KMO Show episode number 28 with guest David Roman, Tuesday, January 7th, 2025.
Well, let's just launch into it.
And I will say that you are listening to the KMO show.
I'm your host, KMO, and I'm speaking with fellow sub stacker
David Roman, who is right now in Spain, but fresh back from China.
David, it's good to talk to you.
Likewise.
So tell me about your trip to China.
Well, it was a family trip.
I used to live there.
I was a correspondent for a while in China.
Then I married a Chinese woman.
So I've been going back and forth to China because of my work as a journalist
and because of family visits for about it's 27 years now.
Yeah.
So you have gotten periodic firsthand views of the progress
and changes taking place in China.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
You know, firsthand, like, like whenever I arrived, the things were so different
from the way they are now.
The whole country has changed so very much.
Well, it makes sense.
It's been 27 years.
But like, to be honest, Europe hasn't changed as much.
Like it's something that I often discuss with my European friends.
You know, I was born here in Spain.
Then I lived in Australia, lived in a lot of countries.
And I've talked to a lot of people from many places.
And, you know, the US has changed a lot.
You know, many countries have changed.
China did. But, you know, Europe hasn't.
And for us Europeans, you know, it is it is shocking how much China has changed.
Well, I have never been to China except a layover in Taipei,
which is technically China, but, you know, well, you know, don't go there.
Yeah. Yeah. Right.
But, yeah, it is.
I mean, my my interests are largely in artificial intelligence and robotics.
And China is charging ahead in that area.
You know, Elon Musk has been developing his Tesla bot.
But from, you know, the videos I'm seeing on YouTube, at least
the Chinese companies seem to have leapfrogged past Tesla in terms of the
the agility and just the general dexterousness and competence of their robots.
So it's pretty impressive.
Yeah, it is. It is.
It's hard to tell.
When it comes to China, it's always hard to tell, you know, how much is
is just hype, especially going hype.
They love it.
You know, you see these videos in social media about this fancy, like
world-lead modernistic cities like Shanghai and Chongqing.
And they have all of these, you know, high tech stuff and big screens
and everything looks very fancy.
You know, on the ground, it's not quite that
quite that funky, really.
China is still a country, still a developing country in many senses.
So you have these futuristic landscapes sometimes.
But you also have, you know, things which are definitely, you know, 1970s
bad roads, you know, sidewalks full of cracks.
You know, people still carrying things around in bicycles in many parts of the
country. So it is there's a there's a little bit of everything.
But to be honest, it does feel like when it comes to the very cutting edge
in many senses, like you said, in robotics, in in electrical engineering,
in in electric cars, in high speed trains, in even space race.
China, it's very much on the cutting edge, really.
It's it's very far advanced.
In other things, not so much.
So it's a country that has, you know, like we journalists like to say,
it's full of contrasts.
There's a YouTube channel that's several years old now, but it started with a
couple of guys, one American and one South African who are living in China.
And they would mount GoPros on their motorcycle helmets and just drive all
around China and going to some places that the Chinese government wasn't
particularly anxious to have them broadcast to the world.
Some of the still backwater places, places that are undeveloped and also
areas of new construction, which are as yet uninhabited and already decaying.
Are you familiar with that channel?
No, I'm not.
Well, when they started it, they were living in China and they were both
married to Chinese women, but the Chinese government let them know that
they are unwelcome.
So now they do their show about China from Los Angeles.
Yeah, it happens.
It's it's tricky.
And, you know, it's I've heard a lot of different stories like this.
And, you know, it's really depressing when you are doing a show, which is
like these guys, I don't know their example, but it sounds like it's the
kind of thing that happens to you when you are, you know, a bit too edgy for
the government tastes.
And to be honest, normally they don't care so much about journalists, about
foreigners really say whatever they want for a foreign audience.
But I would suspect that they probably caught some attention in China within,
you know, Chinese audiences.
And that is the thing that the government doesn't like at all.
So if you are, you know, telling things about China to foreigners and, you
know, it doesn't really head back to China in any way, they're fine with it.
But the moment Chinese start paying attention to you and they go like, look
what these foreigners are saying about China.
That's that may be really tricky.
Yeah, I got that impression watching their channel.
Well, you are a fellow substacker and your your beat is world history.
And I've been reading through your posts and yeah, I can there are a few
periods where I could probably have an informed conversation with you.
But not many.
I am impressed with the breadth of your knowledge.
Well, it's my thing, you know, like I've been preparing this project
like for about 30 years now.
I always loved history.
I became a journalist because, you know, to be honest, I was like writing,
you know, history, literature, but I thought, you know, when I was like, I
don't know, 18, I was thinking, I don't know anything about anything.
So I could be writing books.
Lots of people do.
I do it like some sort of a literary or historical career.
And but I don't know anything.
So whatever I write, it's going to be, you know, misinformed.
So I decided to become a journalist and learn things about the world.
Right.
I was like the news and there's this great, you know, the late Christopher
Hitchens, he had this great sentence that he said that he became a
journalist because he wanted to, he wanted to know the news, right.
He didn't want to read the news.
He wanted to learn the news first, just to know whether the news he was getting
were true.
And I had the same feeling really, you know, before Christopher Hitchens
actually, you know, spayed out for me.
And I was always throughout all this time when I was a correspondent for,
you know, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, around me.
And throughout this time, I was always reading lots of books about history.
I was always approach things from a historical perspective.
Right.
So for my teachers, that was a bit of a pain in the ass sometimes when I try
to, you know, you are supposed to be writing a story about inflation in Malaysia
and you go, well, you know, in the time of the Sultanate and they go, oh, come
get it out.
Forget about Sultanate.
We want to know about CPI in Malaysia.
Come on.
Don't be too, don't try and be too smart.
So yeah, I had to, but I was, I was always interested, say I was a correspondent
in Singapore and Southeast Asia for a long time.
And I took, I took that time to, so when I was meeting policy makers, diplomats
and officials, I was asking them about the history and, you know, the important,
you know, the important historical points for their countries, like independence
from the British Empire, how that felt on these crises and these other people
time moments.
And I was always interested, you know, beyond my immediate needs as a journalist.
And I think in the end, that's helped me a lot in my current incarnation as a historian.
How long have you been on Substack?
About three years now.
Ah, so a pioneer.
Yeah.
I started very early when I read about it.
First, I thought this is for me.
Yeah.
This is going to work out for me because I have all of this material.
I have to find some way to let people know about this.
Yeah.
Well, I got kicked off of Facebook and I think it was 2017 and I had a community there that,
you know, I was the administrator of it was devoted to my, my previous podcast,
the Sea Realm podcast, and somebody didn't like an opinion that I expressed about Star Trek.
And they reported me to Facebook as an impersonator and about Star Trek.
Yeah.
Come on.
What opinion did you have?
What opinion did you have about Star Trek that people would object to?
That I didn't much care for the direction of recent Star Trek projects and I preferred
the older Star Trek.
It's a crazy one.
Yes.
So anyway, I got booted and it's, it's an experience in, I don't know if it's Kafka-esque
or Wellian, but you know, with the push of a button, they delete your entire history
on Facebook.
