Making Better Episode 16, Liz Lutgendorff
(music) Welcome to the Making Better Podcast, interviewing some of the world’s finest thinkers about a more optimistic future. Now, here are your hosts, Chris Hofstader and Dr. Francis DiDonato.
Chris: This is Episode 16 of Making Better Podcast, featuring science fiction enthusiast and podcast host Liz Lutgendorff, with special guest co-host Sina Barahm.
Francis: And this should be a welcome change, because honestly, the science that we have right now, I wish was fiction.
Chris: I agree, it does seem like a rather science-fiction-type world out there if you look at the news or anything else.
Francis: Unless you’re looking at Trump, and then, I wouldn’t even tarnish the word “science” in any context of that man, fiction or otherwise.
Chris: And with that, let’s get on with the episode…
Chris: Liz Luckendorf, welcome to to Making Better!
Liz: Thank you for having me.
Chris: Liz, you do a podcast called “Science Fiction Double Feature,” which is about both Science Fiction and science. Can you tell us a little about it?
Liz: Way back in the day, my partner and I did a podcast called “The Pod Delusion,” and a few years ago, I just kind of missed doing podcasts. And at the time, I was reading a lot of science fiction, I’m like, well, let’s do kind of a, Pod Delusion-esque thing where I interview an author about their novel, and how interesting and fun it is, usually. And then a second person, about some aspect of that novel in real life. So if the novel focused on artificial intelligence, I’d talk to someone about artificial intelligence; if it talked about magic, I’d interview someone about the history of magic. So, it’s kind of a double feature because you have the author and the second guest.
Chris: Who are some of the authors you’ve had on?
Liz: Some of my favorites have been Anne Leckie, who wrote the Ancillary Justice books, and she’s one of my favorite sci-fi authors so I was thrilled to have her; but also Malka Older, who wrote the series called the Centenal Cycle, which is kind of futuristic democracy, I think is the way to put it, rather than actual science fiction. Carrie Patel, who did, about kind of a city underground; Christiana Ellis is the last one. I really quite enjoyed the novel, it started out as a serialized fiction, so she’d post every day, but the novel itself has been like all of those together, and it mashes both science fiction and fantasy. So one of the core elements is nanobots that get amplified by a magical amulet, which I quite enjoyed.
Chris; Which authors would you love to have on, whom you haven’t had yet?
Liz: Oh, man, all of them! So, I’m about to start a book called Gideon the Ninth, by Tasmin Muir. Everyone has mentioned this novel this year, I just have constant pre-reviews in my Twitter feed, and so I would love to have her. So I’m going to read it next, but then hopefully I’ll like it and maybe she’ll do an interview.
Chris: Terrific. Sina, why don’t you talk about some of the ones you like, and maybe we can spur a conversation.
Sina: I’m always fascinated by the differences in predictions that are true about, for example, books that came out during the 50s and 60s, you know, we were all gonna have pocket nukes and kind of the old golden-age of all of that and the predictions around that, but then when you look at the computer predictions, I mean, it’s so different, because it was pre-transistor. And so, I’ve always been fascinated by this, this sort of significant segmentation, if you will, between some of the fiction from the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, and then 80s and 90s, and then of course another shift with respect to the web and the internet, right? So, post-Gibson and moving into this idea that everything is going to be networked and really rapid access. For example, I’ve been going through Next Generation episode by episode recently, just something fun with dinner kind of thing, and it always bugs me so much that Data goes “Stand by, Captain, accessing…” and it’s just like, you’re retrieving like 2 kilobytes of information—we can do that on our watches now, and yet that was considered super-advanced because he was “accessing” you know, all of this knowledge. But yet, we have Wikipedia at our fingertips now, so I’m really just fascinated by that dichotomy.
Chris: I recently re-read Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, and the fact that the computers were all these giant vacuum-tube farms jumped out at me, because I think the transistor was invented two years after he published that book.
Sina: I don’t know why that reminded me of something, but that reminded me of a question for Liz: which is, Liz, you read the Diamond Age, Stevenson’s novel?
Liz: Yes.
Sina: I have a question for you. So this is something that always bugged me—I enjoyed the book, I like it, he gets better at writing endings as his career proceeds, which is lovely to see, but this is the question that I have: the thing that always irks me about that is, the plot revolves around this idea, so I understand why it’s there, but all of this advanced technology exists yet they haven’t figured out text-to-speech, something that us are very familiar with and use on a daily basis to access technology. And that’s always just irked me about that novel. I was wondering if there’s things like that about novels that, even though you might love them, sort of jump out at you as, oh my goodness, this one plot point…
Liz: I’m struggling to think of some now, ‘cause like I’ve mostly—my current reading habits are basically, I would like to read people who are currently writing, so they will keep writing me more novels—I’m very selfish, kind of like I will give you money rather than your estate money, because your estate is probably not going to give me any more books! Oh, there was a book I read not that long ago, and I can’t remember the title but I absolutely loved it, and it was interesting, because all of the communication in it was like old Usenet groups, and the aliens have hive minds, and they’re like these kind of weird dog-things and I absolutely loved that book, but the way that they kind of news-worked, with all these usenet groups, and it was just like such an artifact of the time. And that didn’t annoy me as much, ‘cause maybe kind of cross-stellar communication network. The thing that got me, now that I think about—again, I book I love—is Connie Willis’s The Doomsday Book, and a central plot point of that is that the Dean of the History Department, because they have time travel, and the History Department at Oxford gets to regulate time travel, which again, I just love, I don’t care if it’s a terrible kind of weird conceit—but they can’t get in touch with him, because they don’t have mobile phones. This is like, 20 years in the future from now, and so that kind of thing, where there’s this key point of technology missing, and the key plot point of something happening or not happening is because the Dean is fishing in Scotland and there’s no possible way to contact him—like Scotland is so far and remote that that wouldn’t be possible.
