Episode 81: Transcript
Episode: 81: Space Fantasy is a Thing. Deal with it!
Transcription by Keffy
Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about the meaning of science fiction and everything else. I'm Charlie Jane Anders, author of the new young adult space fantasy novel, Victories Greater Than Death.
Annalee: [00:00:13] And I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm the author of Four Lost Cities, a new book about archaeology and ancient cities.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:21] So you might have noticed I just described Victories Greater Than Death as a space fantasy. And that's how I've been talking about the book a lot. So in this episode, we're going to talk about space fantasy. What is it? How is it different from space opera? And why is it cool to put fantasy tropes together with space stuff? And in the second half of the episode, we'll be talking all about my brand-new young adult book, Victories Greater Than Death. Let's dive in.
[00:00:47] Intro music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.
Annalee: [00:01:13] So you already started talking about this a little bit in the intro, Charlie Jane, but I'm wondering if you could start us off by just explaining what is space fantasy? Where has this term been my whole life?
Charlie Jane: [00:01:26] So space fantasy, I feel like there's two different ways to define space fantasy, like a broad way and a narrow way.
Annalee: [00:01:35] Broadway.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:36] So the narrow definition of space fantasy… Broadway space fantasy! Jazz hands!
Annalee: [00:01:39] I actually really want to see a Broadway space fantasy.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:42] I really want that now. Oh my God, I really want that.
Annalee: [00:01:45] Okay, I’m sorry. Continue into the wide definition.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:48] So, the narrow definition of space fantasy is basically, if it really has a lot of the explicit trappings of a fantasy. Like, there's wands and there's wizards, and there's ancient prophecies and castles and creatures that are basically orcs and dragons. If you can basically look at it and be like, okay, this is just Lord of the Rings but we've put it in space, then that's the narrow definition of space fantasy. And the classic example of that is probably Star Wars, which has wizards, has a lot of really explicit fantasy elements, layered on top of like starships and planets and blasters and stuff.
[00:02:26] I would think that the broader definition of space fantasy, though, is, more like any space opera, where there's some kinds of magical elements and things that we might say that it's technology or science, but the explanation is basically hand wavy, and there's just like, it's basically magic. And where you have kind of broad fantasy elements, like a struggle against Ultimate Evil, a hero who is kind of singled out in some way, an epic quest. All the stuff that is the underpinnings of fantasy that's kind of like what makes fantasy so fun. And I feel like a lot of space opera, in the end, kind of includes some kind of fantasy feel to it. And there's actually a lot of overlap between the two.
Annalee: [00:03:13] Well, so what would you say is the difference between space fantasy and space opera, then?
Charlie Jane: [00:03:18] I would say that space opera as a genre is a little bit of a continuum. I think that the kind of swashbuckling adventure elements of space opera often lend themselves to a little bit of fantasy, and there is some fantasy in most space opera, but it's just it's kind of a spectrum. It's like, at the one end of the spectrum, you've got things like The Expanse which are pretty hard science fiction, but do include the protomolecule—
Annalee: [00:03:44] Yeah, I was gonna say.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:45] In the case of The Expanse, which is like—
Annalee: [00:03:46] The way you have people coming back from the dead and glowing sex aliens? I'm not sure how else to describe them.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:57] I think that's a good description. I think that in The Expanse, I love The Expanse series and I love how… I love its commitment to rigorous physics in most areas. But then the protomolecule is basically like a get out of physics free card in away.
Annalee: [00:04:08] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:10] Anytime you want to not have totally realistic physics.
Annalee: [00:04:15] Yeah, it builds all these doorways in space, just just go with it. Yeah, yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:20] And it’s sort of like, we did a whole episode of Arthur C. Clarke's third law, which is, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And what I ended up feeling is that actually, the purpose of that is not to discredit magic in a fantasy setting, but to allow magic in a science fiction setting and say, well, it's advanced technology, we're not going to explain it. It's just, it basically works like magic. And I think that Star Trek makes some attempts at having realistic physics but also has the warp drive and the transporter and other stuff that's kind of fantasy technology. It's kind of like it's not… there's no science perfectly plausible way that stuff could work. And then you actually go around meeting gods like Q and there's like a bunch of other gods who show up in Star Trek.