So I'd been on it for about 10 years and I had thousands of posts and you know,
I was this moderator in a group with a couple thousand members and suddenly all presence
of my history on Facebook is gone.
Yeah.
Just, and I tried to get into Twitter and I just don't really like the format and I never really,
I didn't engage with it enough to get any traction.
So Twitter never went anywhere for me.
And for years there just nothing replaced Facebook, which was fine.
You know, it was a time suck.
But now Substack is, it seems to have finally, you know, filled that hole that Facebook left.
Yeah.
No, absolutely.
I think people underrate how revolutionary Substack is, to be honest.
Even people like you and me, we are creators in the platform and we read a lot
and do a lot of things.
We really underrate how, what sort of a difference it makes for us as creators,
because every other platform sucks.
It's not just Facebook.
You know, YouTube is awful.
It's like been, it's been run by the devil himself.
It is so bad, like the way that they monetize, you know, successful videos,
because I know there's like two seconds of a song which is copyrighted
or because, you know, you're saying a word that they don't like,
or they will use any excuse.
Like they, I have this, I have this massive folder with about a hundred plus videos,
family videos that I used to, this folder was a private folder
that I shared with my family members, right?
With my mom, because you know, I'm always overseas, right?
So, so my family would see videos of my kids, you know, in Washington DC or in Singapore
or in China, right?
And my mother can see her grandkids doing stupid stuff
and I will send her the link so she can see it on YouTube.
So I had worked well over a hundred videos for about 10 years.
And they just deleted it one day, just because I had images of minors in, you know,
half naked minors, like, you know, my kids who were like three, four, right?
Like crapping in the bathroom or swimming in the swimming pool.
So it was pederasty for YouTube.
So they did everything and I had no, no records.
I couldn't complain.
I couldn't do anything at all.
At least I had copies of all those videos, but it's really hard now
because you know, they're really big videos.
Like it's really hard to share a two gigabyte video with a 70 plus year old woman, right?
It's not, it's not easy.
So it, that kind of thing happens a lot to a lot of people for these stupid reasons.
I've met a lot of YouTube creators and, and Twitter is the same, even under Elon Musk,
it's the same thing.
So it's, it's really hard to find a platform that is just not terribly run.
I have about 800 plus videos on YouTube and they're mostly just me talking into the camera.
And I, those videos are still up for the most part, but I've, I've just withdrawn my participation
from YouTube because every time I would get close to the threshold for them to make a payment to me,
you know, for the, the ads, they would demonetize my account.
They would find something objectionable that I had said, said that I had violated.
I remember.
Yeah.
And eventually I wasn't there to make money.
That wasn't the point, but that sort of practice is just so distasteful.
I just, you know,
Come on, money's nice.
We all like making money.
If it's 50 bucks, come on.
They do.
I mean, they're obsessed with their margins.
Like they act like we don't care about the money and they're obsessed with the money.
Like they live and die for like extracting 0.1% out of you.
Right.
And then they took your, they take your money like it's nothing.
Yeah.
That's very common among these companies and you know, they're really heartless and,
and it's best not to engage with them at all if you can avoid it because you are
giving them, not only you're giving them content for free in the end, you're giving them also,
you know, content that they can use to train their AI models now.
Right.
So they're not paying you and they're actually getting a service out of you.
Right.
And you're not seeing a dime.
It is pretty crazy.
Yeah.
Well, let's, let's turn to happier talk.
The most recent guest on this podcast was the Feral Historian who's doing quite well on YouTube,
I have to say.
And, you know, he is somebody who his primary interest is history,
but he also loves science fiction.
And I think that you fall into that category as well.
Yeah, I do.
So tell me about your history with science fiction.
Well, I've always, you know, I was the, you know, very bookish, very bookish boy.
I was really bad at all sports until I grew up and I was, you know,
I was a very good kid growing up and it turns out that, you know,
basketball is good for tall people.
And that was, you know, very convenient for me.
But before I grew up, you know, I was really bad at every sport.
So I was all day with books and I read a lot of science fiction since I was very, very young.
My father was a big fan of science fiction.
He had a massive library, which I read almost entirely.
And so he had all of the classics, right.
Highline, Philip K. Deak.
He had a little cover for me.
So when I was in my twenties, it was when I started, you know,
living the classics for the first time and, you know, trying new things.
And I didn't like them very much.
So I had like a 10 year divorce from science fiction, I would say.
And then one day I came across Peter Watts' Blindsight.
It's a novel that at one point Peter Watts, he put out for free
in his website because it wasn't selling at all.
Right. So he said, well, I want people to read this novel.
I don't care if I don't make any money because he said, I think it's a good novel.
And he put it up for free.
I downloaded the PDF one day.
I was browsing.
Somebody probably told me about it.
I read the novel and this really, this single novel just got me back in touch with,
you know, the science fiction scene.
I started buying books from a lot of authors and started to discover,
you know, the Greg Gigan, you know, Generation,
Alastair Reynolds, Stephen Baxter, you know, Chiang, all these guys.
But it really, I'm really in that with Peter Watts.
I mean, I dislike Peter Watts intensely, personally.
Every time I see an interview with him, I think it's the kind of person I dislike
completely as a person, but as a writer, I think he's fantastic.
And I recommend all of his novels.
I think he's a fantastic novelist.
And, you know, if he has, you know, cookie opinions and is my impression,
if not better in person, but my impression is that he's quite a dislikeable person.
But my impression is I may be wrong.
He may be very nice in person, but he comes across as not a very nice person
in this as well.
But his books are fantastic.
And I really am in that with him.
Well, I'm happy that I came late to Peter Watts because I listened to the audio book
of Blindsight and it was after talking to people who just, you know, praised it.
But I hadn't ever encountered it until after I had written my own book, which takes place
in the Kuiper Belt.
So I'm glad that I wasn't even subconsciously drawing on Peter Watts, but that I did then
get to go and pick up the spare, as the bowlers would say.
Yeah.
But I would say, you know, the thing is I just read your book, you know,
Fianna Lothing in the Kuiper Belt, I think that the future you present, it's as crazy
as this may sound because, you know, as you wrote, you know, it has like these AIs who
essentially control the inner solar system and all.
It sounds more feasible to me than what he presents in Blindsight.
Blindsight is too crazy at points.
It's like, this is not going to happen.
Like these vampires, you know, genetically engineered vampires.
I mean, it doesn't, I mean, it's a great novel.
I love it, but it's not really what I would call a likely blueprint for the future.
I don't think the future is ever going to look like this.
Well, Fianna Lothing in the Kuiper Belt, I have to say, you are the only person that I know of
who purchased the book because they learned about it on Substack.
Actually, I'm assuming you learned about it on Substack.
I did.
Yes, I did.
Good.
It is not selling, but largely just through laziness, I'm not going to put it up on a website
for free.
I'm just going to let it linger there on Amazon.
And in the fullness of time, I would really like to produce an audiobook with a human narrator.
I think it needs a woman narrator.
Yeah, probably.
But in all likelihood, it'll be an AI narrator.
Audible will create an AI narrated version of your book for free and put it up on Audible.
