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KMO Show episode number 28 with guest David Roman, Tuesday, January 7th, 2025.

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Well, let's just launch into it.

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And I will say that you are listening to the KMO show.

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I'm your host, KMO, and I'm speaking with fellow sub stacker

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David Roman, who is right now in Spain, but fresh back from China.

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David, it's good to talk to you.

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Likewise.

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So tell me about your trip to China.

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Well, it was a family trip.

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I used to live there.

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I was a correspondent for a while in China.

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Then I married a Chinese woman.

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So I've been going back and forth to China because of my work as a journalist

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and because of family visits for about it's 27 years now.

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Yeah.

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So you have gotten periodic firsthand views of the progress

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and changes taking place in China.

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Oh, yeah, absolutely.

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You know, firsthand, like, like whenever I arrived, the things were so different

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from the way they are now.

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The whole country has changed so very much.

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Well, it makes sense.

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It's been 27 years.

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But like, to be honest, Europe hasn't changed as much.

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Like it's something that I often discuss with my European friends.

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You know, I was born here in Spain.

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Then I lived in Australia, lived in a lot of countries.

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And I've talked to a lot of people from many places.

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And, you know, the US has changed a lot.

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You know, many countries have changed.

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China did. But, you know, Europe hasn't.

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And for us Europeans, you know, it is it is shocking how much China has changed.

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Well, I have never been to China except a layover in Taipei,

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which is technically China, but, you know, well, you know, don't go there.

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Yeah. Yeah. Right.

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But, yeah, it is.

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I mean, my my interests are largely in artificial intelligence and robotics.

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And China is charging ahead in that area.

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You know, Elon Musk has been developing his Tesla bot.

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But from, you know, the videos I'm seeing on YouTube, at least

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the Chinese companies seem to have leapfrogged past Tesla in terms of the

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the agility and just the general dexterousness and competence of their robots.

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So it's pretty impressive.

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Yeah, it is. It is.

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It's hard to tell.

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When it comes to China, it's always hard to tell, you know, how much is

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is just hype, especially going hype.

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They love it.

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You know, you see these videos in social media about this fancy, like

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world-lead modernistic cities like Shanghai and Chongqing.

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And they have all of these, you know, high tech stuff and big screens

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and everything looks very fancy.

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You know, on the ground, it's not quite that

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quite that funky, really.

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China is still a country, still a developing country in many senses.

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So you have these futuristic landscapes sometimes.

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But you also have, you know, things which are definitely, you know, 1970s

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bad roads, you know, sidewalks full of cracks.

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You know, people still carrying things around in bicycles in many parts of the

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country. So it is there's a there's a little bit of everything.

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But to be honest, it does feel like when it comes to the very cutting edge

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in many senses, like you said, in robotics, in in electrical engineering,

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in in electric cars, in high speed trains, in even space race.

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China, it's very much on the cutting edge, really.

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It's it's very far advanced.

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In other things, not so much.

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So it's a country that has, you know, like we journalists like to say,

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it's full of contrasts.

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There's a YouTube channel that's several years old now, but it started with a

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couple of guys, one American and one South African who are living in China.

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And they would mount GoPros on their motorcycle helmets and just drive all

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around China and going to some places that the Chinese government wasn't

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particularly anxious to have them broadcast to the world.

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Some of the still backwater places, places that are undeveloped and also

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areas of new construction, which are as yet uninhabited and already decaying.

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Are you familiar with that channel?

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No, I'm not.

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Well, when they started it, they were living in China and they were both

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married to Chinese women, but the Chinese government let them know that

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they are unwelcome.

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So now they do their show about China from Los Angeles.

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Yeah, it happens.

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It's it's tricky.

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And, you know, it's I've heard a lot of different stories like this.

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And, you know, it's really depressing when you are doing a show, which is

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like these guys, I don't know their example, but it sounds like it's the

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kind of thing that happens to you when you are, you know, a bit too edgy for

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the government tastes.

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And to be honest, normally they don't care so much about journalists, about

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foreigners really say whatever they want for a foreign audience.

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But I would suspect that they probably caught some attention in China within,

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you know, Chinese audiences.

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And that is the thing that the government doesn't like at all.

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So if you are, you know, telling things about China to foreigners and, you

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know, it doesn't really head back to China in any way, they're fine with it.

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But the moment Chinese start paying attention to you and they go like, look

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what these foreigners are saying about China.

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That's that may be really tricky.

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Yeah, I got that impression watching their channel.

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Well, you are a fellow substacker and your your beat is world history.

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And I've been reading through your posts and yeah, I can there are a few

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periods where I could probably have an informed conversation with you.

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But not many.

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I am impressed with the breadth of your knowledge.

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Well, it's my thing, you know, like I've been preparing this project

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like for about 30 years now.

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I always loved history.

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I became a journalist because, you know, to be honest, I was like writing,

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you know, history, literature, but I thought, you know, when I was like, I

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don't know, 18, I was thinking, I don't know anything about anything.

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So I could be writing books.

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Lots of people do.

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I do it like some sort of a literary or historical career.

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And but I don't know anything.

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So whatever I write, it's going to be, you know, misinformed.

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So I decided to become a journalist and learn things about the world.

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Right.

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I was like the news and there's this great, you know, the late Christopher

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Hitchens, he had this great sentence that he said that he became a

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journalist because he wanted to, he wanted to know the news, right.

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He didn't want to read the news.

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He wanted to learn the news first, just to know whether the news he was getting

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were true.

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And I had the same feeling really, you know, before Christopher Hitchens

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actually, you know, spayed out for me.

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And I was always throughout all this time when I was a correspondent for,

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you know, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, around me.

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And throughout this time, I was always reading lots of books about history.

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I was always approach things from a historical perspective.

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Right.

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So for my teachers, that was a bit of a pain in the ass sometimes when I try

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to, you know, you are supposed to be writing a story about inflation in Malaysia

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and you go, well, you know, in the time of the Sultanate and they go, oh, come

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get it out.

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Forget about Sultanate.

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We want to know about CPI in Malaysia.

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Come on.

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Don't be too, don't try and be too smart.

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So yeah, I had to, but I was, I was always interested, say I was a correspondent

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in Singapore and Southeast Asia for a long time.

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And I took, I took that time to, so when I was meeting policy makers, diplomats

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and officials, I was asking them about the history and, you know, the important,

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you know, the important historical points for their countries, like independence

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from the British Empire, how that felt on these crises and these other people

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time moments.

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And I was always interested, you know, beyond my immediate needs as a journalist.

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And I think in the end, that's helped me a lot in my current incarnation as a historian.

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How long have you been on Substack?

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About three years now.

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Ah, so a pioneer.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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I started very early when I read about it.

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First, I thought this is for me.

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Yeah.

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This is going to work out for me because I have all of this material.

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I have to find some way to let people know about this.

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Yeah.

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Well, I got kicked off of Facebook and I think it was 2017 and I had a community there that,

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you know, I was the administrator of it was devoted to my, my previous podcast,

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the Sea Realm podcast, and somebody didn't like an opinion that I expressed about Star Trek.

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And they reported me to Facebook as an impersonator and about Star Trek.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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Come on.

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What opinion did you have?

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What opinion did you have about Star Trek that people would object to?

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That I didn't much care for the direction of recent Star Trek projects and I preferred

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the older Star Trek.

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It's a crazy one.

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Yes.

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So anyway, I got booted and it's, it's an experience in, I don't know if it's Kafka-esque

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or Wellian, but you know, with the push of a button, they delete your entire history

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on Facebook.

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So I'd been on it for about 10 years and I had thousands of posts and you know,

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I was this moderator in a group with a couple thousand members and suddenly all presence

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of my history on Facebook is gone.

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Yeah.

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Just, and I tried to get into Twitter and I just don't really like the format and I never really,

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I didn't engage with it enough to get any traction.

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So Twitter never went anywhere for me.

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And for years there just nothing replaced Facebook, which was fine.

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You know, it was a time suck.

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But now Substack is, it seems to have finally, you know, filled that hole that Facebook left.

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Yeah.

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No, absolutely.

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I think people underrate how revolutionary Substack is, to be honest.

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Even people like you and me, we are creators in the platform and we read a lot

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and do a lot of things.

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We really underrate how, what sort of a difference it makes for us as creators,

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because every other platform sucks.

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It's not just Facebook.

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You know, YouTube is awful.

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It's like been, it's been run by the devil himself.

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It is so bad, like the way that they monetize, you know, successful videos,

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because I know there's like two seconds of a song which is copyrighted

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or because, you know, you're saying a word that they don't like,

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or they will use any excuse.

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Like they, I have this, I have this massive folder with about a hundred plus videos,

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family videos that I used to, this folder was a private folder

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that I shared with my family members, right?

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With my mom, because you know, I'm always overseas, right?

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So, so my family would see videos of my kids, you know, in Washington DC or in Singapore

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or in China, right?

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And my mother can see her grandkids doing stupid stuff

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and I will send her the link so she can see it on YouTube.

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So I had worked well over a hundred videos for about 10 years.

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And they just deleted it one day, just because I had images of minors in, you know,

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half naked minors, like, you know, my kids who were like three, four, right?

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Like crapping in the bathroom or swimming in the swimming pool.

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So it was pederasty for YouTube.

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So they did everything and I had no, no records.

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I couldn't complain.

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I couldn't do anything at all.

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At least I had copies of all those videos, but it's really hard now

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because you know, they're really big videos.

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Like it's really hard to share a two gigabyte video with a 70 plus year old woman, right?

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It's not, it's not easy.

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So it, that kind of thing happens a lot to a lot of people for these stupid reasons.

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I've met a lot of YouTube creators and, and Twitter is the same, even under Elon Musk,

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it's the same thing.

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So it's, it's really hard to find a platform that is just not terribly run.

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I have about 800 plus videos on YouTube and they're mostly just me talking into the camera.

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And I, those videos are still up for the most part, but I've, I've just withdrawn my participation

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from YouTube because every time I would get close to the threshold for them to make a payment to me,

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you know, for the, the ads, they would demonetize my account.

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They would find something objectionable that I had said, said that I had violated.

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I remember.

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Yeah.

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And eventually I wasn't there to make money.

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That wasn't the point, but that sort of practice is just so distasteful.

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I just, you know,

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Come on, money's nice.

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We all like making money.

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If it's 50 bucks, come on.

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They do.

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I mean, they're obsessed with their margins.

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Like they act like we don't care about the money and they're obsessed with the money.

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Like they live and die for like extracting 0.1% out of you.

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Right.

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And then they took your, they take your money like it's nothing.

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Yeah.

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That's very common among these companies and you know, they're really heartless and,

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and it's best not to engage with them at all if you can avoid it because you are

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giving them, not only you're giving them content for free in the end, you're giving them also,

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you know, content that they can use to train their AI models now.

248
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Right.

249
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So they're not paying you and they're actually getting a service out of you.

250
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Right.

251
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And you're not seeing a dime.

252
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It is pretty crazy.

253
00:14:17,760 --> 00:14:18,260
Yeah.

254
00:14:18,720 --> 00:14:20,960
Well, let's, let's turn to happier talk.

255
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The most recent guest on this podcast was the Feral Historian who's doing quite well on YouTube,

256
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I have to say.

257
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And, you know, he is somebody who his primary interest is history,

258
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but he also loves science fiction.

259
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And I think that you fall into that category as well.

260
00:14:36,400 --> 00:14:38,160
Yeah, I do.

261
00:14:38,160 --> 00:14:40,240
So tell me about your history with science fiction.

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Well, I've always, you know, I was the, you know, very bookish, very bookish boy.

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I was really bad at all sports until I grew up and I was, you know,

264
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I was a very good kid growing up and it turns out that, you know,

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basketball is good for tall people.

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And that was, you know, very convenient for me.

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But before I grew up, you know, I was really bad at every sport.

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So I was all day with books and I read a lot of science fiction since I was very, very young.

269
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My father was a big fan of science fiction.

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He had a massive library, which I read almost entirely.

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And so he had all of the classics, right.

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Highline, Philip K. Deak.

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He had a little cover for me.

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So when I was in my twenties, it was when I started, you know,

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living the classics for the first time and, you know, trying new things.

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And I didn't like them very much.

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So I had like a 10 year divorce from science fiction, I would say.

278
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And then one day I came across Peter Watts' Blindsight.

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It's a novel that at one point Peter Watts, he put out for free

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in his website because it wasn't selling at all.

281
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Right. So he said, well, I want people to read this novel.

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I don't care if I don't make any money because he said, I think it's a good novel.

283
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And he put it up for free.

284
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I downloaded the PDF one day.

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I was browsing.

286
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Somebody probably told me about it.

287
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I read the novel and this really, this single novel just got me back in touch with,

288
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you know, the science fiction scene.

289
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I started buying books from a lot of authors and started to discover,

290
00:16:13,440 --> 00:16:17,360
you know, the Greg Gigan, you know, Generation,

291
00:16:17,360 --> 00:16:23,120
Alastair Reynolds, Stephen Baxter, you know, Chiang, all these guys.

292
00:16:23,920 --> 00:16:27,360
But it really, I'm really in that with Peter Watts.

293
00:16:27,360 --> 00:16:30,960
I mean, I dislike Peter Watts intensely, personally.

294
00:16:32,240 --> 00:16:37,840
Every time I see an interview with him, I think it's the kind of person I dislike

295
00:16:37,840 --> 00:16:41,360
completely as a person, but as a writer, I think he's fantastic.

296
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And I recommend all of his novels.

297
00:16:43,760 --> 00:16:45,360
I think he's a fantastic novelist.

298
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And, you know, if he has, you know, cookie opinions and is my impression,

299
00:16:50,160 --> 00:16:53,680
if not better in person, but my impression is that he's quite a dislikeable person.

300
00:16:54,480 --> 00:16:56,960
But my impression is I may be wrong.

301
00:16:56,960 --> 00:17:00,960
He may be very nice in person, but he comes across as not a very nice person

302
00:17:00,960 --> 00:17:01,840
in this as well.