[00:05:07] And then at the other end of the spectrum you've got Star Wars, you've got Dune. Where Dune really is an epic fantasy set in space, I would say. There's a manga series called Edens Zero, whose creator, Hiro Mashima has described it explicitly as space fantasy, there's Warhammer 50k. Really, when we're talking about space fantasy, as opposed to space opera, we're talking about a specific type of space opera that wears its fantasy elements on its sleeve proudly and just says, heck, yeah, this is kind of a fantasy in space and we're just gonna run with it, we're not going to try to pretend that everything here is completely, scientifically rigorous. And we're going to just have fun with all the fantasy stuff of swinging across a chasm that happens to be inside a space station and having magic wands that have nanotech or whatever. I think that the advantage is that you can just acknowledge the fantasy-ness and revel it is. And I think that's really what I'd like to see more in popularizing this term space fantasy is the reveling in it.
Annalee: [00:06:09] Yeah, I was I was just thinking about Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti series, too, in this context. Because, again, that is a space opera that has strong elements of fantasy and magic. And the thing that's great in those books, and I think in some of the other stuff that you're talking about, too, is that it allows you to bring in basically non-Western traditions into the storytelling. And to say, hey, it's not just about the chosen one from Western mythos. And the chosen one fits in really nicely with a lot of ideas about science, because the scientist, the great scientist, is often kind of a chosen one figure. And so it's interesting that now that we're seeing a little bit more diversity in publishing, we're starting to get more really interesting crunchy space fantasies. Not just the dude with the glowing sword.
[00:07:08] So, okay, tell me a little bit more about what you think is new about space fantasy? What's kind of coming up now that's really different from the kind of space operas we saw, historically?
Charlie Jane: [00:07:22] I would say that we are seeing and kind of a new wave of space opera and some of it is very much influenced by The Expanse where it's trying to be grounded and realistic and gritty and you have things like Becky Chambers’s Wayfarer series, which has a certain amount of realism about life and space and has that kind of blue collar feeling. Which, you can have a fantasy with a blue color feeling, for sure. No question about that. But you're also seeing a lot of space opera coming along recently that just fully embraces the ridiculousness of it and just fully goes for broke and you have animated shows like Steven Universe and She-Ra, which basically are fantasies, but they go into space all the time. And they're just like, yep, there are spaceships and there's planets and aliens. But it's still basically a fantasy story about a chosen one and about magic and about gods and monsters and stuff.
[00:08:16] Star Wars is obviously making a huge comeback in the last five years since Disney bought Lucasfilm and we've got The Mandalorian and we've got a bunch of other Star Wars stuff coming along. I think we're gonna be up to our eyeballs in Star Wars soon. And I'm actually super excited about that. One of the most popular space operas in the last decade and change is Battlestar Galactica, which got very mystical. And then you’ve got the Marvel Universe, where the Marvel Universe is basically… Like, Thor is from another planet, but he's also a god. And he is just constantly fighting mystical objects and fighting Frost Giants and doing like Norse mythology stuff in space. And then Dr. Strange goes into space and Guardians of the Galaxy is kind of a giant fantasy. It's just a ball of fantasy tropes in space.
[00:09:02] And then there's the young adult space opera, like my book Victories Greater Than Death, but also like things like Once & Future by Cori McCarthy and Amy Rose Capetta, which is just a straight up Arthurian, Knights of the Round Table story, but in space. And I people are realizing that there's a lot of fun to be had by just going for broke with the fantasy elements in a space opera setting.