But so far, the AI can't do different voices for different characters, and I'm waiting for that.
Yeah, good point.
Yeah, I mean, I'm not very fond of audiobooks in general, so I've read some this way, listened to
them, but as a rule, it's not something that I'm very concerned about because I just don't use
the format very much.
But I know lots of people do.
So it's helpful to cater to their taste, definitely.
And being an Audible will work better like this.
Yeah.
I take a lot of very long walks with my dog, and I listen to a lot of Substack posts that are AI
narrated, and I also listen to a lot of audiobooks.
And some audiobooks, I mean, the narration from professional actors is just so good that
while I do, I mean, my history with science fiction is mostly on the page, but in the last few years,
I've listened to a lot more books than I've read.
And I find that after some time has passed, I can't really remember what books I read on the
page and what books I listen to as audiobooks.
So the content, at least in memory, I think is the same, although it's very easy to tune out while
listening to an audiobook and miss something crucial.
And I often find myself rewinding and trying to rewinding.
There's an archaic phrase, but going back and trying to pick up something that I missed because
I'll ask myself, wait, what happened?
Who is this?
What are they talking about?
So that's one frustration of audiobooks.
And another frustration is, and I know this is a bad habit, I could easily stop it by not having
the phone within reach of my bed.
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
audiobook that I'm listening to and there's a sleep timer on the audible player and also on the
hoopla player, which is it's like audible.
I mean, the interface is just like audible, but it is you get books through libraries.
And so it's free.
At least it's free for you, the listener.
The library actually has to pay the publisher for the right for you to listen to the book, which I
think is a great, a great situation.
It is a great model.
Yeah.
But I'll hit like the 15 minute sleep timer and I end up like, I'll still be awake when it turns
off and I'll shake the phone and start it up again and I'll go two or three hours in the middle of
the night listening to an audiobook, which is unhappy the next day when I'm very tired.
Yeah.
Oh, but science fiction, you recently wrote a sub stack post that it was about generational
ships and there have been a great many novels about generation ships, which I haven't read
because I think the only one that you mentioned that I'd actually read was the Kim Stanley
Robinson one Aurora.
Aurora.
Yeah.
But let me just, I'm going to mute my microphone and let you talk at length about the concept
of the generational ship.
Yeah.
Well, it's, it's probably my favorite sub gender within science fiction.
I've always been intrigued about this concept because I think it's pretty realistic that,
you know, pretty soon say within the next 100 years or so there will be somebody crazy
that once, you know, Elon Musk spaceship is working properly.
Somebody will build a bigger spaceship and then somebody will say, well, don't we put
two or three of these together and try a massive trip all the way to, I don't know, Taoseti
or a Barnard star or whatever, and try and see what's over there.
And you will find 50 crazy volunteers and they will all go together and they will have
kids along the way.
And that's, you know, the concept of the generation ship that you have a very, very long trip
you know, well below the, you know, speed of light.
And it's going to take a long time to get to the, even the closest star.
So it's going to be several generations living and dying within this ship.
So the idea is that it has to be big enough to have a system where you can plant crops
and regenerate, you know, breathing air and get water and, you know, be protected from
radiation and find a way to generate gravity because otherwise it's going to be, you know,
everyone's going to be very sick at the end of the trip or at least, you know, unable
to colonize a planet.
So the whole concept is that you have this long term trip in which you have people who
start the trip and their descendants with any luck will be the ones who finish the trip.
I think this is going to happen.
Is it going to ever succeed?
I'm not sure.
Right.
It's possible that all of the generation trips that we try fail.
It's possible that some succeed.
It's possible in the end that we'll find some other way to traverse, you know, the
stars in some different way, like people will travel, will be frozen or asleep or
transported as AIs or within robots or who knows.
But the generation ship is a very, very old concept in science fiction.
In my piece, I discuss the very first generation, strictly speaking, the very first
generation ship novel, which was published in the fifties.
And then there's been a lot of them and they all always have this concept that from the
very beginning, I mean, there was never a golden era of the generation ship in which
people said, well, it's going to be great and we're going to colonize the whole
universe with this thing.
They are always narrative stories in the sense that they are realistic, pessimistic,
right?
They are looking all of these things can happen and lots of things can happen.
Just imagine any trip along the way.
If you look at the history of human colonization of the planet, like even if you had to go
to spend one year traveling from say the UK to Australia to establish the first
settlements over there, one year is a long time.
So, I know, 200 years, 500 years.
So what happens is that lots of these stories are about people forgetting that they're
even in a generation ship or fighting with each other, killing each other or developing
crazy religions about how they are trapped in this netherworld.
So there are all sorts of approaches.
So what I did is I picked several novels which I read that I thought were most, you
know, most symbolic of the genre in the sense of they provide several viewpoints about
People who forget about the destination, people who develop different castes within
the different groups within the generation ship and it becomes divided.
People who go just, you know, downright crazy.
People who escape earth and then they fight each other and then they divide into several
groups.
People who are clones.
Like I love this one.
This is so very crazy.
It's not a great novel by any, but it has so many crazy ideas.
Just imagine the notion of just cloning some of the brightest and the most, like you have
a look at the planet and you go, like, who are the best people for a long-term trip throughout
the stars?
We're going to make clones of them.
And when they die, we're going to get another clone.
It's going to be always the same people being cloned and re-cloned forever.
It's just a crazy concept.
I never thought of that.
It's the least practical idea you can have.
You can imagine that the very same person that starts a trip in earth, say, 2100, is
going to be the ideal person to be in that ship a thousand years later.
It's a pretty crazy concept.
In the end, what we have is that I found, reading all of these novels, what I found
is that, you know, genetianship novels also give you a pretty good summary, pretty good
impression of how the field is now.
Science fiction.
Not just this specific subject, but science fiction as a whole.
You can see the dominant obsessions, the dominant approaches, the way things are going to be
and the way most writers are looking at societies and how the future is going to look like.
And it's not a very positive impression that you get.
You get the impression that a lot of these guys are, you know, self-censoring themselves,
are trying to convey and present ideas that are socially acceptable as of 2024, 2025,
or even 2020.
Some of these guys seem to be stuck in the summer of Floyd or in the wokest possible
point in human history.
And it is really disappointing.
Kim Stanley Robinson, for example, it's a great example of this.
He's such an enforcer of the current thing.
It is really infuriating very often.
You read his novels.
It's like the guy is asking friends in Davos to look over their manuscripts.
And it really is, to me, a melancholy reflection because, like I said, I started reading the
classics when I was very young because of my father.
So I've seen the whole arc of the world in science fiction.
And you know these guys, very in the 60s and 70s, they were pretty free, pretty crazy.
They had their own ideas and people would let them rip.
Just Philip K. Dick, yes, he was.
You know, he was a guy with no system.
He would come up with these insane ideas and he would just polish them.
And if people wanted to read them, fine.
And if they didn't, you know, fuck them.
This approach has gone away from science fiction.
I think it's pretty sad.
Well, I, as a teenager, I went through a Philip K. Dick phase where I read all of his books
that I could get my hands on.
And I noticed that he had a formula that he, you know, a story structure that he enacted
again and again.
