Episode 110: Transcript
Episode: 110: The Future of Pizza and Other Listener Questions
Transcription by Keffy
Annalee: [00:00:00] Hey everybody, thanks for listening to Our Opinions Are Correct. Before we get to the episode we want to take a moment to address the June 24th Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade. This decision stripped away the right to have a safe and legal abortion in many parts of the United States. restricting access to comprehensive reproductive care, including abortion threatens the health and independence of all people in the United States. This decision could also lead to the loss of other rights. To learn more about what you can do to help go to podvoices.help. That's podvoices.help. We encourage you to speak up, take care, and spread the word.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:44] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, podcast about science fiction, science, futurism and the never-ending search for the least bad multiverse. I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I'm the author of Victories Greater Than Death and the sequel that just came out, Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak.
Annalee: [00:01:05] And I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist and science fiction writer and I'm the author of Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:15] So, for today's episode, we're going to do something extra special. We're going to answer some questions from you, our beloved listeners.
Annalee: [00:01:22] Yeah!
Charlie Jane: [00:01:22] Yeah! We have a whole mailbag bursting with incredibly insightful and thought-provoking questions, which have provoked some thoughts that we're going to share with you. These questions range from the complexities of time traveling and colonizing alien worlds to the reasons for the resurgence of Dungeons & Dragons. We love our listeners.
Annalee: [00:01:46] Yeah, we love you.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:48] In our audio extra next week on Patreon, we'll be answering a reader question that's a little bit more personal in nature. Speaking of which, all of the questions that we're answering today came from our Patreon supporters. Which reminds me, this podcast is entirely independent, and it is funded by you, our listeners, via Patreon, you are the wind beneath our giant, leathery batwings. If you become a patron, you are helping to keep this podcast going, and you get rewards with every episode. You get an audio extra in the off week, plus, you get access to our Discord channel where we just hang out all the time. So, think about that, that could be yours for just a few bucks a month. Anything you give us goes right back into making our opinions even more correct and possibly yours as well. So, find us at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. With that out of the way, let's open our mailbag.
[00:02:52] [OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]
Charlie Jane: [00:03:18] All right, so first half of the episode is gonna be some slightly more serious questions. Mike asks, “What are some of the pitfalls to writing about near future scenarios that involve decreased bodily autonomy, when the present is telling so many dystopian visions to quote, “hold my beer.”
[00:03:38] And I think this is really about like, for example, the fact that Black Mirror felt really scary and science fictional, when it started airing like, I don't even know, five, six years ago, I look at Black Mirror now. And I'm like, yeah, that's a historical documentary. That stuff has already happened and we're already over, you know.
Annalee: [00:03:54] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:54] Like ah, we already got that. That's just our reality now, and a lot of it does have to do with various kinds of decreased bodily autonomy and it does feel like the present is really kind of challenging us. And so what do you think, Annalee?
Annalee: [00:04:12] Yeah, I mean, I've seen a lot of people using that exact phrase about how the present is telling dystopia to “hold its beer,” which makes me have a delightful image in my head of two abstract concepts, sharing beer.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:26] I mean.
Annalee: [00:04:28] So let's tackle the part of this question where Mike is asking about the pitfalls. So, he's like, what's a possible problem of writing about near future scenarios when everything already seems like it has become one of these dark near future scenarios? And there's two ways to look at that. One is, as a writer, is there a pitfall in trying to describe something that's in the process of happening because you risk cringe and you risk becoming outdated really quickly so that your story no longer feels relevant? So there's that question. And then the other question is, is there some kind of social harm that's caused by writing stories that seem to confirm the idea that there's some kind of inevitability to the dystopia we're experiencing?
Charlie Jane: [00:05:20] Right. I mean, it's an intrinsic problem to writing near future stories that the future will catch up to you. It arrives more quickly than you think it will, especially these days. And it's happened to me, it's happened to a lot of sci fi authors. But at the same time, I think that we have to talk about the things that we're experiencing right now. And the things that are kind of in the process of getting more nightmarish, in some cases, because that's the only way that we can formulate solutions, and that we can kind of make sense of it and deal with it. So it’s work that has to be done. But it's also work that's incredibly challenging right now.
[00:05:56] I feel like part of what's good about speculative fiction is that you can get a little bit weirder and more fanciful and fantastical and more kind of Philip K, Dickian or Octavia Butlerian and kind of make it a little bit weirder. And that way, you kind of sidestep some of the kind of notion of whether you’re being predictive.
Annalee: [00:06:17] Yeah, I remember Malka Older, talking about when she was working on Infomocracy and we had her on the podcast talking about her trilogy, that starts with Infomocracy. And one of the things she said was that it is kind of a near future vision of what happens to democracy when you try to run a global election. And one of her characters flies around in this vehicle, that, I forget what she calls it. But I think she just calls it like a flyer or like, she gives it some other name that's really generic. And she said she did it deliberately. Because it's kind of like a personalized autonomous helicopter of some kind. I mean the person who uses it lives in it and flies around it. And it's kind of a flying car, but it's kind of something else. And Malka was saying that she wanted to futureproof the story in a sense by giving it this really generic name, instead of trying to explain, “This is this piece of technology that grew out of this other piece of technology.”
