Episode 63: Transcript

Episode: 63: What Is Indigenous Futurism?

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. I’m a science fiction writer who thinks rather a lot about science.

Annalee: [00:00:13] And I’m Annalee Newitz. I’m a science journalist who writes science fiction. 

Charlie Jane: [00:00:17] Today we’re going to be talking about indigenous futurism, and we’re incredibly lucky to be joined by two incredible, brilliant guests, Julian NoiseCat and Rebecca Roanhorse, and we’re going to just get right into it after the break.

[00:00:29] Intro music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.

Charlie Jane: [00:00:57] Julian and Rebecca, maybe we can start off by having both of you just introduce yourselves and tell us a couple sentences about who you are and what you do? Julian, why don’t you go first?

Julian: [00:01:06] Well, first, thank you so much for having me on. My name is Julian Brave NoiseCat. I’m a member of the Secwepemc and St’at’imc nations in what is now British Columbia, Canada although I have grown up and reside in the United States. Currently in Washington, DC. And I do a variety of things, primarily journalism and some policy development and advocacy.

Charlie Jane: [00:01:31] Cool. And Rebecca?

Rebecca: [00:01:33] Hi, I’m Rebecca Roanhorse. I am Black on my father’s side, Ohkay Owingeh descended on my mother’s side, and I live here in Santa Fe, New Mexico where I am married to a Navajo artist. And so, have inlaw connections to the Navajo Nation. I am also a science fiction and fantasy writer. I won a Hugo, a Nebula, and a Locus for various works including a short story called “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience.”

Annalee: [00:02:03] Awesome.

Charlie Jane: [00:02:04] Cool. So, the term indigenous futurism was coined by Grace Dillon at Portland State University, who edited an incredible anthology called Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Speculative Fiction, which I have been reading for the past couple weeks, and it’s so amazing. It’s such a great book.

[00:02:22] And similar to Afro-futurism, Indigenous Futurism is described as imagining futuristic storylines and settings with indigenous people featured in them and centered in them, and also just futures in which indigenous people prosper. She talks a lot about what this means in the introduction to Walking the Clouds. But I would love to hear from both of our guests. What does indigenous futurism, what does that phrase mean to you?

Rebecca: [00:02:46] Right, so I would categorize my work as indigenous futurism, I think that’s fair. And for me, that means that you’re—I guess indigenous futurism for me functions in two ways. Can create art or stories that are speaking to the colonial experience. So you’re in dialogue with colonization and genocide and the history of land loss and all the things that are happening for indigenous peoples in the Americas, and in other places, too, if it’s international indigenous folks.

[00:03:23] But I think what excites me the most about indigenous futurism is this idea that you can center indigenous stories. That we actually don’t have to constantly be in dialogue with sort of mainstream history or white settler stories. That we can create our own. We can see our own people and our own selves in stories in the future. But we can also talk to the past. And we can reframe history from our perspective. So we can retell stories with indigenous values or indigenous viewpoints. And even into the present, because I think one of the great thing about indigenous futurisms, and I think you see this also in Afro-futurism, is there is a play with time. There’s an elasticity to that. This is not, when we say futurisms, yes, we absolutely mean the future. We are here, we will continue to be here, but we are not constrained by the idea of only being in the future. There is an idea that time is fluid and by reclaiming and retelling stories, we are reframing them from a future perspective as well. So there’s a fluidity to the concept of futurism.

Annalee: [00:04:31] Julian, how do you see that fitting into your work. Because I feel like a lot of your journalism and your policy work, too, is kind of reframing indigenous history as a way of looking forward to how we might have better social policies around single moms or around homelessness or around how we treat history, on Alcatraz Island, for example.

Julian: [00:04:56] I’ll just be honest and say that, I guess some of my work could be categorized under sort of an indigenous futurist posture towards contemporary indigenous life and history and issues of social justice and culture and arts and all that sort of stuff. If there was a proper noun, Indigenous Futurist, I don’t know if I would first, categorize myself under that, although I do think that some of that sort of analysis would apply to my work.