And then much later in life, I read some biography about him.
And he was basically trapped in a system where he was working in a record store or he had
a number of different day jobs, one of which was a record store.
But he would work all day and then he would take amphetamines to stay up and write all
night.
And he ruined his health.
And, you know, one might argue his sanity in the process, but he was always living off
the advance from his last novel and his books never sold enough that he had got any residuals.
So he always had to take another advance.
And, you know, he was just churning the novels out for a period.
And so, yeah, he would write the same story again and again, but because he was such a
he did a lot of acid, a lot of other drugs as well.
And he was, you know, a scholar of an amateur scholar, I guess I would say of religion and
history.
But he always had something new to plug into the formula.
Yeah, he was an artist.
That's impressive.
You always get with him.
It's not that his craft was perfect.
He was a great writer in the sense of the craft.
Like he wasn't a great stylist.
You wouldn't you wouldn't grab one of his books and, you know, go teach a course in
literature and say, yeah, try and write like Philip K.
Dick.
No.
But, you know, his mind was very fertile and he found a way to express this on the page.
Not always in the best possible way, but he found a way to to make it come across.
And he was so free.
Yeah, he was like, you know, I have this idea and it may be a crazy idea.
Maybe you don't like it, but I'm going to like you say, I'm going to expand over it
in three books.
Right.
And then I keep going over the same subject.
Like if you read his most famous novels like like the Electric Ship novel that inspired
Blade Runner, for example.
Right.
It's a pretty crazy novel.
Like the movie had to be turned down and it happens with a lot of his with all of his
novels.
And I think that's missing now.
I think that people writers now, so they get published, so they get the prices, so they
get the advances.
They have to be much more careful and they have to be very mindful of how people are
going to interpret certain things.
They don't want to go into certain subjects and they want to they want to have certain
approaches.
And one thing that I noticed, for example, which is all over my pieces of stuff is how
everyone has found a way to have a female lead, which is not actually a woman, which
is a man in disguise.
Right.
In your novel and in Fiona Lothian in the Keeper Vault, you have a woman as the captain
of the ship and several women protagonists as well as men.
But this woman is a woman.
Right.
You can you see you that's one of the strongest points of the book.
You can see that this is a lady acting as a lady.
It's a woman because it's 20, 25.
All of us had teachers who were women, bosses who were women.
Right.
I've worked in several corporations where most of all of my bosses were women.
So you can tell how this has an effect on human relations.
It's not the same thing to work in a place where everyone is a man.
There's completely different approaches, completely different ways to relate to each
other as when you have women in charge, because women have different approaches to things.
Sometimes better, sometimes worse.
But it's fundamentally different from that in many ways.
And what lots of writers now they do is I have this story and I have this guy who was
John and he's going to be the hero of the story.
But it's not going to sell as John.
People will like it better if it's Joanna.
So I'm going to write exactly the same character.
This was like this superhero strong independent man who ran the ship.
Now it's going to be a woman.
But it's the same thing.
Right.
It's Joanna instead of John.
It's Robert instead of Robert.
And in the end you have all of these interchangeable women who are all strong, who are like all
powerful, who are like smarter than anyone, who take shit from no one.
And they're not feminine at all in any sense.
They don't act like any woman I've ever worked with.
None of them.
Right.
They have nothing to do with real actual women.
They're just, you know, men in disguise.
Because, you know, you have to have a woman leading the story.
And I think that's pretty sad.
It's pretty sad that people, first of all, they can't write an actual woman's character.
And second of all, they feel forced to have a woman running things because, you know,
it's the way it has to be now.
Yes.
And I think that science fiction is dying not necessarily as exclusively the result
of that, but just in terms of sales.
And the sad truth is that, you know, more, far more women read books than men read books.
I work in a library.
I see who comes and checks out books.
And it's mostly women reading books.
Yeah.
And so publishing houses cater to women, but it becomes a sort of positive feedback where,
you know, the more that the industry panders to the woman reader, the more men are driven
away into video games and TV and sports and whatever else.
But even male science fiction writers who are successful in the field and have been
for a while and you would think they could write whatever they want, they also, you know,
they bend themselves to the contemporary fashions.
There's an author whose books I like.
His name is M.R.
Carey.
And I think he's best known because one of his books, The Girl with All the Gifts, got
made into a movie.
But he's got a science fiction, I think it's a trilogy or maybe it's just two books, but
it's a multiverse story.
It's called The Pandemidium.
There's lots of parallel Earths.
And the premise is, look, the stars are just too far away.
Space travel just never worked out.
But then this one person discovered a way to move between parallel Earths.
And then she discovered that, yeah, there are whole civilizations that are pan dimensional
civilizations, and one of them is called the pandemidium.
Of course, the one unique aspect of this story is that, you know, you're sampling different
Earths and in different Earths, different species evolved to be the dominant, you know,
technological species.
And so most of the characters are not human.
But of the worlds where there are human characters, the only named character who is a white man
in all of the books is the most vile, disgusting person imaginable.
He is a white man living in an alternate Earth version of Nigeria, and he is essentially a
slaver.
Yeah.
And there are no other white men, you know, in the multiverse that are worth naming who
aren't just scumbags.
Yeah.
And M.R.
Kerry is a white man.
I mean, there seems to be a self-loathing that one has to buy into in order to gain
entry into this, you know, this dying genre of mainstream published science fiction.
But fantasy, fantasy dwarfs science fiction these days in terms of sales, which I read
fantasy as a teenager, but I just I'm not attracted to it anymore.
And particularly, you know, I've tried to read a couple modern fantasy novels and I
don't get very far into them at all.
No, no, it was it was not my thinking.
I think fantasy is very exposed to this as well, because fantasy, as you know, it's almost
always based on on an idealized or mythical version of middle of European Middle Ages.
Right.
So you have some sort of European Middle Ages with knights and kings and aristocrats and
everyone is wearing helmets and armor and they fight with swords on horses.
Right.
And so this presentation, like it really it really is it really is very tricky if you
are trying to appeal to a walk publisher.
So you have to really bend yourself over.
Wow. So you have to make sure that your knight is going to be trans or your queen is going
to be the most powerful and virtuous person ever, because, you know, it wasn't on the
face of it.
This wasn't a very egalitarian or idealistic world.
It was very much driven by macho warriors fighting each other.
And, you know, actual women did very, very badly on a battlefield when you have to fight
with brute force, because most women, like 99 percent of women are unable to fight head
to head against a man unless they are genetically modified, like, you know, women warriors in
your novel.
So it really is it really is a mind field.
So it really forces fantasy forces people to be extra, extra mindful of all of these
difficulties.
Have you read Jean Wolf's The Book of the New Sun?
I have, but I didn't go through it.
I didn't finish it.
I didn't like it very much.
I just I just can't.
You know, I'm too much of a historian.
I just can't deal with fantasy very well because because of these reasons, because I know how
it was at the time.
So whenever people start to stray too much from, you know, my actual knowledge of the
period, not just in Europe, because, you know, the Middle Ages were applied to the whole
planet.
You had similar versions of it in Islamic world in China.