Annalee: [00:09:26] Do you think some of this is coming from the fact that there's maybe more of a tolerance for genre blending now, too, and that people… maybe we've always been blending these genres because I think you're right that this is a tradition that goes back pretty far. But like now that we're admitting that we want to have horror sci fi and we want to have romance fantasy that suddenly it's kind of like, actually, it's okay if we have space fantasy.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:55] Yeah, I mean, I think that genre blending has definitely become a much bigger deal in the last 10 years. It's funny because I started working on All the Birds in the Sky in like 2011 and I was like, Oh my gosh, putting sci fi and fantasy together in a book. That's like, such a big deal. And now I'm just like, yeah, I feel like that's everything now. I feel like in the last decade, that I'm glad that book came out before everybody was just like, yep, fantasy and science fiction are just like a big swirly. They're just like, when you go to the frozen yogurt place and they just they give you a swirly of two different flavors. Man, now I really want frozen yogurt. It's like caramel and chocolate or whatever. Or yeah. Oh my God, I’m going to stop talking about frozen yogurt.
Annalee: [00:10:36] Is fantasy the caramel or the chocolate?
Charlie Jane: [00:10:39] Oh, gosh.
Annalee: [00:10:40] I mean, I want to know if science fiction is caramel or chocolate, too. This seems important.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:44] I feel like science fiction is caramel because it's salted.
Annalee: [00:10:48] Well, it doesn’t have to be salted.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:49] And also because science fiction contains caramel universes, like when you go to a caramel universe and it’s like everything is caramel. I don’t know. But fantasy is definitely chocolate. Fantasy is definitely, definitely chocolate.
Annalee: [00:11:00] Wow. I feel like this is a sidebar that we need to have at some point.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:04] Oh, God.
Annalee: [00:11:06] Maybe we can talk about this in our audio extra.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:10] We should definitely talk about this in our audio extra.
Annalee: [00:11:11] Because I feel like science fiction is the chocolate, so, okay.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:18] Oh my God. I haven’t been to the frozen yogurt place in over a year and now I’m just like, frozen yogurt with toppings.
Annalee: [00:11:23] So this is really all about frozen yogurt but the point is that—
Charlie Jane: [00:11:25] Moving on. So point is, genre blending has become a much bigger deal because superheroes have been just eating everything in media and superheroes, the defining trait of superheroes is that they just like bust through genre dividers. They just, they don't care, like superheroes are like, oh, yeah, we're fantasy, we’re science fiction, we’re horror. Oh, yeah, whatever you want. We're it. And superheroes don't care about genre. They are just like, any genre that they want to be, they just smoosh it all together. And then a lot of a lot of the most popular stories of the last decade, have kind of taken different genres and just mashed them up in various ways.
Annalee: [00:12:04] Mm-hmm. So leaving aside our important conversation and questions around chocolate, is it sci fi or fantasy? I'm curious why you're so drawn to space fantasy. What is it that you love about it so much?
Charlie Jane: [00:12:23] I just think that the concept of space fantasy is really fun. Like I said before, I think that part of it is just being able to revel in how kind of ridiculous and non-scientifically-plausible a lot of space opera is. But also once you start acknowledging the extent to which fantasy tropes are everywhere in space opera, a lot of fantasy tropes take on a new lease on life when you put them out in space with planets and stars and galaxies and spaceships. As soon as you sort of put your wizards and your kind of ancient gods and your monsters and your quests and your kind of magical objects into space, they get a different kind of feel to them. Because space is really fun and exciting in its own right. And it's just, again, going back to the swirly metaphor, it's just like, everything tastes better when you kind of smoosh them together like that. And I think that, I love a kind of austere, realistic, grounded, gritty space opera like an Alastair Reynolds kind of space opera where everything is fairly plausible, and you have a lot of attention to orbital mechanics and ΔV and like all the physics of space flight.
Annalee: [00:13:34] Well, and also immortality, so it’s not completely plausible.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:38] Yeah, there’s immortality via suspended animation or cloning or whatever. So when you get into the biology of it, it gets a little bit more, a little bit less plausible, perhaps. But I love that kind. I love the kind of Iain M. Banks Culture books where those are kind of fantasies in the sense that the AIs are kind of gods in a weird way. But they also have a lot of very plausible space opera stuff in them.