[00:05:29] I guess the thing that I am constantly confronted with as a nonfiction writer, as a journalist, somebody who has to construct narrative out of the facts of the world is that as native people, we are constantly sort of consigned to the pages of history. There is a very notable and celebrated book of United States history by Jill Lepore who’s also a New Yorker staff writer, whose work I honestly, I read it every single time it’s in the magazine. But in that history book, there is only one mention of anything in United States history regarding native people after the year 1900. And that is actually, she refers to the occupation of Alcatraz, which she actually erroneously attributes to being launched by the American Indian Movement. And having grown up in Oakland, California, we were, it was hammered into our heads when we were kids, by the people who actually led that movement, that it was started by a group called the Indians of All Tribes, by essentially a group of native students and urban native people who were at places like San Francisco State and living in places like Oakland.

[00:06:46] And I think that that might sound like a minor detail in a very big and important work of history. But I think it’s important, because I think it illustrates the reality, which is that so many writers and historians and people who think about contemporary life still, either explicitly or implicitly, firstly believe that native peoples’ only relevant contributions to history are past. There are things that happened on the frontier in the 19th century and usually involved some chief like Geronimo or Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. And that history’s obviously important. But there’s also so much happening right now in native life and culture.

[00:07:33] And similarly, I think that it’s notable that a historian would, even in the single detail that she included about our people and our contributions to United States history actually get the story wrong. And I think that that’s a second piece of this, right? That native peoples’ stories are so marginal and so little-known that it’s actually okay to be sort of the preeminent United States historian, a tenured professor at Harvard, a New Yorker staff writer, someone who produces prodigious and beautiful work. And when it comes to the first peoples of this land, you get some of the details a bit wrong.

[00:08:16] Firstly, I see my role as a journalist in getting the story right and getting the story of how it pertains to now on why native people matter in this moment. Because as a native person, I’ve been told since I was a little child that we are a people of the past and that we do not matter in contemporary life. And I think I’m writing against that social and cultural assumption.

Charlie Jane: [00:08:45] Yeah, and on that note, in the introduction to Walking the Clouds, Grace Dillon talks a lot about different forms of thinking about the future, including indigenous science and sustainablility, and decolonization of narratives and returning to ourselves, which she talks about as kind of returning to reclaiming traditions in order to have them in the future.

[00:09:06] And I’m wondering if you can both talk about the relationship between those two ideas. The idea of sustainability and science on the one hand and reclaiming traditions and returning to ourselves on the other.

Rebecca: [00:09:19] Well, for science fiction and fantasy, I’m a fiction writer, right? So I’m actually speculative fiction, even, and I think one of the things, one of the ways that science fiction has really let native people down, is a lot of kind of what Julian said, it happens in science fiction as well. We’re stuck in the past. And for some reason the science fiction imagination has failed to move us past the 1900s. Nevermind 2000 and 2100 and above. Part of the impetus, I think of indigenous futurism is to make sure that we exist in the future. And that our ways exist.

[00:10:05] One of the… also the failures, I think, of science fiction, the failures of imagination is that we don’t seem, in mainstream science fiction to do anything but conquer other planets. We have this very colonial viewpoint about how our interactions with other people or beings on other planets would go. And it’s usually, you know, kill them all, build our own cities. The same sort of way that Europe approached the rest of the world when they decided on the path of conquest.

[00:10:39] So that’s unfortunate. And so one of the, I think, exciting thing that other indigenous futurist writers have done is sort of take that idea on. That there are other ways to interact with flora, fauna, humans, whatever that is. And there are other ways to sort of explore space. And what would that look like? If we weren’t just out there conquering, what would that look like?

[00:11:00] And then, you also have a narrative, I think, in science fiction, that’s just right out of the West, whether it be Star Trek or whether it be the Mars, oh—

Annalee: [00:11:11] The Martian?

Charlie Jane: [00:11:12] The Martian, yeah.

Rebecca: [00:11:12] The Martian, thank you. Where, you know, it’s sort of, the lone man against the forces of nature whether they be in space or whether they be on Earth, it seems that this is a common narrative as well. There’s no collaboration. It’s always just survival of the fittest and nature is against you and it’s this sort of brutal thing where you will prove yourself a man. Which is very much the western narrative, right?

Charlie Jane: [00:11:37] Rugged individualism.

Rebecca: [00:11:40] Yeah, the rugged individualism, and space is the final frontier. Wow, frontier, did you really say that? So it’s sort of interesting—

Annalee: [00:11:46] Yes, we did.

