of building the star gates, that we always conveniently go out and just discover that the ancients built them for us, so we don’t have to discover how to do it ourselves. And so, left to my own devices, I build characters essentially like chess pieces. They have to illustrate various aspects of the problem that I’m solving. And this was especially the case in Blindsight, because every character in Blindsight actually illustrates, embodies a different type of consciousness. But how I actually do it is: I’m writing a story about a linguist, or I’m writing a linguist as a character, and I realize I don’t know the first thing about linguistics. So I find a friend who happens to have a post-graduate degree in linguistics, and I sit her down and I buy her beers, and I get her drunk, and I poke to her about…

[00:17:50.14] – Peter Watts

It’s okay, so if you were confronted with an alien, what would you do? What would be your… Or how would you analyze the transmissions and so on? And I write everything down. Then, in exchange, I put her into the book as the linguist. I give her the same name, and I kill her horribly. In a lot of cases, What happens is… I mean, people tend to say that… People tend to knock me because I don’t have a great ethnic diversity of characters, although I try to get around that by giving people different surnames, and so on. But a lot of it is because many of my characters are actually friends of mine, whom I kill horribly in my books, because that’s just what happens to any character in any of my books. I tried to write a story once, where there was a happy ending, and the parents had their arms around each other, and they were looking at their sleeping child, and I just about vomited.

I was like, I developed diabetes from all the sugary-sweetness.

[00:18:56.18] – Peter Watts

I just can’t do that. It didn’t strike me. So, yeah, they all die. But if there is personality there, as opposed to a simple chess piece moving in a strategic way to illustrate a thematic point, it’s not because I’m any good at developing characters, it’s because I have interesting friends, and I just shamelessly steal personality traits from people that I know. And so if you do like my characters, you’d get along great with my buddies. Isaac Spindell, from Blindsight, he’s an actual dude. I haven’t actually heard from him in years. But yeah, we called him Buckeroo Bonsai because he was a practicing neurosurgeon. He was a martial arts expert, and he was a writer. He was a cool guy. I wish I knew what happened to him. There was a serious illness in the family last I heard, and he kind of dropped off the grid. But yeah, you can… You know, Rob Cunningham is an actual guy from a video game company. I actually think he’s a bit of a sociopath, but the physical characteristics, the emotional attributes, these are things that I just observe in other people and port into my books as though I am capable of character development.

[00:20:24.02] – Peter Watts

Of course, the problem now is that I no longer do science. I work at home. I’m running out of friends. And so basically, I’m at the point now where I’ve run out of people whose personalities I can steal. And I expect that my character development is going to asymptotically decline over time as more people that I know just die of old age. Hopefully, society will collapse before that happens, and so I can escape that particular fate. We’ve got till, what, 2040, 2050, before the studies say that we’re going to have a global societal collapse. So if I can just hang in there for another couple of decades, I should be okay.

[00:21:15.20] – John Knych

Thank you, Peter. I’ll make sure before I share this with the readers who couldn’t make it today, that there’s a spoiler alert, all your characters die.

[00:21:25.07] – Noémie

Don’t get too attached to anyone.

[00:21:28.08] – Peter Watts

They don’t all… I mean, In fairness, they don’t all die. Some of them spend the rest of their lives in perpetual misery and emotional torture.

[00:21:40.14] – John Knych

Excellent. Moving on to Jenn. Jen, do you have a question, or do you want to pass ?

[00:21:46.03] – Jenn

Yes, I do.

[00:21:47.14] – jenn

I thought it was interesting that you included vampire. I thought their origin was interesting. What made you include a vampire in a science fiction story ? How did that come about ?

[00:22:02.00] – Peter Watts

The answer to that is something that… Everybody out there in thumbnail land, put up your hands if you have heard this story before, how I got the vampire. Nobody else seems to. Brandon, you can go get a coffee. Everybody else. I was a guest at a Con in Edmonton. This was way to help back around the turn of the millennium, maybe just like 2001, 2002, thereabouts. And I had one novel out and one collection of short stories. I had Starfish was out. So I was like, and I was… And Starfish, it had… It was a New York Times Notable Book, and it had a collection of references at the end. Nothing like the bloated bibliographies I went for later, but it had a few pages of reference at the end. I was like, Mr. Hard SF. I had a PhD in science, and I was really cool. They stuck me on a panel about vampires. I didn’t know the first thing about vampires. When did Buffy come out ? There were people talking about Buffy, so this had to happen while Buffy was still on the air, so maybe it wasn’t 2001. Anyway, sorry ?

[00:23:30.15] – John Knych

Late ’90s was Buffy ?

[00:23:33.08] – Peter Watts

Ok, maybe it was. I’m sitting there, and everybody’s talking about various vampires. There was a cheap-ass Canadian vampire police procedural called Night Something or Something Night. They also have the word night in there. Maybe it was Night Night, with the second night being Kniget/Knight, like the thing in the armor. Anyway, I’m just sitting. And I have absolutely nothing to say about vampires, but I start to think, okay, vampires are really dumb. They make no sense biologically. What if I can come up ? Can I maybe cobble together some sort of a half-ass biological reason for some of the things that characterize vampires ?

[00:24:23.19] – Peter Watts

And I’d been reading a book at the time called The Cerebral Symphony by William Calvin, out of Woodshole. And I had learned from that about various aspects of the mammalian visual processing system, Mexican hat waves. It turns out that there are receptor arrays in our visual system that respond only to certain geometrical primitives. They’re a set of neurons that will only fire when they see horizontal lines, or vertical lines, or lines of particular angles, right? And we integrate these arrays that only fire when they see various little things, right? And we take all those various little pieces, and we integrate them further up the visual system into an actual image. But it starts off with us only responding to very, very basic shapes. And this light went on in my head. Supposing that vampire suffer from this mutation, where, when the receptors that respond to vertical lines, and the receptors respond to horizontal lines, when they fire at the same time, this causes some kind of a neurological overload and results in a grand-mal seizure. I guess they call them chronic seizures these days. That would explain the aversion to crosses. It’s not a religious thing at all.

[00:25:45.21] – Peter Watts

It’s a geometric glitch in their visual system. And I blurt this out. And I talk about Mexican hat waves, and I cite William Calvin. And I guess I go on maybe a little too long. It’s maybe 90 seconds for me to lay the whole thing out and explain it. And there’s crickets for about 30 seconds. And then the person next to me says, Yeah, well, I think that Spike would be a better boyfriend for Buffy than Angel because at least Spike’s honest about who he is. And so they never invited me back, and just as fucking well. Oh, look at this. I’ve just got a pop-up reminding me that I have a virtual book club meeting from 10:00 to 11:00. Wait a minute. I even got that wrong. I even set my alarm for the wrong time. Anyway. So, yeah, at that point, it was like, okay, this is kind of challenge, right ? There’s so many dumb things about vampires. But if I can come up with a neurological explanation that’s even semi-plausible for the crucifix glitch, another dog, doesn’t anybody here have cats? Then what else can I explain? My ultimate goal was to… I wanted to…

[00:27:15.20] – Peter Watts

Does anybody remember, back in the ’80s, there was this big coffee table book on gnomes? It was like a natural history of gnomes. It was like you had little line, drawings, and diagrams, and it talked about gnome life cycles and stuff. I thought, I can do this for vampires. I could do the proceedings of the second Biennial conference on the evolution and biology of vampires.

[00:27:39.05] – Orateur 7

And we can make a big coffee table book. And it can be… And my agent hated it. My publisher hated it. Everybody thought it was the worst idea ever. Nobody was going to buy a coffee table book on the biology of vampires. So I just kinda sat there. And then I was writing Blindsight.

[00:27:56.10] – Peter Watts

And as I may have mentioned, characters in Blindsight each illustrate a different aspect of consciousness. And… One thing I was playing around with was the idea how when you… When you are asleep and dreaming, you could say that you’re conscious. Because you’re aware of the dream. But also, when you’re dreaming, you don’t have your critical faculties. So if you see your girlfriend in a dream, and she’s just got one giant hair sticking out of the side of her head, as thick as a tree branch. That doesn’t strike you as at all odd. You’re living this weird… And also, you don’t have a lot of volition. You tend to watch yourself doing things, or you experience yourself doing things, but more as an observer than as a proactive participant. You’re not making these decisions. It’s essentially you’re watching a movie from the first-person perspective. And I thought, OK, that’s an interesting idea, because if consciousness really is a spandrel, if it doesn’t serve any useful function, if it’s just a side effect, then, effectively, dreaming is an illustration of that. You can be conscious of something, but the rest of your brain, the non-conscious part of your brain, is doing the heavy lifting.

[00:29:25.17] – Orateur 7

So you’re sitting there like a parasite, watching yourself behave. It’s a lot like a dream. And I didn’t have anybody in the book that did that. And I thought, you know, a vampire might fit there. You can talk about vampires with parallel processes. They’re essentially like meaty [?] parallel processes. So they can run multiple cognitive thread simultaneously. I mean, in a sense, you could say that every vampire brain contains multitudes because you’d have a different perspective for each. But at the same time, they don’t have any conscious control over any. You have these multiple consciousnesses that are in a constant dream state. Apparently, it’s a little similar to the Indigenous Australians talk of a dream walking.

[00:30:15.18] – Peter Watts

So I thought, OK, nobody wants my vampires. I’m going to stuff my vampires down their throats, whether they like it or not. And so I decided to… And it was… I mean, it was also a joke. I mean, remarkably, there are people out there who think I believe this stuff. I did a PowerPoint presentation from the point of view of a sociopathic pharmaceutical scientist for Big Pharma, who had accidentally stumbled on how to reactivate the genes for vamporism while they were trying to cure certain types of autism. And they were now trying to market vamporism as a product. And I got a I got an email from somebody actually working in the pharmaceutical industry saying: What company do you work for? You are obviously deeply embedded in the pharmaceutical industry because you absolutely nailed their attitude. But yeah, it was like… I had the pre-existing biological template for how vampires might work biologically. I had a vacant niche in the book into which vampires could fit. And there was also just something wonderfully absurd about… I’m going to write a hard science-fiction novel that’s crammed up to the wazoo with hard SF, like with peer-reviewed scientific references, and I’m going to stick a fucking vampire in it.

[00:31:45.19] – Peter Watts

What are people are going to make of that. And in that sense it was just a joke. There were readers who said: ‘Yeah I really liked Blindsight, but boy the vampires just ruined it for me. I could really do without the vampires.’ And then there were others who jumped to my defense: ‘No, no, the vampire is an integral part. Thematically, the book doesn’t work without them.’ Then, of course, there’s other people who say, Blindsight is just crap from one page to the next. But that was it. It was like there were about three or four different reasons for sticking them in. One was just a big middle finger to people who took hard science fiction too seriously.

[00:32:22.21] – Jenn

It’s really interesting. Thanks.

[00:32:25.11] – Peter Watts

Sorry, Brandon. I know you’ve heard it before.

[00:32:30.20] – John Knych

Thank you, Peter. Moving on to Sean.

[00:32:35.20] – Sean

Yeah, thanks. So full disclosure, I’m still a little bit away from the finish of Blindsight, so I can’t ask about endings or any spoilers, but I’ll probably hear a few anyways. I got enough of the way through to have some thoughts, but the main thing that’s coming to mind for me, and this might be a boring question, but you essentially, it seems like, wrote a book where one of the primary characters, plot elements, is essentially like an LLM in some ways. And now, there’s… I mean, obviously, LLMs were out for quite a long time, but now, they’re very much in the public. They’re the zeitgeist, I guess you could say. So I’m curious about how closely have you been following and reading and learning about the latest version of LLM, GPT, and these others ? How much have you, like, reflected on what you wrote in 2006, and like the research that I went into it at the time? And, I’m just curious if you have any… If it’s been top of mind for you, or are you sort of….you’re not interested in that connection or what?

[00:33:48.07] – Peter Watts

Well, the… The research that I’ve done has basically consisted of sitting back and everyday ego surfing on Reddit, And rubbing my hands with glee as people say, Peter Watts was writing about LLMs back like 20 years ago. I’m thinking, yeah, I nailed it. But in fact, the first LLM thing I wrote was in Starfish, which came out in 1999. In Starfish, I had these things called headcheeses, which are basically cultured neurones on a slab. And the rationale for headcheeses in the Riftors Trilogy was that the Internet had become so infested with self-evolving bots and malware, that it was virtually unusable. And so people were sticking these headcheeses as gatekeeper nodes into the Internet at large, because the thing about a neuron culture is it’s constantly rewiring itself. So it’s very difficult for malware that is programmed to hack certain security protocols. It’s difficult for that malware to get a target lock on a headcheese because it’s constantly in motion. And I had…And of course, these headcheeses, because they are basically like human brains, their internal logic is opaque. They learn by operant conditioning. And this turned out to be an absolutely major…

[00:35:26.12] – Peter Watts

A lynchpin of the book, the fact that you’re conditioned headcheeses to do certain things, but that they had internalized the wrong… They had internalized the wrong lesson. Because you thought you were teaching them one thing, but as it turned out, something else always happened in conjunction with this thing you were trying to teach them. And it focused on the wrong thing. The example I used was, there was a headcheese that was running the London underground. And it had basically learned to turn up the ventilators whenever a train pulled into the station and people got out so the people would not suffocate. But what it had actually been keying on was not the sight of people coming out of the tube, but it had been keying on a digital clock on the wall, which happened to coincide with the arrival of the trains. When vandals smashed the clock, it no longer had that triggering stimulus, so it stopped turning on the ventilators and a bunch of people suffocated. That was just one off-hand example that I used. That wasn’t the main thrust of the story. But you had somebody actually talking to this headcheese, and it responded, in hindsight, it responded very much like an LLM would today, right down to the point that it would make certain hallucinations.