303
00:17:03,280 --> 00:17:04,480
But his books are fantastic.

304
00:17:04,480 --> 00:17:05,760
And I really am in that with him.

305
00:17:07,120 --> 00:17:13,680
Well, I'm happy that I came late to Peter Watts because I listened to the audio book

306
00:17:13,680 --> 00:17:18,000
of Blindsight and it was after talking to people who just, you know, praised it.

307
00:17:18,800 --> 00:17:23,920
But I hadn't ever encountered it until after I had written my own book, which takes place

308
00:17:23,920 --> 00:17:24,960
in the Kuiper Belt.

309
00:17:24,960 --> 00:17:30,480
So I'm glad that I wasn't even subconsciously drawing on Peter Watts, but that I did then

310
00:17:30,480 --> 00:17:33,200
get to go and pick up the spare, as the bowlers would say.

311
00:17:33,840 --> 00:17:34,320
Yeah.

312
00:17:34,320 --> 00:17:37,680
But I would say, you know, the thing is I just read your book, you know,

313
00:17:37,680 --> 00:17:46,800
Fianna Lothing in the Kuiper Belt, I think that the future you present, it's as crazy

314
00:17:46,800 --> 00:17:52,400
as this may sound because, you know, as you wrote, you know, it has like these AIs who

315
00:17:52,400 --> 00:17:54,800
essentially control the inner solar system and all.

316
00:17:54,800 --> 00:17:59,280
It sounds more feasible to me than what he presents in Blindsight.

317
00:17:59,280 --> 00:18:01,280
Blindsight is too crazy at points.

318
00:18:01,280 --> 00:18:03,120
It's like, this is not going to happen.

319
00:18:03,120 --> 00:18:06,800
Like these vampires, you know, genetically engineered vampires.

320
00:18:06,800 --> 00:18:11,760
I mean, it doesn't, I mean, it's a great novel.

321
00:18:11,760 --> 00:18:16,960
I love it, but it's not really what I would call a likely blueprint for the future.

322
00:18:17,840 --> 00:18:20,240
I don't think the future is ever going to look like this.

323
00:18:21,280 --> 00:18:26,960
Well, Fianna Lothing in the Kuiper Belt, I have to say, you are the only person that I know of

324
00:18:26,960 --> 00:18:30,080
who purchased the book because they learned about it on Substack.

325
00:18:31,040 --> 00:18:33,840
Actually, I'm assuming you learned about it on Substack.

326
00:18:33,840 --> 00:18:34,400
I did.

327
00:18:34,400 --> 00:18:35,040
Yes, I did.

328
00:18:35,040 --> 00:18:35,520
Good.

329
00:18:35,520 --> 00:18:35,840
Good.

330
00:18:35,840 --> 00:18:42,400
It is not selling, but largely just through laziness, I'm not going to put it up on a website

331
00:18:42,400 --> 00:18:42,880
for free.

332
00:18:42,880 --> 00:18:46,240
I'm just going to let it linger there on Amazon.

333
00:18:46,880 --> 00:18:51,680
And in the fullness of time, I would really like to produce an audiobook with a human narrator.

334
00:18:51,680 --> 00:18:53,360
I think it needs a woman narrator.

335
00:18:54,160 --> 00:18:54,960
Yeah, probably.

336
00:18:55,520 --> 00:19:00,560
But in all likelihood, it'll be an AI narrator.

337
00:19:00,560 --> 00:19:09,440
Audible will create an AI narrated version of your book for free and put it up on Audible.

338
00:19:09,440 --> 00:19:14,320
But so far, the AI can't do different voices for different characters, and I'm waiting for that.

339
00:19:15,600 --> 00:19:16,880
Yeah, good point.

340
00:19:16,880 --> 00:19:27,120
Yeah, I mean, I'm not very fond of audiobooks in general, so I've read some this way, listened to

341
00:19:27,120 --> 00:19:32,880
them, but as a rule, it's not something that I'm very concerned about because I just don't use

342
00:19:32,880 --> 00:19:33,920
the format very much.

343
00:19:33,920 --> 00:19:35,280
But I know lots of people do.

344
00:19:36,240 --> 00:19:40,480
So it's helpful to cater to their taste, definitely.

345
00:19:41,040 --> 00:19:44,720
And being an Audible will work better like this.

346
00:19:44,720 --> 00:19:45,220
Yeah.

347
00:19:46,080 --> 00:19:54,320
I take a lot of very long walks with my dog, and I listen to a lot of Substack posts that are AI

348
00:19:54,320 --> 00:19:56,480
narrated, and I also listen to a lot of audiobooks.

349
00:19:56,480 --> 00:20:02,480
And some audiobooks, I mean, the narration from professional actors is just so good that

350
00:20:03,040 --> 00:20:09,440
while I do, I mean, my history with science fiction is mostly on the page, but in the last few years,

351
00:20:09,440 --> 00:20:11,600
I've listened to a lot more books than I've read.

352
00:20:12,240 --> 00:20:20,640
And I find that after some time has passed, I can't really remember what books I read on the

353
00:20:20,640 --> 00:20:23,360
page and what books I listen to as audiobooks.

354
00:20:23,360 --> 00:20:30,720
So the content, at least in memory, I think is the same, although it's very easy to tune out while

355
00:20:30,720 --> 00:20:33,200
listening to an audiobook and miss something crucial.

356
00:20:33,200 --> 00:20:37,520
And I often find myself rewinding and trying to rewinding.

357
00:20:37,520 --> 00:20:43,360
There's an archaic phrase, but going back and trying to pick up something that I missed because

358
00:20:43,360 --> 00:20:44,880
I'll ask myself, wait, what happened?

359
00:20:44,880 --> 00:20:45,440
Who is this?

360
00:20:45,440 --> 00:20:46,320
What are they talking about?

361
00:20:46,880 --> 00:20:48,960
So that's one frustration of audiobooks.

362
00:20:48,960 --> 00:20:54,560
And another frustration is, and I know this is a bad habit, I could easily stop it by not having

363
00:20:54,560 --> 00:20:56,160
the phone within reach of my bed.

364
00:20:56,480 --> 00:21:00,720
But if I wake up at two or three in the morning and I can't go back to sleep, I'll turn on the

365
00:21:00,720 --> 00:21:06,320
audiobook that I'm listening to and there's a sleep timer on the audible player and also on the

366
00:21:06,320 --> 00:21:09,440
hoopla player, which is it's like audible.

367
00:21:09,440 --> 00:21:13,680
I mean, the interface is just like audible, but it is you get books through libraries.

368
00:21:14,000 --> 00:21:14,960
And so it's free.

369
00:21:15,600 --> 00:21:17,120
At least it's free for you, the listener.

370
00:21:17,120 --> 00:21:21,840
The library actually has to pay the publisher for the right for you to listen to the book, which I

371
00:21:21,840 --> 00:21:23,680
think is a great, a great situation.

372
00:21:23,680 --> 00:21:24,480
It is a great model.

373
00:21:24,480 --> 00:21:25,040
Yeah.

374
00:21:25,040 --> 00:21:25,600
Yeah.

375
00:21:26,480 --> 00:21:33,600
But I'll hit like the 15 minute sleep timer and I end up like, I'll still be awake when it turns

376
00:21:33,600 --> 00:21:37,600
off and I'll shake the phone and start it up again and I'll go two or three hours in the middle of

377
00:21:37,600 --> 00:21:42,640
the night listening to an audiobook, which is unhappy the next day when I'm very tired.

378
00:21:43,840 --> 00:21:44,320
Yeah.

379
00:21:44,320 --> 00:21:54,800
Oh, but science fiction, you recently wrote a sub stack post that it was about generational

380
00:21:54,800 --> 00:22:00,160
ships and there have been a great many novels about generation ships, which I haven't read

381
00:22:00,160 --> 00:22:05,840
because I think the only one that you mentioned that I'd actually read was the Kim Stanley

382
00:22:05,840 --> 00:22:07,440
Robinson one Aurora.

383
00:22:07,440 --> 00:22:08,240
Aurora.

384
00:22:08,240 --> 00:22:08,880
Yeah.

385
00:22:08,880 --> 00:22:09,520
Yeah.

386
00:22:09,520 --> 00:22:15,920
But let me just, I'm going to mute my microphone and let you talk at length about the concept

387
00:22:15,920 --> 00:22:17,360
of the generational ship.

388
00:22:18,560 --> 00:22:18,800
Yeah.

389
00:22:18,800 --> 00:22:24,400
Well, it's, it's probably my favorite sub gender within science fiction.

390
00:22:25,200 --> 00:22:31,440
I've always been intrigued about this concept because I think it's pretty realistic that,

391
00:22:31,440 --> 00:22:36,880
you know, pretty soon say within the next 100 years or so there will be somebody crazy

392
00:22:36,880 --> 00:22:40,960
that once, you know, Elon Musk spaceship is working properly.

393
00:22:40,960 --> 00:22:44,240
Somebody will build a bigger spaceship and then somebody will say, well, don't we put

394
00:22:44,240 --> 00:22:50,160
two or three of these together and try a massive trip all the way to, I don't know, Taoseti

395
00:22:50,160 --> 00:22:54,720
or a Barnard star or whatever, and try and see what's over there.

396
00:22:54,720 --> 00:22:59,520
And you will find 50 crazy volunteers and they will all go together and they will have

397
00:22:59,520 --> 00:23:00,720
kids along the way.

398
00:23:00,720 --> 00:23:06,160
And that's, you know, the concept of the generation ship that you have a very, very long trip

399
00:23:06,160 --> 00:23:11,440
you know, well below the, you know, speed of light.

400
00:23:11,440 --> 00:23:16,160
And it's going to take a long time to get to the, even the closest star.

401
00:23:16,160 --> 00:23:19,840
So it's going to be several generations living and dying within this ship.

402
00:23:20,480 --> 00:23:27,280
So the idea is that it has to be big enough to have a system where you can plant crops

403
00:23:27,280 --> 00:23:33,680
and regenerate, you know, breathing air and get water and, you know, be protected from

404
00:23:33,680 --> 00:23:41,200
radiation and find a way to generate gravity because otherwise it's going to be, you know,

405
00:23:41,200 --> 00:23:45,200
everyone's going to be very sick at the end of the trip or at least, you know, unable

406
00:23:45,200 --> 00:23:47,200
to colonize a planet.

407
00:23:47,200 --> 00:23:54,880
So the whole concept is that you have this long term trip in which you have people who

408
00:23:54,880 --> 00:23:59,520
start the trip and their descendants with any luck will be the ones who finish the trip.

409
00:23:59,520 --> 00:24:00,880
I think this is going to happen.

410
00:24:00,880 --> 00:24:04,080
Is it going to ever succeed?

411
00:24:04,080 --> 00:24:04,640
I'm not sure.

412
00:24:05,440 --> 00:24:06,000
Right.

413
00:24:06,000 --> 00:24:10,320
It's possible that all of the generation trips that we try fail.

414
00:24:11,040 --> 00:24:12,880
It's possible that some succeed.

415
00:24:12,880 --> 00:24:16,640
It's possible in the end that we'll find some other way to traverse, you know, the

416
00:24:17,520 --> 00:24:25,680
stars in some different way, like people will travel, will be frozen or asleep or

417
00:24:25,680 --> 00:24:32,560
transported as AIs or within robots or who knows.

418
00:24:33,440 --> 00:24:38,160
But the generation ship is a very, very old concept in science fiction.

419
00:24:39,360 --> 00:24:44,960
In my piece, I discuss the very first generation, strictly speaking, the very first

420
00:24:44,960 --> 00:24:49,040
generation ship novel, which was published in the fifties.

421
00:24:49,040 --> 00:24:53,520
And then there's been a lot of them and they all always have this concept that from the

422
00:24:53,520 --> 00:24:57,760
very beginning, I mean, there was never a golden era of the generation ship in which

423
00:24:57,760 --> 00:25:00,800
people said, well, it's going to be great and we're going to colonize the whole

424
00:25:00,800 --> 00:25:02,080
universe with this thing.

425
00:25:02,080 --> 00:25:07,120
They are always narrative stories in the sense that they are realistic, pessimistic,

426
00:25:07,120 --> 00:25:07,520
right?

427
00:25:07,520 --> 00:25:12,000
They are looking all of these things can happen and lots of things can happen.

428
00:25:12,000 --> 00:25:13,840
Just imagine any trip along the way.

429
00:25:13,840 --> 00:25:20,320
If you look at the history of human colonization of the planet, like even if you had to go

430
00:25:20,320 --> 00:25:25,120
to spend one year traveling from say the UK to Australia to establish the first

431
00:25:25,120 --> 00:25:28,240
settlements over there, one year is a long time.

432
00:25:28,240 --> 00:25:31,520
So, I know, 200 years, 500 years.

433
00:25:32,160 --> 00:25:35,840
So what happens is that lots of these stories are about people forgetting that they're

434
00:25:35,840 --> 00:25:42,480
even in a generation ship or fighting with each other, killing each other or developing

435
00:25:42,480 --> 00:25:46,720
crazy religions about how they are trapped in this netherworld.

436
00:25:46,720 --> 00:25:49,760
So there are all sorts of approaches.

437
00:25:49,760 --> 00:25:55,520
So what I did is I picked several novels which I read that I thought were most, you

438
00:25:55,520 --> 00:26:04,000
know, most symbolic of the genre in the sense of they provide several viewpoints about

439
00:26:04,000 --> 00:26:11,840
People who forget about the destination, people who develop different castes within

440
00:26:11,840 --> 00:26:18,640
the different groups within the generation ship and it becomes divided.

441
00:26:18,640 --> 00:26:24,160
People who go just, you know, downright crazy.

442
00:26:24,160 --> 00:26:33,200
People who escape earth and then they fight each other and then they divide into several

443
00:26:33,200 --> 00:26:33,760
groups.

444
00:26:33,760 --> 00:26:35,760
People who are clones.

445
00:26:35,760 --> 00:26:37,760
Like I love this one.