Rebecca: [00:11:50] —to posit other ways of thinking about that. So I think maybe that speaks a little bit to your idea of sustainablility, or what that looks like. That there are better ways to imagine space. There are better ways to imagine interacting with other life forms.

Annalee: [00:12:08] Yeah, that’s really cool, I like that. What about sort of reconciling science and sort of environmental science with traditional ideas?

Rebecca: [00:12:18] Right. One of the things that I know that Grace Dillon talks about, and Elizabeth LaPensée who is, I think, at University of Michigan. She’s a game developer. She’s actually Grace’s daughter. She’s really at the forefront of gaming in indigenous futurism. She talks about sort of reclaiming science, that indigenous thinking, indigenous ways have often not been thought of as science. But it’s science just as much as anything else is. It’s, you know, it’s the observation, it’s the hypothesis. It’s all of that stuff. But because it came from indigenous people, it’s often discounted.

[00:12:52] And so I remember, there’s a whole hashtag that was going around on Twitter called #NativesToldYouSo. And so there’d be constant scientific discoveries. You know, oh, well, we have red algae that does this, and ooh, the scientific breakthrough. And people would be like, oh yeah, we’ve been talking about that forever in our tribe. Hashtag #NativesToldYouSo. Or birds carry fire! Oh yeah, we know that. #NativesToldYouSo.

[00:13:17] So it’s this whole discounting of traditional knowledge when it’s actually been passed on for generations and it’s—and so there is a reclaiming of that as well, as part of the science in science fiction, and that’s pretty exciting, too.

Julian: [00:13:32] So I guess just, to take a step back, right? There is this sort of imperial form of scientific knowledge and reasoning that was, from the time of Darwin and before, deeply ingrained in the colonization and conquest of indigenous lands, globally. Right? Darwin was, himself, on an imperial vessel. And that of course, as Rebecca pointed out, gets projected onto a lot of science fiction. In Star Trek, it’s the U.S.S. Enterprise. And Captain Kirk is awfully similar to Captain Cook. There is a conceptual and theoretical framework and relationship to the world that is rooted in, often, sort of a form of inquiry and relationship to indigenous peoples and land and sometimes even ecology itself, that was always, for so long, considered to be superior. Was actually considered to be part of European’s right to conquer so much of the world was the fact that they supposedly encountered inferior peoples.

[00:15:00] I think that it’s telling and notable that from, just from the stuff that I pay attention to with my journalism and policy work, in all sorts of areas of inquiry now, whether it be the proper way to manage fisheries in the Pacific Northwest where my family comes from. The proper sort of approach to managing the forests and making sure that there aren’t crazy wildfires across much of the American west. Or even, I think, in a more heady sense, understanding actually that humans are not separate from our environment, are not actually this sort of rational semi-god that reigns over the land. But actually that we are deeply embedded in the ecosystems in which we live and are actually very dependent on them. Something that I think is very ingrained in most indigenous forms of knowledge and governance that I’ve come into contact with.

[00:16:04] I think that there is a way that we are still, in 2020, sort of undoing some of the ways that colonization and imperialism led our forms of knowledge astray. And I think that, you know, to give full credit to folks like Rebecca and artists and culture creators. Very often, that also means that we’re making now, better art. I’m a big fan of Star Trek, but I do think that the sorts of sort of culture that are emerging from an indigenous futurist perspective on arts and culture, and also an Afro-futurist perspective on arts and culture are much more compelling and interesting and inviting to sort of a new generation of people like me.

[00:16:54] By acknowledging the importance of indigenous people by not making us invisible, by not relegating us to the past, by acknowledging our forms of knowledge and governance and culture and all that sort of stuff, I think we actually produce a much more holistic, and actually even better, sort of, scientific and human understanding of the world and where it’s headed and how we might make it better.

Charlie Jane: [00:17:20] Yeah, so we’re going to take a very short break and when we return, we’re going to talk about storytelling and speculative fiction in particular.

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Charlie Jane: [00:17:39] Part of what I love about Walking the Clouds and some of he other indigenous speculative fiction I’ve read, including yours, Rebecca, is the way that it kind of takes a lot of science fiction and fantasy tropes and kind of reformulates them to talk about the indigenous experience and indigenous visions of the future. And particularly things like the post apocalyptic world, which obviously is a big deal in some of your work, Rebecca, and themes of first contact and exploration which have been kind of weaponized against indigenous people in the past.