[00:36:53.00] – Orateur 7

It would make cute little turns of phrase that didn’t make a lot of sense, but did, if you didn’t think about it too hard. I put a fair bit of thought into that. And that actually seems to have worn, seems to have aged really well, to the point where you actually have headcheeses now, there’s actually a company called Cortical Labs, which has created a mishmash of human and rat neurons in a box, which they are leasing out. They’re actually selling them for commercial applications now. I’m actually in touch with them. I’ve got them on my roller deck because they were actually inspired. They read a paper I did recently in The Atlantic. That’s super cool. I feel super vindicated about that. But yeah, we didn’t… I mean, as you pointed out, we’ve had the large language model template since the ’80s. Nothing’s really changed since then since then, except Moore’s law has allowed us to invest so much more massively, orders of magnitude, more compute in the same old model, so that it just becomes brute force, more powerful, as opposed to a more elegant process…

[00:38:17.14] – Sean

Has anything, a quick follow-up on that. Has anything about this surprised you? Or is there anything about current GPT that you, having done a ton of research and written about it and studied it, is there something new to this that you wouldn’t have expected?

[00:38:33.24] – Orateur 7

I mean, not really. Again, it’s not a… I wasn’t thinking in terms of large language models when I wrote Roarshock [?]. I was thinking about the Chinese room, which was pretty explicitly. It turns out that those are very convergent models. The stuff that’s happened, I mean, it’s weird. I gave a keynote address at a weird AI symposium in Madrid a couple of years ago. And I don’t know anything in A.I.. My formal background is in marine-biology. My PHD thesis was on the biophysical-ecology of harbor seals. the But…you know… One of Geoffrey Hinton’s colleagues gives me drugs. Apparently, I’m quite popular in A.I. circles. This Michael Bennett character I mentioned earlier says that one of his colleagues describes me as his favorite science fiction author who he hopes is wrong. I seem to have… I seem to have thrown a dart over my shoulder and hit a bullseye, or at least hit the board, with no formal expertise whatsoever.

[00:39:57.15] – Peter Watts

I did coding back in the day, because it was just that you had to write your own programs for your doctorate. But I never knew anything about computer science. I was like, the whole…

[00:40:13.01] – Peter Watts

Even my whole AI consciousness thing didn’t even occur to me until I was out of university. It’s weird that I write a series of books set in the deep sea, and while you have people saying, Oh, yeah, You can really tell he’s a marine biologist. He really knows the marine biology. Nobody has been actually inspired, as far as I know, to go into marine biology as a result of reading Starfish. But there’s shitloads of people who have gone into computer science because of the digital ecosystems I described in Maelstrom. There’s people who’ve gone into AI because of what they’ve read in Blindsight. It’s amazing how… It’s almost like the more ignorant I am about something, the more influential I become? I’ve got this theory that, when you are an expert in a specific field of science, you become encrusted with the state-of-the-art dogma of that particular field. Somebody pointed out that Isaac Asimov very rarely wrote stories in which biochemistry played a major role, because his background was in biochemistry, and every time he would come up with a cool idea about biochemistry, his formal training would kick in with all the reasons why it wouldn’t work.

[00:41:41.02] – Peter Watts

And so I think that to some extent, when you actually write a story based on your field of expertise, your imagination becomes strait-jacqueted because your own expertise keeps you from looking beyond the state of the art today and recognizing that there will be a different state of the art tomorrow.

[00:42:01.19] – Peter Watts

But if you have formal training in science, generally, you respect the scientific process.

[00:42:08.04] – Peter Watts

You are capable of more rigorously interrogating assumptions and tropes and things, then you would be if you had no scientific background. So I’m thinking maybe what happens is, by moving from one field of science in which I had expertise, into another field of science in which I had no expertise, but which still respected the same principles of scientific methodology, I could look at things that were more batshit in a particular field, while at the same time, being relatively rigorous in my interpretation of it, making sure that things didn’t actually turn into magic. And so I think there might be an interdisciplinary flexibility in that, maybe, that has allowed me to be more inspirational in neuroscience and AI. I mean, hell, it’s weird. I came out with a story in Lightspeed. It came up just a couple of months ago, but I’d written it years ago. It’s a long story. Et it got some real back stream buzz years before it came out. The co-founder of Neuralink loved it, wanted to take me out for coffee. The founder of Midjourney loved it. And what they didn’t seem to realize was that I was actually writing about all the things I thought were going to go wrong with Neuralink, catastrophically wrong with Neuralink, if it behaved exactly as advertised.

[00:43:45.00] – Peter Watts

The sense I got is that Elon Musk doesn’t have the first idea about how brains work. When he talks about removing the I/O constraints so that brains can talk to each other instantaneously, I think that’s going to result in a catastrophic implosion of identity. And so I’ve written these stories. And so I wrote this story, The 21 Second God, and it was basically about a hive mind gone wrong. And Shivon Zilis, wants to have coffee with me… Because she learned so much about the brain from my science fiction story, again, by a guy who studied harbour seals when he actually did science, which is disturbing in its own right. Haven’t really heard from her much since because I had to say, you do realize I’m writing about your company, right ? Holtzer ? Holz ? David Holz, the Midjourney guy, right ? Also loved 21 Second God, and his aspiration is to build a hive mind. It’s like the classic meme from 2021, where the tech company says, At long last, we have created the torment nexus from the classic sci-fi novel, Do not build the torment nexus. These are torment nexus-adjacent experiences I’m having. On the one hand, it’s super cool to be recognized and appreciated by people who are experts in fields that I have no expertise in, and who I’m just noodling around with my science fiction stories.

[00:45:24.09] – Peter Watts

But on the other hand, it’s a bit disturbing that they seem to be taking the wrong message from my… I’m writing cautionnary tales, and they seem to be taking them as aspirational. I try to keep up with what’s going on with LLMs, and neuromorphic models, and the various hybrids, and so on, I’m certainly no expert. But at this point, I know experts, so I can ask them, and I can make sure I don’t make any egregious boners in my subsequent stories because I just have this vast stable now of actual experts I can ask. But the thing that… Other than the sheer glee of vindication I get from the fact that I do seem to have hit a bullseye with some of my completely speculative and uninformed predictions, the thing that really sticks with me now is how people seem to be taking the wrong take home message from it.

[00:46:26.11] – John Knych

Fascinating. Thank you, Peter. Yeah, Yeah Sean asked the same question I had because…on page 117, you write, But pattern matching doesn’t equal comprehension. And you read all these articles now like, Oh, large language models, are they conscious? And you were way ahead of the game.

[00:46:44.24] – Peter Watts

Yeah, but again, I mean, maybe pattern matching does equal comprehension, because we don’t know what comprehension is, right ?

[00:46:50.09] – Orateur 7

Pattern matching certainly equals computation of a sort. And babies, young mammals, neonates of all species, learn by experience, by pattern matching, at some point, maybe past some critical threshold and something clicks.

[00:47:08.05] – Peter Watts

I mean, the general consensus, Geoffrey Hinton is basically saying at this point, that it’s possible that current LLMs are, to some extent, already conscious. And the consensus, apparently, amongst his colleagues is Hinton is a very smart guy, but he may have jumped the shark with that. But on the other hand, he makes the point that transformer models are essentially neural nets. Neural nets are based, at least loosely, on how brains work. And we don’t know how consciousness arises. So I’m not willing… I mean, the dude won a Nobel Prize for his work on artificial intelligence, so I would not write him off just from that, or just on that basis. But beyond that, people saying, This is not comprehension, this cannot be conscious, this isn’t like us, strikes me as awfully defensive and awfully ill-informed. And it’s not the thing you can say until you can describe what makes us us, why we are conscious, how consciousness works in us. Until you figure out how consciousness works, you can’t, as has been said in this very conversation, for all we know, rocks are conscious to a rudimentary extent.

[00:48:33.23] – Peter Watts

So who fucking knows ? I can’t write anything off. And it’s true that pattern matching does not equal compréhension, but we don’t know what comprehension equals. So, yeah. I just don’t see what good, from an evolutionary point of view, what good comprehension, conscious comprehension, is when non-conscious computation can do all the same heavy lifting. I mean, we had a case here in Toronto, where somebody basically drove across town, stabbed his mother-in-law to death, cleaned up the mess, went back, got caught. He was asleep the whole time. Jury let him off because he was asleep. He did not do those things. Something else in him did those things. It’s called homicidal somnibalisme. There are a few cases of it now. There are people who go out, pick up sex partners, take them home. wake up and say: who the fuck is this strange person in my bed? Because they were asleep the whole time they did it. There’s a guy in Europe who can draw incredibly detailed pencil drawings of entire cityscapes, right down to individual windows, like almost photographic, except they’re done in pencils. But he can only do that when he’s asleep.

[00:50:02.03] – Peter Watts

He can barely scratch his name in the dirt when he’s awake. We tend to cite these things as weird Ripley’s believe it or not stuff. But when you realize that you do the same stuff yourself every day. That most people driving home from work aren’t driving consciously, they are thinking of other things. They are not thinking about the stop signs and the turn signals and stuff, that they’re doing all of this automatically. And when you factor in the fact that neurologically, the computation that makes the decision seems to precede the conscious decision being made. It just seems a lot more parsimonious to say, OK, the decision is made non-consciously, and then somebody sends a memo upstairs to the conscious self, which then reads that memo and thinks that it made the decision, as opposed to simply being informed of the decision. We’ve got pretty compelling neurological evidence that decision making happens anywhere from 7 to 10 seconds before the self becomes aware of making the decision. And so, given that, nobody denies that consciousness is a thing, whether consciousness actually has a function? As far as I’m concerned, the jury is out on it.

[00:51:37.24] – Peter Watts

I think I’m in the minority on this. A lot of other people have reasons for consciousness, but every time I look at possible reasons for consciousness, the question I ask is, OK, maybe, but can you imagine a non-conscious system performing the same operations? And so far, for me, the answer has always been: yes. So even if we do use consciousness for something, consciousness does not seem to be necessary for any operation I’ve encountered so far, other than aesthetic appreciation. And you could make a really strong argument that aesthetic appreciation is maladaptive because we think with our dicks, we get swamped on the glory of the Universe, and a tiger eats us because we’re distracted. Again, I know it’s long-winded and I’m going on and probably not being very focused in my response, but yes, pattern matching is not comprehension, but in response, what good is comprehension ? Do we know?

[00:52:40.16] – John Knych

Thank you. Before moving on to Joe’s question, for the sake of my sanity, I have to believe that aesthetics has some value that’s…

[00:52:48.15] – Peter Watts

This is one of the things that people think that I’m being so grim and so on and nihilistic. But to me, the people who think… I guess I would put you in that category. The people who think that this is an unpleasant interpretation or something that you find unpalatable, you’re not thinking of yourself in the right sense, right ? You think that I am this thing for which consciousness is a waste of time. But you’re not the system. You’re the tape worm living inside the system, okay ? If consciousness is, in fact, some parasitical spandrel, and that doesn’t serve any purpose, then, by definition, it’s a parasite. It’s true that most hosts would be better off without the tape worm in their gut. But at the same time, no tape worm in the long, venerable histories of tape worms has looked around said: You know, I think I’m going to flush myself out the anus because I think my host would be better off without me. I like being a tapeworm. I’m probably too pathological about it now, but at least once an hour, I look around and say, “Wow, it’s amazing to be conscious.”

[00:54:09.09] – Peter Watts

I am perceiving that plant. I am perceiving this cat, shredding my arm because it’s 8:01, and I was supposed to feed them at 8: 0. I am constantly gobsmacked by how amazing it is to just consciously perceive things. And I’m the tape worm. Fine. I’m not going to flush out of the system, even though that probably would make the system itself more survivable. In fact, I’ve started giving talks. I’m going to be giving one next month, arguing that, in fact, the best way to ensure our survival is to stop caring about whether we do survive, because all the things that are responsible for a destruction of the environment are a result of cognitive biases, the inability to internalize future consequences. Cognitive biases, like hyperbolic discounting, kin-selection, cascade effects, all these things that allow us to destroy the environment and realize cognitively, yeah, we should probably stop destroying the environment because it’s what keeps us alive, but we don’t internalize that in the gut.