Chris: That’s always been a problem I’ve had with The Walking Dead—I was like, you have guns, you have all this other stuff, how come you don’t have walkie-talkies? They don’t exist anywhere in The Walking Dead.
Liz: That’s very true. I only read the comics of The Walking Dead, though, I didn’t actually watch the television series because the comics were brutal enough!
Chris: I watched the first couple of seasons of the TV show, and that was it. I sort of lost interest. Francis, you’re a big Star Trek fan, do you want to speak to some of your life as a Star Trek guy?
Francis: I guess I grew up with Star Trek, and it informed me with all its moral lessons. It kind of replaced, in some ways, religion for me and gave me myths that I could sort of live by; but what I liked about it, too, is that it had that dichotomy between, say, logic and emotion and that kind of thing, and I guess they carried that on with Data, to some extent. You know, I always thought that was a really fun way to, ..a lens to view the world through. I guess one of the things that was interesting to me, too, was we had M.E.Thomas who wrote the book about being a sociopath, and if you don’t have any emotions, what governs your morality? And I guess with the Spock example, somehow he was like an extremely moral person, but it was completely not based on emotion. I thought was interesting…
Sina: ..or religion.
Francis: Yeah. Although I guess they did have their religion, they did that meditation and that sort of thing. But that’s pretty advanced stuff for our society back then, because you really couldn’t question religion too much publicly back then and get away with it, but Star Trek found a way to address a lot of these big questions.
Liz: What I quite like about Star Trek, which I feel lis missing a lot in some of the sci-fi now, or speculative fiction, is like the hopefulness of the future—there is a current trend in a lot of the books that are recommended to me, of just absolute kind of dire, post-apocalyptic wastelands. I don’t besmirch the kind of genre that they go into, I’m just not a particular fan of it, and I find it just kind of wearying on a kind of, just, consumptive level. Like, I like fiction and science fiction because it’s interesting and hopeful and has nice ideas, and offers like this vision of the future that you can kind of aspire to; and the post-apocalyptic stuff is just like, well, everything’s gonna be horrible, and the level of horribleness varies between post-apocalyptic endings. And some are really good, I do like some post-apocalyptic stuff; there is a series, the book is called Archivist Wasp* and it’s like a post-apocalyptic future, but there’s still hope in that future. And so when you think back to Star Trek, it’s just like, oh, we’ve got this amazing Federation, we’ve got impetuses to explore, and sure there’s wars and stuff, but ultimately it’s got this really great core message, which I feel is lost sometimes in the doom-laden post-apocalyptic stuff.
Sina: I am so glad you said that, because I feel very similarly about, like, dystopic sci-fi. There’s nothing wrong with being dystopic or examining and exploring, you know, post-apocalyptic, but I find some of it to just be—you know, it’s very predictable, it’s like, well, yes, our society is definitely hinged on a few key things like constant power and access to resources and such being there, and when those go away obviously you could explore some things within the human condition. But I don’t find it as difficult, right? And again, I’m not trying to besmirch that genre, like you said, but I think trying to solve the problems in, for example, post-scarcity, like Ian M Banks with the culture series, is just so much more, I feel so much more joy when I read those books, and yet I feel like they’re still struggling with really complex situations, but able to just explore it in a way that feels better to me.
Liz: Yeah. I have this tagline at the end of my podcast, which is like, remember the science fiction we read today is basically the science fiction of the future. And I think it’s that sort of thing, if all we read is kind of post-apocalyptic stuff, or like everything’s terrible—as much as I like William Gibson, you know, these very highly stratified societies based on wealth and access—oh my god! like that’s so disheartening, whereas if you read something like Becky Chambers, which is hopeful and is like, expansive and like they solve problems and complex ethical issues, but they’re done in a way that you’re left with, like, “we can work our way through these problems” rather than “all is lost.”
Chris: A few years ago I read a book called Station Eleven, it was by a Canadian woman, I can’t recall her name—
Liz: Emily St. John Mandel. Really good, I know. It’s really good as well.
Chris: I thought that was, you know, the Walking Dead without the walking dead. It was just such a great book, with this post-apocalyptic but very, very hopeful message, that you know, good humans will continue to exist and continue doing good things.
Liz: And that’s the kind of post-apocalyptic stuff I can deal with, like even if the world ends there’s still hope, whereas some of it just goes down these, like, really dark—like there is no hope, kind of way out of it, and that’s the stuff that’s always recommended to me. And I’m so—I can’t, I can’t face it!