I just I just find it unbelievable.
Just unbelievable.
So it's hard for me.
But it's probably my mistake.
It's my defect because, you know, I'm too much.
I'm too much involved with with history.
Yeah.
So but I felt good things about you.
Well, the the thing with the Book of the New Sun is that it reads as fantasy at first.
But the longer you read, the more you realize this is a hard science fiction story set in
the very, very far future.
Right.
And, you know, one of the things about the book is that you can't put a shovel in the
ground without turning up some relic of some past civilization.
But his books are very dense.
And that one in particular is it seems to be, you know, a lot of people are just put
off by the vocabulary.
It seems like it's filled with made up words, but it's not his point.
The one point of the novel or the series of novels is that English is a huge language.
And we only use a tiny little piece of it, really.
So, you know, all of these arcane, seemingly made up words are actual English words, which
we just don't really use in daily life anymore.
Right.
And I absolutely love that series.
And then he wrote another series called The Book of the Long Sun.
And it also seems to be a sort of medieval fantasy story.
But then you realize that the people are living.
It's not a generation ship, but it's more like an O'Neill cylinder, a very large spin
habitat.
Yeah.
Like the ring world, right?
Yeah.
Not as big as the ring world.
Right.
I don't remember the exact dimensions of the ring world, but it's, you know, you could
put at least hundreds, if not thousands of Earths inside it.
It's impossibly large.
See, that was another good example of just crazy free, you know, classic science fiction.
I remember that they have this system, like in the real world, you have all of these different
space races living together.
And the way they have to greet each other is by having sex.
Like, I remember reading this as a teenager.
I was like, this is pretty insane.
This is absolutely insane.
Like, you can imagine this now, like in this supposedly super free enlightened times, like
people who have sex with, I don't know, some sort of, I don't know, like sentient dinosaur,
which is something that happens a lot in ring world, apparently.
If I remember correctly.
Yeah.
I think more in ring world engineers, but we get it in both novels where there are so
many different variations on not just humans, but other species as well.
Yeah.
And if you travel for a long time, you're going to encounter a lot of very alien civilizations.
And just one of the universal practices for breaking the ice between different groups
is to pick a member of each group and just point them to each other and say, OK, go at
it.
Yeah.
Pretty insane.
Yeah.
And the main character, particularly in the second novel where he spends a lot of time
alone, and he's just traveling through the ring world, he can tell how well a group is
doing based on the person that they send to have sex with him.
If they send out their youngest, most attractive woman, it means they're desperate and they
really want to curry his favor.
And if they provide him with, you know, an older woman or one who's not so attractive,
then he realizes that they're actually doing pretty well and they don't need anything from
him.
They're just being polite.
Yeah.
I don't want to work too well these days.
Oh, no.
I don't know if Larry Niven is still writing science fiction.
He must be very old at this point.
He must be very old.
Yeah.
I remember reading Jerry Brunel's, his co-authors.
He had a blog in the early 2000s.
And he sounded pretty old by then, in the early 2000s.
Like, he was like this, you know, old guy, like remembering, you know, the golden years
when he met somebody in the 1950s, right?
Yeah.
Like, they really, they really members of a different generation altogether.
Well, I'm looking at a thumbnail image of you, which is pretty small, but I'm going
to guess that you are a member of my generational cohort, Gen X.
Yeah.
51.
Yeah.
So you're more to the middle of the Gen X pack.
I was born in 68, so I'm, how old am I, 56.
And I'm an early Gen Xer, but I definitely do identify with that generational archetype.
And I'll be posting something later today, talking about the great filter of the Fermi
paradox and the adaptive cycle of the panarchists and the Strauss and Howe generational cohort
theory.
And, you know, a lot of people, and I'm one of them, I'm very skeptical that the generational
theory has much predictive power, but I have to say that the, you know, the generational
archetypes really do seem to tap into something real.
I definitely identify with my generation, Generation X.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
It's something that I've noticed over time, right?
Because, you know, when you are very, very young, you just don't care too much about
these things.
Now I have teenage sons and I can tell the difference.
I can not only tell the difference between me and my sons, I can tell the difference
between me, my sons, and the intermediate generations, right?
And people who are now thirties, in their thirties, and they have different tastes,
different approaches to things.
So this would be say the millennials, right?
So my kids are like, you know, I don't know, Gen Y, I don't even remember.
I think if your kids are teenagers, particularly if they're late teenagers, they're Generation
Z or Zoomers.
They're mid-teenagers.
The oldest is 17 now and the youngest is 14.
Well then I'm not sure what they're calling the next generation.
It might be Generation Alpha.
I don't know.
But you know, you don't get to pick.
And Generation X didn't really stick until the Douglas Copeland novel, which was in 91,
I think.
It was in my early 20s by the time my generation got a name that stuck.
Strauss and Howe tried to give it a different name and their label didn't stick.
So we don't know what generation your sons will be called.
But my sons who are in their early 20s, they're definitely Zoomers, Generation Z.
Yeah.
And also, I think, you know, most of the writers we've been discussing before, the writers
who are now writing generation ship novels and other science fiction novels are members
of this generation.
Like, all of these, Stephen Baxter is probably slightly older, but people like Alastair Reynolds,
his 50s, Greg Egan, Peter Watts, all these people are our generation.
And you know, we all, all of us, these guys, I think you're American, okay?
Right?
Yes.
Yes, I am.
Peter Watts is Canadian, Stephen Baxter is British, Egan is Australian.
But we all were born in what may be the last really huge cohort, right, that there was
in all of these countries, right?
And then fertility fell off a cliff.
And so now society has changed a lot because of immigration, right?
When you were born, the US was like 80% white.
It's going to be like 50% white by the time you are retired, right?
And it's the same all over Europe.
And you can tell these writers are just not very mindful of that.
Like they try, but they, I think it's an additional part of science fiction.
You try and being this anti-racist and you don't quite, you don't stick it because, you
know, lots of people, I mean, these writers, they come up with futures in which they are
the, everyone is essentially standard American, standard, you know, Anglo-Saxon person, even
if they have a funky name.
And it's just not the way the world actually works.
You know, there's, you know, there's actual difference in when you are Asian American,
when you are African American and Indian Americans, right?
And not to speak of the rest, like, like none of the novels that I discussed before, they
contain any hint that China is super power, for example, right?
So the future, most of the, most of the science fiction written in the last 30 years assumes
that China will disappear from the map soon, right?
There will be no Chinese bases on Mars or the moon.
There's barely any Chinese characters.
You know, there's 1500 million, 1.5 billion Chinese people in the world right now, right?
So there will be space.
There's nothing about the Chinese culture in specifically, like I wrote in my piece
in this, in Aurora, right?
By Kim Stanley Robinson, there is no Chinese representatives in this trip.
So they are going to settle this other solar system and they took care to bring people
from Mongolia.
They didn't, they didn't worry about having Chinese on the ship.
This is pretty crazy, right?
There's this like this massive, massive place, this massive vacuum that they have, most,
most writers in science fiction right now.
And I think it's pretty sad too, you know, being married to somebody of another race,
from another country, from another continent.