Charlie Jane: [00:07:24] Right.
Annalee: [00:07:24] Instead, it’s like, in the same way that we call cars, cars, we don't call them horseless carriages or automobiles or we give them this nickname. So, she gives the technology this nickname. And that, in a way, makes it less likely that we're going to feel cringe when we see it and be like, oh, this was the thing that never happened, or this was the thing that already got invented. Because it's just this kind of fill in the blank flying vehicle thing. So, I think that's one kind of way you can get around the issue of talking about new tech at least, is to kind of think about how people always end up nicknaming things in their environment something really generic so you don't have to worry about like, is it the, you know, autonomous, self-driving flying vehicle? It's like, nope, it's a car.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:23] But yeah, I guess my final thought is that we need to kind of let go of this idea of predicting, which is always a kind of anchor that's hung around the neck of science fiction writers in particular and just be like, we're telling stories about what's happening now. We're kind of thinking about how things could get worse or weirder or whatever. But we're also kind of just coming up with metaphors or ways of thinking about the present that kind of put it at one remove so that we can actually look at it. And once you think about it that way, then you have less trouble writing about dystopia that's near future that grows out of the present, because I think you can just, you have a little bit more license, I think.
Annalee: [00:09:00] Yeah, I think my one my one pitfall that I would identify is, I think the only real problem is when you write a near future dystopia and make it seem as if it is inevitable and there's no way out of it. Because that is incredibly unrealistic. There's always another path. There's always a way to resist. And the idea that we're just trapped in a never-ending dystopia. It's both harmful, I think, psychologically, for people reading and also just, it doesn't ring true.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:36] Yeah, I mean, that is really a good point. I feel like we have to allow for the idea that there's choice and that we have the power to shape our future. I think otherwise, it's just not even worth it. So we have another question from David, who asks, you know, as writers you sometimes imagine the thought processes of nonhumans and David mentions Martha Wells and how or she shows us the thoughts of nonhumans in the Raksura series and also in Murderbot. And you know, when you're writing these stories in English, your own native language, in the case of both of us and some other folks, we know. What kind of constraints does that put on your presentation of an alien mind? And would it be necessarily different if we wrote about that same mind’s thoughts presented in Mandarin or Farsi.
[00:10:22] And to start off, I want to kind of caution that I feel a little uncomfortable with conflating like other cultures on Earth, like nonwestern cultures or non-European cultures, equating those with like something that's actually alien that's like extraterrestrials or supernatural beings or robots or whatever. And I don't think that's what David intends here. But I think that what he's asking is, if we're writing in our own native language, are we going to be able to really capture the consciousness of some being that is very different from our own? Or is the fact that we kind of are used to using this language in a particular way, is that going to constrain our ability to kind of capture that that other consciousness and I feel like Annalee, obviously, you could speak to yourself, but I think both of us have experimented with finding ways to write the thoughts of non-human or you know, nonstandard human beings in English, but making it feel like it's distinct in some way. Like, I feel like you do that in Autonomous, for example.
Annalee: [00:11:27] Yeah, I think you're right, that this question is intended to really ask, does language shape the way we represent alien consciousness, and not that it was a that the reader was not kind of claiming that alien consciousness equals nonwestern consciousness. I was just going to say that I had a really interesting experience when I was working with the Spanish translator for Autonomous Alexander Garcia, who emailed me. And not all translators do this. Like sometimes translators will just like go off and do their thing and they won't ever ask you questions, but he was really interested in the way that Paladin, the robot character, switches pronouns halfway through the book. So, Paladin starts out as a he/him and winds up she/her. And in the middle of the book, I as the narrator start referring to Paladin as her. And, of course, in Spanish, every noun is gendered, as in most Romance languages. And so his question was, as he is writing the second half of, as he's translating the second half of the book, of course, he changed Paladin’s pronouns. But there was this problem because the word for robot is it can either be la bot or el bot, because I call the robots bots. So, he was asking, you know, there's a final scene in the book. This is not a spoiler. Where a character who has never met Paladin before is describing Paladin and they describe Paladin as the bot. And one of the themes in the book is that people who meet Paladin, and Paladin is a big burly huge combat robot. They always assume that Paladin is a he because they just assumed that any big burly strong thing would be male. And so there's this disconnect when Paladin starts to be identified with she/her pronouns. So, what Alex wanted to know, was in the scene, when this character meets Paladin, who doesn't know Paladin’s pronouns is describing Paladin, should they say el bot, like a male bot? Or la bot? Because they don't know Paladin’s pronouns.