Chris: The only problem I had with Station Eleven is she hasn’t written a sequel.
Liz: It’s true.
Chris: It ends with them, like, seeing other people off in the distance, so like it ends right where the next book should start, but there’s no next book.
Liz: When I looked for that book, ‘cause I was in Toronto, I think, we were in Canada—basically I always look for, what’s the top ten by women, and I found that. And it was in the “literary” section in Chapters, and I was so annoyed that it wasn’t in the sci-fe section. Maybe that’s why, maybe it just didn’t find an audience ‘cause it was in the wrong section.
Sina: Speaking of female authors, who are, would you say, your top four or five female authors?
Liz: Only four or five? Oh, god! And I’ll cover all the speculative fiction, because I like to kind of mix them between. But I love Silvia Moreno-Garcia, who is Mexican-Canadian, and so all of her novels are novels, but they cover different thing, so; the first one, Signal to Noise, was kind of magical realism in Mexico City, the second one was Certain Dark Things, which was about vampires, but more like Mexican vampires, so not like…she mentions kind of like our traditional western-European vampires, but the main characters were not of that variety of vampire. And the last one, which I absolutely adored, was Gods of Jade and Shadow, which is 1920s Mexico and like a kind of re-animated mind-god. Brilliant, so good! So her, for sure; as I mentioned, Malka Older, I love the Centenal series, it just explores so many interesting things about, kind of, electronic voting, about information society, about democracy, so very good. Probably V.E. Schwab, who writes more fantasy, but her Darker Shades of Magic series was really, really good; she writes for all ages, so she does sort of middle-school kind of YA and adult fiction. She also did a series called the Villains, which basically explores some villains, which is also interesting. I have recently been reading a lot of—oh, I can’t pronounce her first name, I’m gonna massacre it, but Aliette de Bodard—she has a fantasy series as well, but I’ve mostly read her short science fiction, which is—if there is a Vietnamese empire in space, and it follows different aspects of that, and some of it—and the best story I can mention is The Tea Master and Detective, which I describe as like Sherlock Holmes and Watson, if Sherlock was a Vietnamese aristocrat and Watson was a spaceship with PTSD. It’s so beautiful and vivid, there’s about four short stories, I think, or four novellas, and all of them, they just like explore a different aspect of this universe, and they’re just beautiful and elegant and interesting and explore such interesting kind of sci-fi and ethical concepts.
Sina: Have you read Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga?
Liz: Yes.
Sina: I am absolutely in love with her as an author, because she I think has the ability to write in any genre, whether it’s a whodunit, whether it’s a space opera, whether it’s a police procedural on a planet or—just all of these other things, and nails it every time in my opinion, but then I love the way that she doesn’t fetishize the technology—which I admit to really enjoying, but you know I can get that from other authors. With her, the technology has like a really significant purpose for existing: for example, her incubators, which just completely turns around all of the societal implications of women carrying children. I thought that was just fascinating, not to mention I think she’s one of the only authors I respect that has a main character with significant disabilities, and does that superb amounts of justice.
Liz: I haven’t read as many of the Miles books, but I agree.
Chris: What about Margaret Atwood?
Liz: I think it’s a Canadian thing, that you’re forced to read Margaret Atwood as a child and then you just grow up hating Margaret Atwood. So I had to read so much in high school, and as a result I just dislike everything she writes, including The Handmaid’s Tale, and I don’t think I’d pick up Testaments either. I’m sure everything everyone writes about them is great, but I just can’t stand Margaret Atwood…
Francis: Can you elaborate on that, like why?
Liz: I don’t know, it’s just…I find it really hammer-over-the -head kind of torturous in that, like she’s going to make a point, she’s gonna make it a hundred times and she’s going to batter you over the head with it. I just can’t…I just can’t! I remember reading her in high school and thinking like, oooh, like I got the point on, like, page 10, can we move on? I just can’t deal with it. I like Margaret Laurence, who also writes kind of like, she’s a short story author, also from Canada, and like her stories are equally kind of hard to deal with, but just much prefer her to Margaret Atwood. Sorry Margaret Atwood fans!
Sina: I completely agree with you. I found the same to be true about things like, you know, The Fountainhead or whatever, where—you know, make your point, but if you’re going to beat me about the head with it a thousand times, like I got it the first time, maybe the second time, but completely agree.
Liz: Gilead is a terrible place!
That’s right…
Liz: There’s the patriarchy—and….
Francis: Perhaps we could dial back. You had mentioned about how some science fiction is very dystopian, and some of it is a little more positive…I was wondering if there were any sort of utopian visions for the future that you’ve read in books that seem plausible to you that you’d like to share.