I noticed that very often we are, we're still very much, you know, Eurocentric in the sense
of thinking that the world is always going to be like it was when we were, you know,
in the eighties.
And it's not like that.
Things are going to be very different.
And one way or another, the future will be different, whatever happens.
And it will definitely not be just like an extension of California in space forever.
And this is something that I'm, I'm pretty surprised about that.
Like, like I said, Nomenon in this generation ship, the only clone which is Hispanic is
a guy who's a gardener, right?
I mean, this is pretty insane.
They got this guy and they clone him and reclone him to be the gardener in the ship for generations.
This is just mind boggling.
Well, I will say a word of defense for Kim Stanley Robinson in that he, after Aurora,
he wrote a book called Red Moon and the, you know, he wrote a book called Red Mars.
And that was in reference to the color of the planet.
But in Red Moon, it is a political and cultural description that dominate, you know,
Yeah, because in his Mars trilogy, there are no Asians at all.
Like the Asians, they never make it to Mars.
It's all a bunch of Americans fighting each other forever because they also immortal,
right?
So, yeah, you mentioned not every place is California.
And Kim Stanley Robinson is very much a Californian writer.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
He wrote a California trilogy.
For him, Mars was on another extension of California, right?
So the Chinese were like engineers working on the background, right?
Trying not to bother anyone, right?
So then he felt bad.
And he said, well, I'm going to do a scary story about the evil communist Chinese are
going to take over the moon unless we do it first, right?
There's Indy Expans.
I haven't read the novels, but I did watch the TV series and there's a group of Mormons
who collect their funds and they build a generational ship and they're going to go off and just
start a Mormon world somewhere.
And it doesn't happen because the ship gets commandeered.
But I think it's quite plausible that a lot of interstellar colony ships and generational
ships would be crewed by people from a specific culture who want to propagate their culture
and who might be very selective about who they have in their crew.
Of course.
And that is something, again, that few, if any, writers of the relationships ever address.
The whole, you know, what happens if we have this ethnic group on earth that has survived
for thousands and thousands of years?
Oppression, travel, diasporas, and they decide to set up a colony for people who are observant
members of their ethnic region.
That never happens, right?
That never happens.
There's never a Sorastrian colony on Eon, right?
It never ever happens.
Like whoever sets on a trip to the next solar system, they have no religion, they have no
ethnic allegiance, whatever, and they all speak perfect English.
Yeah, it's pretty fantastic if you think about it.
I'm not saying that you're wrong about that, but I would like to offer a notable counter
example.
It's a book that I don't think ever really sold much.
I never hear anybody talking about it, but it's by Greg Baer, the author of Blood Music
and Darwin's Radio and things like that.
It's called Strength of Stones.
It takes place on a world with mobile cities, and each city is devoted to an esoteric sect
of Christianity.
I was reminded of it when you said there are no Sorastrian colonies anywhere, because I
don't remember the full list of different esoteric, extinct, in many cases Christian
sects have cities devoted to them in this novel.
There are many that I had to look up.
I had never heard of them when I read it.
I read it in the 90s, so this is a pre-internet experience for me.
Looking something up was actually an effort, particularly because I was living in Japan
at the time, and there wasn't a handy local library where I could go and grab an encyclopedia.
So looking things up used to be a challenge.
I notice when I'm writing my own…
I think about my writing process, and I'm constantly stopping to look things up, and
I'm constantly stopping to discuss with an AI, usually perplexity.
In the current story I'm writing, it takes place on Galts, which is the place where all
of the Colombian soldiers come from.
Yeah, the Inrundians.
There's a character who…
It's important to him to infiltrate a society of people who are cigar aficionados.
So he has to learn about smoking cigars.
Well, I don't smoke cigars, and I certainly don't run in cigar aficionados circles.
So I'm doing a lot of research about cigar etiquette and different types of tobacco and
things like that.
I have to present characters who are knowledgeable about these things.
And I find that…
I'll do a search and I'll read articles and things, but then I can also ask the AI
and have Claude or Chet, GPT, assume the persona of a knowledgeable cigar aficionado and have
little practice conversations.
I don't use any of their text, but I get a feel for the lingo and the way that it gets
used.
So it's a writing process that would not have been possible five years ago.
Yeah, yeah.
And I think you're really good with AI.
Not just…
I've read your pieces when you are having discussions with AI for your writing process,
but I think that your depiction in Fionnual Lothian in the Kuiper Belt of AI is the most
realistic depiction I've seen of a likely AI takeover of Earth.
And I was really, really intrigued by it.
I mean, how did you think of that?
Okay.
I'll credit where credit is due.
The powers, which are the superintelligence inside the Dyson Sphere, I lifted that entirely
from Charles Strauss's novel, Accelerando.
He calls that force the vile offspring.
And the powers…
You call it the powers.
Yeah.
It is a direct reference to Accelerando.
Right.
And I think it sounds so feasible and so realistic, the way you presented, because they essentially…
You know how it works.
There's the old saying that any sufficiently advanced technology will look like magic to
us, right?
And in the end, they look like magic to us.
That's the way you presented, right?
There are these powers that people say, you know, they took over Earth and now they run
it and we don't know why.
We don't know what the long-term plan is.
We don't know what they intend to do.
But you know, they are there.
And I think it's a really, really, really good approach.
It's probably my favorite approach in science fiction to AI, together with the sunflower
cycle.
In Peter Watts, you know, they have this chimp, which is a really, really stupid AI
running the ship.
And I also love that one.
Yeah.
I remember…
You know, I use the sunflower cycle as a source of bedtime stories for my kids.
I'm going to…
I mean, my kids are older now, but I think I'm going to use it for some bedtime story.
You know, your semi-shared concept of the powers.
I'm going to use it for stories with my kids because it's really fascinating.
You just reminded me.
I used to tell my kids bedtime stories and they were insatiable.
They wanted more and more and more.
And so I would just pull whatever out of my head, you know, out of my memory.
So one time as a bedtime story, I told my son's the story basically of Apocalypse Now.
And…
That's really good.
Yeah.
On another night, my son asked me, Oh, tell me more about Colonel Kurtz.
That's really good.
Yeah.
It's really good.
Yeah.
But it is a really, really intriguing…
I mean, it is a really intriguing thing to consider.
I mean, you have a world that is taking over.
But it doesn't mean the end of mankind.
It just means, you know, just how things branch out and you have…
Which is to be expected.
You have many different kinds of humans at some point in the future, right?
If we live on Earth, you know, there will be very different people evolving in many
different ways.
Like the floaters you describe in your novel, right?
And you have like… sort of like in Expans you have the Martians, right?
The people who are like this Spartan-like people who have to… who have been trying
to, you know, to set up Mars as an habitable planet for generations.
And you have people living on Earth.
And then you have the powers.
I think that's going to be the future of mankind.
Not, you know, not a California in every solar system.
It's going to be very, very different approaches.
And, you know, Mormons in space and Soresens in space and, you know, Wahhabis in space,
right?
It's going to be lots of different colonies, lots of different approaches, lots of different
people very often fighting, you know, the same conflicts that we have right now on Earth,
only taking them out there, right?