[00:13:51] And this is a question that I didn't have to deal with at all in the English version, because they just said the bot. And so we don't know what this character is thinking about Paladin’s gender. And so Alex, the translator said, what I'd like to do is when we're in the perspective of this person who doesn't know Paladin, I'd like to have her identify Paladin as el bot, the male bot, and then when a different character who knows Paladin’s gender in the same scene refers to them, they say la bot, and I was like, yes, that is amazing, because having that extra gendered marker actually adds another layer to that scene where we see how different people project different gender identities onto Paladin. And depending on your perspective, Paladin appears to be male or female. And that's just something I could have never done in English. And so I think that's a great example of how language does change your ability to describe a different kind of consciousness.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:50] Yeah, and you know, I mean, when I was younger, I learned a lot of languages which are now mostly kind of rusty, unfortunately, because that's what happens when you don't practice them enough. But you know, I was learning when I was younger, I learned some Latin, also French, Chinese, like Mandarin, Japanese, I learned a little bit of Mongolian. And now more recently, I've been learning Portuguese, and I feel like that has really influenced how I think about writing vastly different cultures, not that I'm equating the real life cultures on Earth with alien cultures, which is the thing that I used to be very careful about stressing that because Star Trek and Star Wars and other things have done that in real life where they're like, these aliens are Jews, these aliens are Chinese people or whatever.
Annalee: [00:15:31] God, yes.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:33] It's really not okay, don't do that.
Annalee: [00:15:36] No space Jews.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:38] But at the same time, I feel like that experience of kind of getting to kind of think, like construct sentences in a different way. And think about the way you express yourself in a different way is actually helpful, just for kind of knocking yourself out of this one kind of rote way of processing things. And so, you know, I have tried to write non-human consciousness is in English. And sometimes the way that I will do it is by just having them communicate in a way that's nonverbal, like The City in the Middle of the Night, or having them communicate in a way that's kind of very orthogonal.
[00:16:08] But in the third, this is a minor spoiler. In the third book of my young adult series, we actually spent a lot of time kind of getting to understand more about an alien language. And I've been working with a linguist from MIT on this, because I want this to be a language that really doesn't have nouns and verbs as we understand them. And so it's like, on Earth, we have several languages that are like subject object verb, we have several languages that are subject, verb object, there are a bunch of different ways to construct a sentence, depending on which language you're speaking and different word orders that make sense. So, what if this language is one where it's like a bunch of nouns and random qualifiers, and then you get the verb at the end, and you have to kind of figure out how it all fits together? Because it's not they don't think about action, the way that we think about action.
[00:16:57] And that was actually a really fun thought experiment that I'm excited to kind of dive back into. So, I feel like language is important. I feel like there's a reason why so many people have been creating these like conlangs or constructed languages for other cultures that are not Earth cultures, like in The Expanse, like when they made Klingon into a language. Which, somebody I talked to recently was learning Klingon in Duolingo. And apparently, it is a very hard language to learn. It is very, the sentence structure is not… It's actually weirdly passive. Like you’d think Klingon would be very active. But actually no.
Annalee: [00:17:30] Wow. Marc Okrand, who created Klingon we can blame him.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:37] I know. I mean, it's very interesting. So, I do think it's interesting to think about languages. I also think it's good to do whatever you can to kind of jar yourself out of our normal thought patterns. And that can be language, it can also be a bunch of other things, thinking about how having different senses might impact your consciousness or thinking about, like, how evolving in a very different environment.
[00:17:59] One book about artificial intelligence that I love is Virtual Girl by Amy Thompson, because there she starts out with AIs that are just confined to a machine and their only sensory input is maybe like a webcam, or a camera and speaker, like an audio processing thing. And then this AI becomes embodied and suddenly has this very different relationship to the world, with more sensory input and more kind of ways to interact. And I think I think about that a lot, because I think that's such a good way to think about like, how do your senses and your ability to touch the world? How do they shape your consciousness?
Annalee: [00:18:35] Yeah, there's a great little bit of world building in Suzette Haden Elgin’s series that starts with Native Tongue, which is all about humans who translate alien languages for other humans. And one of the things that the translators always do is they never use sensory words that are connected to specific organs. So instead of saying, oh, I'm feeling good. Do you see why? They would say do you perceive why? And they replace all the words for like, see and hear with perceive. And it's just so effective. Like that one little thing reminds you that they're never dealing with people who have the same sensory organs. So they simply speak in these generalities about perception.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:24] That is so interesting. I love that. Okay, so we have a question for Marsh, who asks, What's the fresh new non-Earth habitation that corporeal beings will be scrambling to live on in 1,000, 5,000? And then 10,000 years? And you know, I mean, I hope that humans in some way or post humans of some form will be around in 10,000 years to find out. I really hope so. I don't know. Annalee, what's our non-Earth habitation?
Annalee: [00:19:55] Yeah, I mean, so the time spans that we’re given are 1,000, 5,000, 10,000. So, I would say in 1,000, I really hope that we're just still able to live on Earth. And I would suspect that our non-Earth habitation is going to be pretty limited. But by 10,000 years, I think that, well, as Iain M. Banks used to say, a planet is a terrible waste of matter. And it's just, you're only using part of it, you're just using the surface of the matter, like, what are you doing? So, I think that if we have the ability to convert planetary matter into giant space structures, that that's going to be the hot new thing, like living inside a giant hollow wheel.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:46] Perhaps literally hot, depending?
Annalee: [00:20:50] Yeah, you know, Dyson spheres where you're living on the inside of a sphere that's surrounding a sun. I love halo worlds, those are like a great idea, great use of matter, and all kinds of stuff we can't even imagine. So I think artificial structures, and maybe some of them will be made out of hollowed out asteroids, for example, where you just grab a whole bunch of asteroids and smoosh them together and fill them with tunnels and like add all kinds of crap to the outside.