[00:55:13.22] – Peter Watts

We think about it in the same way that we think about sapient raccoons with gun fetishes in Marvel Cinematic Universe movies. It’s a cool thing to think about, but we don’t believe it down in the gut, the way you would believe you were in danger if a grizzly bear started charging at you from across the field. That is something you would react to, right ? We don’t respond to actual threats because we’re not wired for that. And we’re not wired for that because our brains are designed for survival in a world in which there are short term local problems. And if you don’t solve the local short term problems, you don’t live to the long term. So we have very, very short perspectives. And so, everything we perceive is biased. The line I like to use is that you can either see the world as it is or you can care whether you live or die. You cannot optimize along both axes simultaneously because caring whether you live or die results in all these cognitive biases which result in environmenal destruction.

[00:56:19.10] – Peter Watts

Honestly, if you want to stop destroying the environment, if you want to maintain a healthy environment, you have to do away with all these survival biases that kept us alive back on the Pleistocene, but which are now threatening the planet. You have to stop caring about whether you live or die, and then maybe you will live. I mean, it’s counterintuitive, and I’m probably the only person in the world who believes it, but it also makes for an interesting bomb to drop into conversations like this. I bet you never thought of that before.

[00:56:55.23] – John Knych

Thank you. I’d love to hear a politician say that.

You can see the world how it is or care if you live or die!

[00:57:02.24] – Peter Watts

Yeah, I mean, really, you can do it. There are some indications of how we can do this. There are certain types of brain damage and things that we consider pathologies, which are actually just things that eliminate one or another bias. But what you basically got to do is say, OK, we’re going to save humanity by rewiring human nature into something else. Now, give me a research grant.

[00:57:30.00] – John Knych

Thank you. All right. I keep interrupting. I’m sorry, Joe, if you have a question. Joe, last question let’s hear it..

[00:57:37.07] – JP

No, no, no. Thank you. No, thank you, Peter, for being here. You’re talking a little bit about the flow state, where the climber exits the flow state and thinks about what they’re doing, and then they fall, because they’re no longer back in that fluid system, where everything comes naturally. Their objectivity gets in the way of success, and they fall and die. It’s really interesting. Just think about it. I’m a huge fan. I’ve read your Rifter series. I’ve read your short story, Malak, Malak. Malak, yeah. Yeah, it was a really good read. I wonder if you’re dive certified, is actually my first question. The Rifter series has me wondering if with your biology degree, if you’re dive certified.

[00:58:47.08] – Peter Watts

Yeah, I actually got my C card. I got my Naui card when I was grade 10, I think.

[00:58:53.03] – JP

Okay.

[00:58:53.24] – Peter Watts

And I did some diving in nuclear discharges for a local power utility back when they pretended to care about the environment, and they didn’t. There were some pretty hairy experiences there. These were like the gales of November. You would jump off the boat. You would have to swim for the bottom as fast as you possibly could because the boat was rolling so much that the trim tabs would give you a concussion. You grab a rock on the bottom, and even when you grab the rock on the bottom, the surge is so great that you get picked up and bounced along the bottom.

[00:59:30.20] – Peter Watts

But I have not dived…Shit, I probably haven’t dived since 2000, 2001, and that was just a recreational stuff. In Hawaii. Yeah, I’m way out of practice.

[00:59:51.24] – Peter Watts

Do I even still have my card?

[00:59:53.15] – OJP

I just got to say…

[00:59:58.02] – Peter Watts

There it is! Here’s my Naui card.

[01:00:01.19] – Orateur 2

You’ve got it. Okay. That’s pretty cool.

[01:00:06.15] – Peter Watts

Yeah.

I mean, there were scenes, I don’t know if you remember the scene in Starfish, where they’re just swimming on the bottom, and all of a sudden, this row of teeth just resolves out of the murk directly in front of them. That’s… When you’re diving, especially up in temperate waters. I don’t know where you’re located, but the water is hardly… Off the coast of BC, the water tends to be murky, right ? And there’s killer whales out there, and there are sharks out there, and you’re swimming along, and all of a sudden, everything just goes dark, like something is blocking out the sun from overhead. And it is scary as shit. I have an imagination, and I know the kind of things that are in the water, and you’re swimming along, and all of a sudden, this giant shadow from overhead drops on you. And of course, what it is, it’s a cloud blocking the sun. But there’s that brain stem. Holy shit, there’s like a killer whale coming down. And because the water is so murky, you just have this vision that this is going to be the last thing you see. You’re going to see a shadow in front of you, and then you’ll see these teeth, and they’ll come out almost like a grainy starlight amplification, tactical goggles, that resolution.

[01:01:51.03] – Peter Watts

It’s just a recurring… I won’t call it a nightmare, because I don’t know if I’ve ever dreamed of it. It’s like a waking. And yeah, that’s what I based that particular scene on.

[01:02:03.11] – Orateur 2

No, I’ve never dived. I live in Oregon. The ocean here is scary, but it was very visceral. I’ve taken to watching diving posts and underwater stuff a lot more since reading that series, and I’m just like, wow, that must have got to be on some level. The weird concept that the bottom is the safest. We just don’t have that in 3D non-aquatic life. We don’t think of the bottom as safe. We don’t think of the above as dangerous. It was really interesting to me. But, yeah, that was fascinating. And a tiny little thing about the headcheese – I wanted to go back to was, in Star Trek – Voyager – You’re right. Yes, Voyager, there are neural packs that gets infected by cheese. It was very real. It was very real because if you’re using neural substrate, infection is literally possible.

[01:03:21.22] – Peter Watts

Yup, I stopped watching. Voyager was the first Star Trek series I stopped watching after maybe the first half season because it was just… I mean, give me a fucking break. I thought, okay, hey, they’re basically on the other side of the galaxy now, right ? Finally, we can get away from aliens with wrinkly foreheads. Finally, we can get away with: We can actually deal with something that’s actually alien because it’s way the hell over there, the progenitors or whatever it is that explains why everybody’s humanoid in this part of the galaxy doesn’t necessarily have to matter in the Delta Quadrant or wherever it is. But yeah, it was the same old shit. And the very first episode, you have the weird guy with the funny sideburns and the creepy affection for Kess, and asking if they have water to barter. It’s like, Are you fucking kidding me ? I mean, you’re in space. There are comets, right ? There is more water in an Oort cloud than there is on any given planet. Don’t you guys know anything about science? And I just gave up on it at that point. It lasted seven years, though. I do remember the infected, literally, head cheese.

[01:04:40.24] – JP

I guess in that vein. Okay, so my question is, given that you’re talking about how you’re that far away, it shouldn’t really apply anymore. This is a bit abstract, super abstract, maybe not. But what do you think would happen to the entire field of science fiction? Let’s say a microbe is discovered, let’s say a life-form is discovered, what’s the survivability of the franchise of science fiction if some extraterrestrial facet is provable, is discovered. I mean, how much does it cut the weeds back on what we consider the field of sci-fi? Or do you think there’s, like we’ve been discussing, some underlying undiscoverability that informs this topic that supersede that? Or do you think it would get overwhelmed, I guess? That’s a complex question.

[01:05:42.15] – JP

That’s a really interesting question. I don’t think anyone has asked me that before. And as a result, anything I say now comes with a disclaimer that I’m just pulling it out of my ass on the spur of the moment. So I could be completely wrong. My sense is that there’d be a sweet spot. I think if we discover microbes on Mars, or pond scum on Europa, I think that would boost interest in science fiction. Because, holy shit, there is life out there. It’s pond scum, it’s a microbe, but we now know there’s life out there. What else could there be? It provides an indication that science fiction is not… I mean, it’s a cliché. We got past the science fiction of spaceships and ray guns shit. That’s like the ’60s, ’70s stuff. But you still find it in English departments, I guess. But it’s a vindication of… It’s a vindication of the genre without being a usurper of the genre. There’s an ecosystem under the ice in Europa. That is so cool. What else could be out there ? Now, basically, everything’s back on the table because now we know that extraterrestrial life is a thing.

[01:07:10.05] – Peter Watts

What forms might extraterrestrial life take? On the other hand, if a bunch of intelligent elephants land on the lawn of the White House and vaporize Trump in his cabinet, after the cheering dies down, and after Marjorie Taylor-Green finishes blaming the Jews for it, at that point, I think maybe science fiction would wither away. Because all of a sudden, it’s not a question of, wow, we know there’s life out there, what else could there be? Now, all of a sudden, it’s, oh, We know what’s out there, and it’s mean, and it looks like a giant 20-foot elephant, and it can kick our asses. And at that point, reality becomes a standard science fiction trope. There’s no need to have to speculate about things. Nobody cares anymore, because you now have aliens walking up and down our streets. So I think we’re looking at a narrow curve with a peak. And it’s great as soon as you find some evidence of life. But the more science-fiction reality becomes, the less relevant science-fiction will have. Although, if that was the case, you’d think that we wouldn’t be paying much attention to science fiction now because… We are certainly in an era now where people are now arguing about whether or not our software is conscious.

[01:08:49.01] – Peter Watts

The whole idea of AI has traditionally been a purely science-fictional thing, and now we’re talking about… People can actually talk about personality uploading without being laughed out of the room. So as I say, maybe I’m completely wrong, but that’s my first cut at an answer, and I will probably think about it a little more. Maybe we’ll come into a talk somewhere down the road.

[01:09:12.18] – JP

Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. I’ve got to leave this conversation, but I appreciate you so much for joining us today. You didn’t miss a minute. You weren’t even late. So thank you. I appreciate you being here. Jack, thank you, guys.

[01:09:25.23] – Peter Watts

I was kind of late. It was my pleasure.

[01:09:29.19] – John Knych

Thank Thank you. Yeah, thank you. I got to wrap things up, too, because I have a wife and kid who are running around. But I loved, I really enjoy this conversation. Are there are any final, burning questions, I guess someone can throw them out? But it’s been fascinating. I can’t wait to read over the transcript, to be honest.

[01:09:52.12] – Peter Watts

Ok, awesome. I’m glad. I’m glad that I made up for my initial tardiness.

[01:09:57.22] – Brandon

What are you working on next?

[01:10:30.00] – John Knych

Yes. Thank you, Brandon. Two minor things. What are you working on next? Also, do you have any recommendations of living Sci-Fi authors? Because we’ll quick, I need to shout out Adrian Tchaikovsky because he shouted you out.

[01:10:31.08] – Peter Watts

I would shoutout Adrian Tchaikovsky. I would also shoutout Hiron Ennes. I would shout out, it’s kind of like an Edgar Allen Poe-y David Kronengbourg-ian. He wrote a really interesting novel called Leech, which is basically, it’s about a parasitic hive mind, told from the point of view of the parasitic hive mind, infesting people and encounters another parasitic hive mind, also infesting people.

[01:10:46.12] – Peter Watts

It’s like, Shit, I have competition. It’s a really interesting idea. [Who is it?] Hiron. H-i-r-o-n, space, E-N-N-E-S or I-S ? I don’t remember. But the book is called Leech. Seth Dickinson, Xordia, is really good. It’s a big fucking doorstop of a book. It’s been out for a couple of years now. It has passages that viscerally turn to my stomach, but also, really, really interesting conceptually. I think, like the first two chapters, he came up with an argument for free will that I had never encountered before. And my current favorite is Rachel Rosen, who you will never heard of. It’s not science fiction, it’s more like an urban fantasy with biting political overtones about rising authoritarianism in Canada after environmental collapse has presaged the emergence of a magical environment. So you basically have civil servants plotting each other’s… It’s almost like a Charlie Strauss thing, where you have magic being used for the most mundane, grubby political ends. But it’s produced by a micro publisher in Ottawa called Humble Puppy Press, which you can be forgiven for never having heard of before. It’s probably very difficult to get because it’s a small press, it’s a small book.

[01:12:17.14] – Peter Watts

But yeah, she’s written two books in a trilogy called The Sleep of Reason, which I would strongly recommend. But the ones that you will be able to get really easily are the ones by Hiron Ennis and Seth Dickenson, and, of course, Adrian Tchiakovsky. I’ve only read a couple of Adrian Tchaikovsky books, and I thought that Children of Ruin was good. I thought the ideas were really good. I thought that some of the spider cognition was a little too human. But his latest book, Shroud, it’s probably not his latest book. He comes up with a book every two months. But the latest book of his that I read was Shroud, which a hell of a first contact story and has a really, really inventive alien ecosystem. [I love Shroud.] Alien biology, I’ve never seen anything like it.

[01:13:09.04] – Brandon

Shroud is good.

[01:13:10.07] – John Knych

Yeah, he mentioned your influence in his writing of that book.

[01:13:13.06] – Peter Watts

Yeah, well, he hasn’t been sending me any royalty or commission checks, so talk is cheap, Adrian.

[01:13:21.13] – John Knych

Thank you. Then, as Brandon said, what are you working on now ?

[01:13:24.10] – Peter Watts

Oh, right.

[01:13:25.15] – Peter Watts

Okay, well, I’m a bunch of things.

[01:13:28.06] – Peter Watts

I’m doing some video game work I’m doing some stuff I can’t actually talk about because of NDAs.