And you have people who, you know, Armenians and Azerbaijanis, you know, coming across
each other in Mars and, you know, fighting it out because they hate each other on Earth
and they will hate each other there as well.
Think of the US.
I mean, people still identify themselves as Irish Americans, right?
I do.
Yeah, most Irish Americans actually are like one eighth Irish, right?
Oh, not me.
I have my DNA sequenced.
I'm very Irish.
But it is, yeah, it is a common thing that you keep some sort of not allegiance, but
a sense of identification.
It's healthy, too, right?
It's healthy if you're an Italian American as well and you like your pizza and your pasta.
And yeah, you don't speak any Italian.
You don't even, you barely know where Italy is on the map.
But you feel this, especially not so much as an Italian, but you feel as an Italian
American, right?
And that's going to happen.
There will be, I don't know, American Martians and they will like, you know, they will have
Halloween, right?
And people who are not American Martians, they will celebrate Halloween on Mars.
Yeah, it's going to happen.
Yeah, there's a YouTube channel that I've watched for a few years now.
It's called Science Fiction and Futurism with Isaac Arthur.
And a point that he makes frequently is that because interstellar travel times are so long,
any human colony that gets established far from Earth, you know, around a different star
is going to take a very different developmental path.
And if humans from Earth ever encounter them, you know, after a few thousand years, they
will effectively be aliens.
They will be so different from us, not just culturally, but biologically as well.
Yeah, we'll probably won't be able to breathe with that.
Yeah.
We'll probably, you know, maybe even get along with them or communicate with them in any
meaningful way.
And so I think it's quite likely that, you know, humans will never encounter genuine
extraterrestrials with a different, you know, biological origin.
But we will, you know, provided we get off Earth and start establishing different human
lines in different places, we will encounter aliens, but they will be our descendants.
And before that, the aliens will be AI.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I think that's probably one of the reasons why, you know, all of these generation ship
authors that I was describing for, they don't get too much into the subject is that, yeah,
it's another minefield in terms of political correctness and workings today.
Like if you describe a planet where you have a bunch of humans that, you know, develop
differently and now they are smarter or less smart than other humans, right?
Are you making a political point?
Oh, you know, today's different countries and different conflicts, right?
You're not, you're really just making a point that it's going to happen, right?
People are going to evolve in different ways.
Say you may have people like you described in your novel who are genetically modified,
so they're stronger and they're better for combat, right?
These guys who take over the gold colony.
And others were not.
And it doesn't mean that they are better or they're worse, but they're not as good in
combat, but it really is a minefield.
And people are going to go, oh, are they superior?
Now are we saying some people are superior to others?
Well, in the sense of, you know, being able to combat better, yes, but there are also
other senses.
So you can easily see how that can be misconstrued as you're making a point about, you know,
have people been better than others from specific things like, like in Nomenon, like Mexicans
are so very good at gardening, right?
So let's always have them gardening, right?
Yeah, I guess.
That's a trope of the generational ship is that you have very little freedom to chart
your own destiny because you or your ancestors were selected for a particular role on the
ship and particularly if people are being cloned.
And yeah, I mean, we need a gardener and this genetic template is the best gardener.
So guess what?
That's your job.
Super gardener forever.
Yeah.
So it's yeah, you can see how, how it's tricky.
And, and you can see how people, I mean, Stephen Baxter, Alsthereanos, all of these guys have
been discussing, they're really smart people and they've written very, very good science
fiction novels.
And I'm criticizing these books and many of them are very entertaining.
Like they're very good, they're very well written, they have great ideas.
So I don't think it's that they don't know this.
I think it's that the context in the publishing industry and the context in society is such
that they don't have the same sort of freedom to express themselves as Philip K. Dick had
in the seventies.
I think that is fundamentally the problem.
Yeah, yeah.
It's, it's an effect of cultural pressures and economic pressures and the economic pressures.
I really think that they are, they're not destroying science fiction because there's
lots of people writing science fiction who have no hope of being published traditionally,
but who will find a very small audience online, probably not big enough for it to be their
main source of income.
But there's plenty of science fiction being written.
But the, I think the problem I have, and this is certainly true of my work, is that I am
my own editor and there's not a book in the world really that can't be made better with
the, you know, under the skilled guidance of a talented and experienced editor.
And so all of these people writing science fiction out in the wilderness because their
visions are not politically palatable, their books really could be better and should be
better.
Yeah, absolutely.
That's something that as a journalist, something that I really noticed how everyone, I mean,
you may think of yourself as the best writer ever in history.
Everyone can really work with an editor and see his work improved.
And editors really have a role in, and because of different reasons, editing is a lost start.
Even for big time authors, editing is not the same sort of process it used to be.
If you read about, say, Raymond Carver is a great example.
You know, Raymond Carver, he was a notorious because he had this, I think it was Gordon
List, I think, Gordon Just.
He had this editor who was very hands on and he essentially created, you know, Raymond
Carver's books out of the raw material, right?
So they were very different when Raymond Carver was writing them.
And his editor, he created the style that Raymond Carver became famous of.
So you have a role that used to be key that now because of different developments in the
industry, it's almost gone.
And I published books and I've had them edited.
And I've noticed over time that this is really getting worse.
Like my last book was, it's a book of philosophy and it was edited by the publisher.
And it wasn't badly edited, but I noticed that the process was less thorough, that it
would have been in a Wall Street Journal article.
So I took more time and my editor took more time for a 1000 word story in the Wall Street
Journal than we took in editing a book which is 100,000 words.
And that's the way the industry is working now.
And I mean, for self-publishing authors, yeah, forget about it.
Nobody's going to edit your work.
But even if it's published by a press, by a publisher, it's not that simple.
And that's an additional problem that the standards are dropping, definitely.
What's your philosophical area of interest?
I became very, very interested in philosophy because my readings of what we might describe
as a postmodern neo-Marxist writer, philosopher Slavoj Džek in Slovenian.
But I keep writing.
I mean, I keep reading Džek with pleasure.
I mean, I love his work, but I've been reading a lot of the classics now.
So for this book in particular, this is a comparative history of ancient Chinese and
Western philosophy, right?
So I did a lot of reading of Plato, Socrates, the sophists, the early Christians, Augustine,
and all the Chinese classics, Mencius, Confucius, the Taoists.
I didn't read a lot of the originals.
I read a lot of histories of philosophy and extracts and originals, some of them, but
not all of them, definitely.
I mean, it's really hard to go through the whole production of Mencius.
But yeah, I've always loved philosophy as well.
And I think in my approach when it comes to history, it's really entangled.
I mean, I don't see them as fundamentally separate subjects.
So when I write about the history of mankind, I write about not just the history of what
people did.
I like to write about the history of what people thought, right?
How they saw things.
And to understand that, you need the philosophy, because the philosophers are the ones giving
you a window into how people perceived things, right?
So if you read Augustine, you get an idea of how educated, literate people in the late
Roman Empire, they saw the world around them.
And if you try and write that history without having a good grounding on Augustine writings,
you are missing out on a big part of the history.
Well, it's funny in that my academic training was in philosophy, but philosophy is a big
universe and I was interested in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of science.