[00:18:10] So I would love to hear both of your thoughts about that. And Rebecca, maybe you could start us off by talking about how you kind of reuse these, or recontextualize these tropes in your work.

Rebecca: [00:18:18] Well, first and foremost, I am a science fiction and fantasy fan. I’ve been reading in that genre my entire life and writing, even before I became a professional writer in that genre. I’ve tried to write stories that are like contemporary fiction, and all of a sudden people are doing magic, or I don’t know. I just can’t do it. I know my limitations.

Annalee: [00:18:43] Yeah.

Rebecca: [00:18:43] And so I love a lot of these tropes, you know. These tropes have a function, and they’re also familiar. So a lot of what I think I do in my work is often take familiar tropes and then put them in the world that I’m creating where I’m throwing a lot of new ideas and new things at readers. So I really try to balance that. Like, here’s a familiar trope, like the post apocalyptic world. I think we’re all familiar sort of with that novel. But let’s say the apocalypse has already happened to indigenous people, you know, 1492. We have already survived the apocalypse and here’s what our world looks like now. So the rest of you are in shock and we have been practicing survival for hundreds of years, or for generations. And so, hopefully that’s sort of—because I understand a lot of my readers are not indigenous, but I do, I think my primary—when I’m writing, I’m usually writing for the indigenous reader. I want them to see themselves and their stories and the people that they know day in and day out sort of thing in the stories that I write. And then everyone else can sort of come along for the ride and enjoy it and maybe get something out of it.

[00:19:58] We have our own take on these sorts of things and it’s also a way through genre to introduce these ideas that are perhaps a little more palpable or a little more, oh I didn’t think of it that way, you know, to readers who don’t seem to be able to stomach a more nonfiction perspective.

Annalee: [00:20:18] Julian, when I interviewed you one time before, you were telling me that you had had this kind of epic conversation in Paris with the filmmaker Cowboy Smithx, where he talked to you about how indigenous folks are living in the post apocalypse. Can you talk about that or tell us a little bit about that conversation?

Julian: [00:20:36] I mean, one of the cool things about being a journalist is that I get to hang out with artists and creative types who are much cooler than I am. And I would definitely count Cowboy among those. And his name is in fact Cowboy. He’s a member of the Blackfeet Nation in what is now Alberta, Canada. We were at a literature festival just outside of Paris, France. And we were hanging out at, there’s like a castle-type thing in this little town called Vincennes, and he was just sort of like riffing on these ideas that he’s had around, kind of just reclaiming all sorts of things. And taking the notion of reclaiming things all the way to Europe.

[00:21:29] So he has this film company called Noir Foot, which is a sort of play on his people’s, what his people were called by white people, which is Blackfoot. He had this idea to reclaim Castle Calgary, and Calgary is the nearest major city to his people’s reserve in Alberta and rename it Moh-Kíns-Tsis, which is the original Blackfoot word for Calgary, and it means the elbow.

[00:22:00] He has this way as a filmmaker and when we were hanging out of sort of taking what is the sort of nut of the story and exploring that as far as the sort of idea will go. So he said this thing to me, which I guess I sort of knew in a felt sense, but hadn’t sort of fully articulated before, that as native people we are a post apocalyptic people, by which he meant that we have survived apocalypses before. We survived the apocalypse of colonization. The genocide of our people. The theft of over 99.9% of our lands. The taking of our children away to boarding schools. And today, many of our people in communities still live in the aftermath of that apocalypse. They’re basically, every single measurable statistic of misery, native people are pretty reliably falling to the bottom of it.

[00:23:05] And so, I think that, firstly, understanding indigenous people as a post apocalyptic people probably is a fairly new concept to listeners. It was a new concept, or a new way of articulating this concept to me, not so long ago, I will admit. But I think it’s very relevant right now from sort of a humanities perspective or sort of what sort of human experiences matter in this moment, perspective. Because we’re, in my view, and in many scientist views, we are effectively living through an apocalypse. We are living through—I live in DC. I just walked outside to the store. It’s 100 degrees and humid and the parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere is somewhere around 410. Which is unprecedented in all of human history. The last time there was that much carbon in the atmosphere there were forests on Greenland. There was no Antarctic ice sheet, the seas were hundreds of feet above where they are now. 