[00:14:05] But I also have a huge soft spot for swashbuckling, gonzo, wild and wooly, everything is just going haywire. And also, I think that when you infuse these fantasy elements into things, it just makes things more meaningful, because it's like, there's a purpose to it. Usually, part of what's fun about an epic fantasy is that you have a heroic quest or whatever. And it just infuses everything with purpose. Like we have a noble goal, and we are fighting against evil and we are on a path towards justice. And I think that part of what I love about fantasy in general is, especially epic fantasy, that kind of sense of, we are kind of moving in a direction of goodness and there is good and there is evil and we are going to fight for good. And I think that you could argue that that's very unrealistic, but it's also just a lot of fun and it just kind of opens up a different side of space adventures, I think.
Annalee: [00:15:04] Yeah, I was thinking when you were talking about the kind of swashbuckling and the silliness… I was thinking about Chilling Effect by Valerie Valdes. Which is such a fun goofy novel. It's a perfect example of space fantasy where a lot of it is realistic, they’re zooming around in spaceships. But it's got just all this silly stuff, silly aliens, like silly romantic encounters.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:33] It's got psychic cats.
Annalee: [00:15:35] The psychic cats are like a major draw for a lot of people in those books, I think. Yes.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:39] Oh, yeah.
Annalee: [00:15:39] And the other thing I was thinking about was Gideon the Ninth, which has been such a big galvanizing force in space fantasy over the past couple years. It's such a popular series. I'm thinking specifically of the first novel, I think Harrow the Ninth is a little bit more harrowing. But Gideon the Ninth has a lot of silliness in it and the narrator is kind of a goofball. And so it kind of lends itself well to that blended world, the swirly as it were, the swirly of genre, which makes it sound like—
Charlie Jane: [00:16:14] The genre swirly.
Annalee: [00:16:14] we’re dunking books in the toilet and flushing their hair down the drain.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:20] We're definitely not dunking books, you guys. Okay?
Annalee: [00:16:21] No, we are anti-book swirly in that way.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:23] We are not—I don't have a book sitting in my toilet right now.
Annalee: [00:16:27] No.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:27] It’s not happening, I promise.
Annalee: [00:16:30] So why don't we take a break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about your new novel.
[00:16:34] Segment change music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.
Annalee: [00:16:47] Okay, I am super excited about this, because I, of course, have read this novel, Victories Greater Than Death. I read it in an early version. I read it in a final version. It's amazing. I love it. Obviously, I'm biased. But also, I'm unbiased in the sense that I really found it to be delightful. And it is a perfect example of a space fantasy.
[00:17:10] So why don't you start by telling us about this book, which is the first in a trilogy and the world and how it came to be?
Charlie Jane: [00:17:18] Yeah, so Victories Greater Than Death is a young adult novel about a girl named Tina, who has known for a few years now that she is actually the clone of an alien hero, and she was left on Earth as a baby. And when she's old enough, she has this rescue beacon inside her, and these aliens are going to come back and get her and take her away from Earth. And she's going to discover who she really is, where she really belongs, and her true destiny and her heritage and all of that. And then of course, the aliens do show up and take her away from Earth along with a few other human kids. And she just starts to realize that her destiny is not what she was expecting. Nothing is quite what she was expecting. And it turns out that trying to live up to the legacy of this alien hero is actually kind of tough. And she has to really lean on her friends.
[00:18:06] That's kind of the thumbnail sketch. And really this book came out of me thinking about when I was a teenager, and all I wanted, the only thing I desperately craved was for aliens to show up and take me away from this planet. I was just like, I'm sick of this planet. This planet kind of sucks. I don't want to be a human being anymore. I just want to be up in space, having awesome adventures, I want to be on the Enterprise or in the TARDIS or whatever. And just off saving the galaxy and having fun and being with my chosen family of cool alien and human people.
