Episode 41: Transcript
Episode: 41 — The Multiverse Problem!
Transcription by Keffy
Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about the meaning of science fiction. I'm Charlie Jane Anders and I'm a science fiction writer who obsesses quite a bit about science.
Annalee: [00:00:09] And I'm Annalee Newitz, a science journalist who writes science fiction.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:14] Today we're going to talk about multiverses versus single universes. Why are multiverses so hot right now and what's so interesting about having different divergent timelines that you can cross over between? And how does this affect our understanding of time travel? Plus, we're going to talk to Annalee about their new book, the future of another timeline, which is the greatest book ever written in the history of the entire universe. Let's get to it.
[00:00:38] Intro music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.
Annalee: [00:01:06] Charlie Jane, why are people obsessed with multiverses right now? Let's just start with the big question. Like, what do you think is going on that's made this erupt?
Charlie Jane: [00:01:14] It's a really interesting question because there's definitely a huge multiverse boom right now. Into the Spider-Verse really kind of just dove straight into the idea of like many, many different spider people, universes.
Annalee: [00:01:29] And they team up and it's amazing.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:31] It's awesome.
Annalee: [00:01:31] I mean, it is like probably the best Spider-Man movie. I mean, to me it is the best and you can fight me. I mean, I know you won't, but you out there who have bad opinions will probably fight me.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:43] And Marvel is really doubling down on this. The next Doctor Strange movie is called Doctor Starnge in the Multiverse of Madness.
Annalee: [00:01:50] It is?
Charlie Jane: [00:01:51] It is, yeah.
Annalee: [00:01:51] Oh my God…
Charlie Jane: [00:01:51] Marvel is also making an animated show called “What If?” which is based on this comic that they used to do where it was basically like, what if, you know, Captain American never got these super powers? What if some other person became the Hulk instead of Bruce Banner? You know—
Annalee: [00:02:06] What if we brought Sliders back?
Charlie Jane: [00:02:09] What have we brought Sliders back? I mean, that is a classic.
Annalee: [00:02:12] That's a good question, right?
Charlie Jane: [00:02:12] I assume you're referring to the TV show about jumping between multiverses and not the—
Annalee: [00:02:18] Tiny hamburgers.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:19] —tiny sandwiches. I feel like the tiny sandwiches never went away, but—
Annalee: [00:02:24] But you could combine them.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:25] You could have a show, where people—
Annalee: [00:02:27] What if Sliders were in another universe? Whoa.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:30] What if people just jump from universe to universe eating different tiny sandwiches. It's like, “Ooh, this one has eggplant.” And this is the universe where sliders have, like, little—
Annalee: [00:02:40] Oh my God, I want to go that universe.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:40] I want to go to the eggplant sliders universe.
Annalee: [00:02:42] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:42] I think we should, like…
Annalee: [00:02:43] Yeah, nice, yummy, like, grilled eggplant.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:46] With a little bit of like, you know—
Annalee: [00:02:48] Okay, so we're not bringing Sliders back.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:50] Tzatziki on top, or something.
Annalee: [00:02:50] Yes.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:50] Anyway, now I'm really hungry. And you know, Marvel—our friend Saladin Ahmed is doing in the Exiles comic where they jump between universes. Star Trek keeps bringing back the mirror universe and so on and so forth.
Annalee: [00:03:02] Yes.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:02] You know, the CW’s superhero shows are doing Crisis on Infinite Earths—
Annalee: [00:03:07] Which—
Charlie Jane: [00:03:08] Which, yeah.
Annalee: [00:03:08] —when I was first getting into comic books, I was sort of challenged to try to understand Crisis on Infinite Earths. So I went out and I bought… this is from the 1980s, like, mega crossover.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:21] Oh, yeah.
Annalee: [00:03:21] And I went out and bought the floppy that you can get, which is like, I don't know, 9,000 comic books put together, that—
Charlie Jane: [00:03:28] It's, you know, a giant trade paperback.
Annalee: [00:03:30] Yeah, it's a giant trade paperback. Sorry. It wasn't a floppy, it was like the opposite of a floppy, it was like a hard drive of comics. And I tried to understand it and that's the—kind of the joke right, is it's impossible because it really is infinite earths.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:43] It's insane. It’s literally insane.
Annalee: [00:03:44] It’s not as much as Transformers, which, one time I was researching multiverses back when we were at IO9 and it turns out that the Transformers series does have millions of alternate universes and we don't obviously visit all of them. That would be, you know, that'll be for coming generations I suppose to visit every iteration. But indeed, part of the mythos of that series is that there are millions of alternate time with Shia LaBeouf eating sliders.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:14] Right. And I think that that—actually you put your finger on another reason why this is so big is that you have these continuities that go back decades and decades and that have like many different, you know, creative approaches to the same character. And inevitably what you have is people being like, I wish I could have a way that these could all co-exist at the same time and they could meet each other or they could like have different versions. I think that part of why nerds love multiverses so much is just that you get to see different versions of the characters you love. But also it's just more complexity.