Liz: I’m going to say Becky Chambers again, just because I love her and I think she doesn’t shy away from the problems that you could see in the future, but you still have humanity being helpful and like, working through problems. So, I’m thinking mostly about her second novel, which is A Closed and Common Orbit. You have AIs, but they are in ships, basically, but one gets downloaded illegally into a body kit, so she looks like a human—or it looks like a human, but I always think of “she”—it’s basically, how do you then navigate that, being actually illegal but having your own personality and all the people who are around who help her and things like that. And I just love it, it’s so hopeful, but it’s just like, the core of it, is this person is illegal by the nature of her existing and things like that. And there’s still crappy bits in the universe, but like people still overcome them, and I think that’s realistic. I don’t think utopias are necessarily realistic, but still being able to confront hard things and changing things and being hopeful about the change you can bring are really positive things to hope for. Oh man, I need to think of others…gonna have a look at things I’ve read—this is really hard off the top of my head.
Sina: In my group of friends, a lot of folks liked the first book in that series more. I—and it sounds like you did as well—really enjoyed the second one, I thought that exploration was really fun.
Liz: If you like Becky Chambers—she came out recently, really recently I think, with a novellas called To Be Taught If Fortunate, and it’s this group of explorers, basically if you think of our future now possible trajectory of catastrophic climate change, kind of diminishing rights and things like that. Basically the space program ends because they can’t afford it any more, but then there’s this big groundswell of citizen-sponsored space travel, and so they send these groups of astronauts off to explore distant planets, and they have some sort of cryo-sleep, but on their way to the stars, they adapt their bodies, they go into a torpor and they adapt their bodies to have some acclimatization to the planet. So in some times they end up with more muscle mass because it’s higher gravity, and things like that. And again, it’s not so much about the planets they find, but it’s the beauty of exploration and like the pursuits of knowledge and these sort of things, and like persisting even though the people listening may be gone and things like that. And it’s so wonderful, it’s just absolutely wonderful in terms of hopefulness and like all the great things you want to feel about science in the future.
Sina: It is definitely on my to-read list, thank you.
Liz: What else have I read about the future?
Sina: I mentioned the culture earlier—how much of Ian M Banks (sp) have you read, and what do you think of his envisioning of a post-scarcity society?
Liz: I’ve read very little. I never really read much Ian Banks, Ian M Banks. Two years ago, I was in the middle of my PhD, and I just like realized that I wasn’t reading any fiction at all, and like I really missed fiction, I needed a break from history. And so I just latched onto a list, and I read my way through it, and some of it I absolutely loathed, and some of it I really liked. But by the end of it I realized it was almost all men. And so I basically then had a year of being like, alright, I’m just gonna not read any men, or not any white men, because the list was mostly white men—apologies to all white men, no offense, but you’ve written a lot of books. And then for a year I only read women and nonwhite men, and then I basically just made it my mission to only read them. So, unfortunately, I only encountered Banks at the very end of that list, so I only read the one book that was on that list, which apparently is not the best book to read.
Sina: Right.
Liz: So I haven’t read any others. I feel like I should, I feel like I should make an exception—but we’ll see.
Chris: You were reading through the list of what the hundred greatest science fiction books of all time or something like that—which of those were your favorites?
Liz: So, I only read the ones I hadn’t read before—so I had already read loads of Asimov and some others on there. So I had read The Doomsday Book off that list, by Connie Willis, which again I absolutely love. I didn’t mind, like The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, I didn’t like a lot of the classics of sci-fi, because they tended to either be a bit racist or a bit sexist. And like, there’s the debate about whether or not you should read them, and all this sort of stuff, but they may have been the best for their time, but they’re certainly not the best now, I think is my opinion on it.
Sina: Your kindness of using “a bit” instead “overflowing with” is uh, very generous.
Liz: the worst one, I will tell you the worst one—oh God, there’s three worst ones! Oh, I’ll go with the one I think is the worst, which is A Spell For Chameleon. It was like a lesson in misogyny, you know, the kind of main lesson was “don’t trust pretty women,” or just don’t trust women in general! You can only trust ugly women, because they’ll have going for them; it was just terrible on levels I cannot describe. It made me so [inaud]. A couple others did as well.
Sina: Heinlein…I mean, it was just, essentially, barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen level of just, wow, this is so like the worst part of the 50s and 60s in literature form. I remember in one book, this woman is coming home from work, she’s late getting home, basically, to summarize the plot, and basically her response to her husband is, “I was raped on the way home, we had to wait for the trial and the execution,” and it was just this odd sense of, like, “rape is bad” but that’s about the most moral it gets. Right? Because everything else is just completely objectification, and so it’s just fascinating, and I have some trouble reading those books now. I think it would have been different reading them at the time—but even then, there were, especially for example in the feminist movement and such, my understanding is in the 60s and 70s there were still folks talking about these issues in response to science fiction, it’s just those voices weren’t really amplified a lot back then.
Liz: Yeah, the thing that annoys me, and I must have had like a particularly bad run at one point, where kind of rape or sexual assault just became like a plot point for the main white male character to…do something, and there was absolutely no impact, like the women’s feelings didn’t matter or didn’t matter because they were dead, or…there was no deeper meaning to it, or deeper explanation of like, you know, this is really bad and this would be quite traumatic for anyone involved or related to it. And now it’s just like, oh my god, like it was just so insensitive, on like such a huge scale that—and again, I just had this run of them, and now every time I read it in a book I’m like, well that’s really lazy writing and you should have done something more interesting with your plot.