[00:18:38] I kind of started out with that wish fulfillment aspect. And then the thing about wish fulfillment, of course, is that the more you get into it, the more you have to complicate it and kind of put barriers and obstacles in the way of just getting the pure wish fulfillment. But also you kind of interrogate it and like why is this a wish that I have? And, you know, what are the problems with it? What's the downside of it? So that's kind of what the book is.
Annalee: [00:19:01] That's so interesting. I mean, I have to say the wishing that you were an alien is so relatable, and I think that, I mean, definitely a lot of us felt that way as teenagers. But I think anytime things are tough on Earth, it's a thing that we feel in our hearts, like, maybe I don't really belong here. Maybe I was put here by someone else, and they're gonna come get me.
[00:19:24] So okay, in the interest of science, Charlie, Jane, I would like you to break down how much of this book is science fiction versus fantasy. I would like ratios. I would like charts. I would like graphs.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:37] Okay, I'm going to put up some pie charts in the show notes for this episode. Lots of pie charts like apple pie chart, and blueberry, God, we're just talking about food today. Okay, so. So I kind of started out having a sense of, I want this to be a proper space opera, which means that there's going to be some tech that is kind of hand wavy, there's gonna be faster than light travel. There's going to be some stuff that is not really scientifically plausible, but we're gonna make an effort to have scientific plausibility. And I did talk to Katie Mack, who's an astrophysicist that we know, a fair bit about some of the sciency stuff in the book.
Annalee: [00:20:10] Friend of the show, we had her on.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:13] Yeah, we had her on the show. She's amazing. And that episode was so great. And I talked to, you know, Terry Johnson about the biology in the book. And so I did talk to some science people. And I did kind of show it to some folks and kind of do some research. And I tried to come up with a consistent sense of the technology in the book, and how things work, and came up with my own ideas. For example, instead of having a transporter that that teleports you instantly from the planet surface up to the ship, there's a kind of super-fast space elevator that still takes like two or three hours to get up from the surface of the planet to orbit. And it's got all sorts of limitations that I thought were really kind of fun and useful for the plot. And so things like that. And I came up with a lot of different technologies and different things where I kind of have an explanation for them in the book, but the explanation is often a little bit hand wavy.
[00:21:04] And so it was kind of like, there was a version of it, where it was kind of Star Trek-y. But I found that part of what made it fun for me and part of what made it kind of young adult feeling for me, because, you know, it's really true that even though there's a lot of great science fiction and young adult, young adult does tend to skew more fantasy as a general rule. And part of what made it feel like a fun young adult story for me, was leaning into the fantasy elements a little bit more. So there was actually a draft of the book, which I think you read, where it started out feeling 100% a fairy tale. And I love to kind of do these kinds of swerves, sometimes. It started out feeling like a fairy tale where an mysterious old woman shows up and gives the main character a magical necklace that turns out to actually be connected to her legacy as a space hero. And it's not magical a necklace, It’s actually, alien technology. And so I was like, we're gonna start off feeling like a fairy tale. And we're gonna kind of swerve into that. And for various reasons that had to go. That's not in the book anymore. There's no more magical necklace. But I did keep that in the back of my mind and sort of keep the kind of quest element. And the kind of ancient gods and monsters. And there's a little bit of a feeling of prophecy in the sense that this character has this legacy that she is trying to follow up on. And there are things that she's trying to make sense of from her own past, and things that she has to do in order to make things right that she has to understand.
Annalee: [00:22:26] Yeah, she has a destiny. Like she really does.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:27] She has a destiny.