446
00:26:37,760 --> 00:26:42,160
This is so very crazy.

447
00:26:42,160 --> 00:26:46,160
It's not a great novel by any, but it has so many crazy ideas.

448
00:26:46,160 --> 00:26:52,640
Just imagine the notion of just cloning some of the brightest and the most, like you have

449
00:26:52,640 --> 00:26:59,680
a look at the planet and you go, like, who are the best people for a long-term trip throughout

450
00:26:59,680 --> 00:27:00,160
the stars?

451
00:27:00,160 --> 00:27:02,160
We're going to make clones of them.

452
00:27:02,160 --> 00:27:04,160
And when they die, we're going to get another clone.

453
00:27:04,160 --> 00:27:08,160
It's going to be always the same people being cloned and re-cloned forever.

454
00:27:08,160 --> 00:27:10,160
It's just a crazy concept.

455
00:27:10,160 --> 00:27:12,160
I never thought of that.

456
00:27:12,160 --> 00:27:14,160
It's the least practical idea you can have.

457
00:27:14,160 --> 00:27:20,160
You can imagine that the very same person that starts a trip in earth, say, 2100, is

458
00:27:20,160 --> 00:27:26,160
going to be the ideal person to be in that ship a thousand years later.

459
00:27:26,160 --> 00:27:28,160
It's a pretty crazy concept.

460
00:27:28,160 --> 00:27:34,160
In the end, what we have is that I found, reading all of these novels, what I found

461
00:27:34,160 --> 00:27:42,160
is that, you know, genetianship novels also give you a pretty good summary, pretty good

462
00:27:42,160 --> 00:27:44,160
impression of how the field is now.

463
00:27:44,160 --> 00:27:46,160
Science fiction.

464
00:27:46,160 --> 00:27:50,160
Not just this specific subject, but science fiction as a whole.

465
00:27:50,160 --> 00:27:56,160
You can see the dominant obsessions, the dominant approaches, the way things are going to be

466
00:27:56,160 --> 00:28:04,160
and the way most writers are looking at societies and how the future is going to look like.

467
00:28:04,160 --> 00:28:10,160
And it's not a very positive impression that you get.

468
00:28:10,160 --> 00:28:16,160
You get the impression that a lot of these guys are, you know, self-censoring themselves,

469
00:28:16,160 --> 00:28:24,160
are trying to convey and present ideas that are socially acceptable as of 2024, 2025,

470
00:28:24,160 --> 00:28:26,160
or even 2020.

471
00:28:26,160 --> 00:28:32,160
Some of these guys seem to be stuck in the summer of Floyd or in the wokest possible

472
00:28:32,160 --> 00:28:34,160
point in human history.

473
00:28:34,160 --> 00:28:38,160
And it is really disappointing.

474
00:28:38,160 --> 00:28:42,160
Kim Stanley Robinson, for example, it's a great example of this.

475
00:28:42,160 --> 00:28:46,160
He's such an enforcer of the current thing.

476
00:28:46,160 --> 00:28:50,160
It is really infuriating very often.

477
00:28:50,160 --> 00:28:52,160
You read his novels.

478
00:28:52,160 --> 00:28:56,160
It's like the guy is asking friends in Davos to look over their manuscripts.

479
00:28:56,160 --> 00:29:07,160
And it really is, to me, a melancholy reflection because, like I said, I started reading the

480
00:29:07,160 --> 00:29:11,160
classics when I was very young because of my father.

481
00:29:11,160 --> 00:29:14,160
So I've seen the whole arc of the world in science fiction.

482
00:29:14,160 --> 00:29:19,160
And you know these guys, very in the 60s and 70s, they were pretty free, pretty crazy.

483
00:29:19,160 --> 00:29:23,160
They had their own ideas and people would let them rip.

484
00:29:23,160 --> 00:29:25,160
Just Philip K. Dick, yes, he was.

485
00:29:25,160 --> 00:29:28,160
You know, he was a guy with no system.

486
00:29:28,160 --> 00:29:31,160
He would come up with these insane ideas and he would just polish them.

487
00:29:31,160 --> 00:29:33,160
And if people wanted to read them, fine.

488
00:29:33,160 --> 00:29:36,160
And if they didn't, you know, fuck them.

489
00:29:36,160 --> 00:29:38,160
This approach has gone away from science fiction.

490
00:29:38,160 --> 00:29:41,160
I think it's pretty sad.

491
00:29:41,160 --> 00:29:47,160
Well, I, as a teenager, I went through a Philip K. Dick phase where I read all of his books

492
00:29:47,160 --> 00:29:49,160
that I could get my hands on.

493
00:29:49,160 --> 00:29:56,160
And I noticed that he had a formula that he, you know, a story structure that he enacted

494
00:29:56,160 --> 00:29:57,160
again and again.

495
00:29:57,160 --> 00:30:02,160
And then much later in life, I read some biography about him.

496
00:30:02,160 --> 00:30:08,160
And he was basically trapped in a system where he was working in a record store or he had

497
00:30:08,160 --> 00:30:11,160
a number of different day jobs, one of which was a record store.

498
00:30:11,160 --> 00:30:15,160
But he would work all day and then he would take amphetamines to stay up and write all

499
00:30:15,160 --> 00:30:16,160
night.

500
00:30:16,160 --> 00:30:17,160
And he ruined his health.

501
00:30:17,160 --> 00:30:23,160
And, you know, one might argue his sanity in the process, but he was always living off

502
00:30:23,160 --> 00:30:28,160
the advance from his last novel and his books never sold enough that he had got any residuals.

503
00:30:28,160 --> 00:30:30,160
So he always had to take another advance.

504
00:30:30,160 --> 00:30:33,160
And, you know, he was just churning the novels out for a period.

505
00:30:33,160 --> 00:30:39,160
And so, yeah, he would write the same story again and again, but because he was such a

506
00:30:39,160 --> 00:30:42,160
he did a lot of acid, a lot of other drugs as well.

507
00:30:42,160 --> 00:30:48,160
And he was, you know, a scholar of an amateur scholar, I guess I would say of religion and

508
00:30:48,160 --> 00:30:49,160
history.

509
00:30:49,160 --> 00:30:52,160
But he always had something new to plug into the formula.

510
00:30:52,160 --> 00:30:54,160
Yeah, he was an artist.

511
00:30:54,160 --> 00:30:55,160
That's impressive.

512
00:30:55,160 --> 00:30:56,160
You always get with him.

513
00:30:56,160 --> 00:30:58,160
It's not that his craft was perfect.

514
00:30:58,160 --> 00:31:02,160
He was a great writer in the sense of the craft.

515
00:31:02,160 --> 00:31:04,160
Like he wasn't a great stylist.

516
00:31:04,160 --> 00:31:09,160
You wouldn't you wouldn't grab one of his books and, you know, go teach a course in

517
00:31:09,160 --> 00:31:11,160
literature and say, yeah, try and write like Philip K.

518
00:31:11,160 --> 00:31:12,160
Dick.

519
00:31:12,160 --> 00:31:13,160
No.

520
00:31:13,160 --> 00:31:21,160
But, you know, his mind was very fertile and he found a way to express this on the page.

521
00:31:21,160 --> 00:31:26,160
Not always in the best possible way, but he found a way to to make it come across.

522
00:31:26,160 --> 00:31:28,160
And he was so free.

523
00:31:28,160 --> 00:31:31,160
Yeah, he was like, you know, I have this idea and it may be a crazy idea.

524
00:31:31,160 --> 00:31:35,160
Maybe you don't like it, but I'm going to like you say, I'm going to expand over it

525
00:31:35,160 --> 00:31:36,160
in three books.

526
00:31:36,160 --> 00:31:37,160
Right.

527
00:31:37,160 --> 00:31:39,160
And then I keep going over the same subject.

528
00:31:39,160 --> 00:31:47,160
Like if you read his most famous novels like like the Electric Ship novel that inspired

529
00:31:47,160 --> 00:31:48,160
Blade Runner, for example.

530
00:31:48,160 --> 00:31:49,160
Right.

531
00:31:49,160 --> 00:31:51,160
It's a pretty crazy novel.

532
00:31:51,160 --> 00:31:58,160
Like the movie had to be turned down and it happens with a lot of his with all of his

533
00:31:58,160 --> 00:31:59,160
novels.

534
00:31:59,160 --> 00:32:01,160
And I think that's missing now.

535
00:32:01,160 --> 00:32:08,160
I think that people writers now, so they get published, so they get the prices, so they

536
00:32:08,160 --> 00:32:09,160
get the advances.

537
00:32:09,160 --> 00:32:14,160
They have to be much more careful and they have to be very mindful of how people are

538
00:32:14,160 --> 00:32:16,160
going to interpret certain things.

539
00:32:16,160 --> 00:32:21,160
They don't want to go into certain subjects and they want to they want to have certain

540
00:32:21,160 --> 00:32:22,160
approaches.

541
00:32:22,160 --> 00:32:26,160
And one thing that I noticed, for example, which is all over my pieces of stuff is how

542
00:32:26,160 --> 00:32:33,160
everyone has found a way to have a female lead, which is not actually a woman, which

543
00:32:33,160 --> 00:32:34,160
is a man in disguise.

544
00:32:34,160 --> 00:32:35,160
Right.

545
00:32:35,160 --> 00:32:42,160
In your novel and in Fiona Lothian in the Keeper Vault, you have a woman as the captain

546
00:32:42,160 --> 00:32:47,160
of the ship and several women protagonists as well as men.

547
00:32:47,160 --> 00:32:49,160
But this woman is a woman.

548
00:32:49,160 --> 00:32:50,160
Right.

549
00:32:50,160 --> 00:32:54,160
You can you see you that's one of the strongest points of the book.

550
00:32:54,160 --> 00:32:57,160
You can see that this is a lady acting as a lady.

551
00:32:57,160 --> 00:32:59,160
It's a woman because it's 20, 25.

552
00:32:59,160 --> 00:33:05,160
All of us had teachers who were women, bosses who were women.

553
00:33:05,160 --> 00:33:06,160
Right.

554
00:33:06,160 --> 00:33:10,160
I've worked in several corporations where most of all of my bosses were women.

555
00:33:10,160 --> 00:33:15,160
So you can tell how this has an effect on human relations.

556
00:33:15,160 --> 00:33:19,160
It's not the same thing to work in a place where everyone is a man.

557
00:33:19,160 --> 00:33:23,160
There's completely different approaches, completely different ways to relate to each

558
00:33:23,160 --> 00:33:28,160
other as when you have women in charge, because women have different approaches to things.

559
00:33:28,160 --> 00:33:30,160
Sometimes better, sometimes worse.

560
00:33:30,160 --> 00:33:35,160
But it's fundamentally different from that in many ways.

561
00:33:35,160 --> 00:33:39,160
And what lots of writers now they do is I have this story and I have this guy who was

562
00:33:39,160 --> 00:33:41,160
John and he's going to be the hero of the story.

563
00:33:41,160 --> 00:33:43,160
But it's not going to sell as John.

564
00:33:43,160 --> 00:33:45,160
People will like it better if it's Joanna.

565
00:33:45,160 --> 00:33:48,160
So I'm going to write exactly the same character.

566
00:33:48,160 --> 00:33:52,160
This was like this superhero strong independent man who ran the ship.

567
00:33:52,160 --> 00:33:53,160
Now it's going to be a woman.

568
00:33:53,160 --> 00:33:54,160
But it's the same thing.

569
00:33:54,160 --> 00:33:55,160
Right.

570
00:33:55,160 --> 00:33:56,160
It's Joanna instead of John.

571
00:33:56,160 --> 00:33:58,160
It's Robert instead of Robert.

572
00:33:58,160 --> 00:34:04,160
And in the end you have all of these interchangeable women who are all strong, who are like all

573
00:34:04,160 --> 00:34:08,160
powerful, who are like smarter than anyone, who take shit from no one.

574
00:34:08,160 --> 00:34:11,160
And they're not feminine at all in any sense.

575
00:34:11,160 --> 00:34:14,160
They don't act like any woman I've ever worked with.

576
00:34:14,160 --> 00:34:15,160
None of them.

577
00:34:15,160 --> 00:34:16,160
Right.

578
00:34:16,160 --> 00:34:19,160
They have nothing to do with real actual women.

579
00:34:19,160 --> 00:34:21,160
They're just, you know, men in disguise.

580
00:34:21,160 --> 00:34:26,160
Because, you know, you have to have a woman leading the story.

581
00:34:26,160 --> 00:34:28,160
And I think that's pretty sad.

582
00:34:28,160 --> 00:34:32,160
It's pretty sad that people, first of all, they can't write an actual woman's character.

583
00:34:32,160 --> 00:34:36,160
And second of all, they feel forced to have a woman running things because, you know,

584
00:34:36,160 --> 00:34:40,160
it's the way it has to be now.

585
00:34:40,160 --> 00:34:41,160
Yes.

586
00:34:41,160 --> 00:34:47,160
And I think that science fiction is dying not necessarily as exclusively the result

587
00:34:47,160 --> 00:34:50,160
of that, but just in terms of sales.

588
00:34:50,160 --> 00:34:56,160
And the sad truth is that, you know, more, far more women read books than men read books.

589
00:34:56,160 --> 00:34:58,160
I work in a library.

590
00:34:58,160 --> 00:35:00,160
I see who comes and checks out books.

591
00:35:00,160 --> 00:35:02,160
And it's mostly women reading books.

592
00:35:02,160 --> 00:35:03,160
Yeah.

593
00:35:03,160 --> 00:35:11,160
And so publishing houses cater to women, but it becomes a sort of positive feedback where,

594
00:35:11,160 --> 00:35:17,160
you know, the more that the industry panders to the woman reader, the more men are driven

595
00:35:17,160 --> 00:35:23,160
away into video games and TV and sports and whatever else.

596
00:35:23,160 --> 00:35:28,160
But even male science fiction writers who are successful in the field and have been

597
00:35:28,160 --> 00:35:33,160
for a while and you would think they could write whatever they want, they also, you know,

598
00:35:33,160 --> 00:35:37,160
they bend themselves to the contemporary fashions.