[00:04:46] I feel like, and I should say this in the first person. I, as a nerd, love complicated universes and like situations where there's many, many different kinds of variations and wrinkles and little lacy bits and twists and turns in different… There's just so much to obsess about with multiverses.
Annalee: [00:05:04] I think it can actually get really nuanced when you have multiverses, I mean you can certainly get things that are almost literary, like Ian Banks's novel Transitions, which is his kind of semi-literary semi-science fictional story about agents who go across the multiverse trying to tweak times to be more, they think, more democratic and progressive. But of course the jury is out on that and that's part of the pleasure of the book. And it is quite nuanced. And I think you could say the same thing about the new novella, This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, which is also very similar to Transitions in that it's two agents who are kind of traveling through these slightly different universes.
[00:05:53] And then, so I would say to contrast, you get what I would consider to be like the most boring way of doing this, which is that there is Dark Willow or there is the Darkest Timeline. So it's like an alternate…
Charlie Jane: [00:06:07] Awww…
Annalee: [00:06:07] Okay, well whatever. Like I love Buffy, I love Willow, but I think that this gets back to the mirror universe problem where it's just that there's two universes or two versions of a character, right? There's like Happy Willow and Dark Willow and there's like Happy Phoenix and Dark Phoenix. There's mirror universe and happy universe and that's one of the things that gets so tropey in science fiction and there's an episode of Community that's actually all about kind of making fun of that idea.
Community Clip: [00:06:34] At nice times like this, I wonder what's happening in the darkest timeline.
Timeline? Abed, there are no dark timelines.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:40] Yeah. And that was Abed talking about the Darkest Timeline, which became a big catch phrase on Community and it was super fun. And then the creator of Community, Don Harmon, went on to do Rick and Morty where there's a lot of visiting different universes and you know, if someone gets killed in one universe, you just go find a version of them in another universe and that's fine. And like…
Annalee: [00:07:00] Yeah, and they eventually reach a universe where there's just this giant factory full of Ricks and Mortys, and you know, it's, it gets, it gets really dark. But, in Rick and Morty’s defense, it actually is, despite the nihilism and the darkness, it's actually quite nuanced. Like… and it's also quite silly, like it's not, it's not really intended to be like the new Star Trek Discovery series. It's not intended to really be like an actual meditation on like human evil and things like that. I mean it kind of sneakily is, but not in the same kind of overt way.
[00:07:32] Do you see there being a difference between kind of those, I guess you could say [mono-kean?] multiverses versus like a true multiverse where there's like a million different versions of you know, planet Cybertron or whatever.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:48] I mean, I think that there is a bit of a difference because usually the point of like where you have the dark version of our universe or the mirror universe or whatever is to kind of show that things could have been worse. The characters that you love and admire could actually be bad people under other circumstances. It's kind of, usually gets back to sort of appreciating what we have, but also kind of understanding that it... I think a lot of what is fun about multiverses is to get into questions—is they let you get into questions of fate vs freewill and nature versus nurture and are we product of our circumstances? Are we capable of exercising choice in how we respond to our circumstances or are we basically just the people that you know, our situation has turned us into?
[00:08:30] Which is the same kind of questions you get with alternate histories, which we talked about before, where it's like, well, you know, it could have very easily been a situation where the Nazis won World War II or this other thing happened. Part of what's interesting about alternate timelines or different universes is often the changes can be really weird and quirky.
[00:08:48] With alternate history, it's frequently like, some big historical event turned out differently. Whereas with multiple universes there's less of an obsession about finding the point of divergence and it's often much more just like this is a universe where everything is turned upside down and random things are subtly different.
[00:09:05] One of my favorite multiverse stories is this novel called The Walls of the Universe by Paul Melko, where this guy just traveled to a universe where they never invented pinball and he gets to become the inventor of pinball because he's the only person who knows. It's like almost like that Beatles movie Yesterday, he gets to be the only person who knows that pinball exists or knows what pinball is. So he gets to invent pinball and become rich and famous as the inventor of pinball and he gets to travel between universes, kind of stealing intellectual property.
[00:09:36] That's the kind of thing that's fun. Like those Charles Stross novels, The Merchant Princes novels are about like kind of bringing stuff back and forth between different universes.
Annalee: [00:09:43] And it becomes almost a portal story at that point, where you're sort of bringing tech from a different world into ours or ideas cross-pollinating or whatever.