[00:24:14] And that is the reality that we have fundamentally changed the atmospheric chemistry of our planet, is going to have and is already having, in many parts of the world, apocalyptic consequences. Of course, at the same time we’re recording this episode, when I walked outside I had to throw a mask on because we’re in the middle of a pandemic. A pandemic that is making the most vulnerable in our society, putting them at risk of death. The old, the poor, many people of color, are the most at risk amidst this pandemic. 

[00:24:53] And at the same time, as we’re recording, there are currently, in cities in the United States, including Portland, Oregon, there are representatives of the United States military who are patrolling the streets and rounding up protesters. Something that is quite foreign, I think, to many people who have only been paying attention to United States politics over the last so many years.

[00:25:20] So, you know, just to summarize that, we are enduring an ecological apocalypse, an apocalypse of our health and wellbeing. We’re also enduring what I would view as a potential political apocalypse, an apocalypse that feels like an occupation to some. That feels like the loss of democracy to many. That looks like the sort of infringement on civil rights to many others, and human rights, to folks who are at the border. And who, in my view, has the past lived and human experience of apocalypses like that, I think that indigenous people are certainly a group that has that and carries those stories and carries the genetic consequences of prior apocalypses in our very DNA. And so, I think that’s why storytellers like Cowboy, like Rebecca, and like so many others who are telling that perspective to a wider audience, and explaining, maybe not explicitly always, but showing why it matters, are so important in this moment. Because we need sort of experiences that tell us that humans have survived apocalypses before and can persist and be reborn in our cultures and in our love for each other, and in our art, and all of that, afterwards.

Charlie Jane: [00:26:45] Yeah, and actually, that segues perfectly into my next question that I was going to ask, which is: in the middle of the cluster of crises that we’re living through right now, in particular, what kind of stories should we be telling and what kind of stories do indigenous people need most, and what kind of stories are going to be most useful to, kind of, that kind of survival or survivance as Gerald Vizenor called it?

Rebecca: [00:27:09] So, I would say, the indigenous stories that need to be being told are whatever the hell indigenous people want to tell. 

Annalee: [00:27:16] Yes.

Charlie Jane: [00:27:16] Right on.

Julian: [00:27:17] [crosstalk]

Rebecca: [00:27:17] I think that our voices have been absent for so long that shout it out. If you want to tell important stories. If you want to tell frivolous stories. If you want to tell a romance, if you want to tell stories of survival. Whatever it is that you want to tell, I think is important and vital and adds to the conversation. So, I don’t really think through, like what I’m going to write. I’m like, I’m writing this because it’s important to me, but also because there are some badass people doing some badass things.

[00:27:54] And that’s sort of my criteria for what kind of story I want to tell, often. Sometimes I’m more thoughtful, but often I just like, you know, pew pew stuff. So, anyway. I don’t think there’s any bad story right now for indigenous voices. I think we need… the more the merrier and I would love to hit a critical mass level of different kinds of stories from indigenous creators.

Annalee: [00:28:22] I wonder if I could just ask a quick follow up to that, because Trail of Lightning which was an incredible novel that you published a couple years ago now, really centers the idea of survival and indigenous survival. It’s, I mean, it’s also just, as you said, it’s a badass story about people running around fighting evil spirits. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that and about how survival kind of fit into that story and how you were imagining it when you were framing it?

Rebecca: [00:28:49] So two levels of survival. There’s the larger, sort of, cultural survival, and then there’s a very personal level of survival. The main character, Maggie Hoskie has survived an act of violence in her life that sort of set her on her course. And you know, that’s a personal survival that’s actually pulling from some of my own personal history, the way that some authors, many authors, do.