599
00:35:37,160 --> 00:35:40,160
There's an author whose books I like.

600
00:35:40,160 --> 00:35:41,160
His name is M.R.

601
00:35:41,160 --> 00:35:42,160
Carey.

602
00:35:42,160 --> 00:35:45,160
And I think he's best known because one of his books, The Girl with All the Gifts, got

603
00:35:45,160 --> 00:35:47,160
made into a movie.

604
00:35:47,160 --> 00:35:53,160
But he's got a science fiction, I think it's a trilogy or maybe it's just two books, but

605
00:35:53,160 --> 00:35:56,160
it's a multiverse story.

606
00:35:56,160 --> 00:35:57,160
It's called The Pandemidium.

607
00:35:57,160 --> 00:35:59,160
There's lots of parallel Earths.

608
00:35:59,160 --> 00:36:03,160
And the premise is, look, the stars are just too far away.

609
00:36:03,160 --> 00:36:05,160
Space travel just never worked out.

610
00:36:05,160 --> 00:36:10,160
But then this one person discovered a way to move between parallel Earths.

611
00:36:10,160 --> 00:36:16,160
And then she discovered that, yeah, there are whole civilizations that are pan dimensional

612
00:36:16,160 --> 00:36:19,160
civilizations, and one of them is called the pandemidium.

613
00:36:19,160 --> 00:36:27,160
Of course, the one unique aspect of this story is that, you know, you're sampling different

614
00:36:27,160 --> 00:36:33,160
Earths and in different Earths, different species evolved to be the dominant, you know,

615
00:36:33,160 --> 00:36:35,160
technological species.

616
00:36:35,160 --> 00:36:38,160
And so most of the characters are not human.

617
00:36:38,160 --> 00:36:46,160
But of the worlds where there are human characters, the only named character who is a white man

618
00:36:46,160 --> 00:36:51,160
in all of the books is the most vile, disgusting person imaginable.

619
00:36:51,160 --> 00:36:56,160
He is a white man living in an alternate Earth version of Nigeria, and he is essentially a

620
00:36:56,160 --> 00:36:57,160
slaver.

621
00:36:57,160 --> 00:36:58,160
Yeah.

622
00:36:58,160 --> 00:37:04,160
And there are no other white men, you know, in the multiverse that are worth naming who

623
00:37:04,160 --> 00:37:06,160
aren't just scumbags.

624
00:37:06,160 --> 00:37:08,160
Yeah.

625
00:37:08,160 --> 00:37:09,160
And M.R.

626
00:37:09,160 --> 00:37:10,160
Kerry is a white man.

627
00:37:10,160 --> 00:37:16,160
I mean, there seems to be a self-loathing that one has to buy into in order to gain

628
00:37:16,160 --> 00:37:22,160
entry into this, you know, this dying genre of mainstream published science fiction.

629
00:37:22,160 --> 00:37:28,160
But fantasy, fantasy dwarfs science fiction these days in terms of sales, which I read

630
00:37:28,160 --> 00:37:32,160
fantasy as a teenager, but I just I'm not attracted to it anymore.

631
00:37:32,160 --> 00:37:36,160
And particularly, you know, I've tried to read a couple modern fantasy novels and I

632
00:37:36,160 --> 00:37:39,160
don't get very far into them at all.

633
00:37:39,160 --> 00:37:42,160
No, no, it was it was not my thinking.

634
00:37:42,160 --> 00:37:47,160
I think fantasy is very exposed to this as well, because fantasy, as you know, it's almost

635
00:37:47,160 --> 00:37:57,160
always based on on an idealized or mythical version of middle of European Middle Ages.

636
00:37:57,160 --> 00:37:58,160
Right.

637
00:37:58,160 --> 00:38:03,160
So you have some sort of European Middle Ages with knights and kings and aristocrats and

638
00:38:03,160 --> 00:38:08,160
everyone is wearing helmets and armor and they fight with swords on horses.

639
00:38:08,160 --> 00:38:09,160
Right.

640
00:38:09,160 --> 00:38:18,160
And so this presentation, like it really it really is it really is very tricky if you

641
00:38:18,160 --> 00:38:22,160
are trying to appeal to a walk publisher.

642
00:38:22,160 --> 00:38:25,160
So you have to really bend yourself over.

643
00:38:25,160 --> 00:38:30,160
Wow. So you have to make sure that your knight is going to be trans or your queen is going

644
00:38:30,160 --> 00:38:35,160
to be the most powerful and virtuous person ever, because, you know, it wasn't on the

645
00:38:35,160 --> 00:38:36,160
face of it.

646
00:38:36,160 --> 00:38:40,160
This wasn't a very egalitarian or idealistic world.

647
00:38:40,160 --> 00:38:44,160
It was very much driven by macho warriors fighting each other.

648
00:38:44,160 --> 00:38:51,160
And, you know, actual women did very, very badly on a battlefield when you have to fight

649
00:38:51,160 --> 00:38:58,160
with brute force, because most women, like 99 percent of women are unable to fight head

650
00:38:58,160 --> 00:39:03,160
to head against a man unless they are genetically modified, like, you know, women warriors in

651
00:39:03,160 --> 00:39:04,160
your novel.

652
00:39:04,160 --> 00:39:08,160
So it really is it really is a mind field.

653
00:39:08,160 --> 00:39:16,160
So it really forces fantasy forces people to be extra, extra mindful of all of these

654
00:39:16,160 --> 00:39:17,160
difficulties.

655
00:39:17,160 --> 00:39:23,160
Have you read Jean Wolf's The Book of the New Sun?

656
00:39:23,160 --> 00:39:25,160
I have, but I didn't go through it.

657
00:39:25,160 --> 00:39:26,160
I didn't finish it.

658
00:39:26,160 --> 00:39:28,160
I didn't like it very much.

659
00:39:28,160 --> 00:39:30,160
I just I just can't.

660
00:39:30,160 --> 00:39:32,160
You know, I'm too much of a historian.

661
00:39:32,160 --> 00:39:36,160
I just can't deal with fantasy very well because because of these reasons, because I know how

662
00:39:36,160 --> 00:39:38,160
it was at the time.

663
00:39:38,160 --> 00:39:43,160
So whenever people start to stray too much from, you know, my actual knowledge of the

664
00:39:43,160 --> 00:39:48,160
period, not just in Europe, because, you know, the Middle Ages were applied to the whole

665
00:39:48,160 --> 00:39:49,160
planet.

666
00:39:49,160 --> 00:39:54,160
You had similar versions of it in Islamic world in China.

667
00:39:54,160 --> 00:39:56,160
I just I just find it unbelievable.

668
00:39:56,160 --> 00:39:57,160
Just unbelievable.

669
00:39:57,160 --> 00:39:59,160
So it's hard for me.

670
00:39:59,160 --> 00:40:00,160
But it's probably my mistake.

671
00:40:00,160 --> 00:40:03,160
It's my defect because, you know, I'm too much.

672
00:40:03,160 --> 00:40:06,160
I'm too much involved with with history.

673
00:40:06,160 --> 00:40:07,160
Yeah.

674
00:40:07,160 --> 00:40:10,160
So but I felt good things about you.

675
00:40:10,160 --> 00:40:15,160
Well, the the thing with the Book of the New Sun is that it reads as fantasy at first.

676
00:40:15,160 --> 00:40:19,160
But the longer you read, the more you realize this is a hard science fiction story set in

677
00:40:19,160 --> 00:40:22,160
the very, very far future.

678
00:40:22,160 --> 00:40:23,160
Right.

679
00:40:23,160 --> 00:40:28,160
And, you know, one of the things about the book is that you can't put a shovel in the

680
00:40:28,160 --> 00:40:32,160
ground without turning up some relic of some past civilization.

681
00:40:32,160 --> 00:40:35,160
But his books are very dense.

682
00:40:35,160 --> 00:40:40,160
And that one in particular is it seems to be, you know, a lot of people are just put

683
00:40:40,160 --> 00:40:41,160
off by the vocabulary.

684
00:40:41,160 --> 00:40:46,160
It seems like it's filled with made up words, but it's not his point.

685
00:40:46,160 --> 00:40:51,160
The one point of the novel or the series of novels is that English is a huge language.

686
00:40:51,160 --> 00:40:53,160
And we only use a tiny little piece of it, really.

687
00:40:53,160 --> 00:40:59,160
So, you know, all of these arcane, seemingly made up words are actual English words, which

688
00:40:59,160 --> 00:41:02,160
we just don't really use in daily life anymore.

689
00:41:02,160 --> 00:41:03,160
Right.

690
00:41:03,160 --> 00:41:05,160
And I absolutely love that series.

691
00:41:05,160 --> 00:41:11,160
And then he wrote another series called The Book of the Long Sun.

692
00:41:11,160 --> 00:41:15,160
And it also seems to be a sort of medieval fantasy story.

693
00:41:15,160 --> 00:41:18,160
But then you realize that the people are living.

694
00:41:18,160 --> 00:41:24,160
It's not a generation ship, but it's more like an O'Neill cylinder, a very large spin

695
00:41:24,160 --> 00:41:25,160
habitat.

696
00:41:25,160 --> 00:41:26,160
Yeah.

697
00:41:26,160 --> 00:41:28,160
Like the ring world, right?

698
00:41:28,160 --> 00:41:29,160
Yeah.

699
00:41:29,160 --> 00:41:30,160
Yeah.

700
00:41:30,160 --> 00:41:31,160
Not as big as the ring world.

701
00:41:31,160 --> 00:41:32,160
Right.

702
00:41:32,160 --> 00:41:37,160
I don't remember the exact dimensions of the ring world, but it's, you know, you could

703
00:41:37,160 --> 00:41:41,160
put at least hundreds, if not thousands of Earths inside it.

704
00:41:41,160 --> 00:41:43,160
It's impossibly large.

705
00:41:43,160 --> 00:41:51,160
See, that was another good example of just crazy free, you know, classic science fiction.

706
00:41:51,160 --> 00:41:56,160
I remember that they have this system, like in the real world, you have all of these different

707
00:41:56,160 --> 00:41:58,160
space races living together.

708
00:41:58,160 --> 00:42:02,160
And the way they have to greet each other is by having sex.

709
00:42:02,160 --> 00:42:05,160
Like, I remember reading this as a teenager.

710
00:42:05,160 --> 00:42:08,160
I was like, this is pretty insane.

711
00:42:08,160 --> 00:42:10,160
This is absolutely insane.

712
00:42:10,160 --> 00:42:16,160
Like, you can imagine this now, like in this supposedly super free enlightened times, like

713
00:42:16,160 --> 00:42:25,160
people who have sex with, I don't know, some sort of, I don't know, like sentient dinosaur,

714
00:42:25,160 --> 00:42:27,160
which is something that happens a lot in ring world, apparently.

715
00:42:27,160 --> 00:42:29,160
If I remember correctly.

716
00:42:29,160 --> 00:42:30,160
Yeah.

717
00:42:30,160 --> 00:42:35,160
I think more in ring world engineers, but we get it in both novels where there are so

718
00:42:35,160 --> 00:42:40,160
many different variations on not just humans, but other species as well.

719
00:42:40,160 --> 00:42:41,160
Yeah.

720
00:42:41,160 --> 00:42:46,160
And if you travel for a long time, you're going to encounter a lot of very alien civilizations.

721
00:42:46,160 --> 00:42:52,160
And just one of the universal practices for breaking the ice between different groups

722
00:42:52,160 --> 00:42:56,160
is to pick a member of each group and just point them to each other and say, OK, go at

723
00:42:56,160 --> 00:42:57,160
it.

724
00:42:57,160 --> 00:42:58,160
Yeah.

725
00:42:58,160 --> 00:42:59,160
Yeah.

726
00:42:59,160 --> 00:43:00,160
Yeah.

727
00:43:00,160 --> 00:43:01,160
Pretty insane.

728
00:43:01,160 --> 00:43:02,160
Yeah.

729
00:43:02,160 --> 00:43:05,160
And the main character, particularly in the second novel where he spends a lot of time

730
00:43:05,160 --> 00:43:12,160
alone, and he's just traveling through the ring world, he can tell how well a group is

731
00:43:12,160 --> 00:43:16,160
doing based on the person that they send to have sex with him.

732
00:43:16,160 --> 00:43:20,160
If they send out their youngest, most attractive woman, it means they're desperate and they

733
00:43:20,160 --> 00:43:21,160
really want to curry his favor.

734
00:43:21,160 --> 00:43:25,160
And if they provide him with, you know, an older woman or one who's not so attractive,

735
00:43:25,160 --> 00:43:29,160
then he realizes that they're actually doing pretty well and they don't need anything from

736
00:43:29,160 --> 00:43:30,160
him.

737
00:43:30,160 --> 00:43:31,160
They're just being polite.

738
00:43:31,160 --> 00:43:32,160
Yeah.

739
00:43:32,160 --> 00:43:33,160
Yeah.

740
00:43:33,160 --> 00:43:34,160
Yeah.

741
00:43:34,160 --> 00:43:35,160
I don't want to work too well these days.

742
00:43:35,160 --> 00:43:36,160
Oh, no.

743
00:43:36,160 --> 00:43:41,160
I don't know if Larry Niven is still writing science fiction.

744
00:43:41,160 --> 00:43:43,160
He must be very old at this point.

745
00:43:43,160 --> 00:43:44,160
He must be very old.

746
00:43:44,160 --> 00:43:45,160
Yeah.

747
00:43:45,160 --> 00:43:47,160
I remember reading Jerry Brunel's, his co-authors.

748
00:43:47,160 --> 00:43:52,160
He had a blog in the early 2000s.

749
00:43:52,160 --> 00:43:55,160
And he sounded pretty old by then, in the early 2000s.

750
00:43:55,160 --> 00:44:00,360
Like, he was like this, you know, old guy, like remembering, you know, the golden years

751
00:44:00,360 --> 00:44:04,160
when he met somebody in the 1950s, right?