[01:13:37.18] – Peter Watts

I’m writing another novella in the Sunflower sequence, a sequel to the Free Stream Revolution. I’m working on a screenplay with this hotshot Black cinematographer installation artist called Arthur Jaffe [?], who is basically a science fiction allegory about the Black experience in America involving an AI who identifies as Black and who presents itself as Mickey Mouse. He writes very different stuff than I do. He’s worked with all sorts of people. He’s worked with Stanley Kubrick and Kanye West and Spike Lee. The Kanye West thing hasn’t aged well I guess. I’m working on that. Neil Blomkamp has optioned the Blindsight-Echopraxia stuff. He’s presumably going to be working on something that takes my vampire biology but sticks it into a different context. He’s basically describing it as secaria [?] with vampires. He’s presumably going to be working on that. He’s going to be filming that after he finishes the Starship Troopers Reboot, so that’ll be next year. I’ve just finished a series treatment for Blindsight, which he has also optioned. I don’t know if anything’s going to come à that, but if it does, I will be working on that. And yeah, there’s always omniscience being pushed ever further into the distance because all this other stuff has deadlines and pays better.

[01:15:22.06] – Peter Watts

But yeah, I’m doing a lot, and I’m feeling a little bit overwhelmed. Honestly, I’m afraid that I’m going to produce a lot of crap because it all has to be done by Tuesday. It has to be handed in by Tuesday, not when it’s actually ready to hand in. So we’ll see how it goes. Remember me if… My subsequent work is crap. Remember me as I am now, not as I am about to become.

[01:15:47.18] – John Knych

Well, despite all the projects, we’re grateful for your time and for talking with us. Yeah.

[01:15:54.01] – Peter Watts

No, it was fun.

[01:15:55.04] – Peter Watts

And again, I hang my head in shame about the whole forgetting entirely about you guys thing.

[01:16:00.18] – John Knych

If anything, it’s… I’m always nervous in the beginning, but we were able to just talk about your work and science fiction. So it was a nice introduction, just waiting. So it was fine. No problem.

[01:16:15.06] – Peter Watts

Ok, well, everybody go off and live your lives in the short period of time that we have left to live our lives. I hope when you’re fighting each other over the last tin of spam in the rubble, spare some kind thoughts for me and think, Hey, he saw this coming. He tried to warn us.

[01:16:35.06] – John Knych

He threw the dart. He threw the dart behind.

[01:16:38.19] – Peter Watts

Thank you, Peter. Ok, well, goodbye. Thank you. Bye, everyone. Thank you for having me.

[01:16:42.21] – John Knych

Bye, bye. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all for being here. Enjoyed it. I really got a run. Au revoir.

[01:16:49.10] – Brandon

Thank you, Jack.

[01:16:50.16] – Noémie

See you guys.

“I’m afraid we’ve left today’s youth with circumstances where there’s little room for hope.”

Interview with American writer Sigrid Nunez, published in the Slovenian Newspaper: sobotna priloga-Delo.

By Katarina Gomboc Čeh

In the winter of 2021, while browsing the library, I came across a book with a simple title, The Friend, and a Great Dane on the cover. I had never heard of the American author Sigrid Nunez before, but the blurb promised a “perfectly pitched novel.” The Friend, which was later adapted into a film of the same name starring Naomi Watts and Bill Murray, tells the story of a woman who adopts her deceased friend’s dog. Beyond the bond between human and dog, the novel delves into themes of writing, grief, abuse, and friendship. The New York Times included this extraordinary book on its list of the 100 best books published since 2000.

Following The Friend (translated into Slovenian by Petra Anžlovar and published in 2021 by Aktivni mediji), came its follow-up, What Are You Going Through—this time with a cat on the cover—which was published in Slovenian in 2023. A harrowing tale of two friends, one of whom is dying of cancer while the other accompanies her through it, was adapted into the 2024 film The Room Next Door by Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar. With the novel The Vulnerables (translated into Slovenian this year), the author concludes her unofficial trilogy about an unnamed woman. In this last book, she finds herself quarantined in a stranger’s New York apartment with a parrot she must care for and a younger man from Generation Z.

The author’s last three novels have been translated into Slovenian, but she has written nine in total. Her first, A Feather on the Breath of God (1995), is closest to autofiction and tells the story of her childhood and parents. Born in New York in 1951 to a Chinese-Panamanian father and a German mother, she grew up in a low-income neighborhood in Staten Island with her parents and two older sisters. Her later novels explore Vietnam, loss, family relationships, friendship, social issues, even a marmoset from Bloomsbury and a fictional flu pandemic.

In 2011, she published the memoir Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag, which is unique because Nunez knew Sontag personally—she dated her son and lived with them for a time.

I met Sigrid Nunez in New York, where she has lived her whole life. She chose a quiet lobby of a concert hall in the Upper West Side—her favorite neighborhood for concerts, film premieres, ballet, and opera—for our conversation.

You’ve lived in New York your whole life. How has the city changed before your eyes?

It’s changed a lot. When I went to college—first Barnard and then Columbia—the city was much more dangerous than it is today. There was a lot of crime, especially in the neighborhoods I lived in, like the Upper West Side and the Lower East Side.

But at the same time, the city was more interesting than it is now. In the 1970s and early 1980s, it was very bohemian. Although New York has always been a place for the wealthy, things were still affordable back then. I always loved its vibrancy and unconventionality.

Then, in the 1980s, the city started changing. There was less crime in the neighborhoods, which of course is a good thing, but many corporations moved in, and a lot of neighborhoods lost their character—real estate was taken over by banks and big chains like CVS and Duane Reade. That’s why I have a special affection for the place where we met. It has remained almost the same, even though prices have gone up significantly.

Do you think New York is more superficial today, more shallow?

To some extent, yes. It’s a less interesting, less unconventional, more mainstream city.

There used to be this very important idea about New York —that you could come here from anywhere, with no money, no connections, and live your true self. If you were talented —like Andy Warhol, for example—you could become a great artist. You didn’t need money or influence, whereas elsewhere you wouldn’t have had a chance. The same goes for director Robert Wilson. Many people like him, who were gay, came from places where they couldn’t be themselves, let alone develop their creativity.

Today, that’s no longer the case, mainly because young people especially can no longer afford to come here and live like artists once did. Even Brooklyn, which used to be considered affordable, isn’t anymore.

Freedom and opportunity—that’s what made New York so special. And most of that is now gone.

Is the neighborhood where you live undergoing gentrification?

Oh yes, absolutely. Gentrification started in the 1980s, continued through the 1990s, and is still happening everywhere in Manhattan. I live in the West Village now, where part of the original spirit has been preserved. But the East Village, which was once considered a bohemian area, has completely changed. It’s become highly gentrified, with outrageously high rents. Much of the world that Patti Smith wrote about when she and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe were young is gone.

In The Vulnerables, you include a passage about 1968 as “the year that shattered America,” and how Joan Didion experienced that time—so intensely she sought psychiatric help. The psychiatrist’s report said she had a “fundamentally pessimistic, fatalistic, and depressive view of the world around her.” In the novel, you write: “This would describe, more or less, the current view of most Americans I know. Though I would add: an overwhelming sense of shame.”

The year 1968 was hugely significant for Americans. It was a time of massive protests, many of them related to the Vietnam War. Protesters opposed the horrific actions of U.S. foreign policy. They were part of student movements, civil rights movements… And then there were the assassinations—John Kennedy, his brother Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. Despite all that, there was still hope, because the movements were strong. People opposing the government felt they had power to stop it.

Now, many people feel the same way. The Vulnerables was written before Donald Trump’s second election, so it reflects feelings already present after his first term.

Trump is now, in 2025, serving a second term. What is it like to be an American citizen in 2025?

It depends who you ask. Trump wasn’t an unknown figure last year. He was very open, especially in the final days of the campaign. Everyone could see it. Information wasn’t withheld. We knew about “Project 2025,” a conservative plan to overhaul the American government. We knew his intentions, his grandiosity, narcissism, even his talk about being “a dictator from day one.” And people still bought into it.

In some ways, I experience it as a betrayal. If it had been a coup, it would be easier to bear. Less painful than the fact that people voted for this man, and that many didn’t vote at all. Even people of color, young people, women—many chose the right wing, despite Trump and JD Vance having said horrific things about immigrants, about migrants…

Trump didn’t pretend to be anyone else. I think that’s something people like about him: that he is largely what he appears to be. Not that he doesn’t lie—but with him, people feel they know what they’re getting.

So no, I don’t understand how anyone doesn’t feel ashamed. It’s your country, even if you voted for someone else. Still, we as a nation allowed this to happen. People often say Germans should be ashamed that Hitler came to power. There’s even a term, “Good Germans,” referring to those who didn’t actively support him but didn’t do anything to stop him either. They just allowed it. I feel similarly about the current situation in the U.S.

After his first term, people tried to console themselves with thoughts like, “It could be worse.” They said, “At least he doesn’t meddle in foreign affairs,” “At least he believes in America First,” “He’s not a warmonger and doesn’t seem to have imperial ambitions.” But on the day he started his second term—and this is how narcissism works—he became so grandiose he started talking about annexing Greenland, Canada, and Panama. So much for not being an imperialist. Now Trump poses an ever-growing threat—not just to America, but to the whole world.

The shame also comes from the fact that this isn’t just about us. Everything the U.S. does affects the entire world. Even those who couldn’t vote will feel the consequences —especially from Trump’s decisions on climate and health care.

Obviously, I didn’t vote for him. But it’s still my country. These are still my fellow citizens.

As a writer, how do you cope with the current political situation? Does it affect your writing?

After finishing The Vulnerables, I was thinking about what to do next. For a long time, I wasn’t satisfied with my short stories. But last spring—before the election—I wrote a few that I actually liked. That led to compiling a short story collection, which my agent loved. The collection has twelve or thirteen stories and is expected to be published in summer 2026.

While working on that, one story started growing into a novel. It’s quite different from my last three books. The Friend, What Are You Going Through, and The Vulnerables ended up forming an unofficial trilogy, narrated in first person by an unnamed writer who teaches creative writing. At the end of the third book, I felt like I had reached a conclusion —I no longer wanted to continue in that voice or structure. At one point I even thought: maybe I’ll never write another novel. Maybe I’ll just stick to short stories or criticism.

But then this new work started taking shape. It’s written in third person, the characters have names, and none of them are writers—which feels like a significant shift. I can’t say exactly where it’s heading yet, but that’s what I’m exploring now. And inevitably, the story reflects our current societal moment. I don’t think it will be overtly political, but you can’t write about the present without the texture of the time seeping into the narrative. Would you say that this trilogy is your most personal work?

Not exactly. My first book, A Feather on the Breath of God, was the most personal for me it’s at least half, if not more, practically autobiographical. There are also personal elements in For Rouenna and The Last of Her Kind, but I’d say the last three novels are more intimate.

In my earlier books, I didn’t write about what I actually do —that is, writing itself, being a writer. All my novels contain autobiographical elements, but there’s more fiction than non fiction in them, so I don’t consider them autobiographical novels. They may sound like autofiction, but they’re not.

I remember when I first came across The Friend —the cover with the dog drew me in instantly. A novel about a dog and writing? The perfect book for me. And it really was.

So I’m curious—how do animals inspire your writing? The Friend and its sequels aren’t your only books that feature animals. You also wrote Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury. What led you to start writing about animals?

Most writers who write for adults don’t write about animals. I think many are afraid that animal stories might come across as too sentimental or shallow.

The Mitz novel began rather unexpectedly. I’ve long been a huge admirer of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group. In the 1990s, after two of my books had already been published, a children’s book editor asked me if I’d ever considered writing for childre n—she thought I might be good at it, based on my writing. At first, I turned her down because I didn’t have any ideas. Then I remembered Mitz, the little marmoset that Leonard and Virginia Woolf had kept.

I’d come across Mitz in their letters and diaries —she appeared now and then in tiny, but charming anecdotes. So I thought: maybe I could write a children’s book about the Woolfs’ monkey. I even wrote three chapters in the style of books for young readers. But when I sent them to the editor, she flatly rejected them, saying that children’s literature must include children—which isn’t true at all! So I gave up on the idea.

But then my agent mentioned it to another editor, who liked the concept but wanted it to be “a book for children and adults.” I thought that sounded absurd and didn’t know how to go about it. Then I remembered Virginia Woolf’s Flush—a wonderful fake biography she wrote about Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel. That book isn’t written from the dog’s perspective, but it’s very tender. So I thought maybe I could write Mitz in that style. I pulled some things from the Bloomsbury archives, and it turned into a short work—but I truly enjoyed writing it. Writing about that little monkey—and later about the dog in The Friend—was a pure pleasure.

At first, I didn’t even plan to write about a dog in The Friend. I just began writing, and the story led me to the idea that the narrator inherits her friend’s dog. I wrote the scene where the friend’s wife, now a widow, calls her to meet—and I needed a twist in the story. Then I thought: What if she gives her the husband’s dog?

Then came the question: What kind of dog? I love Great Danes. They’re visually stunning, especially harlequin-colored ones. I imagined this enormous dog and thought about how the narrator lives in a tiny apartment like mine, where you can’t have such a big dog. That’s when I realized: this is my story. The same thing happened with What Are You Going Through —I didn’t plan to include an animal there either. Then I came to a part where the narrator is staying in an Airbnb, and I imagined her lying in bed reading. Suddenly, there was a cat.