[00:21:23] I just I love imagining future habitations that are built about as haphazardly as cities are built on earth. Because when we imagine a halo world, usually it's like, it's a clean, beautiful halo surrounding a planet. And it looks perfect. And it's not like there's weird junk hanging off the side and somebody built a favela that's like attached to the under part because they couldn't afford to buy a house on the inner part of the ring. And I think that's going to be how it is, I think we're going to have space structures that have been modified and changed and it'll be much like a city on earth.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:00] Built up over hundreds of years. Yeah, that makes sense. I'm going to be a rebel and say that I think it's conceivable that 1,000 years from now, I don't think it's gonna happen any sooner. But I think 1,000 years from now, our descendants could be colonizing Mars, I think that there might be—
Annalee: [00:22:17] Oh, sure.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:17] Some kind of terraforming project. And I don't know if most humans will be living on Mars, I think it might just be an outpost, I think that it might take us 1,000 years to figure out how to make a sustainable colony on Mars, because of the many challenges of that. But I think 1,000 years from now, that's entirely possible. I think 5,000 years from now, it's I'm just going to be bold and say that by 5,000 years from now, it's possible that we've figured out some kind of rudimentary engine or you know, railgun kind of situation, that's don't send me hate mail about saying railgun because I’m just blathering but—
Annalee: [00:22:58] I like the railgun type of situation like, it could be anything, man.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:00] Some method of propulsion.
Annalee: [00:23:01] Some kind of throwy thing. A throwy thing.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:04] Efficient, and that, basically, we will figure out some way to get people to Proxima Centauri or some other nearby star systems, maybe some of the other star systems that we've been studying that have tidally locked planets around them. But basically, that 5,000 years from now, we may have some means to like send people to neighboring star systems, or nearby star systems that take like 20 or 30 years subjective time. And people just either go in suspended animation, or just live on ships for 20 or 30 years, and then arrive and they’re never going to come home again but they're going to colonize or settle on these other planets.
[00:23:42] And I think 10,000 years from now, it's possible that we will be, you know, I mean, I actually agree with Annalee, that 10,000 years from now, we might be living on artificial habitats, more than anything else, because, you know, planets are kind of a problem. And I think that one thing that we're going to discover firsthand is that exoplanets are always going to be really tough, because there's never going to be an exoplanet that is suitable for human habitation without just a ton of work. And, there's going to be weird diseases and weird just slightly wrong levels of radiation. Their gravity is not going to be quite right. It's going to just—there’s gonna be stuff that we have to grapple with on any exoplanets.
Annalee: [00:24:24] Yeah, we either have to modify ourselves or modify the planet really dramatically in order for that to work out.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:31] Right.
Annalee: [00:24:33] For sure, yeah. I'm really fond of the idea of wormhole travel for kind of vaguing out how we're gonna get to one of these other places. And I think it would be hilarious because we always think of the idea that like, first we're going to colonize Mars, then we're going to colonize something close. But what if we find a wormhole and the wormhole takes us to like a galaxy that's on the other side of the universe? And so our first colonization efforts are literally the farthest away you could possibly get from Earth. because that's where the wormhole goes. So, whoops. So, I kind of like that idea. Anyway, go ahead.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:05] Yeah, I mean, I would love it if we found or figured out how to make a wormhole. Maybe we'll eventually… we’ll be studying black holes and white holes. And we'll just figure out some way to create an artificial wormhole that is like stable and safe for transit. And we'll just create one and figure out where it leads and just start going there. And I could see that for sure.
Annalee: [00:25:25] So, our next question is from Alicia Goranson, who asks, what do we find comfortable in our representations of fictional aliens? What do we like to see in the sorts of critters who we either run into in the stars or who seek us out? What strengths and flaws do we like to see represented?
[00:25:44] Okay, so I love the thing about comfortable. So, what do you think are comfortable in our representations of aliens? Which is different from what is exciting? Or what is new or different, or weird, or alien? Like what's comfy when we talk about aliens?
Charlie Jane: [00:26:00] Yeah, I think that that's an interesting way of putting it because that is kind of, a lot of science fiction is about, you know, encounters with aliens that are kind of either just non-challenging, or just kind of like, reassuring in some way, or just cozy. I think, a lot of the time for human-centric people, which is pretty much all of us, I think we're all human-centric, whether we want to be or not.
Annalee: [00:26:24] Speak for yourself, human.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:26] Anyway, for human-centric people, we want aliens who make us feel good about being human, first of all, so that's why you see so many stories where a human being shows up somewhere, and everybody's just like, oh, humans are so great, or whatever. I feel like there's a lot of science fiction where like, the one human is just like the only person who has ingenuity, or who takes initiative, or I feel like we're told over and over again, in a lot of different sci fi things that humans are just uniquely, either clever, or individualistic, or we’re special in some way.