Oh, I just found it—A Fire Upon the Deep! Oh, I loved it. So good.
Sina: [inaud] Verner Vinge?
Liz: Yes! It was just so good!
Sina: I thought that’s what you were alluding to but you made it sound like it was a more modern novel, so I was like, I wasn’t sure about, hesitating that as a guess—it’s the first book I ever read by him.
Chris: I had dinner with Verner Vinge and Greg Vanderheiden once.
Sina: Oh really?
Chris: Yeah.
Sina: What I find fascinating about stuff like A Fire Upon The Deep and things like that is, that today we are building those robotic systems and software systems that behave like these things that were explored in speculative fiction 30 years ago—you know, swarms and the idea of like peer-to-peer communication and all of the stuff we just take for granted today, they were explored as concepts, pretty well in a way, in terms of not only the good sides but what could go wrong, decades ago and I just wish more architects of our society and technology today would read more speculative fictions preceding when they invent something.
Liz: I also really quite like the idea of advanced technology discovered through basically archeology, so you have these kind of vastly superior alien races and all of these kind of pesky lower humans and the like, going like we’re going to go trip across all this super-advanced technology, and hopefully not destroy the universe by accident, which is what they almost do, and it’s just such a wonderful concept, right? Of course, like if there were these super-advanced civilizations, and they had technology that persisted, why wouldn’t we, right? Like, we are that kind of species, we’re like let’s go press all the buttons and see what happens! Contact, which I had never read before, also very much enjoyed. There is like a really, I call it really trashy vampire novel called Sunshine, not the one that the film’s based off of, not science fiction at all, but like the characters in it were so adorable that I loved them.
Sina: Who’s that by?
Liz: Robin McKinley. I disliked quite a few of the navels, but I think that, aside from like taking every kind of best list with a massive pinch of salt, is that you’re only ever going to like about 30% on whatever list that you come across. So if you don’t think you like it, you probably won’t like it, and t hat’s fine, don’t read it.
Sina: Let me toss a name at you—Octavia Butler. Thoughts?
Liz: Yeah, I haven’t read many Octavia Butler books, and again this probably comes from my reading history, like all the way up until, actually, quite recently. Again, I just read the kind of classic sci-fi, most of them white and male, so I didn’t come across Octavia Butler, and I should read more now, but again, she died, so she’s not going to write me any more books—but I recently read one, and it was great but harrowing. But essentially, it’s like these humans are brought onto an alien ship, and it’s basically, if you think about assimilation from a cultural point of view, it’s how it feels to have to, like, culturally assimilate as, like, another person. So if you think if you’re black and you’re having to assimilate into like a white culture, is the closest analogy. It’s the kind of trade-offs and all the sort of things you have to make, and it’s harrowing! It’s really distressing!
Sina: Lilith’s Brood?
Liz: It’s not Lilith’s Brood,, let me find it…I’ve read it quite recently, as I felt really bad for not reading any Octavia Butler,..
Sina: Because she and Ursula Kela-Guinn* were some of my earlier exposures to female authors, to women authors in sci-fi and fantasy.
Liz: The Dispossessed, I read that as part of a list and again was super, super good, I loved that. The other one I felt a bit weird..but I can’t remember what it’s called…Dawn! Very good but harrowing, so I recommend it. So I should totally read Kindred and all thse other ones, but I haven’t. And I haven’t read like the, was it the Broken Earth series, either, even though [inaud], so I should definitely do that. Because I have no excuse there, because she’s still writing books.
Sina: Now, fair disclosure, this is obviously going to be heavily white male-dominated, but there are a few women authors, actually several of the ones we discussed, on their—I like the list Wikipedia has of joint winners of the Hugo and Nebula. That’s a reasonable filter in a way, although it’s definitely symptomatic of of its time. So again, heavily white male dominated, but you’ll get some male authors from other parts of the world, and you will definitely get some female authors in there, Lois McMaster Bujold is on there, Connie Willis is on there, I think both LeGuinn and Bulter are on there, if I’m not mistaken. So, I’ve enjoiyed that list, because it’s only a few, every few years that aligns, it seems, since the 60s. So it’s a nice collection of 30 or 40 books.
Liz: Nice. I’ll have a look.
Sina: It has that for both novels and novellas and short stories and such. I haven’t worked through short stories—I always feel weird—it sounds like you read a lot more shorts and novellas, so what are your feelings on that, because to me—I’m always scared to read a novella or a short story, because I’m afraid I’m gonna like the universe a lot, and then it’s over. And so, that’s always just a sense of, I don’t know, trepidation before reading one.
Liz: I’ve only recently started reading novellas, and what kicked it off was Martha Wells Murderbot Diaries, I don’t know if you’ve come across those…
Sina: Yep
Liz: I love Murderbot, like I always say, I would love to be murder [inaud], but I think Murderbot would be uncomfortable with that—such a good character, and so I read the first one and then rapidly consumed the others. Although, there’s going to be a full-length Murderbot, so I’m like, “Yaay!” And because of that, I picked up Aliette Bodard’s book, and because I knew Becky Chambers, I picked up that one, and then Cho, who wrote Sorceror to the Crown, which is a full-length novel she did. I’ve been doing the “read harder” challenge this year as well, because I’m an idiot and I just want to read everything all the time, and she wrote a book called The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo, which qualified as my romance pick for the read harder list, and it was just delightful and funny. So, I have kind of gently made my way into novellas.