People in the novel share stories, so I thought I’d add another one—a slightly magical one. I didn’t want the cat to talk—talking animals aren’t really my thing. But I found a way for the cat to have a voice: the cat talks all night, and in the morning, the narrator remembers just one story. So maybe it was only a dream.

That scene is only eight pages long and not directly connected to anything else in the book. I thought my editor would ask me to cut it or shorten it. But no—the first thing she said was: “I love that part with the cat.” After publication, readers started calling it “the book about cat.” They didn’t want to believe it was just a dream. They insisted the talking cat was real.

By the time I began writing the next book, I already knew there’d be another animal. And like the cat, the parrot doesn’t appear that often—but still, one UK review called the book “the book about the parrot”.

It’s amazing how animals win readers’ hearts. I wish more writers wrote about them. As for myself, I feel like I’ve closed the chapter on that with this last book —I can’t imagine writing about a hamster or a mouse.

Both The Friend and What Are You Going Through were adapted into films. Would you say that’s a dream come true for a writer?

Yes, I’d say it is. Hollywood is an important part of American culture. So many great films have come from there—some of the most beautiful ever made. Around the world, Hollywood is associated with postwar American dreams.

But the truth is, most writers end up disappointed by the film adaptations of their books. They often make the mistake of wanting to be involved in the filmmaking process —which almost never works out well.

I always hoped that my books would be made into films, though I knew it could turn out to be a bad experience. But even a bad adaptation doesn’t mean the book itself is bad.

I was lucky—not disappointed by either adaptation. I never expected the films to be exact mirrors of the books. With The Friend, I knew they’d focus on the dog’s story and leave out a lot of other things.

When I met with Almodóvar, it was clear from our conversation that he was mostly interested in the friendship between the two women—other themes in the novel mattered less to him. Interestingly, both directors added a character that doesn’t exist in the no vel: a daughter. In the book The Friend, the daughter is briefly mentioned—in the film, she becomes central. In What Are You Going Through, she’s also only briefly mentioned, but in The Room Next Door, she plays a significant role. The filmmakers of The Friend decided that the story needed this character. They told me they needed what they call a “triangle.” I don’t know much about films or screenwriting, but I understood their desire for a third character to balance the narrative.

My friend Vivian Gornick, who wasn’t impressed by The Room Next Door, asked me, “Do you really think this film represents your novel well?” But for me, that was never the question. I didn’t expect the film to be a mirror image of the novel.

When I found out that Almodóvar—one of my favorite directors—wanted to adapt What Are You Going Through, I immediately understood why. First, because of the female friendship. And second, because Spain legalized assisted dying in 2021. That’s a topic that means a lot to him; in recent years, he’s been dealing with questions of mortality. His movie Pain and Glory, which also explores aging, came out in 2019.

I have a friend whose books have been adapted multiple times, and he hasn’t been happy with any of the films. He’s afraid that if someone doesn’t read the book and only sees the film—and the film is bad—they’ll assume the book is bad too. Still, I’ve never met a writer who didn’t want a film adaptation. And I was quite lucky. All the actors —especially Naomi Watts in The Friend and Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, who play the two friends in The Room Next Door—were extraordinary.

Themes of aging and dying are also strongly present in your last three novels translated into Slovenian. How do you grapple with these issues through your writing?

When I was younger, I couldn’t imagine ever writing about aging. Why would I? Aging didn’t seem at all interesting to me at the time. You just get old, this or that happens. Nothing special. Only now that I’m older do I realize how wrong I was. Aging really isn’t boring. It’s incredibly interesting. In fact, I wish it were less interesting.

For many writers—take J. M. Coetzee, whom I also quote in The Vulnerables —this is the period when you begin to seriously engage with the big themes, like death, impermanence, loss. That’s completely natural. You write about what’s occupying your mind. For me, that became suicide, because my friends also began to think about it at a time when suicide rates were rising in the U.S. and probably elsewhere.

I knew people who were thinking of that as the way they’d leave this world. And one of them actually did. He jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, at just fifty-seven years old. That marked me. I began writing about someone who dies by suicide even before I i ncluded the dog in the story.

This stage of life also brings a sense of loss. I know people older than me who have buried all their friends, who have outlived their partners. When I think about it, I realize: those are my people, my generation. I too will bury my friends.

These realizations sneak into life in strange ways. In Vermont, I heard a story about a woman who went to a shelter to adopt a kitten, and they told her she was too old. She was 75 —just one year older than me. They said she could adopt a five-year-old cat or older, because—what if she dies before the kitten grows up? When I heard that story, I said to myself: “I’ll use this in my next novel.” Isn’t that both funny and sad at the same time? That’s what aging is —you suddenly start experiencing things you’d never thought about before.

In The Vulnerables, the older, unnamed first-person narrator ends up in a vacant New York apartment during quarantine with a younger man from Generation Z. How do you perceive this generation?

I think it couldn’t be harder for them. It seems to me this generation has only one big advantage—youth and the resilience that comes with it. Everything else… it’s like the world has turned against them. Of course, science has progressed. Many things th at used to cause terrible suffering can now be solved by medicine. But what I really can’t imagine is how they deal with such a flood of stimuli, with this overload of information. If I had been born later, I’d probably be using social media too, because I wasn’t a nonconformist in my youth. If my friends were doing something, I did it too. So I’m grateful that a lot of this was spared me.

When I think about these generations, what worries me most are climate change and the future they’re facing. How will leaders tackle these issues?

In 1968, we experienced what was called a Youthquake. The world turned toward the youth. It was most desirable to be under thirty. The market, the media, politics —everything revolved around young people and their ideas. Today, I feel like the world mostly exploits young people—to sell them something, to persuade them of something.

I really wish Generation Z would create a movement similar to the one from the sixties. We can laugh at the hippies—yes, some really did look ridiculous—but they had a philosophy: care for the environment, brotherhood, anti-racism, support for social equality. At parties, millionaires and workers mingled. The class divide we feel today wasn’t so pronounced back then.

It would be beautiful if young people today came together again around those same values not MAGA and consumerist values—but around ideas like community, peace, cooperation. If you look at the songs from that time, Get Together, Imagine—they all spoke about the possibility of a better world. They were anti-war, they promoted peace. What happened to those ideas?

Of course, there was also a dark side—drugs did a lot of harm—but the philosophy was right. I fear we’ve left today’s youth with conditions where there’s little room for hope. And we should be ashamed of that. It seems we care more about profit than their well-being. In the U.S., for example, education has become exorbitantly expensive. Students finish college with enormous debt. My generation didn’t have that. Universities have become corporations; instead of being scholars, students have become consumers. That was already beginning in my time, but now it’s out of control and is one of the greatest injustices young people face.

I read that you don’t consider yourself an optimistic person. And yet The Vulnerables is also a novel about hope. Where do you find hope?

It’s true—I’m not an optimist. I inherited my pessimism from my mother, who was German. She grew up during Nazism and the war. She had a wonderful sense of humor, but also a very dark view of humanity—she was aware of what people are capable of and how much horror they can inflict on each other.

And yet, I still manage to find hope. For example, during the pandemic. At that time, death was very close, and they said it would take six years to develop a proper vaccine. But in the end, they developed it in just a few months, saving so many lives, and the pandemic is now behind us.

So I say: people really are incredible. What they can achieve in art, science, technology is astonishing—and that gives me hope. They can cause a bad situation to suddenly turn around. That’s why I put the most hope in science—I must admit, more than in art.

That’s why what’s happening in the U.S. right now affects me so deeply. We survived a pandemic—together—and now… now we have to live in this nightmare. People had a choice. These elections were literally existential. Between life and death. And America cho se death. That’s how I see it. And yes—it hit me hard. I even feel a kind of betrayal. As if Americans blindly walked into a catastrophe.

Then there’s writing. As I wrote in The Vulnerables, Flannery O’Connor believed that people without hope don’t write novels. Sometimes I think: if I’m still writing, then there must be some trace of hope in me. Writing, for me, is proof that hope still exists—despite everything.

[00:00:02.17] – John Knych

Hello, Joan. Thank you for being here to discuss A Door into Ocean. First, we’ll jump right in. Can you share with us the origin of this book, your idea for it, how it came to be? And we’ll just start with how you came up with this book.

[00:00:20.17] – Joan Slonczewski

Well, that’s a great question. So I would say that the origin of this book, it’s like a tree with many roots. So it wasn’t just one origin, but different aspects grew together. So I think I would have to say, going back to reading science fiction, I read science fiction for many years. When I was growing up, I thought that the worlds of Robert Heinlein and Ursula Le Guin had more to do with my consciousness than the real world I lived in. And in particular, Ursula Le Guin, when I read her books in college, somehow I thought, Well, you know, that’s something I could write. I just had this feeling, and I wanted to have a dialog with her worlds, especially The Word for World is Forest. I was very taken by that book, the idea of the forest people and their conflict with the more destructive civilization. And yet I was disappointed at the ending. I thought, well, it seemed to me that the forest people had to become as bad as the invaders in order to repel them. And I thought, well, it doesn’t have to be that way. So at the time, I had accidentally ended up at a Quaker College.

[00:01:47.19] – Joan Slonczewski

I attended Bryn Mawr College for the science. And then the boys school associated with Bryn Mawr was Haverford, which was a Quaker College. And so I learned about Quakers and Quaker ways of dealing with things. And I thought, well, what if the forest people had dealt with things the way the Quakers did? And I was also very interested in Herbert’s Dune and the idea of the ocean, excuse me, the desert planet. But I had a contention with Dune because as a biologist, I knew that that wasn’t possible to have a planet that was dry and that water would poison things. It would not be possible to have the whole ecosystem work like that. So I thought of devising a water world, the water world of Shora. So there were many different things that came together.

[00:02:44.07] – John Knych

Wonderful. Thank you. We’ll move on to Brandon next. And before you arrived, Joan actually mentioned to Brandon, I said, I wonder if Dune had been a slight influence, and Brandon thought your ecology was better than what was done. So interesting to hear that you had a problem with the plausibility of the planet while reading it. But Brandon, onto you.

[00:03:12.16] – Brandon

Yeah. Thanks so much for joining us today. We really appreciate that. So you came up with this whole climate for Shora, and everything’s…The Sharers have a balance with everything on the planet, or I guess it’s a moon, right? But there’s this balance of this ecosystem, and they live within it, and they don’t want to disturb it or anything, which is very much in contrast to our world today. I’m just wondering, were you writing that with a theme in mind of: We don’t treat our planet properly today – so you wanted to show a way to treat an ecosystem?

[00:04:07.18] – Joan Slonczewski

Well, there were some seeds to that, Brandon. But first, let me say I’m really impressed seeing your bookcase, the range of really interesting stuff you have there. I can tell you’re a very thoughtful person. You have a lot of different things. So yes, in a sense, I I was very concerned with… I was aware of how the planet was getting trashed back then, and it’s not too much better now, although people are more aware of things now. Some things are better, others are worse. That’s a big topic. But I also presented, this was not really so much a utopia. The shareers leave hints about how their planet got to be the way it is. I did present a balanced ecosystem, but there are hints that it’s not a perfect balance. And this gets developed a little more in the next novel in the universe, The Daughter of Elysium, Where you find out that actually the planet Shora had started out, being…having a lot more ecology than it does. And much of their ecosystem got lost before The Sharers learned how to maintain the balance. So although it’s a balanced ecosystem, it’s in part because the shareholders manage it.

[00:05:37.02] – Joan Slonczewski

It’s not just an unmanaged ecosystem. And I think today, ecologists do not understand how ecosystems remain in balance, or even if there really is a balance. Okay, because over the history of the Earth, we’ve seen how ecosystems change. The biggest poison event on our planet was the emergence of oxygen from oxygen emitting phototrophs. And so over periods of millions of years or hundreds of millions of years, an ecosystem may seem balanced, but how is that possible? Is that real? Perhaps a steady-state is the best way to think about it. But The sharers do act as managers. So when they see that certain things are overgrowing, they They release the finger snails to feed on the plants. And so it’s a mixed thing. But I think the shares show a consistent respect for their ecosystem. And I think the concept of respect for nature is an important one that if you have respect, at least you’re working at it.

[00:06:55.00] – Brandon

Thank you. Yeah, I think that’s definitely something we could learn from today, that respect for the ecosystem.

[00:07:04.17] – Joan Slonczewski

So it’s paradoxal, isn’t it? That you respect things that you think are precious or in short supply. We respect babies, infants as being important and worthy of care. But if babies rain from the sky, then it would just be a nuisance like the rainfall. It’s hard to imagine. But Anything that we respect is precious. It’s because of the possibility of losing it. That’s a philosophical paradox.

[00:07:39.00] – Brandon

All right.

[00:07:40.16] – Brandon

Thank you.

[00:07:42.15] – John Knych

Thank you, Joan. On to Fab?