752
00:44:04,160 --> 00:44:05,160
Yeah.

753
00:44:05,160 --> 00:44:06,160
Yeah.

754
00:44:06,160 --> 00:44:10,160
Like, they really, they really members of a different generation altogether.

755
00:44:10,160 --> 00:44:14,240
Well, I'm looking at a thumbnail image of you, which is pretty small, but I'm going

756
00:44:14,240 --> 00:44:18,160
to guess that you are a member of my generational cohort, Gen X.

757
00:44:18,160 --> 00:44:19,160
Yeah.

758
00:44:19,160 --> 00:44:20,160
51.

759
00:44:20,160 --> 00:44:21,160
Yeah.

760
00:44:21,160 --> 00:44:24,280
So you're more to the middle of the Gen X pack.

761
00:44:24,280 --> 00:44:29,280
I was born in 68, so I'm, how old am I, 56.

762
00:44:29,280 --> 00:44:35,080
And I'm an early Gen Xer, but I definitely do identify with that generational archetype.

763
00:44:35,080 --> 00:44:41,380
And I'll be posting something later today, talking about the great filter of the Fermi

764
00:44:41,380 --> 00:44:48,640
paradox and the adaptive cycle of the panarchists and the Strauss and Howe generational cohort

765
00:44:48,640 --> 00:44:49,640
theory.

766
00:44:49,640 --> 00:44:54,760
And, you know, a lot of people, and I'm one of them, I'm very skeptical that the generational

767
00:44:54,760 --> 00:44:59,580
theory has much predictive power, but I have to say that the, you know, the generational

768
00:44:59,580 --> 00:45:03,120
archetypes really do seem to tap into something real.

769
00:45:03,120 --> 00:45:06,640
I definitely identify with my generation, Generation X.

770
00:45:06,640 --> 00:45:07,640
Oh yeah.

771
00:45:07,640 --> 00:45:08,640
Yeah.

772
00:45:08,640 --> 00:45:11,040
It's something that I've noticed over time, right?

773
00:45:11,040 --> 00:45:15,320
Because, you know, when you are very, very young, you just don't care too much about

774
00:45:15,320 --> 00:45:16,320
these things.

775
00:45:16,320 --> 00:45:21,400
Now I have teenage sons and I can tell the difference.

776
00:45:21,400 --> 00:45:24,600
I can not only tell the difference between me and my sons, I can tell the difference

777
00:45:24,600 --> 00:45:27,320
between me, my sons, and the intermediate generations, right?

778
00:45:27,320 --> 00:45:32,680
And people who are now thirties, in their thirties, and they have different tastes,

779
00:45:32,680 --> 00:45:34,280
different approaches to things.

780
00:45:34,280 --> 00:45:36,560
So this would be say the millennials, right?

781
00:45:36,560 --> 00:45:41,200
So my kids are like, you know, I don't know, Gen Y, I don't even remember.

782
00:45:41,200 --> 00:45:46,600
I think if your kids are teenagers, particularly if they're late teenagers, they're Generation

783
00:45:46,600 --> 00:45:47,600
Z or Zoomers.

784
00:45:47,600 --> 00:45:48,600
They're mid-teenagers.

785
00:45:48,600 --> 00:45:53,920
The oldest is 17 now and the youngest is 14.

786
00:45:53,920 --> 00:45:56,520
Well then I'm not sure what they're calling the next generation.

787
00:45:56,520 --> 00:45:58,000
It might be Generation Alpha.

788
00:45:58,000 --> 00:45:59,160
I don't know.

789
00:45:59,160 --> 00:46:02,160
But you know, you don't get to pick.

790
00:46:02,160 --> 00:46:07,280
And Generation X didn't really stick until the Douglas Copeland novel, which was in 91,

791
00:46:07,280 --> 00:46:08,280
I think.

792
00:46:08,280 --> 00:46:12,560
It was in my early 20s by the time my generation got a name that stuck.

793
00:46:12,560 --> 00:46:16,760
Strauss and Howe tried to give it a different name and their label didn't stick.

794
00:46:16,760 --> 00:46:19,320
So we don't know what generation your sons will be called.

795
00:46:19,320 --> 00:46:24,320
But my sons who are in their early 20s, they're definitely Zoomers, Generation Z.

796
00:46:24,320 --> 00:46:25,320
Yeah.

797
00:46:25,320 --> 00:46:26,320
Yeah.

798
00:46:26,320 --> 00:46:30,280
And also, I think, you know, most of the writers we've been discussing before, the writers

799
00:46:30,280 --> 00:46:34,600
who are now writing generation ship novels and other science fiction novels are members

800
00:46:34,600 --> 00:46:35,600
of this generation.

801
00:46:35,600 --> 00:46:41,320
Like, all of these, Stephen Baxter is probably slightly older, but people like Alastair Reynolds,

802
00:46:41,320 --> 00:46:47,760
his 50s, Greg Egan, Peter Watts, all these people are our generation.

803
00:46:47,760 --> 00:46:52,840
And you know, we all, all of us, these guys, I think you're American, okay?

804
00:46:52,840 --> 00:46:53,840
Right?

805
00:46:53,840 --> 00:46:54,840
Yes.

806
00:46:54,840 --> 00:46:55,840
Yes, I am.

807
00:46:55,840 --> 00:46:59,880
Peter Watts is Canadian, Stephen Baxter is British, Egan is Australian.

808
00:46:59,880 --> 00:47:06,440
But we all were born in what may be the last really huge cohort, right, that there was

809
00:47:06,440 --> 00:47:09,880
in all of these countries, right?

810
00:47:09,880 --> 00:47:12,720
And then fertility fell off a cliff.

811
00:47:12,720 --> 00:47:18,160
And so now society has changed a lot because of immigration, right?

812
00:47:18,160 --> 00:47:20,800
When you were born, the US was like 80% white.

813
00:47:20,800 --> 00:47:24,480
It's going to be like 50% white by the time you are retired, right?

814
00:47:24,480 --> 00:47:27,600
And it's the same all over Europe.

815
00:47:27,600 --> 00:47:32,880
And you can tell these writers are just not very mindful of that.

816
00:47:32,880 --> 00:47:40,880
Like they try, but they, I think it's an additional part of science fiction.

817
00:47:40,880 --> 00:47:48,480
You try and being this anti-racist and you don't quite, you don't stick it because, you

818
00:47:48,480 --> 00:47:57,560
know, lots of people, I mean, these writers, they come up with futures in which they are

819
00:47:57,560 --> 00:48:04,960
the, everyone is essentially standard American, standard, you know, Anglo-Saxon person, even

820
00:48:04,960 --> 00:48:07,080
if they have a funky name.

821
00:48:07,080 --> 00:48:11,240
And it's just not the way the world actually works.

822
00:48:11,240 --> 00:48:17,600
You know, there's, you know, there's actual difference in when you are Asian American,

823
00:48:17,600 --> 00:48:23,280
when you are African American and Indian Americans, right?

824
00:48:23,280 --> 00:48:27,480
And not to speak of the rest, like, like none of the novels that I discussed before, they

825
00:48:27,480 --> 00:48:32,120
contain any hint that China is super power, for example, right?

826
00:48:32,120 --> 00:48:39,320
So the future, most of the, most of the science fiction written in the last 30 years assumes

827
00:48:39,320 --> 00:48:43,000
that China will disappear from the map soon, right?

828
00:48:43,000 --> 00:48:46,520
There will be no Chinese bases on Mars or the moon.

829
00:48:46,520 --> 00:48:48,000
There's barely any Chinese characters.

830
00:48:48,000 --> 00:48:54,420
You know, there's 1500 million, 1.5 billion Chinese people in the world right now, right?

831
00:48:54,420 --> 00:48:57,680
So there will be space.

832
00:48:57,680 --> 00:49:02,560
There's nothing about the Chinese culture in specifically, like I wrote in my piece

833
00:49:02,560 --> 00:49:05,840
in this, in Aurora, right?

834
00:49:05,840 --> 00:49:10,680
By Kim Stanley Robinson, there is no Chinese representatives in this trip.

835
00:49:10,680 --> 00:49:15,360
So they are going to settle this other solar system and they took care to bring people

836
00:49:15,360 --> 00:49:16,360
from Mongolia.

837
00:49:16,360 --> 00:49:21,440
They didn't, they didn't worry about having Chinese on the ship.

838
00:49:21,440 --> 00:49:24,520
This is pretty crazy, right?

839
00:49:24,520 --> 00:49:34,680
There's this like this massive, massive place, this massive vacuum that they have, most,

840
00:49:34,680 --> 00:49:36,480
most writers in science fiction right now.

841
00:49:36,480 --> 00:49:39,920
And I think it's pretty sad too, you know, being married to somebody of another race,

842
00:49:39,920 --> 00:49:42,400
from another country, from another continent.

843
00:49:42,400 --> 00:49:48,240
I noticed that very often we are, we're still very much, you know, Eurocentric in the sense

844
00:49:48,240 --> 00:49:55,280
of thinking that the world is always going to be like it was when we were, you know,

845
00:49:55,280 --> 00:49:56,280
in the eighties.

846
00:49:56,280 --> 00:49:57,280
And it's not like that.

847
00:49:57,280 --> 00:49:59,520
Things are going to be very different.

848
00:49:59,520 --> 00:50:02,920
And one way or another, the future will be different, whatever happens.

849
00:50:02,920 --> 00:50:08,440
And it will definitely not be just like an extension of California in space forever.

850
00:50:08,440 --> 00:50:12,840
And this is something that I'm, I'm pretty surprised about that.

851
00:50:12,840 --> 00:50:19,160
Like, like I said, Nomenon in this generation ship, the only clone which is Hispanic is

852
00:50:19,160 --> 00:50:20,760
a guy who's a gardener, right?

853
00:50:20,760 --> 00:50:23,280
I mean, this is pretty insane.

854
00:50:23,280 --> 00:50:31,120
They got this guy and they clone him and reclone him to be the gardener in the ship for generations.

855
00:50:31,120 --> 00:50:32,680
This is just mind boggling.

856
00:50:32,680 --> 00:50:38,760
Well, I will say a word of defense for Kim Stanley Robinson in that he, after Aurora,

857
00:50:38,760 --> 00:50:43,960
he wrote a book called Red Moon and the, you know, he wrote a book called Red Mars.

858
00:50:43,960 --> 00:50:46,200
And that was in reference to the color of the planet.

859
00:50:46,200 --> 00:50:51,680
But in Red Moon, it is a political and cultural description that dominate, you know,

860
00:50:51,680 --> 00:50:56,160
Yeah, because in his Mars trilogy, there are no Asians at all.

861
00:50:56,160 --> 00:50:57,840
Like the Asians, they never make it to Mars.

862
00:50:57,840 --> 00:51:02,800
It's all a bunch of Americans fighting each other forever because they also immortal,

863
00:51:02,800 --> 00:51:03,800
right?

864
00:51:03,800 --> 00:51:07,600
So, yeah, you mentioned not every place is California.

865
00:51:07,600 --> 00:51:10,640
And Kim Stanley Robinson is very much a Californian writer.

866
00:51:10,640 --> 00:51:11,640
Oh, yeah, yeah.

867
00:51:11,640 --> 00:51:12,640
He wrote a California trilogy.

868
00:51:12,640 --> 00:51:15,080
For him, Mars was on another extension of California, right?

869
00:51:15,080 --> 00:51:18,720
So the Chinese were like engineers working on the background, right?

870
00:51:18,720 --> 00:51:21,160
Trying not to bother anyone, right?

871
00:51:21,160 --> 00:51:22,160
So then he felt bad.

872
00:51:22,160 --> 00:51:26,240
And he said, well, I'm going to do a scary story about the evil communist Chinese are

873
00:51:26,240 --> 00:51:31,400
going to take over the moon unless we do it first, right?

874
00:51:31,400 --> 00:51:33,160
There's Indy Expans.

875
00:51:33,160 --> 00:51:38,640
I haven't read the novels, but I did watch the TV series and there's a group of Mormons

876
00:51:38,640 --> 00:51:43,400
who collect their funds and they build a generational ship and they're going to go off and just

877
00:51:43,400 --> 00:51:45,480
start a Mormon world somewhere.

878
00:51:45,480 --> 00:51:48,080
And it doesn't happen because the ship gets commandeered.

879
00:51:48,080 --> 00:51:54,880
But I think it's quite plausible that a lot of interstellar colony ships and generational

880
00:51:54,880 --> 00:52:00,920
ships would be crewed by people from a specific culture who want to propagate their culture

881
00:52:00,920 --> 00:52:04,360
and who might be very selective about who they have in their crew.

882
00:52:04,360 --> 00:52:05,360
Of course.

883
00:52:05,360 --> 00:52:10,440
And that is something, again, that few, if any, writers of the relationships ever address.

884
00:52:10,440 --> 00:52:17,720
The whole, you know, what happens if we have this ethnic group on earth that has survived

885
00:52:17,720 --> 00:52:20,560
for thousands and thousands of years?

886
00:52:20,560 --> 00:52:26,800
Oppression, travel, diasporas, and they decide to set up a colony for people who are observant

887
00:52:26,800 --> 00:52:29,360
members of their ethnic region.

888
00:52:29,360 --> 00:52:31,720
That never happens, right?

889
00:52:31,720 --> 00:52:32,720
That never happens.

890
00:52:32,720 --> 00:52:37,080
There's never a Sorastrian colony on Eon, right?

891
00:52:37,080 --> 00:52:38,440
It never ever happens.

892
00:52:38,440 --> 00:52:48,160
Like whoever sets on a trip to the next solar system, they have no religion, they have no

893
00:52:48,160 --> 00:52:52,440
ethnic allegiance, whatever, and they all speak perfect English.

894
00:52:52,440 --> 00:52:56,640
Yeah, it's pretty fantastic if you think about it.