Annalee: [00:22:27] I mean, she struggles with it. But because of who she's been like she has this role, that she basically has to play.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:35] Yeah, and the more I leaned into that kind of like, it's more of a feeling than a set of tropes in some ways, which is part of what I was trying to get at earlier, where I'm like, it doesn't have to have orcs and wizards and spellbooks to necessarily be space fantasy. It's the feeling of like, you are on an epic quest. And there is ancient horrible evil that you have to stand up against. And there’s basically a curse. Like, in a sense, a lot of the space opera backstory that I came up with for this book, feels plausible to me as a space opera thing of the explanation of how these ancient aliens kind of did this weird eugenics program across the galaxy. But it's also an ancient curse, and the ancient curse has to be understood and dealt with, so that we can move forward. And so I kind of was working in those two different modes simultaneously. And I felt like that was a really fun way to kind of generate a lot of electricity by kind of playing those two things against each other.
Annalee: [00:23:30] So what are some of the things that you feel like you were able to do, because you were allowing yourself to think of this as space fantasy instead of space opera?
Charlie Jane: [00:23:41] I think that especially in the sequel, the second book of the trilogy, which is now done, thank goodness.
Annalee: [00:23:47] I can't wait to read it.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:48] By the time you're hearing this, it's already with my editor and everything. The second book, I definitely lean into this a little bit more in terms of stuff like there were ancient, evil aliens who have, like I said, kind of put a curse on the galaxy. And I really leaned into thinking of them as demons in the second book and thinking of them as kind of these weird, scary, they're a little bit Lovecraftian in a way, although obviously, I have complicated feelings about Lovecraft like everybody. But they're these weird, scary ancient Elder Gods who are kind of demonic. And then there are also these artificial intelligences that we spend a lot of time with in the second book. And I really lean into thinking of them as like benevolent gods. Benevolent but somewhat unknowable and not always reliable. And not always… Their idea of good is not always our idea of good.
Annalee: [00:24:40] They’re kind of tricksters, I feel like.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:41] They're a little bit trickstery, yeah. And so, thinking about it that way, and once I was like, Okay, in this universe, there are gods and their demons. And they are kind of in conversation with each other in some way. Or, they’re not actually working against each other, but they have different agendas. And then also, just really leaning into the thing of like, there are huge, massive stakes, the fate of all of the worlds is at stake. And it's really down to this handful of teenagers, which again is a very YA thing.
[00:25:14] You know, I feel like, the more you have like something like in Star Trek, where you have Starfleet, and there's a ship with hundreds of people on it, and they're all kind of doing their part, and there's other ships out there. And maybe the other ships will show up if things get really bad. And there's an organization and we have discipline and structure. And we're following procedures. And the more you lean into that aspect of it, the less it feels like a fantasy, even if you have a lot of fantasy elements, like gods showing up like they always do in Star Trek. And the more you have, like, nope, it's a handful of scrappy characters who are just making things work and doing things and trying to solve these ancient riddles and stand up to these gods and demons and things, it immediately starts to feel more like a fantasy, which is part of why Star Wars is more fantasy and Star Trek is more a little bit more on the sciency side of things. Because of that kind of… and the first book definitely has a Starfleet like thing. But it also manages to kind of pivot into these teenagers are the ones who are going to save the day.
[00:26:17] But also, just like I said, before, having fun with it. There's a certain nimbleness, there's a certain kind of fun, let's just go with this feeling of like, okay, this is gonna be a little bit fantasy, which means we're not going to really stop to explain every single thing. And we're not going to get bogged down in the plausibility of every little thing. there are some cases where I did kind of come up with a thing in the second book that explained a mystery from the first book, and I came up with a thing that was just an ancient terrible curse. And then I went and called Katie Mack, and was like, how can I give this a scientific explanation?
Annalee: [00:26:57] What the science of ancient terrible curse?
Charlie Jane: [00:27:00] Pretty much, and she helped me to figure it out. We actually ended up with something very scientifically plausible, where I can cite two papers, if people really want that.
Annalee: [00:27:08] Wow.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:08] Hopefully, they won't want that. But at the same time, it's still an ancient terrible curse.
Annalee: [00:27:13] I want that! Wait, why aren’t we allowed to want that?