Chris: I get the audio version of Analog and Asimov’s every other month, and really enjoy that, because I find that sometimes the effect that Sina said, you know, I want more from this author—often six months later you get more in the same universe, just another short story. And if I don’t like the story, I know it’s going to end in ten minutes.
Liz: One of my favorite authors, though, is Ted Chang, and he mostly does novellas and short stories. And they’re absolutely wonderful—there’s, I think it’s a novella-like story in it, which is basically—I love the ethical implications of it, because it feels so tangible to now in that there’s these kind of limited AI creations made in the virtual world, but then part of the problem is basically platform obsolescence. So they all exist on this platform, that platform then gets bought out but they’re not supported, and there’s this hard core group of people who have nurtured these creations for so long, for like decades, and so they’re like real people, they kind of have their own emergent personalities. There’s this huge ethical thing where you’re like, oh my god! They’re just desperately trying to make sure that they persevere, and it’s just such a wonderful story and it feels so timely, it feels like we’re on the cusp of like, creating these slightly emergent personalities and like, would we just shut them up? if the platform became obsolete, like the Facebook of these creations, and then that got bought out and then wasn’t supported—Oh my god! The pain! Like they’re actual, kind of emergent beings that you would just turn off.
Sina: This totally sounds like a Black Mirror episode. That’s a very Black Mirror-esque plot. I’ll have to check that out.
Liz: It’s a bit more hopeful than Black Mirror.
Sina: Yes, that [inaud] corrected.
Liz: But I think anything is more chipper than Black Mirror.
Chris: I enjoy Black Mirror, but it leads me to the question, and we were discussing how much speculative fiction or science fiction these days is dystopic, do you think that’s informed by just modern culture being somewhat dystopic? I mean, we have Trump in America, you have Brexit in England, you have social credit in China—I mean, all over the world we seem to be getting bombarded with bad, dystopic news.
Liz: Yeah, I think it’s some of the time—I mean, you look, probably, a bit like a sci-fi historian would be able to tell you what other, previous things existed. Like I’m pretty sure when nanobots were huge, it was all grey goo and things like that, so I imagine it’s of the time and it’s hard to see the hope in the current system, but I think, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t write about the hope. I think more than ever, we should write about the hope.
Sina: Hear, hear.
Francis: How about if we discuss a little bit, examples of how societies were run with regards to, say, work, in any of these novels. Because it seems like technology’s making it much easier to get what society needs with fewer work hours, but that hasn’t translated into a general good. And I’m wondering if any sci-fi writers have grappled with that one.
Liz: I haven’t read anything like Ian M Banks, where there is definitely this alternative future. Like, it’s always kind of varieties of capitalism, I think. Where there’s the kind of like more dystopic end, where people are exploited in terms of modifying their bodies to do a job, or whatever, or just simple like the extension of digital technology wearer ones like a [crowgramer?] and variations of that, it’s mostly that, it’s mostly still capitalism.
Francis: Is it just so hard to make a well-functioning society seem interesting from, like a dramatic point of view, or is it just hard to envision?
Liz: I imagine when you’re in a system it’s hard to imagine outside of it, or maybe hard to make something like communism or that be more believable, because we’ve had such epic failures of the Soviet Union or because they seem more totalitarian and you don’t want that kind of vibe. It’s hard to say. I think the thing that you also find are these kind of space-opera empire things, which I mostly just like accept for some of them. I think it would be really sad if we ended up with a space empire, and I kind of love Star Wars. So in some ways I’m very hypocritical of this trope. But it would be really sad if we all went to space and there was a giant empire.
Francis: Star Trek, as a theme throughout all the different shows, they went to pretty great lengths to try to show what an advanced society would look like. Some of it was little bit cringe-y, maybe, but I think that’s part of the territory, perhaps. I’m just surprised there’s not more of it.
Liz: Same. I agree. The book I’m reading now, which is called Velocity Weapon, it doesn’t really articulate a different model of how the economy would work or anything like that, but there’s definitely a sense of, like, basic needs are taken care of, but there’s still the stratification of people who have wealth and power and those who don’t. So I think some of the futures are like, there is a base level of sustenance and things, but it’s not enough, there’s still the stratification and so that’s where some of the tension comes from. But yeah, I want a story like that. Maybe they think just Star Trek has done it so they don’t want to do it, or Ian M Banks has done it, but I’m sure there’s going to be, or there already is, a story that has a much more interesting way that humanity is organized.
Sina: Stross plays with some of the evolutions of economics a little bit, like in things like Acelerando, for example. But I think until you go to post-scarcity, which we just find so much less of than dystopic, let’s tear all the things down, it’s not as heavily explored; and part of it might be because it’s honestly, it tends to solve some of these fundamental problems. So perhaps constructing a plot is viewed as more difficult? I don’t know, that could be completely wrong on my part, but it seems like it’s very easy, you know, when there’s an impending asteroid or nuclear event or something, to then immediately have story threads that just spin all over the place out of that. Whereas, if you have a lot of things resolved, then the tension that would lead to a plot might be more difficult to find.