[00:07:45.14] – Fabri

Yeah. So I have a lot of questions, but new ones keep popping up as I hear you speak, Joan. So I want to thank you again for being here and for giving us this opportunity. And in relation of what What you just mentioned about managing the ecology, right? I think it’s really interesting that it gets in the way of this polar opposite. So do we manage the ecosystem with artificial clouds or we just let Mother Nature be, right? So I think you are touching on something that is in between those positions. And that’s something I haven’t thought of until I read your book. And on that, and you also mentioned Ursula K. Le Guin as someone that inspired you to write this book, or you are very much writing in her tradition. It also reminded me of her book, Always Coming Home, that I don’t know if you read, but she does talk about a communal society and how they managed to live in the Earth and sort of managing in a way. And I with different buildings and using some parts of the technology that they inherited from previous generations. So, yeah, I wanted to hear a bit more about this and your position or your thoughts on how do we deal with the climate disaster that we’re facing right now, not in a passive way, but also not in a very exploitative and active predatory way, right? So I wanted to pick your brain a bit about that.

[00:09:12.05] – Joan Slonczewski

Yes. Thanks, Fabri. So I did read Always Coming Home. I think that’s a good example in a way where she’s looking at cultures that are inspired by the Native American cultures and have respect for the environment as well as the more exploitative cultures. And so I think that In some ways, I went beyond that in developing a society that was very highly advanced technologically. So in always coming home, you don’t really have advanced technology. There are some mystical elements, but it’s There’s not advanced genetic engineering or advanced building or nanotechnology. So in my science fiction, you always assume that this is far in the future and there is advanced technology, but what kinds of technology? So the shareers have technology where everything is derived from genetic engineering. And so in a sense, they’ve chosen to live a certain way, but they’ve They’ve also, in their past history, they’ve experienced other choices. And the way they manage their ecosystem is by genetic engineering. They have avoided technologies based on on Silicon-based technologies in that book. And I think in a distant way, that was also similar to Herbert’s Dune. So it’s not often mentioned that in Herbert’s Dune, he assumes that people gave up on computing technology at some distant past.

[00:11:06.04] – Joan Slonczewski

And that’s really bizarre. It’s even more bizarre today. I’m surprised more people don’t point it out. How would that be possible? But in the case of a door to ocean, this is an open conflict. So the shares have rejected Silicon and use life technology. And so by the end of the book, though, they confront this other technology and they come to terms with it. And I think that since I wrote that book, it’s become much more clear that really there is no distinction. There’s life technology and silicon and metal technology. It’s all part of the same thing. So in my more recent books, I’m interested in the idea of AIs and constructs out of computing technology that have agency, just like creatures from life technology could have agency. So that was an interesting idea at the time, inorganic versus organic technologies. Today, I think it’s much more come together. We don’t think of it that way.

[00:12:21.14] – Fabri

Thank you.

[00:12:23.10] – John Knych

Thank you, Joan. I’m super embarrassed that I don’t have books behind me now. I’ve never doing that again. Yes, I have a kid who’s downstairs who’s staying home from school, so that’s why I’m in my bedroom. But I tried to wear an Ocean type theme shirt to make up for a lack of books. Well, I’m just glad that I got a computer to work today.

[00:12:48.19] – Joan Slonczewski

Well, I’m just glad that I got a computer to work today. I love my computers, and our home is full of computers. And it’s like if one doesn’t work, then another works.

[00:12:57.18] – John Knych

Yes. Joan. Before you wrote A Door in the Ocean, you received your PhD in molecular biophysics and biochemistry from Yale in 1982. And then you did post-doc work at UPenn studying calcium, flux, and lucite chemotaxis. And then during this- “White blood cells.”-Joan Yes. During this time, were you working on A Door in the Ocean? Was it a long process? And then also, this is something we often talk about in these groups, did you world-build first? Like create Shora, the social fabric, the technology, and then write the narrative, or was it simultaneous, or narrative first?

[00:13:47.24] – Joan Slonczewski

I would say it was all at once. I was developing the background and the characters all at once, and ideas would come, and then I would write things down. Like, if I was in the middle of the lab, I would write things on little straps of paper. Okay. “So- How did you do that all at once?”-John Knych

[00:14:05.24] – Joan Slonczewski

Because getting working in a lab and write, it’s not easy to.

[00:14:12.24] – Joan Slonczewski

When you’re in the lab, there are lots of times when you’re just waiting for things to happen. And so other students would kick their feet up and read a newspaper, and I would be jotting things down, ideas that would come about. And then I would come home and I write in the evening. I tended to write more in the evenings. Sometimes I may have been less efficient than other grad students. I think other grad students got experiments done quicker. But by the time I wrote my thesis, I had already published my first book, so my thesis was written in record time. I had no trouble writing a PhD thesis because I’d already published a science fiction novel. My first published novel was actually a novel about a Quaker planet, and that one’s gone out of print. I felt like I didn’t I don’t really know how to write when I was writing it, but it did get some good reviews, and that was about a planet colonized by Quakers, like the United States colonized by colonists, except that they discovered there were alien creatures there. And so that was the plot of that book. So that book got published, but it didn’t get much attention outside Quakers.

[00:15:28.01] – Joan Slonczewski

So after that, though, I began to think about other ideas related to the Quakers, but also related to the science I was doing. I think the biggest motivator in keeping me writing was concern about the world, the ecology, and the nuclear arms race. At that time, we were just 10 minutes away from Armageddon. And so I got involved with Quaker movements to save the planet, basically. I helped organize a demonstration in Manhattan in 1982 It drew a million people to New York City, and I helped organize that. And so that was actually one of the things that made Reagan start negotiating with the Russians. So I thought, well, if this thing is possible, then I can combine that concept with things I saw in the lab. So for instance, one day in the lab, I had fellow workers who were looking at purple bacteria that use a purple pigment to pick up light. And then the pigment bleaches when that happens, and then it pumps a proton to generate energy, actually a proton current. And so someone showed me this and said, look at this, look at this. And they had this purple tube and then flash light on it and it bleached clear.

[00:16:54.23] – Joan Slonczewski

And it was just so amazing that they had purified this protein from these bacteria. So So I got the idea from the purple bacteria that what if The Sharers had bacteria in their skin that would bleach, but they would bleach when they lost oxygen. So that became white trans. So that was something where I had the idea of the Quaker-like Sharers, but the idea of what happened to the breath microbes came from something I saw in the lab. So that shows how things would come from different places. So then when I was imagining how The Sharers would interact, I started to wonder, well, what clothes would they wear on a planet covered entirely by ocean, where you live on an island and so on. At that time, there was no internet. It’s hard for you to understand today what it’s like to try to research a book without the internet. But I was at Yale at time and had Sterling Library, one of the greatest libraries. And so I started thinking, I thought, well, maybe they wouldn’t wear any clothes. And I knew one person who had been to nudist colonies in our writing group.

[00:18:15.02] – Joan Slonczewski

I did have a writer’s workshop that I met with. So I actually looked this up in Yale, Sterling Library, the library, looked up nudism, and a Yale student had done a thesis on nudist colonies and nudism. So I found that book in a library. And the funny thing is all the pictures had been ripped out of it. And so I brought it to the library and said, this is a damaged book, but I didn’t damage it. And they said, well, books like that, that’s what happens. Because without the Internet, Where do you find pictures of naked people? You ripped them out of books. There was a picture, the label was a Nudist Wedding, and that picture was ripped out. So I got the idea that this This might be interesting. It was two ways. First, I thought, Well, this might help me sell the book because my last book hadn’t sold very well. So I thought, Well, if I write a book about nude people, Maybe that’ll sell better. At the same time, what I read in the student’s thesis was that he eventually concluded that nudists act just like everybody else. It doesn’t matter whether you wear clothes or not.

[00:19:27.23] – Joan Slonczewski

You would behave the the same way, that there were not unique characteristics to people that live without clothes. So I thought, Well, that makes it easy. So I just wrote the book. And for most of the part, it doesn’t matter if they wear clothes or not, except that you’re aware of it. And there are key plot points where the people from the other civilization are aware of the nudity, but not the people in it. So that shows how different things came together and also different life experiences. The experience of searching out a book in a library can lead to something interesting. Those are some examples.

[00:20:09.04] – John Knych

Thank you, Joan. Yes, you answered my next question, which I was curious about, which was how your science background informed your writing and whether you discovered things in the lab that then you applied to the narrative. Thank you for that. Brandon, back to you.

[00:20:24.20] – Brandon

Yeah. So I really enjoyed the organic technology aspect. I really liked the idea of the click-fight webs coming up. You could create molecular models off of that. And the click-flies can do all these different things. How did you come up with the idea that clickfies So the click flies, I have to think back on that.

[00:20:55.24] – Joan Slonczewski

I think actually one of the inspirations for the shape of the click-fly guys, was my mother was a violin teacher. She was actually a very well known Suzuki violin teacher. And we grew up with classical music and violins all over the house. I thought of the clickfly with the mandibles as looking like the way you play a violin, and you do pitzucato, the bow hits the strings. I think that was where I got the idea for what the click flies would do. In addition, there were all kinds of ideas about machines that could communicate. Although at that time, the thinking at that time was that machines would never be able to reproduce the human voice or understand what humans said. Now, my father was a physicist at IBM, a Nobel nominated physicist. So at that time, I managed to get a job one summer working in the laboratory there. And I overheard the conversations of the physicists. And IBM was at the forefront of voice recognition technology and things like that. So it’s hard to believe today. But back then, they were very discouraged. They said, well, we’re doing this. We’re getting paid to do this research, but we have no idea what we’re doing.

[00:22:31.03] – Joan Slonczewski

It will never come to anything. They were very discouraged. They said, we’re 10 years away from being able to recognize a human voice. Well, I guess that was back in around 1980, so a couple more decades, and now we take this for granted. But the idea of machine… I had the idea that, well, instead of a machine, it would be a living thing that looked machine-like. And there was more awareness among biologists that animals could understand what humans did and imitate, like parrots, imitate human letters. Today, we actually think that parrots and octupuses and so on are a lot more intelligent than we realize that actually have perhaps approaching human level intelligence. But at least at that time, there was more idea of communication by animals.

[00:23:28.00] – Brandon

So would you consider Were the click flies having been genetically engineered or were they a natural organism on the planet or on the moon?

[00:23:39.17] – Joan Slonczewski

They would definitely have been genetically engineered from a natural stock. I think what was hinted at and later said a little more in later books is that The Sharers actually are the the current level of many stages of development of technology. And so, yes, at some point in their ancient history, they would have life-shaped the click flies and just about everything, even the sea swalters, just about every organism in their ecosystem has been touched by their life-shaping. And so, of course, that was then. So today we know that every part of the planet is touched by human technology and the human engineering. So although we did not engineer grasses to become corn, it’s clear that human breeding of grass has led to corn and wheat, and the same thing with animals, dogs and sheep and cattle. So I think that it’s just a little bit more that the shares would have, at some point, genetically engineered everything. So whether they engineered the flesh borers or not, that’s less clear. There’s also a certain amount of disagreements. So the shares, they aim for consensus about things. But that consensus is about groups that have all kinds of disagreements from different islands, different raft colonies.

[00:25:26.15] – Joan Slonczewski

And the character dynamics were very much based on things that I saw going on in the Quaker meetings. I was a member of a friends meeting at that time. And so the character dynamics, I saw a lot of that. I saw how people disagreed and yet reached consensus.

[00:25:45.22] – Brandon

That’s really interesting. Thank you.

[00:25:52.16] – Fabri

Yeah, I’ll go ahead. So, Joan, my next question was going to be about how was it to write in a political context where neoliberalism was on its peak and a lot of progressive politics were scrapped. And you already mentioned that you helped organize a demonstration against Schwiegman. So maybe you can talk a bit more about How was it to write about a topic that was much against the powers that were ruling at that moment? And if you found any opposition from other Sci-Fi writers or from the industry or even political pressures, or how was that received maybe in your university or in the Sci-Fi circles? So I was just curious about that.

[00:26:38.01] – Joan Slonczewski

Yeah, that’s very interesting. So in terms of political opposition, since I was with a friend meeting, it was pretty obvious. In terms of the outright politics of the day, it was clear that there was Reagan politics, and then there were were liberals, and then there were the Quakers. I would say I saw three groups. They were the Reagan Conservatives. And this was shocking to me, actually, because I grew up in a Republican voting household in New York. In New York, Republicans are liberal Republicans. I thought that was Republicans, manage, balance the budget, and treat the poor. That That was so it came as a shock to me to see Conservatives that wanted to destroy everything. At the same time, the Yale that I was at, the research community, young scientists did not bother with that thing. They were so focused on their research that on the night that Reagan was elected, there were postdocs in my building that were not registered to vote. They were so disconnected. It struck me that everyone has these ideals of the university, but why didn’t they even vote? Don’t they understand the society they’re in? And then there were the Quakers, Quakers who seem very connected with society, and we have to do things to save the planet.