[00:09:55] Yeah, it's interesting. I wanted to get back to what you were saying about fate versus free will because there's a couple of ways to do the multiverse story and one is to imagine that there's a million different universes, but in every universe there's a Charlie Jane Anders who has certain feelings and thoughts and she basically is the same across all those different universes. And maybe there'll be, like, she’ll have different color hair or in one universe she's, you know, a six-foot-tall football player or something like that, right? But you know, it'll be basically the same. The idea is that you're the same and then there's the kind of mirror universe idea where it's like in the mirror universe, you're like a cruel assassin, right? Like, in this universe, I can assure everyone that Charlie Jane is not an assassin. As far as I know.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:44] I'm a very kind assassin. I’m just not a cruel assassin.
Annalee: [00:10:47] Yeah, she's a nice assassin, but in the mirror universe, she’s a really mean assassin.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:51] Right.
Annalee: [00:10:51] Who also hates funk music, right? Like, so she would—
Charlie Jane: [00:10:54] What!?
Annalee: [00:10:54] Right, so that's what I'm saying.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:56] That would be just diametric. Diametrically opposed.
Annalee: [00:10:58] Darkest timeline. Darkest timeline. You'd be into, like, I don't know what. What’s the opposite of funk.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:03] Like, easy listening. I don't know. Like Captain & Tennille, I guess I I’d be really into Captain & Tennille.
Annalee: [00:11:09] Whoa.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:09] I’d be really to Simon & Garfunkel.
Annalee: [00:11:12] Yeah, that is definitely the—
Charlie Jane: [00:11:14] I’d be into, like, mellow, ampersand-based music.
[00:11:17] Yeah. I mean, I think that there's a sense in which you can't really know who you are until you've encountered yourself from another universe. And you can see, this is the kind of essence of me that is consistent across universes and these are all the things that would be different if I had just been born into slightly different circumstances.
Annalee: [00:11:34] So which of those two models of like, you meet yourself and you're exactly the same despite the circumstances or you meet yourself and you're totally different because of the circumstances… Which of those is freewill and which of those is—
Charlie Jane: [00:11:46] I mean I think that if you want to believe that human beings have like some kind of innate character—
Annalee: [00:11:51] Like a soul or an essence.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:52] Or just something about us that, no matter what you do to us or no matter what we do, we're always gonna have some part of us that's recognizably us. And that there's still going to be to be some essence of like Annalee Newitz, that’s like, you always know that Annalee Newitz will, they'll behave in this particular way in this situation.
Annalee: [00:12:11] I will always like kaiju.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:13] Yeah. Then you get to test that by like having an Annalee Newitz who was born, you know, not in Irvine, California, but maybe in like Bakersfield, California. And you know how do… maybe you don't like kaiju if you were born in Bakersfield. And part of what's great about the kind of splashy multiverse stories like Into the Spider-Verse, is, it's not about meeting yourself, it's about like meeting radically just weird different versions of like the same idea.
[00:12:39] So it's like Miles Moralez doesn’t meet other Miles Moralezes, Miles Moralez meets Peter Parker from like a couple of different versions of Peter Parker, and Spider Gwen and like—
Annalee: [00:12:49] Yeah, and they're super different. Like, they’re not… Yeah, you're right. It's not different versions of Miles Morales. And in fact, I guess there's like a sense in which there is a Miles Morales and all those other universes, but he's not Spider-Man.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:01] Yeah, exactly. And so it's like—
Annalee: [00:13:04] So yeah, that’s…
Charlie Jane: [00:13:05] —the constant is that there's some kind of Spider-Person, but it's not necessarily the same. And it just, you know, I feel like—
Annalee: [00:13:12] So it’s a role that stays consistent.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:14] Yeah. And I feel like that's kind of where multiverses get really interesting is that you get to have a grab bag of like weird versions of the same thing, and it’s more colorful.
Annalee: [00:13:25] It's also a super great way of, at least in the case of Into the Spider-Verse, it's such a great way to represent diversity and like what we would love diversity to be is that look, here's a role and that role can be played by this person, this person, this person and this person. And guess what? It's always a hero no matter who plays that role.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:43] Right.
Annalee: [00:13:43] They always are a hero. Maybe they’re a hero in a slightly different way. Maybe this version speaks Spanish, you know, but they all save the day. And that's like, I mean that is one of 900 billion reasons why that is the best Spider-Man movie in every universe because—
Charlie Jane: [00:13:58] It definitely, I agree that it is the best. It is definitely the best Spider-Man movie.
Annalee: [00:14:00] So far.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:02] And you know, I love multiverse stories where it's not like a divergent path or a divergent version. It's just that these are very different planes or whatever. Like, I guess Dungeons & Dragons has different planes of existence that you can visit, but also like A Darker Shade of Magic by VE Schwab where there's like one universe where there's no magic, which I guess is our universe. There's one universe where magic is understood. There’s one universe where magic went out of control and it's become this terrible place and it's like it's not different like histories. It's different kinds of states of being almost. I think that can get very metaphysical and very interesting.