Charlie Jane: [00:27:19] Well, I don't know, anyway, because I doubt I completely got it right. But I saw, actually, your event at Skylight Books in LA with Sean Carroll, where he talked about being a consultant on the Avengers movies. And he said that when people ask him about the science of something, he doesn't interrogate whether that thing is really plausible. He instead says, okay, this is an observed phenomenon. This is new data, we have new data that this bizarre thing has just happened. What are our hypotheses for how this could have happened? Like he treats it as this is an observable fact. There is time travel. There is Thanos, and the Infinity gauntlet, and there is all this other stuff. We're just going to, like, pretend that this is a new scientific discovery, and we're going to explain it.
Annalee: [00:28:08] I mean, it's a great way to approach this because that is literally how physics works. You know, a lot of physics is like, what the fuck just happened over there, 20 million light years away? It's some kind of crazy gamma ray thing. And how do we explain it? Or, for example, how do we explain all this gravitation that we observe that seems to be coming from nothing? Okay, let's just call it dark matter, you know, we'll just, that'll be our placeholder. But I mean, dark matter is, in a sense, a kind of fantasy or magical idea, because of course, it's, my guess, as a totally… as merely a physics observer is that we will discover that dark matter is really a bunch of different stuff. And it all kind of adds up to this matter that we can perceive but not perceive. But it’s not all one thing. It's not like just a bunch of invisible goo that's exerting gravitational pressures, or gravitational forces.
[00:29:10] So, okay, I wanted to ask you a final question, which is, this is your first young adult book, and I wondered how that felt? What was it like? How did you have to change your voice or rethink how you would structure the story from when you've done your two adult novels?
Charlie Jane: [00:29:33] Yeah, it was a huge adjustment, actually. And even though a lot of people had said, Oh, all the birds in the sky kind of starts out feeling like a YA, it kind of has YA feel for a lot of its run. It was still a huge adjustment. And a lot of the adjustment was because I really wanted to capture that YA voice, that YA pacing. And that really required me to kind of rethink how I do books, in a way. And I think that I’m going back to writing adult novels now, but I think it's that some of the stuff that I learned from this is gonna stay with me. And kind of spread out a bunch of YA books on the floor of my apartment and just sat in the middle of the floor looking at all these books and just tried to look at how they do the style and what kind of writing style. First person versus third person, present tense versus past tense and just think about how they used voice and POV in different ways so I could try to kind of capture that. And it really came down to creating a voice that was funny and relatable and snarky and cute, but also very emotional, very passionate, and keep the story moving forward constantly, just like we're pushing forward. And like that pacing was like a huge thing.
[00:30:44] I’d definitely seen a lot of situations where adult authors whose books I'd loved, or their adult books I loved, went into YA and didn't really understand what the differences were or what they were doing, and came up with something that was just disappointing, I thought, and that didn't end up appealing to teens or adults, I think. So I think that there's definitely a downside if you don't approach it from a real viewpoint of like, respecting YA and loving YA, and also just paying attention to the different needs of YA.
[00:31:14] And I was so lucky that Miriam Weinberg who edited Victories Greater Than Death really kind of like… she very gently pushed me to streamline the book in a lot of ways and pick up the pace. And the first like, 40,000 words of the book ended up being more like 15-20,000 words, once I had revised it. And I cut out the magic necklace that I mentioned earlier, I cut out a lot of stuff that was kind of making it slow down and bog down a little bit and just kind of picked up the pace until it was a much zippier book.
[00:31:46] At the same time, I found writing YA really liberating and freeing because I just felt way more open to having the politics of the story be right on the surface, not having to sugarcoat them, like you do for adult readers. Because adult readers are a little bit like, they get scared off by anything that's too political or anything that's too challenging. Especially anything with queer themes, you have to kind of like, hold an adult readers hand a little bit and be like, there there, it's okay, don't worry, I'm gonna walk you through this. It's okay. There's queer people. There's politics about liberation. And it's okay. I mean, I'm with you, we're gonna get through this together. Whereas with teens, they're just like, give me the politics! Give me the queerness!