[00:28:21.02] – Joan Slonczewski

So when I saw that, I realized that the Quakers were really right, and that if we were going to survive, that was how we had to do things. And by that time, I was accustomed to opposition. At that time, there was a shipyard right outside Yale called the Electric Boat Shipyard that built the Trident submarine, which had 300 nuclear warheads on it. And when the time comes, they have to release all of them because otherwise the ship is detected. So it was just crazy. So we used to protest. I remember going with the Quakers to protest. Every time they launched one of these trident, I would go with them. And of course, I saw the police and so on. But the Quakers were very well disciplined. It was understood that Okay, that we go in silence and we have these rules. This is how we protest. The amazing thing is the shipyard respected that. It was hard to believe today this would not be possible. But the shipyard said, Okay, you can come right up to the fence and that’s fine. We know that you’re Quakers and you’ll be fine. So I had this experience of looking over the fence and looking way in the distance and seeing the ship.

[00:29:35.21] – Joan Slonczewski

It looked like an orange-colored sausage, very phallic. And then there were workers right across the fence, and we held our signs. And so I remember the one time I looked and there was an African-American gentleman who was working, and he looked at us and he said, You’re right. He said, I know you’re right. But of course, there were so few jobs then that made a big impression on me. I thought, well, we have to be here because people have to be working. They need jobs. Those kinds of experiences. That was how I saw the politics. I also saw how some of the Quakers, they were a little more forward. Some of them, there was a rule. If you wanted to get arrested, you crossed a line. You would spill blood on the steps because they would give their own blood, they would remove their own blood, and then spill that on the steps. Then you would get arrested. It was all very choreographed. That gave me a lot of ideas for how things would work. But also asking how I felt about opposition. Well, I pretty much experienced the opposition there would be. There was also a Ku Klux Klan rally in New Haven, Connecticut.

[00:31:00.20] – Joan Slonczewski

They had a Ku Klux Klan meeting. Go figure. We protested that, and I saw the violence that happened with that. There were other kinds of opposition. I did experience some sexism in the science fiction community. There were people who wrote off. They said, Oh, what you’re writing, you don’t know what you’re doing. That’s just for women. Also, they said, oh, that was the ’60s. It’s not like that. They discounted the whole pacifism idea that was considered, Well, that’s not real. That’s outmoded. And gay culture was in the ’60s. I heard some of that in the science fiction, and some of the reviews from science fiction writers were like that. But when my book came out, it was right around the time of the revolutions in in Europe, in particular Poland. So I knew about the Poland, Solidarność, movement because my father had ties to Poland and the Polish physicists. And so he knew all about that. And so when my book came out, I got letters from people. I got a letter from students in Czechoslovakia about how this was like their revolution. And nobody else, it was a surprise in America, how could there be a pacifist revolution?

[00:32:33.13] – Joan Slonczewski

So I got a big break when Isaac Asimov flashed my book on television. It was on McNeill Lair or News Hour, where Isaac Asimov said, Well, here are the most adult books in science fiction, and he listed seven books, and one of them was Adorn Ocean. He just flashed it on the screen. So I did get a big break with that. I think Asimov was a pacifist. Most people don’t know that.

[00:32:59.20] – Fabri

Yeah. Well, that’s fascinating. I didn’t know that.

[00:33:02.16] – Fabri

And also it’s good to see or it’s good to learn that a lot of your Quaker experience and your demonstration experience actually translates into the book, right? Because we see pacifism, we see communal organization. And also it’s good to pass that out to new generations as a good way to protest, right? When you get your message across, you don’t get arrested unless you want to, and you don’t antagonize the workers, right? Because sometimes, I don’t we go protest a farm, like an industrial farm or a coal mine opening, you don’t have to be against the workers at the place because they just need to put food on the table, right? So that’s something that I think is not quite clear or is not as spread today as it was from what you mentioned in the ’80s, at least in my country. So it’s really good to know and to pass that knowledge over. So, yeah, that’s really good.

[00:33:57.17] – Joan Slonczewski

I did also research. I read the works of Gene Sharp (The Methods of Nonviolent Action). Gene Sharp founded the How to Take Down Dictators. And so I read everything that Gene Sharp wrote, and that also came to the… The Arab Spring movements drew a lot on Gene Sharp. So there is a whole science to nonviolent action. And many of the plot elements in A Door to Ocean were based on that, both either based on my experience or on things that were in Gene Sharp’s writing. And I recommend Jean Sharp. It’s all on the Internet now to anyone interested in that.

[00:34:37.01] – Fabri

Yeah, I’m making a note because I didn’t know him. So, yeah, I’ll look him up.

[00:34:43.21] – John Knych

Thank you, Fabri. Thank you, Joan. Yes, Joan. I have a two-part question. First part, have you been surprised at the longevity of this book and the reprint? Right before you arrived, I said to Brandon, we were talking about how I discovered it. And I asked a close friend of mine, I said, what science fiction book is great that people don’t know about, that isn’t like Dune made into a movie? And immediately she said, A Door into Ocean. So first part of the question, are you surprised that this book has had its longevity? And then another part of the question, I love the ending of this book, and I love the character Lystra, and that she didn’t say anything. I was so happy that she just went away and Spinel swam after her. I thought it just was well done and satisfying. But in Chapter 17, also there’s this reflection on, is the fight over? Is the fight worth it? And hearing your political background and activism, do you look at this book and hope that it somewhat of a blueprint for people in the future to think, okay, even though it’s science fiction, we can passively fight without violence.

[00:36:13.03] – John Knych

Was that idea throughout the whole process? And do you hope in the future that people will take that from your book?

[00:36:24.07] – Joan Slonczewski

Yes, I think that certainly my hope is that people could take an inspiration from that. As I said, I heard from some people in Europe who had managed to get a hold of the book and found it inspiring. And I hope that other people can learn from it and perhaps go beyond it, just as I learned from Le Guin and then went beyond it. So that’s what I would hope. And I guess it’s really hard when you’re close to your own work. I’m a little surprised that it’s still seen as current today as it was back then, because I think it’s easy for what you write to become dated. But that particular book I think it still resonates with many people. I’ve seen bloggers start to pick it up again for whatever reason. There’ve been a couple of blog sites, the big thanks site listed it as one of five novels, including works by Asmael Then Sagan said, these are works, in particular, that are written by scientists. It just seems to me that this past year, I’ve seen a lot more attention to it again. So I’m glad that people are looking at that.

[00:37:52.04] – Joan Slonczewski

I think we live in a time when in this country, we feel political threats as well as global threats, and people need to have a blueprint for how to act. The biggest problem I see for activism in my community, where I’m coming from, is that people are afraid to speak up. At Kenyon College, 20 years ago, there used to be an informal course called Porch Sitting, which was led by a local farmer sociologist who who taught people how to sit on a porch and talk. And the idea was that before there was the Internet, it was normal to go next door and say hello to somebody and just talk on their porch. And today, we don’t do that anymore. We barely know who lives next door, and yet we know people on the Internet continent away. But people are actually afraid to go knock on a door of a stranger. So one of the things I’ve been trying to do in this community in rural Ohio, is train people how to do that, how to go out and talk with your neighbors and organize, find people that have your concerns.

[00:39:13.03] – John Knych

Thank you. And then a quick follow-up question that, Joan. Something that struck me right in the beginning was how you were able to balance this village, right? Simple trade, commercial atmosphere with space travel, an inhabited moon. Did you make a conscious effort to try to have your sci-fi be change-resistant? Did you think, “All right, many sci-fi books in the past are dated. I hope mine won’t be dated.” And by balancing this village atmosphere with space travel, it will be resistant to change. Or did you just think, I’m writing the book that I want to write that’s entertaining and just go ahead?

[00:40:01.11] – Joan Slonczewski

Well, at the time I was writing this book, it’s hard to say. First of all, my first book had been somewhat Earth-related, and I knew that that book hadn’t sold very well. It was on another planet, but then people came from Earth. So it was an Earth connected universe. I had a feeling that that wasn’t going to be what I would be I asked it. Since then, I’ve tried. And just for whatever reason, the books that I write that are Earth-centered are not as successful as the books in the world that I envision. So for whatever reason, the universe that I’ve envisioned, it speaks to people, and it’s somehow actually more convincing than the Earth-related world. That’s just what I’ve found. Although I do have a book, The Highest Frontier, about College on a Space Satellite, and that one did win the Campbell Award again. So I think for a certain audience, that was successful. But in general, I think that the world that I created because you don’t have to worry about whether the society would really act that way. And so you can just take the world for what it is without trying to connect it geographically.

[00:41:30.07] – Joan Slonczewski

In terms of thinking about a book that would last, I don’t know. I actually, I experienced disappointment early while I was writing Adorned Ocean. I sent an early version to the same publisher as my Quaker book, and they just rejected it offhand. They said, This sounds like a fairytale. I also knew that the editor was a bit homophobic. And so that was devastating at that time because I thought, well, maybe this book will never get published. So I would say that from my perspective, at that time, it was very hard to get things published. Either there was the New York scene, the publishers, or there was nothing, Vanity Press, it was called. Today, there’s a much wider range of publication opportunities. So at that time, over the years I was writing it, I really had no idea if it would ever get published at all. I just tried to write it as best I could. I did some workshopping with the New Haven Science Fiction Writers Workshop, but I didn’t know if it would get published at all, let alone how it would be read 40 years later. I was fortunate in that a later version of the book did reach an appropriate editor.

[00:42:51.23] – Joan Slonczewski

The early version was rejected by all the major publishers, but David Hartwell picked it up. David Hartwell is probably the best known editor of science fiction. So he picked it up and looked at it and made some suggestions, including for the ending, or he didn’t like the original ending that I had.

[00:43:18.18] – John Knych

Can I ask what the original ending was?

[00:43:23.14] – Joan Slonczewski

The original ending was more tragic, where Merwin dies. And then they have to deal with that. So I saw that as a Gandhian maneuver, and that so often the leaders of peace revolutions are seen as sacrificial. So often that occurs. But actually what David pointed out is that that works for male heroes, but it doesn’t work for females, because if the female dies, that’s seen as a passive sacrifice. And this is a problem I found in general in plotting novels is that what happens to male and female characters is viewed very differently. And this is still true today. We have a very gendered consciousness. It’s so paradoxical. Today, we have a whole spectrum of genders. I can assign a name to what the shareers were. They were pansexual. They were not lesbian. They were pansexual. But those words did not exist then. Today, my students will say, well, I’m 30% gay and 20% asexual. They’ll say all these different things. And it’s confusing. The ones that say they’re asexual feel more comfortable in the gay community than they do in the heterosexual community because they don’t get hit on. And yet the gender extremes are worse than ever, politically and so on.

[00:45:03.09] – Joan Slonczewski

So why is that? That’s an interesting question. So for me, I actually tried to avoid dealing with gender. I wanted to deal with politics and science and so on. But I felt that you have to write for the audience that there is. So that’s getting a little far away from what you first asked. I just wrote something that I hoped would be readable and entertaining at the same time presenting these very serious ideas. But getting it published was my first thought. It didn’t occur to me, well, how will it be 40 years later?

[00:45:46.16] – John Knych

Thank you. I’ll either back to Brandon or I saw Fabr9 had his hand up. But Brandon, I don’t know if you have a question in your pocket.

[00:45:55.03] – Brandon

I definitely agree that it still holds up today. And readers can for sure learn about the climate and the political issues. So I understand that you’re a microbiologist and a professor, is that right?

[00:46:14.07] – Joan Slonczewski

Yes.

[00:46:15.18] – Brandon

So do you have students ever come up and ask to sign your books?

[00:46:22.03] – Joan Slonczewski

Oh, yes. I’ve had students. Students are very aware that I write books. And So for most of my career at Kenyon, since the ’80s, I have run a major research lab with funding from the National Science Foundation. And I study how bacteria swim, how bacteria respond to acid and base at the molecular level. And I’ve been very aware of living organisms as molecular constructs. And all my research is done with many, many student researchers. In fact, that’s how I spend most of my grant funds is by hiring. I hire first year students or even before they get to Kenyon, I send out a call for any first year student that wants to work in a lab. So that’s how I’m known. It’s called Bacteria Lab. And I sometimes have In the past, I’ve had as many as 10 or 20 students in my research lab. This year, I’ve slowed down a bit because I’m moving into full-time writing after 40 years. But you can see on my website the generations of student lab groups that have worked with me. At the same time, I also taught a course called Biology and Science Fiction. And so many students took that for a science requirements.

[00:47:40.18] – Joan Slonczewski

So in that course, we read all kinds of literature, including some of my books. I had them read Adorned Ocean, but also Dune. And we saw films like Avatar and things like that. So students are definitely aware that I write. And I’m just now starting to teach a course on how to write science fiction.

[00:48:04.04] – Brandon

Yeah, I actually majored in microbiology as a bachelor. So it sounds like I would love to have you as a professor. Sounds great.

[00:48:14.16] – Joan Slonczewski

Oh, thanks. I appreciate that. But you have to like chemistry and physics, though, because from my Yale training, I always look at organisms in terms of the fundamental electrons and protons that they’re made of. And you hear a lot about that in my course.

[00:48:33.24] – Brandon

So do you consider yourself a scientist first or an author first or a scientist who writes? How do you.?