[00:14:39] Okay. We're going to take a super quick break and then when we come back we're going to talk to Annalee about their new book, the future of another timeline.
[00:14:45] Segment change music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:59] The Future of Another TImeline is all about time travel and one of the interesting things about time travel is that often when you travel back in time, you create a whole new universe. How did you decide how time travel works in your book and whether to create alternate universes or not?
Annalee: [00:15:14] It was a big question. I mean, time travel, I think, is one of those genres where you need a ton of world-building before you even start writing. Several years ago when Lauren Beukes’s novel, The Shining Girls, came out—
Charlie Jane: [00:15:29] Right.
Annalee: [00:15:29] —I had been talking to her about how she did that and that's a very complicated time travel story, which has a lot of feminist themes in it, similar to mine. Also has murder but very different murder from in my novel. And she told me that she'd made this incredibly elaborate chart and like note cards pinned on her wall and it is a quite complicated tale and I was like, “Oh shit, I am never doing time travel novel.”
[00:15:54] And then, it happened. I don't know, it started out as a novel just about a bunch of girls in Southern California murdering guys. And it turned into time travel. You know, I've always really liked multiverses for all the reasons we talked about in the first half. And then I realized that it had to be a monoverse or a universe, a single timeline. Because what I really wanted to explore was how people change history. And it's really hard to tell a story about changing history if every single time you change history you spawn a new universe because then you're in a totally separate timeline where all of the political issues that you were struggling with are not the same anymore. And the old universe is still there dealing with all the shit that you're trying to fix, right? So there's a universe where yay, women got the vote in 1860, and like then there's this other universe where they didn't and you just sort of abandoned that universe.
[00:16:56] So I really wanted to think about how we actually, even in the present, are working on changing our timeline and like how we are stuck in one timeline and how do we fix it. I didn't want the characters to have that chance to escape into another timeline. I wanted them stuck with their timeline, with what all the consequences of what they do in history.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:17] So what does it mean when you talk about there being a heavily edited timeline and what kind of possibilities does that notion open up in terms of world-building but also in terms of just the stakes?
Annalee: [00:17:28] So a big theme in this novel has to do with how people get edited out of history, specifically women. And I framed it in the context of kind of a Wikipedia edit war. I'm definitely not the first person to do that. There's lots of other great stories that also explore the idea of history and the timeline as an editable document. And so, the characters are in an edit war. It's a group of feminist time travelers who are secretly going back and changing events in history. They're not supposed to. They’re academics, so they're just supposed to go back and observe, but they've decided to take matters into their own hands. And they're fighting against a group of basically kind of Men's Rights Activists from all across the timeline who are trying to revert their edits in some cases or make their own edits. And so then the feminists are going back and trying to revert their edits. So it's a lot of version control stuff.
[00:18:24] And indeed there is actually a great time travel novel out there called Version Control by Dexter Palmer, which is super awesome. And he's sort of playing with that same idea. The fact that the timeline is heavily edited in my story mattered a lot to me because I wanted to think about the fact that these are people who time travel is kind of mundane in their world. It's a discovery science. Time machines have been on the planet, they don't even know if they're machines. They're just these things that people have discovered that open wormholes that allow them to kind of travel only backward in time. And people have known about these wormhole portal thingys under various names for thousands of years. They were discovered by the ancient Nabataeans in Jordan in an ancient rock formation. And you know, people used to think they were magic. Now they think they're scientific, but they still don't really fucking know how they work or if someone made them or if there's some weird ass natural formation we don't understand.
[00:19:21] So people have been editing the timeline for as long as we know. There's no such thing as a pure untouched timeline. And so these are characters who are basically forced to grapple with the fact that everything they know about history is constantly being manipulated. And every time there's an edit to the timeline, everyone else's memories are changed. So, unless you're the traveler who made that edit you won't remember the previous version. And there's some exemptions to this. There's some loopholes in the book that are really fun, but basically that's kind of the mechanic.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:57] Wow.
Annalee: [00:19:57] And so it's just like our lives where our history is constantly being rewritten and reinterpreted.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:04] Right.