895
00:52:56,640 --> 00:53:01,520
I'm not saying that you're wrong about that, but I would like to offer a notable counter

896
00:53:01,520 --> 00:53:02,520
example.

897
00:53:02,520 --> 00:53:05,840
It's a book that I don't think ever really sold much.

898
00:53:05,840 --> 00:53:10,520
I never hear anybody talking about it, but it's by Greg Baer, the author of Blood Music

899
00:53:10,520 --> 00:53:12,560
and Darwin's Radio and things like that.

900
00:53:12,560 --> 00:53:16,080
It's called Strength of Stones.

901
00:53:16,080 --> 00:53:22,720
It takes place on a world with mobile cities, and each city is devoted to an esoteric sect

902
00:53:22,720 --> 00:53:23,720
of Christianity.

903
00:53:23,720 --> 00:53:28,760
I was reminded of it when you said there are no Sorastrian colonies anywhere, because I

904
00:53:28,760 --> 00:53:33,680
don't remember the full list of different esoteric, extinct, in many cases Christian

905
00:53:33,680 --> 00:53:39,880
sects have cities devoted to them in this novel.

906
00:53:39,880 --> 00:53:41,520
There are many that I had to look up.

907
00:53:41,520 --> 00:53:42,960
I had never heard of them when I read it.

908
00:53:42,960 --> 00:53:47,280
I read it in the 90s, so this is a pre-internet experience for me.

909
00:53:47,280 --> 00:53:51,560
Looking something up was actually an effort, particularly because I was living in Japan

910
00:53:51,560 --> 00:53:58,120
at the time, and there wasn't a handy local library where I could go and grab an encyclopedia.

911
00:53:58,120 --> 00:54:01,560
So looking things up used to be a challenge.

912
00:54:01,560 --> 00:54:04,400
I notice when I'm writing my own…

913
00:54:04,400 --> 00:54:08,880
I think about my writing process, and I'm constantly stopping to look things up, and

914
00:54:08,880 --> 00:54:15,960
I'm constantly stopping to discuss with an AI, usually perplexity.

915
00:54:15,960 --> 00:54:19,880
In the current story I'm writing, it takes place on Galts, which is the place where all

916
00:54:19,880 --> 00:54:23,160
of the Colombian soldiers come from.

917
00:54:23,160 --> 00:54:26,800
Yeah, the Inrundians.

918
00:54:26,800 --> 00:54:29,080
There's a character who…

919
00:54:29,080 --> 00:54:35,480
It's important to him to infiltrate a society of people who are cigar aficionados.

920
00:54:35,480 --> 00:54:37,000
So he has to learn about smoking cigars.

921
00:54:37,000 --> 00:54:41,600
Well, I don't smoke cigars, and I certainly don't run in cigar aficionados circles.

922
00:54:41,600 --> 00:54:47,320
So I'm doing a lot of research about cigar etiquette and different types of tobacco and

923
00:54:47,320 --> 00:54:48,320
things like that.

924
00:54:48,320 --> 00:54:52,440
I have to present characters who are knowledgeable about these things.

925
00:54:52,440 --> 00:54:54,600
And I find that…

926
00:54:54,600 --> 00:54:58,760
I'll do a search and I'll read articles and things, but then I can also ask the AI

927
00:54:58,760 --> 00:55:06,880
and have Claude or Chet, GPT, assume the persona of a knowledgeable cigar aficionado and have

928
00:55:06,880 --> 00:55:08,360
little practice conversations.

929
00:55:08,360 --> 00:55:14,800
I don't use any of their text, but I get a feel for the lingo and the way that it gets

930
00:55:14,800 --> 00:55:15,800
used.

931
00:55:15,800 --> 00:55:20,880
So it's a writing process that would not have been possible five years ago.

932
00:55:20,880 --> 00:55:22,200
Yeah, yeah.

933
00:55:22,200 --> 00:55:26,320
And I think you're really good with AI.

934
00:55:26,320 --> 00:55:27,320
Not just…

935
00:55:27,320 --> 00:55:31,520
I've read your pieces when you are having discussions with AI for your writing process,

936
00:55:31,520 --> 00:55:37,280
but I think that your depiction in Fionnual Lothian in the Kuiper Belt of AI is the most

937
00:55:37,280 --> 00:55:45,480
realistic depiction I've seen of a likely AI takeover of Earth.

938
00:55:45,480 --> 00:55:47,200
And I was really, really intrigued by it.

939
00:55:47,200 --> 00:55:50,040
I mean, how did you think of that?

940
00:55:50,040 --> 00:55:51,040
Okay.

941
00:55:51,040 --> 00:55:52,760
I'll credit where credit is due.

942
00:55:52,760 --> 00:55:58,280
The powers, which are the superintelligence inside the Dyson Sphere, I lifted that entirely

943
00:55:58,280 --> 00:56:01,480
from Charles Strauss's novel, Accelerando.

944
00:56:01,480 --> 00:56:06,040
He calls that force the vile offspring.

945
00:56:06,040 --> 00:56:07,040
And the powers…

946
00:56:07,040 --> 00:56:08,040
You call it the powers.

947
00:56:08,040 --> 00:56:09,040
Yeah.

948
00:56:09,040 --> 00:56:11,040
It is a direct reference to Accelerando.

949
00:56:11,040 --> 00:56:12,040
Right.

950
00:56:12,040 --> 00:56:17,880
And I think it sounds so feasible and so realistic, the way you presented, because they essentially…

951
00:56:17,880 --> 00:56:18,880
You know how it works.

952
00:56:18,880 --> 00:56:23,280
There's the old saying that any sufficiently advanced technology will look like magic to

953
00:56:23,280 --> 00:56:24,280
us, right?

954
00:56:24,280 --> 00:56:26,840
And in the end, they look like magic to us.

955
00:56:26,840 --> 00:56:29,360
That's the way you presented, right?

956
00:56:29,360 --> 00:56:34,640
There are these powers that people say, you know, they took over Earth and now they run

957
00:56:34,640 --> 00:56:35,640
it and we don't know why.

958
00:56:35,640 --> 00:56:37,720
We don't know what the long-term plan is.

959
00:56:37,720 --> 00:56:39,880
We don't know what they intend to do.

960
00:56:39,880 --> 00:56:41,960
But you know, they are there.

961
00:56:41,960 --> 00:56:46,640
And I think it's a really, really, really good approach.

962
00:56:46,640 --> 00:56:50,880
It's probably my favorite approach in science fiction to AI, together with the sunflower

963
00:56:50,880 --> 00:56:51,880
cycle.

964
00:56:51,880 --> 00:56:56,240
In Peter Watts, you know, they have this chimp, which is a really, really stupid AI

965
00:56:56,240 --> 00:56:58,120
running the ship.

966
00:56:58,120 --> 00:57:00,280
And I also love that one.

967
00:57:00,280 --> 00:57:01,280
Yeah.

968
00:57:01,280 --> 00:57:02,280
I remember…

969
00:57:02,280 --> 00:57:08,400
You know, I use the sunflower cycle as a source of bedtime stories for my kids.

970
00:57:08,400 --> 00:57:10,120
I'm going to…

971
00:57:10,120 --> 00:57:14,160
I mean, my kids are older now, but I think I'm going to use it for some bedtime story.

972
00:57:14,160 --> 00:57:20,160
You know, your semi-shared concept of the powers.

973
00:57:20,160 --> 00:57:26,200
I'm going to use it for stories with my kids because it's really fascinating.

974
00:57:26,200 --> 00:57:27,200
You just reminded me.

975
00:57:27,200 --> 00:57:31,400
I used to tell my kids bedtime stories and they were insatiable.

976
00:57:31,400 --> 00:57:32,960
They wanted more and more and more.

977
00:57:32,960 --> 00:57:37,400
And so I would just pull whatever out of my head, you know, out of my memory.

978
00:57:37,400 --> 00:57:44,840
So one time as a bedtime story, I told my son's the story basically of Apocalypse Now.

979
00:57:44,840 --> 00:57:45,840
And…

980
00:57:45,840 --> 00:57:46,840
That's really good.

981
00:57:46,840 --> 00:57:47,840
Yeah.

982
00:57:47,840 --> 00:57:48,840
Yeah.

983
00:57:48,840 --> 00:57:54,840
On another night, my son asked me, Oh, tell me more about Colonel Kurtz.

984
00:57:54,840 --> 00:57:55,840
That's really good.

985
00:57:55,840 --> 00:57:56,840
That's really good.

986
00:57:56,840 --> 00:57:57,840
Yeah.

987
00:57:57,840 --> 00:57:58,840
Yeah.

988
00:57:58,840 --> 00:57:59,840
It's really good.

989
00:57:59,840 --> 00:58:00,840
Yeah.

990
00:58:00,840 --> 00:58:01,840
But it is a really, really intriguing…

991
00:58:01,840 --> 00:58:05,880
I mean, it is a really intriguing thing to consider.

992
00:58:05,880 --> 00:58:09,480
I mean, you have a world that is taking over.

993
00:58:09,480 --> 00:58:11,760
But it doesn't mean the end of mankind.

994
00:58:11,760 --> 00:58:17,800
It just means, you know, just how things branch out and you have…

995
00:58:17,800 --> 00:58:19,960
Which is to be expected.

996
00:58:19,960 --> 00:58:23,800
You have many different kinds of humans at some point in the future, right?

997
00:58:23,800 --> 00:58:28,120
If we live on Earth, you know, there will be very different people evolving in many

998
00:58:28,120 --> 00:58:29,120
different ways.

999
00:58:29,120 --> 00:58:32,040
Like the floaters you describe in your novel, right?

1000
00:58:32,040 --> 00:58:36,080
And you have like… sort of like in Expans you have the Martians, right?

1001
00:58:36,080 --> 00:58:40,520
The people who are like this Spartan-like people who have to… who have been trying

1002
00:58:40,520 --> 00:58:49,280
to, you know, to set up Mars as an habitable planet for generations.

1003
00:58:49,280 --> 00:58:51,560
And you have people living on Earth.

1004
00:58:51,560 --> 00:58:53,040
And then you have the powers.

1005
00:58:53,040 --> 00:58:55,560
I think that's going to be the future of mankind.

1006
00:58:55,560 --> 00:58:59,280
Not, you know, not a California in every solar system.

1007
00:58:59,280 --> 00:59:02,640
It's going to be very, very different approaches.

1008
00:59:02,640 --> 00:59:09,040
And, you know, Mormons in space and Soresens in space and, you know, Wahhabis in space,

1009
00:59:09,040 --> 00:59:10,040
right?

1010
00:59:10,040 --> 00:59:14,440
It's going to be lots of different colonies, lots of different approaches, lots of different

1011
00:59:14,440 --> 00:59:19,520
people very often fighting, you know, the same conflicts that we have right now on Earth,

1012
00:59:19,520 --> 00:59:21,920
only taking them out there, right?

1013
00:59:21,920 --> 00:59:28,080
And you have people who, you know, Armenians and Azerbaijanis, you know, coming across

1014
00:59:28,080 --> 00:59:31,840
each other in Mars and, you know, fighting it out because they hate each other on Earth

1015
00:59:31,840 --> 00:59:33,640
and they will hate each other there as well.

1016
00:59:33,640 --> 00:59:34,640
Think of the US.

1017
00:59:34,640 --> 00:59:39,560
I mean, people still identify themselves as Irish Americans, right?

1018
00:59:39,560 --> 00:59:41,560
I do.

1019
00:59:41,560 --> 00:59:45,680
Yeah, most Irish Americans actually are like one eighth Irish, right?

1020
00:59:45,680 --> 00:59:46,680
Oh, not me.

1021
00:59:46,680 --> 00:59:49,680
I have my DNA sequenced.

1022
00:59:49,680 --> 00:59:53,160
I'm very Irish.

1023
00:59:53,160 --> 01:00:02,040
But it is, yeah, it is a common thing that you keep some sort of not allegiance, but

1024
01:00:02,040 --> 01:00:03,960
a sense of identification.

1025
01:00:03,960 --> 01:00:04,960
It's healthy, too, right?

1026
01:00:04,960 --> 01:00:09,320
It's healthy if you're an Italian American as well and you like your pizza and your pasta.

1027
01:00:09,320 --> 01:00:11,520
And yeah, you don't speak any Italian.

1028
01:00:11,520 --> 01:00:15,120
You don't even, you barely know where Italy is on the map.

1029
01:00:15,120 --> 01:00:19,080
But you feel this, especially not so much as an Italian, but you feel as an Italian

1030
01:00:19,080 --> 01:00:20,080
American, right?

1031
01:00:20,080 --> 01:00:21,840
And that's going to happen.

1032
01:00:21,840 --> 01:00:26,400
There will be, I don't know, American Martians and they will like, you know, they will have

1033
01:00:26,400 --> 01:00:29,880
Halloween, right?

1034
01:00:29,880 --> 01:00:33,280
And people who are not American Martians, they will celebrate Halloween on Mars.

1035
01:00:33,280 --> 01:00:35,880
Yeah, it's going to happen.

1036
01:00:35,880 --> 01:00:40,600
Yeah, there's a YouTube channel that I've watched for a few years now.

1037
01:00:40,600 --> 01:00:47,000
It's called Science Fiction and Futurism with Isaac Arthur.

1038
01:00:47,000 --> 01:00:53,960
And a point that he makes frequently is that because interstellar travel times are so long,

1039
01:00:53,960 --> 01:00:58,680
any human colony that gets established far from Earth, you know, around a different star

1040
01:00:58,680 --> 01:01:01,800
is going to take a very different developmental path.

1041
01:01:01,800 --> 01:01:06,000
And if humans from Earth ever encounter them, you know, after a few thousand years, they

1042
01:01:06,000 --> 01:01:08,060
will effectively be aliens.

1043
01:01:08,060 --> 01:01:12,200
They will be so different from us, not just culturally, but biologically as well.

1044
01:01:12,200 --> 01:01:15,120
Yeah, we'll probably won't be able to breathe with that.

1045
01:01:15,120 --> 01:01:16,120
Yeah.