[00:48:43.07] – Joan Slonczewski

It’s all part of the same thing. In order to dream up new experiments, you have to use the same part of the brain as dreaming up new plots. And you have to tell a story. To get grant funding, you have to tell a story about your research. And so I think part of how I got grant funding for so many years was that I could write great grant stories since the fiction audience actually is a lot more exact and hard to please than the grand audience because they can pick up a book or not. They’re much pickier. So because I could tell a story in science fiction, I knew how to tell a good grant story. And also in writing your research articles about your research, you have to tell a story about it. So to me, it’s all part of the same brain.

[00:49:37.04] – John Knych

Thank you. Fabri?

[00:49:39.12] – Fabri

Yeah. So it’s really good news that you’re going back to writing. That’s really good news for everyone, because, again, I think the book is really interesting. It’s really current and entertaining as well. So that’s really good news. And you mentioned how hard it is maybe to make time to write. I was wondering if you have any time to read, if you’re reading any current sci-fi authors, if you had the chance of exploring how are they addressing the topics that you wrote in the ’80s and in the last decades. So if you have the time, and if you do, if you have the goal into the current sci-fi writing.

[00:50:20.16] – Joan Slonczewski

Yes. So I tend to read widely, not just science fiction. In terms of science fiction, in terms of science fiction I find interesting. I think Nadio Korafor’s Binti, I find very interesting. Some of the different cultural themes, I find that very interesting and relevant to the times we live in now. If you like graphic works, O’Korafor’s La Guardia about the where LaGuardia Airport is a major interplanetary port for aliens and all the different aliens that come in. And I really like the visual aspect of it. Also, I’m a big fan of the murderbot series by Martha Wells, which has now become amazingly an Apple series. So I encourage my students to read murderbot Because in a way, it’s very simple, but it’s a very simple portrayal of what an AI machine might be like that’s actually aware. It’s also an enslavement story. I’m very interested in science fiction as a way of depicting things without the reader being aware of what they’re seeing. So it’s one thing if you write a slave narrative like Kindred. Octavia Butler is also a favorite author of mine. But I think Kindred, it’s very obvious that’s a slave narrative.

[00:52:12.09] – Joan Slonczewski

But in Murderbot, it’s not obvious because it’s defined as a machine that uses the object pronoun. And so you really have to think about it to realize, well, this is what you’re reading. So people are just now starting to think about, well, what will happen when AIs wake up. And I think that’s the next justice theme that will come up.

[00:52:37.11] – Fabri

Well, that’s exciting. Yeah. Because also I was thinking about Octavia Butler’s Dawn that came out, I think, after your book. And she does also mention or works around the topic of a non-hierarchical world or how the hierarchy structures have been the downfall of Earth. But she’s quite explicit about that, right? And I think your book, you present this communal society in a way that’s just possible, but it’s also a given, right? So there’s not a lot of fuss or working towards that. It’s just this is a fact, this is how it works, and it actually works, right? So you’re presenting this alternative that is not very on the nose. And I think that’s really good of your book. I really enjoy that part. So, yeah, I just wanted to mention that.

[00:53:25.15] – Joan Slonczewski

Thanks. Yes. I really like Octavia Butler’s Dawn, and I’m very curious to see how that will be brought to the screen. I know Aver DuVernay is trying to do that. I’ve written some things. I’ve written some science fiction criticism or essays, and I have written essays about Octavia Butler, especially Dawn, and I’m very interested in the way she portrays the aliens and the humans in in Dawn, and actually both are hierarchical, although in different ways. And she shows it in a biological context. Butler’s work is very biological. I think she’s not been recognized as one of the most biological of science fiction writers. She gets it right in the biology. And so, yes, I’m definitely interested in Dawn.

[00:54:26.20] – John Knych

Thank you for having me. Thank you, Joan. All right, Joan, I want to make sure we don’t take up too much of your time. So I have my last question, and then Brandon or Fabri, if you want to ask a final question. This is a very left field question, but you, Joan, you have such a Knowledge in microbiology, physics, chemistry, science fiction writer for years, that I want to ask you about bio computing and what you think of it. The reason why is because I recently watched a video where They’ve been able to take brain cells and have the brain cells play Pong, to make decisions. And in this video, they said, we have a hunger… Humanity has a hunger for data, and semiconductors is a limit. I think the distance between transistors is seven atoms now. And in this video, it said, if we use cells that have a latest structure similar to how our neurons work, we can do things with data and store data like never before. Do you know anything about biocomputing? Can you share with us your thoughts on that next step for humanity?

[00:55:36.07] – Joan Slonczewski

Yeah, I’m interested in what you call biocomputing or cyborg on a microscopic level. So I’m interested in that as a current technology thing.

[00:55:58.06] – John Knych

Is it plausible to store data through bio-bacteria?

[00:56:03.19] – Joan Slonczewski

Yeah, it’s entirely plausible. But actually, the best long term storage is DNA. DNA is a pretty stable molecule. And there are people working on DNA and variants of DNA to store data, but it’s stored in a largely inaccessible state. There are also DNA computers where you can put DNA molecules in solution and they solve a problem. So in terms of cell connections, so I think it’s unlikely that you would get the highest density data storage that way. I think quantum computing is more likely to get there. I’m also familiar with developments in quantum computing. What I find, though, is the more I read up on these various kinds of data storage and data processing, in the end, it seems to me they all converge the same. I know when I started writing my current book, which is Minds in transit, which is coming out in July. So the original title was the Qubit Plague, because I had written about the… The Brain Plague was my book about bacteria in people’s brains, and the Qubit Plague was about quantum computers as coming alive and having sedience. But the more I researched and read, it’s very hard to understand for me, the quantum computing.

[00:57:37.14] – Joan Slonczewski

The more I read about it, the more I understood that it’s really no different. It’s just another computing architecture. And so I think it’s not going to matter that much. And this was clear also at the near the end of a door in the ocean, there’s a scene where where spinel and one of the soldiers are having a dialog about the hemoglobin molecule, about what is important about stone versus organic materials, because that’s a big theme throughout the book. And throughout the book, it’s seen as an opposition. Organic is good and stone is maybe bad, stone is dead and so on. And what they eventually reach is they reach an understanding that actually there are just as many organic, inorganic molecules in the human body. So hemoglobin has an iron, and there’s iron, there’s molybdenum, magnesium, zinc. There are all kinds of inorganic ions that are essential in the human body. So it’s really a false dichotomy that whatever data is stored and whether it’s organic or inorganic, that still data is data, and sentience could be sentience. You’re We’re probably familiar with it. There’s a philosophical tradition, particularly the Asian tradition of philosophy, that says that consciousness is a continuum from the most conscious things we know, the humans and whatever is superhuman, all the way down to the to the stones.

[00:59:22.01] – Joan Slonczewski

We saw this in the film, Everything, Every, Which, Way, But, Once. Everything, Everywhere, At, Once. There’s the scene where the two characters become stones, and they both have the eyes. And so I think that that’s actually an important idea in the science of consciousness. We can’t refute it. Is it possible that even an inert rock has a certain level of sedience and that it’s all gradation? We understand now that intelligence, as humans acknowledge it, has evolved multiple times. It’s evolved in insects, in octupuses, and in birds and humans. Okay, and so So I guess this is getting back to your question. Yes, I think it’s interesting that they’re connecting living cells with machines. But so what? We’ve had prosthetic devices for a long time. I don’t find that an intellectual advance, or maybe it’s just it would have been an advance 20 years ago. But right now, to me, it’s just another technology. So the book that was going to be Qubit plague, I renamed Minds in transit, and it’s more about all the different kinds of sentient minds that there are. So there are microbes, the microbes from brain plague. And then there are Androids that look human, not.

[01:01:05.09] – Joan Slonczewski

And then there are virtual things like the main AI transit consists entirely of code and is not fixed to anything made of silicon or metal. And then there are gigantic networks. So what is sentient or what is not? It could be anything. And so that’s the question that interests me now is, how would you know if something is sentient? Maybe that’s even the wrong question. Maybe if everything is sentient, the question is, what has the political ability to demand recognition as sentient? Maybe that’s the most important practical question, because if everything has the potential to be sentient, it, practically speaking, we’re not going to recognize something sentient unless it demands to be recognized. Okay, Which is a point that I also try to get across to my neighbors who don’t like what the government is doing. Say, well, if you don’t knock on a door of a stranger, your opinion won’t matter. It’s not whether you have a good opinion or not. If you can’t knock a door of a stranger, it doesn’t matter. What matters is if you stand up for your sentience, not whether you’re sentient or not. Okay, so it draws a lot from your question.

[01:02:30.12] – Joan Slonczewski

But yes, I’m interested in that biology, but in terms of where it’s going.

[01:02:41.04] – John Knych

And why wouldn’t DNA type storage be accessible? You mentioned that in the beginning, you said it’s not accessible, if we use- Okay, that’s just for practical reasons.

[01:02:51.02] – Joan Slonczewski

DNA has evolved to be a static molecule that can be compacted. To read the information, you need enzymes that pull it open, and then it’s not… Once you pull it open, then it’s not as stable anymore. Okay? So that’s entirely, practically speaking. But yes, that could be your next hard disk storage could be DNA.

[01:03:19.03] – John Knych

Thank you. Brandon, any last question?

[01:03:26.04] – Brandon

Yeah. Minds in Transit sounds really interesting, so I’m going to check that out. My question is, what’s the best way to support you as an author? I define this second-hand, a door to ocean. Do you have a website we can buy from, or do you just recommend going to Barnes & Noble, or what’s the best way to support you?

[01:03:51.05] – Joan Slonczewski

I think I would say wherever you buy my books is fine with me. I know that in general, for authors that depend on making For a living, obviously, it’s best to buy the first-hand copy. But I’m just happy to have everyone buy my books personally. But then I have the luxury of saying that because I have independent means from my professorship. I would say in general, for authors, if you want authors to keep writing, buy their books, both their new books and their backlist that come out. The sad thing is that Amazon was really a great thing. It has been a really great thing both for purchasers and for small presses. For many small presses, and even for self-publishers. The Amazon model was really the great thing. I should mention another author I really like is Cy Clarke, The Teepot series. Very humorous fluff, but also with imagination about how different aliens might interact, how different kinds of intelligence might be. And she’s everything. She lives in London. She publishes, edits, and everything, her own books and markets her own books. And it’s possible to do that now. It wasn’t possible back then. So the Amazon model was always was really great, I thought.

[01:05:25.21] – Joan Slonczewski

But right now, I I’m avoiding promoting Amazon now because I think, unfortunately, that politically, they’ve gone in a very bad direction. However, there are so many online booksellers now. Barnes & Noble is great, but there’s also there’s There are others out there, Books for a Better Planet. There are ones that claim for every book you buy, they’ll donate a dollar to a library. So I would say whatever platform my book is sold books are sold on, that’s fine with me.

[01:06:05.07] – Brandon

Well, thanks again.

[01:06:07.12] – Fabri

I just wanted to mention, sorry, that I think Powell’s has an online store if you buy from the States, so that may be worth checking out. And my last question was, so first, I’m excited about your new book coming out in July. I actually be in the States in July, so hopefully I can get it from there because it’s quite hard to get I have the books here in Barcelona. But I just wanted to ask maybe more of a personal question about your writing schedule. Where do you find the time to write? Do you have any particular preference and also any advice that you can give us on finding a time to focus and to really get to work in the writing? That’d be appreciated.

[01:06:53.01] – Joan Slonczewski

That’s a big question. When I first wrote Adora and the Ocean, I wrote because I had to write because I felt so strongly about what I was experiencing in the world. I mostly wrote in the evenings, and I found that the bookwriting went best in the evenings, whereas during the day I was running my research And Adorned Ocean was written entirely in longhand in four looseleaf books of paper, and then it had to be typed on a semi-electric typewriter. And of course, today, most of my writing is on the computer. Until recently, it’s been mostly in the evenings. Now I’m just starting to write a little more in the daytime. I also write microbiology textbooks, and I’m always revising the textbooks. Microbiology is a field, as Brandon knows, that is as amazing as science fiction. The things really happening in microbiology. For about 10 years I couldn’t write science fiction because microbiology was more interesting and amazing. And it still is today. The gut-brain axis is what I envisioned in brain plague back in 2000. And so during the day, I do a lot of my writing of the textbooks. And then I think it’s still at night more that I write.

[01:08:25.23] – Joan Slonczewski

But I’ve also found that I found a writer’s group where we sit and write together. So for Minds in transit, I found that there were times when I actually wrote better, it’s called generative writing, when you just have other people writing on their projects with you. And I recommend trying that. That really works for some people, that writing is more fluent when you have fellow writers, even though they’re completely different what they’re writing about.

[01:08:51.13] – Fabri

But you’re sharing a focus, right? Like a writing time, all of you. Yeah, so that’s interesting. Thank you.

[01:08:59.23] – John Knych

Wonderful. Thank you so much, Joan, for being with us today and sharing your story and the process of this book. So I’m going to share this with the other readers in the group, and I’ll send you an email with the link to the video with the transcript. I’ve enjoyed this. Thank you.

[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.