[00:29:15] So there’s levels of that. There’s how to find community again, which is what she struggles with, probably the most. How to trust people again, which she struggles with. So there’s this individual survival. How do I move forward in my life. And then there’s this sort of larger survival narrative of the Navajo Nation, which I’ve lived for quite a while and still have relatives and loved ones there. We spend a lot of time there. And what I saw there, and what I did in the story, too, is they’re doing the best of the entire world. So, because the setting of Trial of Lightning, everything has been flooded below about 4,000 feet or something. We are 20 years into this big water, this flood. People on the rez, on Navajo Nation, are doing pretty good because they’ve already learned how to survive this sort of situation. People on the outside world, there’s actually a wall built around the Navajo Nation now, they’re not doing so good. And so what I really wanted to sort of capture that idea, also, of like, you know, life on the rez goes on. We’re used to being, having less, or living on generators, or not having running water and of course, you know, these things need to be solved. But the things that were weaknesses, or that the outside world might consider weaknesses, suddenly becomes strengths. And I really wanted to play with that idea.

Charlie Jane: [00:30:42] Julian, do you have any thoughts about that?

Julian: [00:30:44] I hesitate to say like, what the stories are, but I’m trying to think about what makes me so drawn to, like, the films made by someone like Taiko Waititi, who’s an amazing, incredible filmmaker who also can do indie films and he can also take on a superhero franchise like Thor and make a film like Ragnarok, and it can be widely considered one of the best Marvel films when there are like, how many dozens of those? And I don’t know, what makes Taiko Waititi so good, and is that? I would imagine that there’s some elements of his sort of perspective as a Maori filmmaker that inform that. There’s some obvious sort of references to indigenous culture, whether it be the fact that one of the space ships is the color of the Aboriginal Australian first nations flag. Or the fact that he plays the, I forget the alien, who’s like a pile of rocks. But he plays that guy and there’s a lot of humor in the way he shoots his films.

[00:32:02] And which, as a native person, as an Indian, we can tell the darkest stories and there can often be humor in there. There’s sort of a tragicomedy to the way of telling a story. So I think there’s a way in which—I guess this is not a fully, I don’t know if I have a full thought on this totally, yet. But I think there’s a way in which the story’s told, maybe not so much what the subject of the story is, that feels to me—there is a certain set of voices and perspectives that can come from an indigenous perspective and worldview that feel like they come from a particular cultural background, to me.

[00:32:40] And then, I think I would also just say that as a journalist, and as someone who has to develop sources and has a large network of people whose stories folks give to me, essentially. They spend time interviewing with me and that is, in my view, a gift that they share what happened to them, to their family, their emotions, often, even. They give me the privilege of telling and sharing their story, and I think that there is a relationship there to, as a journalist, at least, your sources, your source material, your community, your people, that feels quite different than sort of the parachute in, fly out sort of brand of journalism that I think it’s easy to caricature but is very present in the rest of media. So I think that there is maybe some sort of, not subject area of approaches. I mean there’s definitely some subject areas that are common.

[00:33:43] I’m trying to explore here what, maybe, the approach is. The methodology, if you will.

Annalee: [00:33:47] Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I would just add that, of course, Rebecca is also stepping out into some mainstream properties with her Star Wars book, so, you know, all hail being in both worlds. Having stuff that’s more specific and being able to dip your foot into a franchise.

Charlie Jane: [00:34:09] Rebecca and Julian, could you just tell us where to find you online?

Rebecca: [00:34:12] I am at RebeccaRoanhorse.com, R-O-A-N-H-O-R-S-E. I’m also spending way too much time on Twitter at @RoanhorseBex, and I just want to say, I have a new book coming out in October called Black Sun, it’s an epic fantasy inspired by the indigenous Americas.

Charlie Jane: [00:34:30] Yay!

Annalee: [00:34:31] And it’s so good! Oh my good.

Rebecca: [00:34:33] Yay, everybody needs to check it out.

Charlie Jane: [00:34:33] Can’t wait. Yay! Julian?

Julian: [00:34:37] I also spend way too much time on Twitter. I’m at @JNoiseCat. I also have a website where you can read all of my articles in various newspapers and magazines. It’s just JulianBraveNoiseCat.com. And I owe my agent a book proposal that I keep putting off, so maybe eventually you’ll have a book from me to buy, if I stop procrastinating.

Annalee: [00:35:05] Yeah! Something to look forward to.

Charlie Jane: [00:35:06] Nice.

Julian: [00:35:06] That’s methodology. My book is running very much on Indian time.

Annalee: [00:35:13] Awesome, well thank you guys so much for joining us. That was incredible and really awesome.

Charlie Jane: [00:35:17] Yeah.