[00:27:01] I think also, we want aliens who kind of reflect us back at ourselves, which is why so many science fiction things have aliens who are basically human beings with slight differences, who represent some aspect of human nature or who represent, you know, some facet of ourselves. And I think that it's just very, it's comforting and reassuring to have aliens who kind of don't challenge our own ideas about ourselves too much.
Annalee: [00:27:29] Yeah. Wow, that is such a great answer. I think you're absolutely right. I was going to add to that, not very much, but just I think one of the comforting ways that we represent aliens is also as cute and as some somehow similar to cats or dogs or other fluffy, like, fluffy creatures who are not human, but who already share our environments with us. And so that's why for example, you know, Wookiees are a great alien, because a) they don't actually talk, which is one of the things that I think people find very reassuring about cats, because you know, if they could talk, they would be talking shit about us. And also, Wookiees are cute. They’re fluffy. Yeah, they're supposed to be big and scary, but they're always just kind of, they're just like big, fluffy teddy bears.
[00:28:20] So, I think that's something that we find very comfortable is when aliens reassure us that we're the bosses, they're our pets, or they are versions of ourselves. And aliens the ones we see in Arrival, for example, which is based on the incredible short story by Ted Chiang. Those aliens are scary, not because they actually do anything that's inherently terrifying. But just because they're so different. They're not reassuring.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:51] Yeah, I think we like to have a face, we like to have creatures who kind of think in a way that makes sense to us, that is not too different. I feel like, the more alien an alien becomes, the less comfortable and the less kind of reassuring it is.
[00:29:09] And by the way, I just want to say Alicia wrote the novel Supervillainz with a Z on the end, which is a trans superhero novel that I highly recommend.
Annalee: [00:29:19] So, I've thought about this a lot. And there's a couple of really pragmatic reasons why D&D is becoming more popular. One of which, as many other people have pointed out, is the 5th edition rules for D&D make it a lot more accessible as a game. It is now much more story-telling oriented and a lot less about kind of rules lawyering. 4th edition had a lot of just really intense things that you had to keep track of in terms of how you moved and what you could carry and all kinds of other stuff. So, I think that's part of it.
[00:29:57] Also, as expansions have come along for 5th edition, the game has become a lot more diverse. There's a lot more stories that allow you to talk about different groups that that are in the game. You're allowed to have identities that don't fit stereotypes because it used to be, you know, Dark Elves are just evil. And it's true. There's still a lot of evil dark elves, but—
Charlie Jane: [00:30:23] It's not, quite so monolithic anymore.
Annalee: [00:30:27] Yeah. And a lot of the stuff that that was very kind of racial stereotyping and gender stereotyping is slowly leaving the game. And so I think that a lot of women and POC feel more comfortable playing because it's just like less, sort of designed for white men in 1970.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:46] Right.
Annalee: [00:30:48] And the other thing, though, is that, I think that, especially during the pandemic, a lot of people turned to Dungeons & Dragons online, to stay connected with their friends. I know, that's something that that we did in my playgroup. And you can use things like Roll20, you can use D&D Beyond. There's lots of other apps that make it really fun to play online. So I think the rise of apps that let you play are really facilitating games. I'm playing D&D now with a group where one person is in Iceland, one person is in Japan, several of us are in San Francisco.
[00:31:35] I think all of those things together are practically making it more popular. But I also think that we're in a cultural moment where people's identities are really under siege right now. We talked about this a little earlier in the episode about how people are just feeling more precarious in terms of how the government is dealing with their identities, whether it's because they're Black, and they can't get access to places to vote, or because they're queer, and they're worried they're going to be legislated out of existence. D&D and similar kinds of role-playing games are safe spaces where we can take on new identities, and embody them and inhabit them and have agency within them in a way that's very freeing.
[00:32:25] My nephew, before he transitioned, he was using the name of his D&D character as his new identity. He’s like, well, I'm going to become the name of my character, then I'm going to take on a new gender. And I feel like, for him, and I've talked to him about this, that was for him kind of a transitional place to try on a male identity. And it worked. He liked it. And he was like, okay, now I'm going to do this in real life. And luckily, he lives in a place where he can do that here in California. So that's my big blob of thoughts about that.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:03] Yeah, I just wanted a second to think about 5th edition. I was recently at the wonderful Pandemonium Books, which is a gaming store and bookstore in Cambridge, Mass.
Annalee: [00:33:11] Yes. Love that store.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:15] And we were talking a lot about how younger people have just been flocking to D&D. They have tables set up there to play games, and they're just seeing a swarm of wonderful young people playing D&D. The people at the shop were like, it’s like when we were young. D&D is fun again, it's accessible again. And I feel like there's probably a little bit. Like, there was harassment in D&D, for sure. I know that that happens. But I think that if you're playing with your friends, if it's like in a safe environment, you know, there's maybe less harassment than playing the game on the internet, where people can just randomly come and be jerks to you.
[00:33:49] And I feel like it's a good game to play with your friends because it is so, like, you have a party, you're literally forming a party. The other day, I was talking to someone who's playing D&D with his six year old kid, and the six year old kid is like, they're making campaigns together. And it's a thing that you can get into when you're really young. It’s a way to kind of tell a story with your friends. It doesn't have to be something that’s like, well, you have to understand all these complicated rules and the 20 different taxonomies of whatevers.