1046
01:01:16,120 --> 01:01:19,480
We'll probably, you know, maybe even get along with them or communicate with them in any

1047
01:01:19,480 --> 01:01:21,600
meaningful way.

1048
01:01:21,600 --> 01:01:31,000
And so I think it's quite likely that, you know, humans will never encounter genuine

1049
01:01:31,000 --> 01:01:35,200
extraterrestrials with a different, you know, biological origin.

1050
01:01:35,200 --> 01:01:39,840
But we will, you know, provided we get off Earth and start establishing different human

1051
01:01:39,840 --> 01:01:44,280
lines in different places, we will encounter aliens, but they will be our descendants.

1052
01:01:44,280 --> 01:01:50,240
And before that, the aliens will be AI.

1053
01:01:50,240 --> 01:01:52,520
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1054
01:01:52,520 --> 01:01:57,800
And I think that's probably one of the reasons why, you know, all of these generation ship

1055
01:01:57,800 --> 01:02:02,600
authors that I was describing for, they don't get too much into the subject is that, yeah,

1056
01:02:02,600 --> 01:02:06,840
it's another minefield in terms of political correctness and workings today.

1057
01:02:06,840 --> 01:02:11,480
Like if you describe a planet where you have a bunch of humans that, you know, develop

1058
01:02:11,480 --> 01:02:16,920
differently and now they are smarter or less smart than other humans, right?

1059
01:02:16,920 --> 01:02:18,400
Are you making a political point?

1060
01:02:18,400 --> 01:02:24,880
Oh, you know, today's different countries and different conflicts, right?

1061
01:02:24,880 --> 01:02:28,520
You're not, you're really just making a point that it's going to happen, right?

1062
01:02:28,520 --> 01:02:30,920
People are going to evolve in different ways.

1063
01:02:30,920 --> 01:02:34,380
Say you may have people like you described in your novel who are genetically modified,

1064
01:02:34,380 --> 01:02:38,080
so they're stronger and they're better for combat, right?

1065
01:02:38,080 --> 01:02:41,400
These guys who take over the gold colony.

1066
01:02:41,400 --> 01:02:43,920
And others were not.

1067
01:02:43,920 --> 01:02:47,920
And it doesn't mean that they are better or they're worse, but they're not as good in

1068
01:02:47,920 --> 01:02:50,160
combat, but it really is a minefield.

1069
01:02:50,160 --> 01:02:52,840
And people are going to go, oh, are they superior?

1070
01:02:52,840 --> 01:02:55,280
Now are we saying some people are superior to others?

1071
01:02:55,280 --> 01:03:00,640
Well, in the sense of, you know, being able to combat better, yes, but there are also

1072
01:03:00,640 --> 01:03:01,640
other senses.

1073
01:03:01,640 --> 01:03:07,960
So you can easily see how that can be misconstrued as you're making a point about, you know,

1074
01:03:07,960 --> 01:03:14,280
have people been better than others from specific things like, like in Nomenon, like Mexicans

1075
01:03:14,280 --> 01:03:15,880
are so very good at gardening, right?

1076
01:03:15,880 --> 01:03:18,960
So let's always have them gardening, right?

1077
01:03:18,960 --> 01:03:21,040
Yeah, I guess.

1078
01:03:21,040 --> 01:03:26,360
That's a trope of the generational ship is that you have very little freedom to chart

1079
01:03:26,360 --> 01:03:33,400
your own destiny because you or your ancestors were selected for a particular role on the

1080
01:03:33,400 --> 01:03:36,200
ship and particularly if people are being cloned.

1081
01:03:36,200 --> 01:03:40,360
And yeah, I mean, we need a gardener and this genetic template is the best gardener.

1082
01:03:40,360 --> 01:03:41,360
So guess what?

1083
01:03:41,360 --> 01:03:42,360
That's your job.

1084
01:03:42,360 --> 01:03:43,360
Super gardener forever.

1085
01:03:43,360 --> 01:03:44,360
Yeah.

1086
01:03:44,360 --> 01:03:45,360
Yeah.

1087
01:03:45,360 --> 01:03:49,560
So it's yeah, you can see how, how it's tricky.

1088
01:03:49,560 --> 01:03:54,960
And, and you can see how people, I mean, Stephen Baxter, Alsthereanos, all of these guys have

1089
01:03:54,960 --> 01:03:59,080
been discussing, they're really smart people and they've written very, very good science

1090
01:03:59,080 --> 01:04:00,260
fiction novels.

1091
01:04:00,260 --> 01:04:04,960
And I'm criticizing these books and many of them are very entertaining.

1092
01:04:04,960 --> 01:04:08,620
Like they're very good, they're very well written, they have great ideas.

1093
01:04:08,620 --> 01:04:11,680
So I don't think it's that they don't know this.

1094
01:04:11,680 --> 01:04:20,080
I think it's that the context in the publishing industry and the context in society is such

1095
01:04:20,080 --> 01:04:24,480
that they don't have the same sort of freedom to express themselves as Philip K. Dick had

1096
01:04:24,480 --> 01:04:25,480
in the seventies.

1097
01:04:25,480 --> 01:04:28,640
I think that is fundamentally the problem.

1098
01:04:28,640 --> 01:04:31,120
Yeah, yeah.

1099
01:04:31,120 --> 01:04:37,800
It's, it's an effect of cultural pressures and economic pressures and the economic pressures.

1100
01:04:37,800 --> 01:04:42,840
I really think that they are, they're not destroying science fiction because there's

1101
01:04:42,840 --> 01:04:47,660
lots of people writing science fiction who have no hope of being published traditionally,

1102
01:04:47,660 --> 01:04:51,640
but who will find a very small audience online, probably not big enough for it to be their

1103
01:04:51,640 --> 01:04:53,280
main source of income.

1104
01:04:53,280 --> 01:04:55,040
But there's plenty of science fiction being written.

1105
01:04:55,040 --> 01:05:00,900
But the, I think the problem I have, and this is certainly true of my work, is that I am

1106
01:05:00,900 --> 01:05:06,440
my own editor and there's not a book in the world really that can't be made better with

1107
01:05:06,440 --> 01:05:12,800
the, you know, under the skilled guidance of a talented and experienced editor.

1108
01:05:12,800 --> 01:05:17,280
And so all of these people writing science fiction out in the wilderness because their

1109
01:05:17,280 --> 01:05:21,880
visions are not politically palatable, their books really could be better and should be

1110
01:05:21,880 --> 01:05:22,880
better.

1111
01:05:22,880 --> 01:05:23,880
Yeah, absolutely.

1112
01:05:23,880 --> 01:05:30,640
That's something that as a journalist, something that I really noticed how everyone, I mean,

1113
01:05:30,640 --> 01:05:35,000
you may think of yourself as the best writer ever in history.

1114
01:05:35,000 --> 01:05:41,800
Everyone can really work with an editor and see his work improved.

1115
01:05:41,800 --> 01:05:49,840
And editors really have a role in, and because of different reasons, editing is a lost start.

1116
01:05:49,840 --> 01:05:55,320
Even for big time authors, editing is not the same sort of process it used to be.

1117
01:05:55,320 --> 01:05:59,400
If you read about, say, Raymond Carver is a great example.

1118
01:05:59,400 --> 01:06:07,160
You know, Raymond Carver, he was a notorious because he had this, I think it was Gordon

1119
01:06:07,160 --> 01:06:09,480
List, I think, Gordon Just.

1120
01:06:09,480 --> 01:06:14,240
He had this editor who was very hands on and he essentially created, you know, Raymond

1121
01:06:14,240 --> 01:06:20,840
Carver's books out of the raw material, right?

1122
01:06:20,840 --> 01:06:23,880
So they were very different when Raymond Carver was writing them.

1123
01:06:23,880 --> 01:06:31,640
And his editor, he created the style that Raymond Carver became famous of.

1124
01:06:31,640 --> 01:06:37,440
So you have a role that used to be key that now because of different developments in the

1125
01:06:37,440 --> 01:06:39,600
industry, it's almost gone.

1126
01:06:39,600 --> 01:06:43,480
And I published books and I've had them edited.

1127
01:06:43,480 --> 01:06:46,680
And I've noticed over time that this is really getting worse.

1128
01:06:46,680 --> 01:06:52,040
Like my last book was, it's a book of philosophy and it was edited by the publisher.

1129
01:06:52,040 --> 01:06:56,960
And it wasn't badly edited, but I noticed that the process was less thorough, that it

1130
01:06:56,960 --> 01:06:59,600
would have been in a Wall Street Journal article.

1131
01:06:59,600 --> 01:07:05,680
So I took more time and my editor took more time for a 1000 word story in the Wall Street

1132
01:07:05,680 --> 01:07:11,040
Journal than we took in editing a book which is 100,000 words.

1133
01:07:11,040 --> 01:07:14,000
And that's the way the industry is working now.

1134
01:07:14,000 --> 01:07:17,800
And I mean, for self-publishing authors, yeah, forget about it.

1135
01:07:17,800 --> 01:07:18,880
Nobody's going to edit your work.

1136
01:07:18,880 --> 01:07:25,360
But even if it's published by a press, by a publisher, it's not that simple.

1137
01:07:25,360 --> 01:07:32,800
And that's an additional problem that the standards are dropping, definitely.

1138
01:07:32,800 --> 01:07:39,520
What's your philosophical area of interest?

1139
01:07:39,520 --> 01:07:47,160
I became very, very interested in philosophy because my readings of what we might describe

1140
01:07:47,160 --> 01:07:54,560
as a postmodern neo-Marxist writer, philosopher Slavoj Džek in Slovenian.

1141
01:07:54,560 --> 01:07:56,520
But I keep writing.

1142
01:07:56,520 --> 01:07:58,760
I mean, I keep reading Džek with pleasure.

1143
01:07:58,760 --> 01:08:05,000
I mean, I love his work, but I've been reading a lot of the classics now.

1144
01:08:05,000 --> 01:08:12,920
So for this book in particular, this is a comparative history of ancient Chinese and

1145
01:08:12,920 --> 01:08:14,800
Western philosophy, right?

1146
01:08:14,800 --> 01:08:24,120
So I did a lot of reading of Plato, Socrates, the sophists, the early Christians, Augustine,

1147
01:08:24,120 --> 01:08:32,000
and all the Chinese classics, Mencius, Confucius, the Taoists.

1148
01:08:32,000 --> 01:08:34,800
I didn't read a lot of the originals.

1149
01:08:34,800 --> 01:08:41,360
I read a lot of histories of philosophy and extracts and originals, some of them, but

1150
01:08:41,360 --> 01:08:42,360
not all of them, definitely.

1151
01:08:42,360 --> 01:08:50,000
I mean, it's really hard to go through the whole production of Mencius.

1152
01:08:50,000 --> 01:08:54,040
But yeah, I've always loved philosophy as well.

1153
01:08:54,040 --> 01:08:58,280
And I think in my approach when it comes to history, it's really entangled.

1154
01:08:58,280 --> 01:09:03,000
I mean, I don't see them as fundamentally separate subjects.

1155
01:09:03,000 --> 01:09:06,880
So when I write about the history of mankind, I write about not just the history of what

1156
01:09:06,880 --> 01:09:07,880
people did.

1157
01:09:07,880 --> 01:09:12,280
I like to write about the history of what people thought, right?

1158
01:09:12,280 --> 01:09:14,120
How they saw things.

1159
01:09:14,120 --> 01:09:19,560
And to understand that, you need the philosophy, because the philosophers are the ones giving

1160
01:09:19,560 --> 01:09:24,480
you a window into how people perceived things, right?

1161
01:09:24,480 --> 01:09:32,680
So if you read Augustine, you get an idea of how educated, literate people in the late

1162
01:09:32,680 --> 01:09:36,080
Roman Empire, they saw the world around them.

1163
01:09:36,080 --> 01:09:42,480
And if you try and write that history without having a good grounding on Augustine writings,

1164
01:09:42,480 --> 01:09:46,480
you are missing out on a big part of the history.

1165
01:09:46,480 --> 01:09:56,280
Well, it's funny in that my academic training was in philosophy, but philosophy is a big

1166
01:09:56,280 --> 01:10:00,440
universe and I was interested in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of science.

1167
01:10:00,440 --> 01:10:01,480
And that's what I specialized in.

1168
01:10:01,480 --> 01:10:06,680
So as an undergrad, I read Plato and Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and things of that nature.

1169
01:10:06,680 --> 01:10:12,040
But once I got into grad school, I was mostly reading very modern works about the philosophy

1170
01:10:12,040 --> 01:10:16,160
of mind with an emphasis on artificial intelligence.

1171
01:10:16,160 --> 01:10:17,280
And this was in the 90s.

1172
01:10:17,280 --> 01:10:22,000
So neural nets, like functional neural nets, like the ones we interact with all the time

1173
01:10:22,000 --> 01:10:26,240
today were still science fiction.

1174
01:10:26,240 --> 01:10:33,000
But in Western philosophy, there's a big split between what's known as continental philosophy

1175
01:10:33,000 --> 01:10:34,760
and analytic philosophy.

1176
01:10:34,760 --> 01:10:37,240
And I was completely on the analytic side.

1177
01:10:37,240 --> 01:10:42,440
And then I was in Japan and I was going to come back and go to grad school.

1178
01:10:42,440 --> 01:10:47,920
And I had my girlfriend just talk to an advisor and pick some classes for me.

1179
01:10:47,920 --> 01:10:54,000
And my first semester in grad school, without choosing it myself, I ended up in a Hegel

1180
01:10:54,000 --> 01:10:57,640
seminar taught by a German professor.

1181
01:10:57,640 --> 01:11:04,960
And I had no idea what was happening.

1182
01:11:04,960 --> 01:11:05,960
You need to read Jek.

1183
01:11:05,960 --> 01:11:08,880
I mean, that's the beauty of Slavoj Jek.

1184
01:11:08,880 --> 01:11:11,440
A lot of people know him because of his political polemics.

