[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.