Annalee: [00:32:28] Yeah, it's funny how, I think the stereotype of teenagers in the world is that they're these vulnerable people who need all this extra care and extra protection, and the federal government has to come in and make sure their sports teams are perfectly safe. And there's all this weird rhetoric. But in fact, teenagers are radically accepting, and they don't need all these caveats and this hand-holding that grownups need. And it's just, it's so interesting to me that turning a book into something that teenagers are going to love kind of means trusting the reader more in a sense. It’s about saying, look, I know you can handle this, I don't need to give you 40,000 words of caveats. You can just dive right in and you're not going to freak out. And I just, I love that. And I love that YA fiction is constantly dispelling these myths about teenagers as being fragile. And I mean, of course, they're fragile and vulnerable, like anyone, but that, in a sense, when it comes to storytelling. And when it comes to expressing themselves, they're just like, no, we've got this. We don’t really need your help.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:41] Yeah, I mean, the thing that was constantly on my mind was that the readers of this, of Victories Greater Than Death, the target readership. And I should say, this book is for everybody.
Annalee: [00:33:50] Of course.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:50] But the target readership is people who grew up on the internet, who grew up with social media. And their childhoods were radically different from yours and mine in a lot of ways. And we both know kids who are just like in their early to mid-teens who are just so much more up on this stuff than most adults we know. It's just amazing to hang out with them and just be like, oh yeah, half my friends are non-binary and trans. Of course I accept all these political things that adults are like, Oh, well, I don't… It’s just, I feel like it gives me hope. Hanging out with kids, especially teenagers, really gives me hope right now.
Annalee: [00:34:31] They're just so badass. And I feel like that's something that we need to start acknowledging more, especially as we're seeing all these, teenage and early-20s activists who are dealing with climate change and gun control. So anyway, it makes me really happy that your book is all about how teenagers can take things into their own hands and do something good. Like that that's not, that's not a problem if we let teenagers lead the way. That that actually they have a lot to contribute and they're… they’re humans! They're part of our culture.
[00:35:02] So what is one thing that you would like people to know about Victories Greater Than Death? And then we can finish up with that.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:12] It's the big, crazy space opera that I always dreamed of writing with lots of aliens and lots of mysteries and weird technologies and food that explodes when you try to eat it, and alien death metal, and it's just got everything. It's just, I crammed everything into it. It's like… it's 100,000 words, but it contains everything!
Annalee: [00:35:38] It’s like, what are those cookies called that have every… they have like M&Ms and pretzels and tire irons and lint and cereal and…
Charlie Jane: [00:35:51] I think it’s a garbage cookie, it really is. It’s my personal garbage cookie.
Annalee: [00:35:54] I think we must be hungry because it’s like everything is cookies.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:58] It’s all food. This is the food episode.
Annalee: [00:36:01] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:36:02] We already did the food episode, but this is the other food episode.
Annalee: [00:36:03] So the book is coming out on April 13th. That's this coming Tuesday. So everyone, check it out. It's gonna be so good and has a beautiful cover. And you're… just you're gonna love it.
Charlie Jane: [00:36:15] Yeah, thank you so much for listening to Our Opinions Are Correct. We're here every other week at all places where podcasts can be found. And if you like us, please leave a review. It means a huge amount to us. It makes a huge difference. And if you really want to support us, we have a patreon patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. We're also on Twitter at @OOACpod. And we're just everywhere. We're all around you right now. We're in the air you breathe. We're a giant energy field that binds all living creatures together—
Annalee: [00:36:46] We’re a mist network.
Charlie Jane: [00:36:47] Just like the force. We’re a mist network.
[00:36:51] And so thank you so much to our incredible heroic valiant producer, Veronica Simonetti, and thanks to Chris Palmer for their music and thanks again to you for listening. We'll be back in two weeks.
Annalee: [00:37:00] Bye!
Charlie Jane: [00:37:00] Bye!
[00:37:02] Outro music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.