Rebecca: [00:35:17] Yeah, thank you for having me.

Charlie Jane: [00:35:19] So after the break, we’re going to answer a question from one of our beloved Patreon supporters.

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Charlie Jane: [00:35:38] Welcome to a new feature that we’re calling, “Allow us to explain” where every now and then we ask some of our Patreon supporters to ask us questions on our Patreon that we’ll then answer on the podcast. So we have a couple of questions from Sam [sp?:Veltree] who asks, are there any scifi or fantasy works you continually come back to, either as tradition, or as pure love for the work, and also, you are put in charge of bringing whatever book or comic book to the screen, either television or movie, what do you pick and how do you adapt it?

[00:36:13] And I think that those are two really good questions to answer together. So, Annalee, do you want to go first?

Annalee: [00:36:17] Sure, I’ll go first. So there is a novella/short novel by Fritz Lieber called Our Lady of Darkness that was published in 1977 so that makes it kind of on the border of classic science fiction. I come back to it a lot because it’s set in my hometown of San Francisco, and it perfectly captures a kind of a mood that overtook the city in the 1970s. And it combines it with something that he calls megapolisomancy, which is basically city magic. This if often hailed as the first example of urban fantasy writing, modern urban fantasy writing in America. And the tale centers on gentrification and how gentrification is turning San Francisco into an evil symbol that will allow dark forces to enter. And specifically, the erection of the TransAmerica pyramid. And I use erection here very specifically because it really does look like a giant erection, anyone who’s seen the San Francisco skyline, it’s like a very tall, slender pyramid, with a kind of fluted top.

[00:37:38] The TransAmerica pyramid was built in the 1970s over top of an artist’s colony that had been there for many, many years and was torn down. It was a place where Jack London had lived, a lot of scifi/fantasy authors had lived there, and Fritz Leiber and a number of other writers in his cohort were just really saddened by the loss of this huge artist’s colony then being replaced by this hideous bank building that just kind of marred the skyline.

[00:38:09] And so in Our Lady of Darkness, the main character, who is a scifi writer and a fantasy writer discovers that once the TransAmerica pyramid is erected, it forms a magical symbol with a couple of other San Francisco landmarks that will then allow in these dark forces. So it’s sort of his descent into magic and madness and creepy hippie culture and they all kind of mix together and… it just, it deeply affected me because it really is about how urban politics and urban magic mix together.

[00:38:48] I actually wrote a short story called, “Unclaimed,” a number of years ago that was published in Shimmer magazine that’s kind of a response to Our Lady of Darkness, and it’s set in Corona Heights, which is one of the other points on the evil triangle that’s being created by the TransAmerica pyramid. And Corona Heights, for anyone who’s ever been in San Francisco, it’s a beautiful place, but it’s kind of creepy looking from a distance. It has all these broken rocks that look like teeth. So I would love to see someone like Guillermo del Toro take on this story.

Charlie Jane: [00:39:23] Oh yeah. I’m kind of surprised he hasn’t already.

Annalee: [00:39:23] And—Yeah, I mean, he’s busy. He’s doing a lot. And the thing that’s great about a story like this is it sort of borrows some of the tropes that you see often in Lovecraftian tales, where it’s sort of linking American history and urbanism together with ancient evil. But it doesn’t have any of Lovecraft’s shitty racism. It has other issues, for sure. I mean, it was written in the ‘70s, but it’s much more about the west and it’s specifically about social change. How there’s this churning of population in San Francisco and some of it brings in hippies and brings in counterculture and some of it brings in this kind of gentrifying wealth culture.

[00:40:13] Anyway, I think it would be amazing. I would love to see a really gothy but smart and political kind of take on this story. I’d also love to see somebody like Boots Riley take it on. That would be great, to give it—because he’s a local Bay Area filmmaker. He does a great job of interweaving urban politics and sort of weird science. His movie Sorry to Bother You is just incredible. So he could also take this on and I imagine would do an amazing job with it.

Charlie Jane: [00:40:47] Oh man, yeah. 

Annalee: [00:40:48] Okay, what’s your pick?

Charlie Jane: [00:40:50] That would be incredible. So, my pick, both for books that I keep coming back to all the time and for things I would love to adapt for the screen is the novel Geek Love by Katherine Dunn.