1185
01:11:11,440 --> 01:11:16,960
He writes, I don't know, history writing The Guardian, in the Lauderive books about

1186
01:11:16,960 --> 01:11:20,400
Trump or Brexit.

1187
01:11:20,400 --> 01:11:21,800
That's not very relevant, not very important.

1188
01:11:21,800 --> 01:11:27,120
I mean, his role in the modern world, really, is he's the best explainer and the best interpreter

1189
01:11:27,120 --> 01:11:30,080
of continental philosophy.

1190
01:11:30,080 --> 01:11:36,840
So if you want to understand what Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard were all about, he's the guy.

1191
01:11:36,840 --> 01:11:40,240
And all the French crazies, he's the guy.

1192
01:11:40,240 --> 01:11:43,640
He's the one who actually gets them and can explain it to you.

1193
01:11:43,640 --> 01:11:47,920
And to me, that was really eye opening.

1194
01:11:47,920 --> 01:11:53,360
And it really is something just like I was saying that Peter Watts brought me back to

1195
01:11:53,360 --> 01:11:54,360
science fiction.

1196
01:11:54,360 --> 01:11:56,720
Slavoj Jek brought me back to philosophy.

1197
01:11:56,720 --> 01:12:03,440
I had read Nietzsche and Plato and Heidegger when I was a teenager.

1198
01:12:03,440 --> 01:12:08,480
But Slavoj Jek is really the guy who told me, this is what it means.

1199
01:12:08,480 --> 01:12:13,080
This is what these people are, this is the point they are trying to get across.

1200
01:12:13,080 --> 01:12:20,320
And they are actually trying to get points made.

1201
01:12:20,320 --> 01:12:24,720
It's not just crazy verbiage that a lot of people think it is.

1202
01:12:24,720 --> 01:12:29,720
So yeah, there's a lot of interesting contemporary history, definitely.

1203
01:12:29,720 --> 01:12:34,160
So you're familiar with the notion of six degrees of Kevin Bacon?

1204
01:12:34,160 --> 01:12:35,160
No.

1205
01:12:35,160 --> 01:12:38,400
Oh, well, how about just six degrees of separation?

1206
01:12:38,400 --> 01:12:39,400
Yes.

1207
01:12:39,400 --> 01:12:43,080
I think the only few people on the planet, they have a chain of associations that's no

1208
01:12:43,080 --> 01:12:44,080
longer than six.

1209
01:12:44,080 --> 01:12:48,480
I'm one degree of separation from Slavoj Jek.

1210
01:12:48,480 --> 01:12:54,400
A podcasting peer of mine and longtime friend, a guy named Doug Lane, he's interviewed Jek

1211
01:12:54,400 --> 01:12:55,400
many times.

1212
01:12:55,400 --> 01:12:56,400
So there you go.

1213
01:12:56,400 --> 01:12:59,400
Yeah, but that's the thing.

1214
01:12:59,400 --> 01:13:03,720
Slavoj Jek's books are fantastic.

1215
01:13:03,720 --> 01:13:12,320
His podcasting, his conferences, his speeches about why Biden is better than Trump.

1216
01:13:12,320 --> 01:13:13,320
That's good.

1217
01:13:13,320 --> 01:13:17,600
I mean, he's an insightful guy, but it's not great.

1218
01:13:17,600 --> 01:13:19,080
His books are great.

1219
01:13:19,080 --> 01:13:27,300
It's like trying to, I think all of us authors, and I think you would say the same thing.

1220
01:13:27,300 --> 01:13:31,800
If you want to get what's the best of you, the best things you produce, normally are

1221
01:13:31,800 --> 01:13:33,920
the things you wrote, right?

1222
01:13:33,920 --> 01:13:37,960
Because you put so much time and effort on your books, right?

1223
01:13:37,960 --> 01:13:40,880
On your writing.

1224
01:13:40,880 --> 01:13:43,560
Podcasting may be very valuable.

1225
01:13:43,560 --> 01:13:49,640
It may be very profitable, may be very insightful, and it's a very good way to reach audiences.

1226
01:13:49,640 --> 01:13:55,480
But I don't think anyone's best work is in talks.

1227
01:13:55,480 --> 01:13:57,240
And it's the same thing with Jek.

1228
01:13:57,240 --> 01:14:01,640
You can listen to several talks by Jek and you go, oh, this guy's pretty smart.

1229
01:14:01,640 --> 01:14:04,280
It's nothing like reading his books.

1230
01:14:04,280 --> 01:14:07,800
That's your actual real experience.

1231
01:14:07,800 --> 01:14:11,560
Which of his books would you recommend first and foremost?

1232
01:14:11,560 --> 01:14:19,200
I would recommend Less Than Nothing, which is a fantastic Hegelian, massive tome on Hegelian

1233
01:14:19,200 --> 01:14:20,960
interpretations.

1234
01:14:20,960 --> 01:14:25,480
I would recommend the...

1235
01:14:25,480 --> 01:14:29,400
What's his...

1236
01:14:29,400 --> 01:14:31,480
There's so many, really.

1237
01:14:31,480 --> 01:14:40,680
I think really all of the books he wrote between, say, 2005 and 2015, I think that's probably

1238
01:14:40,680 --> 01:14:44,520
all of his best books, all of his best work.

1239
01:14:44,520 --> 01:14:49,200
Less Than Nothing, I think it was 2012, I'm thinking.

1240
01:14:49,200 --> 01:14:51,320
The Parallax View is fantastic as well.

1241
01:14:51,320 --> 01:14:55,720
It's not very famous, but it's a fantastic book.

1242
01:14:55,720 --> 01:14:56,720
It's really good.

1243
01:14:56,720 --> 01:15:03,280
And just like you were saying with Philip Kedik, Slavoj Jek tends to go back to the

1244
01:15:03,280 --> 01:15:04,280
same points.

1245
01:15:04,280 --> 01:15:07,000
Like, you know, Philip Kedik, that's right.

1246
01:15:07,000 --> 01:15:08,480
He wrote the same book three times.

1247
01:15:08,480 --> 01:15:10,640
Jek does the same thing.

1248
01:15:10,640 --> 01:15:15,080
So very often you're going to find the very same anecdote, the very same idea expressed

1249
01:15:15,080 --> 01:15:17,720
slightly differently in various books.

1250
01:15:17,720 --> 01:15:23,320
My impression is that he gets his stories and his points across best in these two books,

1251
01:15:23,320 --> 01:15:26,920
Parallax View and Less Than Nothing.

1252
01:15:26,920 --> 01:15:32,200
You mentioned, you know, well, I brought it up, I guess, initially, that Philip Kedik

1253
01:15:32,200 --> 01:15:34,040
writes the same book again and again.

1254
01:15:34,040 --> 01:15:37,400
He's got three books which are considered to be a trilogy.

1255
01:15:37,400 --> 01:15:38,400
What is it?

1256
01:15:38,400 --> 01:15:43,560
The Divine Invasion, Transmigration of Timothy Archer and Ubik.

1257
01:15:43,560 --> 01:15:46,000
And they don't share any characters in common.

1258
01:15:46,000 --> 01:15:49,800
You know, they don't share the same setting.

1259
01:15:49,800 --> 01:15:52,680
You know, what is it about them that makes them a trilogy?

1260
01:15:52,680 --> 01:15:58,880
And it's basically the same story told three times in, you know, at different points in

1261
01:15:58,880 --> 01:16:00,520
his life.

1262
01:16:00,520 --> 01:16:05,600
And the main character of every Philip Kedik novel is Philip Kedik, and he just gives them

1263
01:16:05,600 --> 01:16:06,600
a different name.

1264
01:16:06,600 --> 01:16:15,400
So in Ubik, not Ubik, it's the book I'm thinking of, Radio Free Albumeth.

1265
01:16:15,400 --> 01:16:18,720
Yes, I remember that one.

1266
01:16:18,720 --> 01:16:23,560
There's a book where the main character's name is Horse Lover Fat, which is just an

1267
01:16:23,560 --> 01:16:24,880
absurd name.

1268
01:16:24,880 --> 01:16:28,080
And the point is, yes, it's me.

1269
01:16:28,080 --> 01:16:30,000
I'm dropping all pretense.

1270
01:16:30,000 --> 01:16:32,360
You know, the main character's name is not Rick Deckard.

1271
01:16:32,360 --> 01:16:33,440
It's not Barney Mayors.

1272
01:16:33,440 --> 01:16:38,080
And it's Horse Lover Fat, although sometimes he'll even drop that and just, you know, either

1273
01:16:38,080 --> 01:16:41,800
speak in the first person or call the character Philip Kedik.

1274
01:16:41,800 --> 01:16:44,280
Which makes sense, right?

1275
01:16:44,280 --> 01:16:46,280
Yeah, it makes sense.

1276
01:16:46,280 --> 01:16:54,480
But he usually doesn't have any sort of like meta-textual pretense or anything like that.

1277
01:16:54,480 --> 01:16:58,680
He tells very straightforward stories with no irony to them.

1278
01:16:58,680 --> 01:17:02,000
But you know, toward the end of his career, he was like, yeah, I'm going to write the

1279
01:17:02,000 --> 01:17:06,800
same story again, but here I'm going to admit it on the page that I'm revisiting these themes

1280
01:17:06,800 --> 01:17:08,320
yet again.

1281
01:17:08,320 --> 01:17:11,960
The same stock character, you know, archetypes.

1282
01:17:11,960 --> 01:17:14,160
Refreshing honesty, really.

1283
01:17:14,160 --> 01:17:18,920
Well, we've been on this conversation for over an hour and a quarter.

1284
01:17:18,920 --> 01:17:24,160
And I find that files, once they go over that length, they tend to become unmanageable on

1285
01:17:24,160 --> 01:17:25,480
my archaic equipment.

1286
01:17:25,480 --> 01:17:28,640
So David Roman, it has been an absolute pleasure.

1287
01:17:28,640 --> 01:17:32,000
I will become smarter as I continue to read your substack.

1288
01:17:32,000 --> 01:17:33,320
And thank you very much.

1289
01:17:33,320 --> 01:17:34,960
Yeah, and I can say the same.

1290
01:17:34,960 --> 01:17:37,600
I hope to keep reading your pieces.

1291
01:17:37,600 --> 01:17:40,240
And I think you're doing really important work.

1292
01:17:40,240 --> 01:17:46,280
I think people should know more about science fiction and about how science fiction can

1293
01:17:46,280 --> 01:17:51,280
really, you know, illuminate our path to the future.

1294
01:17:51,280 --> 01:18:01,400
Amen to that.

1295
01:18:01,400 --> 01:18:03,400
Well that was David Roman.

1296
01:18:03,400 --> 01:18:08,320
And I'm looking at his substack now, A History of Mankind.

1297
01:18:08,320 --> 01:18:10,760
And he describes it thusly.

1298
01:18:10,760 --> 01:18:16,280
The entire history of mankind in regular installments, not just European stuff, but the history of

1299
01:18:16,280 --> 01:18:22,000
all mankind, from the Americas to Sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania.

1300
01:18:22,000 --> 01:18:26,320
And looking at his recent posts, the most recent one is about his trip to China.

1301
01:18:26,320 --> 01:18:32,700
Before that, from January 3rd, is a post called Mithridates, Crassus, and Spartacus.

1302
01:18:32,700 --> 01:18:35,740
Before that, Pompey, Cicero, and Caesar.

1303
01:18:35,740 --> 01:18:39,320
Before that, the best of 2024 in A History of Mankind.

1304
01:18:39,320 --> 01:18:40,920
And before that, Sulla's Revolution.

1305
01:18:40,920 --> 01:18:43,120
So he seems to be back in Rome.

1306
01:18:43,120 --> 01:18:47,000
But before that is the post that we talked a little bit about.

1307
01:18:47,000 --> 01:18:52,080
It's called Christmas Special, A History of Generationships in Science Fiction.

1308
01:18:52,080 --> 01:18:55,600
And we didn't really cover much from this post.

1309
01:18:55,600 --> 01:19:00,200
And I had intended to, but you know, podcast interviews often don't go where we expect

1310
01:19:00,200 --> 01:19:01,420
them to.

1311
01:19:01,420 --> 01:19:06,020
But if you were interested in science fiction, and in particular in the various portrayals

1312
01:19:06,020 --> 01:19:10,760
of generationships in science fiction, then I would check out the Christmas Special, A

1313
01:19:10,760 --> 01:19:13,700
History of Generationships in Science Fiction.

1314
01:19:13,700 --> 01:19:17,800
Science fiction is the history of the imagined future by David Roman.

1315
01:19:17,800 --> 01:19:22,360
Alright, well I'm focusing more on writing than podcasting these days.

1316
01:19:22,360 --> 01:19:23,600
I'm happy to do a podcast.

1317
01:19:23,600 --> 01:19:25,720
I'm always happy to do a podcast.

1318
01:19:25,720 --> 01:19:29,280
But you know, it's finding guests that is...

1319
01:19:29,280 --> 01:19:31,760
I wouldn't even say the challenge, just the bother.

1320
01:19:31,760 --> 01:19:33,960
I'm not bothering.

1321
01:19:33,960 --> 01:19:41,440
But if you would like to talk to me for this podcast, and you are versed in AI, space travel,

1322
01:19:41,440 --> 01:19:48,040
robotics, anything having to do with the prospect for a Comorex future, let me know.

1323
01:19:48,040 --> 01:19:49,360
We can talk.

1324
01:19:49,360 --> 01:19:53,840
If you want to talk about politics, I'm happy to talk about that with you for your podcast.

1325
01:19:53,840 --> 01:19:58,400
But the best way to get in touch with me is just to send me a note on Substack.

1326
01:19:58,400 --> 01:20:04,920
But if you're not on Substack and you're hearing this, my email address is kmo at Crealm.com.

1327
01:20:04,920 --> 01:20:09,600
That's the letter C and then a dash and then R-E-A-L-M dot com.

1328
01:20:09,600 --> 01:20:12,160
Alright, I'm out.

1329
01:20:12,160 --> 01:20:29,000
Stay well.