Annalee: [00:20:04] And you never can feel like you're standing on like the solid ground of history because history is water. It is not solid ground.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:12] Right. Yeah. I mean, you know, it used to be just like a known thing that like, yeah, the civil war was about States' rights. It didn't have anything to do with slavery and a bunch of other stuff like that used to be just known facts and—
Annalee: [00:20:25] That's right. And the more we learn, the more we realize that those facts are, as I said, it's water. There used to be this idea that Homo sapiens all left Africa around 80,000 years ago and colonized the rest of the world. And it's like now we know that actually there were a bunch of Homo sapiens out there already. People had been leaving Africa, proto-humans, early humans, had been leaving Africa for like probably about a million years. So when that group of Homo sapiens left, you know, 90,000 years ago, 80, 70, that area, left, they met a whole bunch of other people. So that kind of changes your picture of evolution. Changes your picture of humanity in a very deep time way. And that kind of stuff is going on all the time with more contemporary history, too.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:10] But it's not just that we're learning new facts. It's also that we're just deciding which facts we're going to pay attention to and whose stories are important and who's going to be included in our discussion of history. And how we're going to actually, what stories we're going to tell about the past.
Annalee: [00:21:24] And that's why Wikipedia is a really powerful metaphor for this kind of stuff because you can watch that happening in real time. You can see people's Wikipedia entries being erased because they are not considered notable enough. And I love that recently, a woman who won kind of the equivalent of the Nobel prize in math had had her Wikipedia page previously deleted because she was so unimportant as a female mathematician. I know, fuck off. And then you know, quickly people had to scramble to kind of reconstitute it.
[00:21:55] That’s a great example of how history works. History is written by the people who are archivists and historians. Often the educated elite. Often associated with whatever the ruling group is in a particular place. And so one of the things that pisses me off all the time is the fact that Sappho’s poetry was not preserved. And this is a thing that was done to us by shitty historians in the middle ages. The two greatest poets of ancient Greece were always considered to be Sappho and Homer. If you read writing from the time, people would always say, “The great poets are Homer and Sappho.” That was just understood. And then it was only during period—after sort of classical antiquity, after classical Rome falls and all of the writing from classical antiquity is now being kind of hoarded and maintained and copied over by monks in monasteries.
[00:22:54] And so the only way that writing is going to be preserved, the only way the greatest poets of fucking ancient Greece are going to be preserved is if white dudes in monasteries supported by the, you know, whatever authoritarian leader they have at that time, actually bothered to copy them.
[00:23:13] So, they keep copying Homer over and over and over again because he's dude and slowly stop copying Sappho over and over again. And so even though at the time, anyone living in ancient Greece or ancient Rome would have been like, well, if you ask them on the street like who are the best poets? They'd be like, for sure it's Sappho and Homer. And now history has erased Sappho. We have just tiny fragments of her writing left. And it's one of those horrific ways that history erases women and erases the words of women.
[00:23:46] And erases in a sense, Greek culture. Because for the ancient Greeks, she was a big fucking deal. You know, it wouldn't be like trying to remember this period in history in the United States without like remembering Beyoncé. You know, it would just be like, “Oh, well, we, preserved, Bob Dylan, you know, because Bob Dylan is so important, but Beyoncé, eh, whatever, we don't need to preserve her crap.
[00:24:07] And it's like that would be a profound misunderstanding of what the United States has been for like the past 20 years if you did that. And, you know, and probably for the next 50 years. So anyway, that was my rant about Sappho and Beyoncé.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:21] So, and you said that time travel is like a discovery science in your book. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? Like how that works and how you came up with that?
Annalee: [00:24:27] I really wanted time travel not to be like people inventing a machine.I wanted it to be a lot like astronomy where it's something that people had been doing under different names for thousands of years. So, like I said, these machines that they have, that they call machines are discovered in antiquity around the time that people in our timeline first started engaging in cosmology and tracking the stars and tracking the movement of the sun and the moon. That's the basis for astronomy. Like all of those observations that were done in the name of spiritual enlightenment or gods was later used by scientists to be like, “Oh, now we figured out why the moon does that,” and “Oh, now we know that those are the Jovian moons out there,” and things like that. So those observations, like I said, they sort of start as mysticism and become science. And it's the same thing with these time machines because they're built into these ancient rock formations and they're discovered by people who are playing around and tapping on the rocks and the way that you open the wormhole is you basically pound out a tune on the rock next to it.
[00:25:28] And the rock is an interface and part of the fun of the novel is learning more and more about that interface. And, of course, because they can travel back in time, they can travel back to when the interface wasn't just worn-down rock. And it actually used to be a lot more than that. But these wormhole-controlling devices are millions of years old. They're like about half a billion years old. And so they've weathered over time. The keyboard has been, what? Worn down a bit.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:58] Oh my God.
Annalee: [00:25:58] So, yeah, so it's really fun. All of the time travelers in the book are geologists because, you know, these are machines that are discovered in ancient rock formations. So time travel becomes part of the geological sciences and the earth sciences, which partly is just because I fricking love geology and I was like, how can I make, how can I bring, how can I somehow make geology part of time travel?