Annalee: [00:41:00] Yes!

Charlie Jane: [00:41:02] Which is a book that, you know, really changed my life when I first read it. It’s a book that really kind of blew my head open and you know, it’s this book about a family of circus freaks, kind of, who try to genetically engineer their children to be better circus freaks by using chemicals and radiation and stuff. But it turns into this thing about twisted families and cults, and this one character who is kind of trying to save her daughter and her brother is becoming a cult leader, and it’s just such a beautifully weird and messed up novel that… and it’s so beautifully written. Every sentence is incredible. And I just always come back to it and just kind of read a few pages at a time, and I’m just like, holy, you know. Katherine Dunn, unfortunately died a few years ago without releasing another novel, so that might be the last novel we ever get from her. I think she also did one other book before that. But it’s really sad, but it’s such an incredible book, and it would be such a cool, weird, I don’t know, like an HBO miniseries.

[00:42:06] I feel like HBO or STARZ or somebody or Netflix, maybe, could do a really fucked up kind of intense just bizarre miniseries based on Geek Love. It couldn’t be a movie, I don’t think. But a miniseries or even an ongoing series could just delve deeper and deeper into the weirdness of that world and the kind of dysfunctional relationships of these characters. I think that there’s just so much that could be done there.

Annalee: [00:42:31] Are there any shows that you’ve seen on HBO where you loved the tone and you would love to see someone take that tone and apply it to Geek Love?

Charlie Jane: [00:42:40] Oh man, I mean I was actually literally just watching the Watchmen miniseries and thinking that that kind of has a weird, the kind of, the dialogue between the past and present in that series and the kind of slightly arch, surreal tone of that series is kind of good. I feel like the folks who made Glow, weirdly, could do something really good with Geek Love, I feel like. But just something that’s—or actually, Mrs. America. The folks that made Mrs. America. Something that kind of deals with complicated inner lives of women but also just like, surreal weird bullshit, kind of.

Annalee: [00:43:14] Yeah. I like that idea of bringing people who’ve worked in kind of comedy or historical-tinged comedy or comedy-tinged history, whatever you want to say. 

Charlie Jane: [00:43:27] Yeah.

Annalee: [00:43:28] To do that, because one of the things that’s so great about Geek Love is that it is very gothy in that it’s about families producing mutants. But it’s also really sarcastic and kind of ironic and there’s a lot of really great dark humor in it. So yeah, I’m obsessed with Mrs. America. I would love to see that team, that writer team, like hunker down with Geek Love. So, dear Hollywood…

Charlie Jane: [00:43:56] Or the makers of Russian Doll, too, I feel like those folks.

Annalee: [00:44:01] Yeah. Wow. You’re just. You’re blowing my mind.

Charlie Jane: [00:44:04] I feel like now is the moment when we could get a really, really good Geek Love miniseries.

Annalee: [00:44:10] Yeah, and I’d so much rather see that than like, Handmaid’s Tale crap, which is just so on the nose. I want to see something that’s like, really delving into the inner lives of people who are going through political change and going through social change and how they handle it and not have it just be like, well, what happens is that women become enslaved again. And it’s like, yeah, that could happen, but also there’s all these other psychological mechanisms for preventing women from making the choices they want to make. Preventing anyone from making the choices they want to make because of what their families have done, or what the entertainment industry has done to their families in the case of Geek Love. I’m into it. Sign me up.

Charlie Jane: [00:44:51] Nice. Well, thank you so much for listening, this has been Our Opinions Are Correct. We’ll back two weeks from now with another episode. If you want more, you can join us on Patreon, where we post extras, including audio extras. And any donation on there is greatly appreciated. We’re really grateful to our Patreon supporters. Also, if you like our podcast, please do leave a review, and you can find our podcast in all of the places that podcasts are found, anywhere in the entire known universe that you can download podcasts, you can get ours, including Apple and Stitcher and Libsyn and Google Podcasts.

[00:45:25] And thank you so much to our wonderful and brilliant and talented audio producer, Veronica Simonetti, which Women’s Audio Mission here in San Francisco. And thanks to Chris Palmer for the music, and thanks again to you for listening. We just really appreciate you so much, and we’ll be back in two weeks. Bye!

Annalee: [00:45:41] Bye!

[00:45:43] Outro music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.