[00:34:26] So, I feel like it's actually one of the things that gives me hope for the future of nerddom is that we're rediscovering this very analog game, even with some digital enhancements.
[00:34:35] So, we're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back, we're gonna answer some slightly less serious questions.
[00:34:42] [OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]
MB ad voice: [00:34:49] Hi, folks, let me see if I can sum up Midnight Burger in about 25 seconds.
Various: [00:34:55] Jesus Christ!
It'll be fine.
So this is how it ends, eaten by wolves in space.
Pardon me, Gloria, might my husband and I have a word?
The radio is talking to me.
Really big monsters.
Zero irony.
We're surrounded by cavemen.
What the hell is that?
Because you're having a cigarette in 415 million BC.
Where are we?
Space.
Can narrow that down?
The bad part.
Eva?
MB ad voice: [00:35:22] Yeah, that didn't work at all. At the nexus of all things, there is a diner. Look for Midnight Burger on your favorite podcasting app, or just go to weopenatsix.com.
[00:35:33] [OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]
Annalee: [00:35:38] So, this is our lightning round questions. And Sheeri asks, what is the pizza of the future? Does it ever homogenize or are there wars fought over deep dish versus thin crust? Pineapple versus none? What's your answer, Charlie Jane?
Charlie Jane: [00:35:52] Okay, you know, that Star Trek episode where there are like pizzas that fly around and they land on you and they if they land on you, they turn you into a rage a zombie and you start killing everybody and Spock has to like fly into the sun to get rid of the pizza on him? You notice nobody ever eats pizza on Star Trek and I think it's because pizzas in the future have evolved to become flying rage creatures that attack you. I don't know. What do you think Annalee?
Annalee: [00:36:15] I think that in the future, we're gonna still be fighting over the pie versus cake question, which I think really—
Charlie Jane: [00:36:22] For sure.
Annalee: [00:36:22] That cuts to the heart of humanity, I feel like. Pizza, you know, it can become an evil force. But cake versus pie like that's, just eternal? Are you a spongy, soft kind of entity? Or are you a crusty, filled entity? I mean, I think that's the future. Is this ancient debate will never be resolved.
Charlie Jane: [00:36:51] I mean, there'll be galactic wars over cake versus pie. I also think that there'll be giant machines in space that just turned all organic matter into pizza. So, there'll be like star systems that are just made out of pizza, and people can fly in there and scoop some up and then fly away again.
Annalee: [00:37:05] That's gonna be where... That's where all of virtual reality is. We're going to upload our brains to these VR pizzas that are in space. I think that’s obviously where we’re headed.
Charlie Jane: [00:37:14] For sure, everything will become pizza.
[00:37:17] So a listener asks, “What currently inaccessible place would you like to be able to travel to and safely explore?” And I'm just going to I mean, my serious answer, unfortunately, is Brazil. I've been really wanting to go to Brazil. And I don't currently feel like I can go there. I don't know, Mars, or I don't know. Possibly one of these, like tidally locked planets that we've discovered Annalee, what's your answer?
Annalee: [00:37:38] My more serious answer would be Damascus. I've always wanted to go and right now is not a great time. I would also love to travel back in time to visit Samarkand during the Tang Dynasty, in the 600s in the Western calendar. So that would be really great. That was an awesome city at that time.
[00:37:59] More fancifully. I, like every science fiction nerd, I'd really like to visit Europa and see like, What the heck is going on in those oceans under the frozen ice? And I want to go to Titan because again, what the heck is going on under all that cloud cover? Like, is there a whole civilization of pizzas? I don't know. I want to know.
Charlie Jane: [00:38:20] Really good question there. Yep.
Annalee: [00:38:23] Okay, next question. A valiant listener asks, is there anything either of you can't write without, such as pizza?
Charlie Jane: [00:38:33] I can write without pizza. I prefer not too, but I can. Things that I need to write. I mean, you know, that I have would find it difficult to write without are coffee. Like, I really need coffee. And music. I'm one of those weird people who likes to listen to music as I write and it helps me to get in the zone better. How about you, Annalee?
Annalee: [00:38:54] Also coffee. The other thing I really need is the ability to go to cafes and sit with my laptop to write. I find that being able to be in a different location really helps. I can write things just sitting in my study. I just wrote an entire novel during the pandemic where pretty much the entire thing was me sitting in a chair at my desk looking out the same window and fuck was that a pain. It was really hard because every other book I've written I've been different cafes all the time. I kind of rotate out where I'm sitting. So, I'm really looking forward to being able to go back into cafes one day. Certainly now in the summer I can go out to some cafes and that's really good.
Charlie Jane: [00:39:41] Oh my God, it’s just a knife through my heart because I really miss writing in cafes. I would also just say like taking a long walk is a thing that really helps me to write it would be hard if I if I couldn't do that at all.
Annalee: [00:39:51] Same.
Charlie Jane: [00:39:54] Okay, next question. And this is specifically one for you, Annalee.
Annalee: [00:39:57] Okay.