[00:26:20] And the answer is, you know, kind of by bending the rules a little bit.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:23] But it makes sense because geology is about long timescales and you know, yeah.
Annalee: [00:26:26] Oh yeah, no, it totally makes sense.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:28] It makes total sense.
Annalee: [00:26:28] I feel like if we actually had time travel, I would definitely want geologists to be deeply involved.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:33] Yeah, for sure. How do you deal with people's preconceptions about time travel and the rules of changing history? What's the hardest thing to deal with in terms people's ideas about time travel that they bring to this book?
Annalee: [00:26:47] Well, I think one is that people really do expect a multiverse. And so, you know, oftentimes when I describe it to people, I'm like, well, it's kind of like Back to the Future or Terminator. Which, it’s very much like, it's definitely in the vein of Terminator, especially Sarah Connor Chronicles.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:03] Yes.
Annalee: [00:27:03] Because people remember different timelines, travelers remember different timelines, because they’ve seen the timeline change.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:09] Different versions of history, yeah.
Annalee: [00:27:10] Different versions of history, which I'm calling timelines. But, of course, there aren't multiple. They aren't happening at the same time, it's just that they've changed the timeline now. So, now there's no longer… But also, you know, the thing that I struggled with a lot with this book and I'm sure that readers will have varying responses to, whether I succeeded, is that time travel involves a lot of explanation. Like, anytime you experience a time travel story, there's always a couple moments where people are like, “As you know Bob, if you hit this button, blibbity-blib.” And you have to come up with lots of, because time travel, if you just like let it go could mean literally you are a God and you can just change anything all the time. And so you have to invent. I think the hard part is, and I talked to you about this a lot when I was writing, was coming up with the limitations. And then how do you slip in for the reader, like well they can't do this, they can't do this, they can't do this but they can't do this. Without it just being literally five pages of exposition? Which, I confess, there are a couple moments where it’s literally just like, “And this is how we do blah.”
[00:28:16] And they can't travel to the future and they can't… Like one of the limits on the machine is that not anyone can use the machines. You have to spend a certain amount of time within physical proximity of one of the machines in order to be able to actually go through the wormhole because otherwise anyone could travel back in time all the time. So you have to put in about five years, within the proximity of a machine. Which is like, I don't think I've ever seen that in another time travel story.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:42] No, that’s really different. That’s really interesting.
Annalee: [00:28:44] Yeah. Because these are, these machines are supposed to be like organic pieces of the planet. And so I wanted all the technology to feel very planetary and not to feel like machine-y. And they don't look like machines really. I mean we use, we use machines to interact with them.
[00:29:01] We also ultimately don't even know… at one point, one of the characters is like, you know, I'm starting to wonder if these are actually time machines. Maybe they’re for something else, but we're just using them for time travel. And that's just kind of a weird epi-phenomena. And so…
Charlie Jane: [00:29:16] Yeah…
Annalee: [00:29:16] And that's the discovery science part is, it's like there's so much with, for example, biology, which is another discovery science that we just don't understand. We know, like, “Oh, if you poke this nerve, this happens. If you cut this thing out, the person seems to be healthy.” But like we don't really know how it all works. We're just kind of flailing and that's what these characters are doing. They're sort of flailing. They're like, okay, we kind of get maybe one-fifth of how this thing works and maybe actually that one-fifth is totally wrong and like based on a completely incorrect understanding of the universe.
[00:29:49] So I dealt with people's preconceptions by trying to build something really different. But by relying on the fact that I think a lot of people are familiar with the idea of discovery science, especially from astronomy.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:01] Oh yeah. So, I guess final question, bringing it back to the kind of multiple timelines, multiverse thing. Do you think it's more feminist or more progressive to have a single timeline that can be altered versus just like, you know, every time you go back you're creating a new timeline.
Annalee: [00:30:18] So I've been thinking about this a lot and I have a hunch that there's a slightly more, I would say progressive or even possibly utopian bent to stories with a single timeline, because, and I mean, I know I just said like, well Terminator is one of those stories. And of course Terminator is about an apocalypse. So that doesn't seem very utopian.
[00:30:43] But the utopian part of it is that with a single timeline, there's always the hope that you can fix it. Whether you're fixing your personal life, and in my novel, there's two things that the characters are trying to fix. One is a very personal thing. One character is trying to change something personal that happened in her past. And then at the same time she's also trying to change history and she's trying to make abortion legal in the United States. It’s an alternate timeline where abortion is not legal at the present in the United States. And I think that just the idea that you could fix a problem like that is very optimistic and hopeful in some ways.