Chris: If automation really does cause 70 or 80 percent or however many people to be without work, you know, I mean Karl Marx predicted that everyone in the post-scarcity world—you know, and he predicted the automation thing, this was a late essay from him, I think it was 1869—where he discusses, you know, everyone’s going to be doing intellectual pursuits and art and music, and people, society will advance more rapidly. And even in the 50s, Buckminster Fuller wrote that if technology is used appropriately, within 20 years every man women and child in America will be living like a millionaire, and within 30 years everyone on the planet will be. And clearly those things haven’t happened.
Liz: Yeah. (laughs.)
Sina: Good talk (more laughs). It’s true though. Well, they have, right? I’ll push back on that a little bit. I would say they have, they just happened for 1% of 1% of 1% of people, right? So they have happened, it’s just that concentration of resources and access to them—he just got the error* bars wrong.
Liz: The way that certain countries operate now is fundamentally different to a hundred years ago, so a hundred years ago in the UK is so different now, and there is still massive stratification, but manufacturing is not a thing we really do anymore in the UK, at all. There are pockets of it, but if you’re gong to say our economy runs on manufacturing, that’s not going to be true, right? So it’s going to be service economy, which is very different, and it’s going to be things like digital data technology, all these sort of things, marketing, all these sort of not-manual, maybe not entirely intellectual, but certainly involves more brainpower than it does brawn, in some cases, service industry maybe not. But it has fundamentally changed, it’s just that we’re now seeing, maybe not developing the way we thought we would in that there’s like zero hours contracts and this kind of gig economy which doesn’t provide enough money. So it’s really futuristic, right? Like, oh my god, I can order food on my app, I can then order a cab on my app, I can go through the airport security with an app, so there is like loads of weird inroads into these futures, but there just not very evenly distributed. And if you then go to another country which does the majority of manufacturing, like that also looks weirdly dystopian because of how bad those countries are regulated and how bad they are for human rights. So, we kind of have like a mish mash of these futures? Depending on what country you’re in, you’re experiencing a different future.
Francis: Well, Bernie has this new slogan—“Us not me,” something like that. And I think that, you know, when society uses technology in a way that is sort of geared towards the capitalist idea of everyone for themself, a lot of potential gets wasted. The real quality of life, I think, for the majority couldn’t help but be pushed down. It’s not what it’s geared to cater to.
Liz: One of the people who I had in my PhD was, in history, was a Labor kind of theorist and journalist called J.A. Hobson. And like other secularists (cause my PhD was in history of secularism), he really disliked charity, because he felt that basically it was used by those who should have already given more wealth through taxes to basically say, “oh, look how good, look how charitable, look how wonderful I am for donating all this money”—and I think a lot of people are making the argument now that kind of large amounts of philanthropy is basically that same thing, right? Like you have Jeff Bezos, you have Buffet, you have Gates, and they have vast sums of money and they’re like, “oh, look how good we are, we’re doing a space program, and we’re solving malaria in Africa” and things like that. But how much more would we have solved if the kind of taxation system could more distribute that, in more directed ways. And like maybe we wouldn’t have SpaceX and things like that, fine. But maybe NASA would be better funded, who knows. And I always kind of look at that kind of historical perspective, because it’s just like, we still have the same problems that we did in the 19th Century, in the 20th Century, early 20th Century. We kind of moved forward and backwards. Like, everyone’s making the argument, I think, in the States right now that like, Oh my god, we’d increase the tax rate and wouldn’t even reach the taxation rates under the New Deal or the 1940s and 50s in America, which also everyone looks at as the golden age of America. And it’s like, maybe we should just tax everyone again! I think we probably have already had the tools to solve some of these problems, or at least make them less worse, but politics goes back and forth, and it’s just how can you motivate enough people to say, that’s the world we want. It feels like the US is now finally having those conversations that loads of people who already have health care systems had in the 30s. So,..
Sina: There’s also an interesting aspect of large amounts of wealth being used for, basically, for whitewashing—so you see this with the Sacklers, for example, and giving to museums and universities and things of this nature, and Laurence Lessig recently, in response to a lot of the stuff that’s going on with the MIT Media Lab and taking Epstein’s money, etc., wrote a really, I thought, very well thought-out, honest, really raw Medium post, and he goes through the different kinds of funding and you could ethically treat them. And one of assertions that he makes that I completely agree with is that, if your funding is coming from an entity which is in any way questionable, it is your responsibility to take that funding anonymously, so that you’re not contributing your universities’ brand, or museum’s ethical position to helping someone else whitewash things that they’ve done over the decade.
Liz: There’s a really interesting article, I think in the Financial Times today as well, that said something like 30%, the kind of majority stake of external investment in companies—when a US company would invest in Ireland, for example—is actually just corporations moving around money. They’re not even contributing to increasing productivity or increasing jobs or anything, it’s literally just moving money from one bank account to another. Thirty percent of the foreign direct investment, which is like a huge thing! It’s meaningless! So at that point you just like, are these instruments that we’ve developed even useful for this kind of measurement of actually investing in a country? I think like the EU’s doing quite a lot of work in trying to—everyone talks about tax avoidance and tax havens and things like that—I feel like it’s moving slowly, but maybe just not fast enough.