And that's what I specialized in.
So as an undergrad, I read Plato and Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and things of that nature.
But once I got into grad school, I was mostly reading very modern works about the philosophy
of mind with an emphasis on artificial intelligence.
And this was in the 90s.
So neural nets, like functional neural nets, like the ones we interact with all the time
today were still science fiction.
But in Western philosophy, there's a big split between what's known as continental philosophy
and analytic philosophy.
And I was completely on the analytic side.
And then I was in Japan and I was going to come back and go to grad school.
And I had my girlfriend just talk to an advisor and pick some classes for me.
And my first semester in grad school, without choosing it myself, I ended up in a Hegel
seminar taught by a German professor.
And I had no idea what was happening.
You need to read Jek.
I mean, that's the beauty of Slavoj Jek.
A lot of people know him because of his political polemics.
He writes, I don't know, history writing The Guardian, in the Lauderive books about
Trump or Brexit.
That's not very relevant, not very important.
I mean, his role in the modern world, really, is he's the best explainer and the best interpreter
of continental philosophy.
So if you want to understand what Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard were all about, he's the guy.
And all the French crazies, he's the guy.
He's the one who actually gets them and can explain it to you.
And to me, that was really eye opening.
And it really is something just like I was saying that Peter Watts brought me back to
science fiction.
Slavoj Jek brought me back to philosophy.
I had read Nietzsche and Plato and Heidegger when I was a teenager.
But Slavoj Jek is really the guy who told me, this is what it means.
This is what these people are, this is the point they are trying to get across.
And they are actually trying to get points made.
It's not just crazy verbiage that a lot of people think it is.
So yeah, there's a lot of interesting contemporary history, definitely.
So you're familiar with the notion of six degrees of Kevin Bacon?
No.
Oh, well, how about just six degrees of separation?
Yes.
I think the only few people on the planet, they have a chain of associations that's no
longer than six.
I'm one degree of separation from Slavoj Jek.
A podcasting peer of mine and longtime friend, a guy named Doug Lane, he's interviewed Jek
many times.
So there you go.
Yeah, but that's the thing.
Slavoj Jek's books are fantastic.
His podcasting, his conferences, his speeches about why Biden is better than Trump.
That's good.
I mean, he's an insightful guy, but it's not great.
His books are great.
It's like trying to, I think all of us authors, and I think you would say the same thing.
If you want to get what's the best of you, the best things you produce, normally are
the things you wrote, right?
Because you put so much time and effort on your books, right?
On your writing.
Podcasting may be very valuable.
It may be very profitable, may be very insightful, and it's a very good way to reach audiences.
But I don't think anyone's best work is in talks.
And it's the same thing with Jek.
You can listen to several talks by Jek and you go, oh, this guy's pretty smart.
It's nothing like reading his books.
That's your actual real experience.
Which of his books would you recommend first and foremost?
I would recommend Less Than Nothing, which is a fantastic Hegelian, massive tome on Hegelian
interpretations.
I would recommend the...
What's his...
There's so many, really.
I think really all of the books he wrote between, say, 2005 and 2015, I think that's probably
all of his best books, all of his best work.
Less Than Nothing, I think it was 2012, I'm thinking.
The Parallax View is fantastic as well.
It's not very famous, but it's a fantastic book.
It's really good.
And just like you were saying with Philip Kedik, Slavoj Jek tends to go back to the
same points.
Like, you know, Philip Kedik, that's right.
He wrote the same book three times.
Jek does the same thing.
So very often you're going to find the very same anecdote, the very same idea expressed
slightly differently in various books.
My impression is that he gets his stories and his points across best in these two books,
Parallax View and Less Than Nothing.
You mentioned, you know, well, I brought it up, I guess, initially, that Philip Kedik
writes the same book again and again.
He's got three books which are considered to be a trilogy.
What is it?
The Divine Invasion, Transmigration of Timothy Archer and Ubik.
And they don't share any characters in common.
You know, they don't share the same setting.
You know, what is it about them that makes them a trilogy?
And it's basically the same story told three times in, you know, at different points in
his life.
And the main character of every Philip Kedik novel is Philip Kedik, and he just gives them
a different name.
So in Ubik, not Ubik, it's the book I'm thinking of, Radio Free Albumeth.
Yes, I remember that one.
There's a book where the main character's name is Horse Lover Fat, which is just an
absurd name.
And the point is, yes, it's me.
I'm dropping all pretense.
You know, the main character's name is not Rick Deckard.
It's not Barney Mayors.
And it's Horse Lover Fat, although sometimes he'll even drop that and just, you know, either
speak in the first person or call the character Philip Kedik.
Which makes sense, right?
Yeah, it makes sense.
But he usually doesn't have any sort of like meta-textual pretense or anything like that.
He tells very straightforward stories with no irony to them.
But you know, toward the end of his career, he was like, yeah, I'm going to write the
same story again, but here I'm going to admit it on the page that I'm revisiting these themes
yet again.
The same stock character, you know, archetypes.
Refreshing honesty, really.
Well, we've been on this conversation for over an hour and a quarter.
And I find that files, once they go over that length, they tend to become unmanageable on
my archaic equipment.
So David Roman, it has been an absolute pleasure.
I will become smarter as I continue to read your substack.
And thank you very much.
Yeah, and I can say the same.
I hope to keep reading your pieces.
And I think you're doing really important work.
I think people should know more about science fiction and about how science fiction can
really, you know, illuminate our path to the future.
Amen to that.
Well that was David Roman.
And I'm looking at his substack now, A History of Mankind.
And he describes it thusly.
The entire history of mankind in regular installments, not just European stuff, but the history of
all mankind, from the Americas to Sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania.
And looking at his recent posts, the most recent one is about his trip to China.
Before that, from January 3rd, is a post called Mithridates, Crassus, and Spartacus.
Before that, Pompey, Cicero, and Caesar.
Before that, the best of 2024 in A History of Mankind.
And before that, Sulla's Revolution.
So he seems to be back in Rome.
But before that is the post that we talked a little bit about.
It's called Christmas Special, A History of Generationships in Science Fiction.
And we didn't really cover much from this post.
And I had intended to, but you know, podcast interviews often don't go where we expect
them to.
But if you were interested in science fiction, and in particular in the various portrayals
of generationships in science fiction, then I would check out the Christmas Special, A
History of Generationships in Science Fiction.
Science fiction is the history of the imagined future by David Roman.
Alright, well I'm focusing more on writing than podcasting these days.
I'm happy to do a podcast.
I'm always happy to do a podcast.
But you know, it's finding guests that is...
I wouldn't even say the challenge, just the bother.
I'm not bothering.
But if you would like to talk to me for this podcast, and you are versed in AI, space travel,
robotics, anything having to do with the prospect for a Comorex future, let me know.
We can talk.
If you want to talk about politics, I'm happy to talk about that with you for your podcast.
But the best way to get in touch with me is just to send me a note on Substack.
But if you're not on Substack and you're hearing this, my email address is kmo at Crealm.com.
That's the letter C and then a dash and then R-E-A-L-M dot com.
Alright, I'm out.
Stay well.