[00:31:21] I think with a multiverse like a Rick and Morty-type scenario, it's very nihilistic. It's a sort of burn it all down kind of approach to changing history. So, one of the things I love about Rick and Morty, even though I sort of said earlier that I thought it was quite silly. It does kind of raise philosophical issues about what do you do if you completely fuck up a universe, which they do over and over. And you just leave. That's the answer. Abandonment. And I think it's something that you see a lot in multiverse stories where it’s just… you don't stay to fix your mess. You go in, you fuck up the timeline, and then you're just like, “Oh well I'll just go into the better timeline that I just created.” And like, who cares about all those people who were left behind in the shitty timeline?
[00:32:05] And I feel like, you know, William Gibson is playing around with that idea a little bit in his new series that starts with The Peripheral. And I think The Agency, which is coming out soon, is going to be a continuation of that same universe.
[00:32:18] There is this great but also quite flawed TV show called Terra Nova, which played with this idea where the earth has been destroyed by climate change. Nobody can breathe anymore. It's really terrible. And so they use time-travel to send a group of colonists back in time to the late Cretaceous to hang out with dinos on a very warm world because actually the Late Cretaceous, there were no ice caps. Anyway, whatever. They don't actually deal with that stuff. But what they do deal with is the idea that they're basically recreating humanity in a different timeline so that they can build a society that won't ruin the earth. But built into that idea is that they are abandoning this other timeline where the earth is being destroyed and their families are dying, and like, so—
[00:33:03] Whereas I think a more progressive approach would be instead of fuck off to that timeline, we're building a new one, is why don't we figure out a way to change history so that we can not develop fossil fuels or like why don't we figure out a way to change the present so that we can protect people who are now becoming sick because of the high level of particulates in the atmosphere or whatever.
[00:33:29] So instead of actually fixing our problems, we just leave. And I think that's why a lot of, for example, environmentalists really hate the idea of like going to Mars and the backup planet idea. Because the backup planet idea is like, we don't actually ever learn how to live better on a planet. We just go to the next planet.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:47] Right.
Annalee: [00:33:47] So we don't fix our problems, we just run away from them.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:49] We make a whole new mass on a whole new planet, yeah.
Annalee: [00:33:51] Right. And I think that that's kind of the dead end of the multiverse idea.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:55] Right.
Annalee: [00:33:55] Is that, you know, instead of fixing ourselves, we reboot. And the reboot has the same problems.
Charlie Jane: [00:34:06] Yeah. And there's always just like unlimited suffering. Because, you know, every terrible thing you can possibly imagine is happening in some universe somewhere and people are horrible agony, in every possible imaginable way.
[00:34:19] There's like that one Star Trek episode where a Whorf is like jumping between universes and then in the end you meet like the Riker from the universe where Picard was assimilated by the Borg and the Federation was destroyed. And that Riker is just like, we're fucked. Please help us. And everybody in our happy timeline is like, sorry, can't help you. Bye.
Annalee: [00:34:37] So my characters in Future of Another Timeline, they're trying to change the timeline and it's about how they forge alliances with other people and other women throughout history to try to do that.
[00:34:52] And so, there's also, for me, I really… the other thing that I love about the single timeline is that you can actually imagine how one generation hands the baton off to the next generation and is like, look, the project of building a better world is like… it's going to take millennia. [00:35:13] You're never going to do it in one lifetime, but through time travel, through history, we remember where that project was and we pick up where people left off, you know.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:26] Right.
Annalee: [00:35:26] And so to me that's another thing that's very hopeful about it is that even if you're in a dark time, you can look back and you can be like, you know, our grandmothers were fighting really hard for something that they got. Like, say, the vote or say, abortion rights or any number of other things. Awesome things that our grandmothers got for us, including really good chicken soup recipes. And those are things that we pick up the threads and we keep going. And that's, to me, especially as I get older and I think about the future, it's like, I imagine them looking back on us and hopefully they'll have Beyoncé to listen to and somebody won't fucking destroy that the way they destroyed Sappho, okay.
Charlie Jane: [00:36:08] Okay.
Annalee: [00:36:08] I just have a lot of feelings about Sappho I just, it really pisses me off.
Charlie Jane: [00:36:10] It pisses me off too. Okay. We're going to take a little break and then we're going to have one more segment called what I'm obsessed with right now.
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Charlie Jane: [00:36:32] What are you obsessed with right now?
Annalee: [00:36:35] I am obsessed with a website and community called Geek Girl Strong. I recently, well, a couple months ago I was at Comicon and I got to meet Robyn Warren who is the founder of this group in New York. And basically she was a PE teacher in New York city and she really started wanting to reach beyond schools and help people get in touch with being physically fit and feeling good in their bodies. And she's also a big nerd and she was like, why? Why do we have this division of like geek versus jock? Like why can't you be athletic and geeky? And so she runs these great classes and online forums where women and non-binary people. She says anyone is invited as long as they identify with the pronouns they/them or she/her. And you are encouraged to wear a t-shirt with your favorite geeky thing on it and kind of get to know the other people in the group through nerdy stuff.