Charlie Jane: [00:39:59] Jaqcat. asks, is there a story behind the relatively high percentage of Canadian content aka CanCon in Annalee’s fiction. Annalee?
Annalee: [00:40:08] CanCon. Yeah, guilty as charged. I mean, my forthcoming novel, The Teraformers is set on a planet called Saski, which is anyone who knows anything about Saskatchewan will immediately recognize that it's… part of the planet is definitely Saskatchewan. Not the whole planet. But there is a very simple answer, which is that I have a lot of family in Canada, so I visit Canada as much as I can. The family used to be based in Saskatchewan and now some of them have defected to Quebec. So now I'm relearning French.
[00:40:49] So, you know, look out for French separatist content coming your way.
Charlie Jane: [00:40:56] Ah oui, ah oui. Yeah, I just ate some really good poutine recently, it was so good. I really love poutine.
Annalee: [00:41:01] Nice job. Yeah, squeaky cheese is the best. So, in fact, I'm going to visit the family in Quebec in a couple of months and I'm really excited. I haven’t been back to Canada in a couple of years.
Charlie Jane: [00:41:12] Aw. Eat some weird bagels for me, man.
Annalee: [00:41:14] Oh, my God. Yes, we're going to spend a couple days in Montreal and there is going to be bagel activity, believe me.
Charlie Jane: [00:41:22] Bagel activity.
Annalee: [00:41:23] Bagel activity will occur. All right, I'm using the passive Klingon voice. Bagels will be provided.
[00:41:34] Okay, next question. Eric H. asks, I would like to know how you first got published?
Charlie Jane: [00:41:41] Yeah, that's such an interesting question because for me, personally, and I think this probably goes for both of us. There's how we got published in journalism. And then there's how we got published as creative, quote, unquote, “writers.” And those are two different, very different questions, at least for me. I mean, when I was in high school, I was doing a weird collaborative storytelling thing on message boards with my friends that only five people were reading. And I was also helping to edit a humor magazine where we would put like weird little stories in there.
[00:42:11] But my first publications that were read by more than a handful of people that read possibly by the public, were all journalism. And I kind of broke into journalism first and spent a lot of time being a journalist as my day job and then writing fiction on the side.
[00:42:30] My first fiction publications were in very small markets, I actually, tragically, had a short story accepted by like a very fancy glossy magazine, which immediately went out of business before they could publish my story. But for the most part, I was just kind of scratching at the door publishing in little tiny kind of zines and anthologies that were like really small press anthologies, and just like, little tiny venues.
[00:42:55] My first major fiction publication was probably in a literary magazine called Zyzzyva. But it took it took years for me to get anywhere as a fiction writer. How about you, Annalee?
Annalee: [00:43:05] Yeah, it's complicated for me too, because, like you, I've had a varied career when it comes to publishing. My earliest writing that got published was actually poetry. I was a poet when I was in high school and undergrad, and pretty devoted to my craft, and took a lot of writing classes in poetry. And so my first publication that other people saw it was actually a poem in the college literary magazine where I was studying. This was when I was at Saddleback Community College in Irvine. Actually, it was Irvine Valley College, which was part of the Saddleback Community College system. So that was really nice and very exciting.
[00:43:49] And then I started seself-publishing when I was in graduate school, a zine called Bad Subjects with a group of friends. And that was angry, academic-flavored cultural criticism from a leftist perspective. Many of us were Marxists, many of us are still Marxists, and continue to write angry screeds. And that was not writing that I got paid for but it got seen by a lot of people because it was an online zine, and actually one of the very first online zines. So I can remember in the ‘90s, when we were publishing it, an article coming out in the San Francisco Chronicle saying “Did you know there's magazines on the internet? Here's one.” And it was like, yes, it's all about a Marxist analysis of Star Trek.
Charlie Jane: [00:44:41] Did you know?
Annalee: [00:44:43] Did you know there's magazines on the internet? But my first professional sales were two indie newspapers. I had a column that ran in the Silicon Valley Metro and the San Francisco Bay Guardian, which was called “Textploitation.” And that was probably my first really big commercial enterprise when it came to journalism. And of course, it was a column, so it was it was opinion, correct opinions.
[00:45:16] And my first fiction publication came a long time later. I mean, I really was a journalist and that was what I wanted to do. It was not a day job for me, it was a job of my heart and soul and mind. And I got really interested in writing fiction, basically in like, 2014. Which for me was, you know, was relatively later in my writing career, in my professional writing career, because live for a long time.
Charlie Jane: [00:45:48] But I remember you were working on Autonomous back in 2009, though.
Annalee: [00:45:51] I started writing Autonomous in 2009. But I didn't actually revise it until much, much later. That was not… That was a thing I was doing, to teach myself how to write basically. And the first version of Autonomous was nothing like the version that came out in 2017. In 2015, I started really seriously revising it. But before that, I was trying to hone my craft by publishing short stories. And my first science fiction short story came out in a an online magazine called Flurb, which was edited by Rudy Rucker who very kindly took my weird story called “The Gravity Fetishist” about someone who had a sexual fetish for gravity.
Charlie Jane: [00:46:43] I love that story.