[00:37:36] You don't have to go in and be like, I like sports. You could be like, I like Batman. And also I really want to get in shape. And it's super body positive and I just, I don't know. I love doing yoga and like walking and doing physical stuff and I really don't see why that needs to be in contradiction with my urge to sit for 12 hours watching Veronica Mars, so…
Charlie Jane: [00:37:57] Same.
Annalee: [00:37:57] So, I highly recommend it. GeekGirlStrong.com. You can follow them on Twitter, you can find them online and you can also follow Robyn Warren who started the whole thing.
Charlie Jane: [00:38:08] Yay.
Annalee: [00:38:10] Okay, so what are you obsessed with?
Charlie Jane: [00:38:12] I'm pretty obsessed with Batwoman, which is the new show that's starting on the CW pretty soon, now. It's starting in October. We got to see the pilot at Comic-Con a couple of months ago and it was just super fun. It's basically like everything you would hope for from lesbian Batman, kind of. Greg Rucka kind of did a lot to make Batwoman a cooler character in the comics and make her officially queer and they've really carried that over into the TV show. Her queerness is front and center in the first episode, which I really appreciated. And, you know, it was, I feel like Ruby Rose, she plays Batwoman, has the kind of perfect kind of stoic crime fighter badass who doesn't take any shit attitude. And then she has her own kind of lady Joker that she's fighting against who's not like Harley Quinn but is a different character and it's just, I thought it was really fun.
[00:39:04] It's not a perfect show. The daddy issues got a little bit too daddy issue-y for me. But, you know, that's like that a lot of shows.
Annalee: [00:39:10] That is also the bat person mythos.
Charlie Jane: [00:39:13] I know.
Annalee: [00:39:14] Every bat person must have some parent problems.
Charlie Jane: [00:39:18] I know, it's true. And usually it's just that Bruce Wayne is a bad dad and all everybody else is like you're a bed dad, Bruce Wayne.
Annalee: [00:39:25] But Bruce Wayne is also traumatized by the loss of his parents.
Charlie Jane: [00:39:28] Right, yeah.
Annalee: [00:39:29] So, he has a lot of—
Charlie Jane: [00:39:30] There's a lot going on there.
Annalee: [00:39:31] —parent issues.
Charlie Jane: [00:39:31] But yeah, it's a super fun show. I'm dying to watch the second episode now that I've seen the first and I feel like it's a show that just gonna you know, in the tradition of those sort of CW superhero shows, it's just going to keep getting more and more awesome as it kinds of finds its footing. And I feel like I really want lots and lots and lots of Batwoman and Supergirl meeting up. And maybe all the queer characters from like the CW superhero universes, like Supergirl’s sister and like, you know, the trans character from Supergirl, Nia Nal, and also everybody who's queer in Legends of Tomorrow, which is basically everybody.
Annalee: [00:40:07] Valkyrie.
Charlie Jane: [00:40:08] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:40:08] Wait, is that, that's the wrong universe. Never mind.
Charlie Jane: [00:40:10] Oh my God. Annalee!
Annalee: [00:40:12] Sorry, ooh.
Charlie Jane: [00:40:13] Oh my God. I mean I do—
Annalee: [00:40:15] Crisis on infinite publishing houses of comic books.
Charlie Jane: [00:40:19] I would actually, I think that it's entirely possible that we're going to leave here and go write some Valkyrie-Batwoman fanfic, for sure. I think that’s definitely going to happen.
Annalee: [00:40:27] I think that’s already in my heart.
Charlie Jane: [00:40:29] It's already happening. But yeah, I mean I think it'd be super fun. I'm super excited and I'm going to totally be watching it every week.
Annalee: [00:40:36] Me too.
Charlie Jane: [00:40:37] Thank you so much for listening. This has been, Our Opinions Are Correct. We'll be back in two weeks. You can follow us on Twitter @OOACpod or on Facebook at Our Opinions Are Correct. We have a Patreon at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect and we welcome any donation of any size. Helps us to keep cranking out the correct opinions.
[00:40:58] And thanks so much to Veronica Simonetti, the greatest human who has ever lived, who is our producer at Women's Audio Mission where we record this show. Thanks to Chris Palmer for the music, and thanks to you once again for listening.
Annalee: [00:41:10] And also you can find us on all kinds of places like Apple Podcasts and wherever you like to download your stuff. And please leave us a review on Apple podcasts because it helps people find us, thanks a lot.
Charlie Jane: [00:41:21] It makes a huge difference. Thank you. Bye.
Annalee: [00:41:24] Bye!
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