Annalee: [00:46:44] And their adventures. You can probably still find it online if you search for “The Gravity Fetishist.” I definitely feel like I've leveled up in my storytelling, but I still stand by gravity fetish as a good invention. So, yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:46:59] It was really cool.
Annalee: [00:47:00] Yeah, but this is just to say, it took me a really, really long time as well. With all of my writing, I started out by publishing stuff for free and spent a long time building up my skills before anyone could be tricked into giving me money.
Charlie Jane: [00:47:20] So, our final question, Andreas asks, “What's your process for making an episode? What work goes into research, recording and postproduction?” And you know, first of all, thanks for thinking about all the work that goes into this show. We really appreciate that. So, Annalee, why don't you start?
Annalee: [00:47:35] So, actually, a lot goes into it when we're on the ball and not procrastinating too much. We talk about episode topics, usually months in advance, but always weeks in advance, so we know what our topics are going to be. And then we spend some time just sort of spit balling with each other about like, where do we want this episode to go? What kind of conclusions do we want to reach? What kind of stories do we want to talk about? And we tend to divide and conquer.
[00:48:10] So usually, I'll take point on one episode, and then CharlieJane will take point on the next one. And so that's why you'll hear us trading off reading the intro and kind of asking each other questions. And then once we've decided on that stuff, that's when we start researching.
Charlie Jane: [00:48:26] And I just want to add that when we're on the ball, when we're not traveling all over the country, which has been unfortunately the case recently, we try to have a weekly meeting where we kind of just strategize about the podcast. And actually, we haven't been doing that recently. I'm hoping we can get back to it. But you know, the more we kind of chew over the episodes, the more kind of when we get to the research phase, we know what we're looking for, which is kind of half the battle, I want to say.
Annalee: [00:48:51] Yeah, and the work that happens when we're recording and after we're recording is entirely due to our amazing producer Veronica. So, Veronica, if you want to like come on the mic and talk about your process, that'd be awesome.
Veronica: [00:49:05] Oh, God.
Annalee: [00:49:08] Welcome to the pod, Veronica.
Charlie Jane: [00:49:11] Yeah, special guest.
Veronica: [00:49:13] Apologies for the Zoom-quality recording because I don't have a microphone setup. Which is very, against my morals as an engineer, I would say.
[00:49:28] Well, we sit on Zoom and record together. And then I take the files and I edit them together and mix them so that they sound good. And I add in clips that are suggested from Annalee and Charlie Jane. And yeah, do any sort of editing to make everybody sound really good.
Annalee: [00:49:52] Yeah, the reason why you don't hear me saying, “Um” every other word is basically because of Veronica.
Charlie Jane: [00:50:01] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:50:03] I'm really into saying, “Um.”
Charlie Jane: [00:50:05] But I do want to go back to the thing about research because I think that's important, is we’ve been gravitating over the years towards making this podcast one that’s a little bit more researched or reported versus like what we used to do. And a lot of that is just kind of trying to find the through line of something and trying to find… Like, the previous episode about work, Annalee did a ton of research about like the history of factories and labor in Lowell, Massachusetts, and everything, and how that ties in with science fiction. Just trying to make these kinds of connections.
[00:50:35] Like I'm really loving having episodes where we can kind of connect the dots in different ways. Like, I did that episode about cars, where I sort of thought about, like, how were cars developing? And how did science fiction talk about them? And it's just, it actually can be really fun to kind of go down the rabbit hole about that, I feel like.
Annalee: [00:50:53] Yeah, I find research to be the most fun part of any project that I'm working on, honestly, because that's when you're, you haven't committed to putting anything on paper yet. And so you can just kind of go wild and you can just allow yourself to watch like weird crap on YouTube and read strange documents from the 18th century and it's like part of your job so you get to just do it instead of like using it as a procrastination tool, which is also something that I do where it's just like, oh, I don't want to write why don't I research more?
[00:51:28] So I, because I am a science journalist first and foremost, I definitely like being able to bring in actual facts like historical facts, scientific facts, and kind of use that to contextualize the stories that we're talking about. Because I don't believe that fiction exists in a vacuum. I think fiction is always in dialogue with what's actually happening to people in their real lives. So, to me, that's one of the really important parts of the research, is figuring out how to contextualize the stories we're talking about. Whether contextualizing them in terms of what kinds of technological innovations were happening at the time, or social changes, or just getting to write about how people in ancient Mesopotamia were paid in beer.
Charlie Jane: [00:52:18] Beer! Okay,, so that's a good place to stop. If you are one of our patrons, you can hear us answer another listener question on Patreon. Thanks, everybody, for listening to this podcast. You can find us wherever podcasts are found. If you find us on Apple podcasts or someplace else where they have a way to leave reviews. Please leave us a review. It helps a lot. We are on Twitter at @OOACpod and most of all, we're on Patreon at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect.
[00:52:49] Thank you so much to our heroic producer Veronica Simonetti, thanks to Chris Palmer for the amazing music, and you know, we'll be back in a couple of weeks with another episode. And if you are a patron, we'll be seeing you on Discord. Thanks a lot. Bye.
Annalee: [00:53:04] Bye!
[00:53:03] [OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]