Sina: I tend to be very socially liberal, and things of this nature, so I completely am aligned with what you’re saying with regards to taxation, but then I’ve also had experience with these systems and just the level of corruption and sheer incompetence, like absolute terrifying incompetence, that tends to be rewarded within these systems, is what makes me very hesitant for the thing that other parts of my philosophy tell me is absolutely the right thing to do, per the examples you cited, like the New Deal and so on and so forth.
Chris: Liz mentioned NASA might be more well-funded, but does that mean that NASA would just be spending more money on the useless Orion rocket that it’s trying to build now for profoundly more money than using a SpaceX Falcon Heavy?
Liz: It’s quite interesting—I just finished reading, not that long ago, a book called Why Nations Fail, and it’s super interesting. Part of their argument—and you have to see it through the lens of like, they clearly are on board with the kind of capitalist system, but the whole thing is about capitalism and the market-driven sort of stuff forces innovation. And I think that’s quite interesting as an argument, and you kind of see it with SpaceX and NASA, but maybe that’s just because NASA’s always strapped for cash, and maybe they would be more innovative if they could. And because they’re not allowed to fail, at all, I think that’s part of the problem is that, if you’re just constantly forced to be 100% foolproof, you’re always going to be very, very risk-averse. And SpaceX is allowed to not be as risk-averse, and maybe it’s not so much the institution but how the institution has to function.
Chris: Howard Bloom is the guest on our next podcast release, which will come out later this week [note: released in September 2019] and, it’s gonna sound crazy, he’s been on Coast to Coast AM 300 times, but he’s their token liberal and real science communicator—they bring him on when they need an alternative point of view—and he was pointing out that if you actually look at the federal budget, it was all the US Congress adding money to NASA’s budget but requiring that it be spent with certain companies, like Lockheed-Martin and Boeing and the traditional military-industrial complex. It seems to be huge handouts to private companies, as opposed to SpaceX, who’s working driven by investors and whatnot.
Liz: That’s quite interesting. You look at these institutions and actually, if you look into the details, and maybe it not be the institutions but the proscriptions placed upon them.
Sina: Yeah, exactly.
Chris: Yeah, it’s NASA’s scientists would come up with something smarter, but they’re really not allowed to by the Congress.
Liz: Oh, Congress!
Francis: I think it would be a good idea to have a separate fund, if you were going to have a progressive tax on corporations and people, to insure that it doesn’t just go to the military or to paying off the debt, that sort of thing, but more specifically to reinvigorate the economy and give resources to people who are aspiring entrepreneurs and inventors, that sort of thing, and create opportunity that way. The idea of just taxing the rich and giving it to Lockheed Martin doesn’t really appeal to me.
Sina: I think you may have mentioned this book earlier—it was envisioning, you mentioned like a future democracy —that’s what made me think of it—and they have this idea of micro-democracy.
Liz: Yeah, Infomocracy, by Malka Older.
Sina: That’s the one, yes.
Chris: I read that one, based on Sina’s suggestion, so…
Sina: I really enjoyed the concepts. I thought it got a little odd, you know, just with the plot and everything was, I had a few gripes, but nothing, just personal opinion based stuff. But what was interesting to me was the—I don’t know how practical this is, but the extreme variance along the edges. So you can have something that is what we would today call white nationalist, you know, whatever, right in like a little square, and then literally meters away from that, have something completely different, and meters away from that, and that to me was really fascinating in a way that—I don’t know, I haven’t necessarily seen explored elsewhere?
Liz: I think that’s why I loved it as well. I also just love the kind of like—I like information, which was like, I think the author describes as like a cross between Google and Wikipedia, alright, like they can instantly or near-instantly verify anything that’s said, so they are the kind of repository of “the truth” almost. It’s such a good idea, and she explores it more, almost a second novel in that series is more interesting, because it looks at some of the places in the margins that are still kind of fighting against …
Sina: ..where corruption can still happen, for example.
Liz: Yeah, exactly. Again, I just really loved it, because I had never encountered such an interesting concept. You have lots of interesting ideas in science and like physics and space flight and all these sort of things, but actually to tinker with democracy, as a science fiction concept—like how great is that! And I love that you had all, everyone had to agree to it, so you had all these pockets; but also that you could have, in Mexico, you could have one centenal, but the other twenty centenals of the same party could be in Europe, or somewhere else. So, it was almost like you could have these pockets of liberalism or democracy or …white nationalism…and it could form together as a club, and then have your own sense of government, but it was just really interesting. I don’t know what else to say other than I love that book, and everyone should read it.
Sina: I’ve had this theory, I’d love to get your thoughts on it: there’s something called, I believe it’s the Overview Effect, which is when astronauts go into space and see the earth as one thing, it tends to eliminate a lot of biases around things such as, a different country is meaningless from up here, you know, it’s like we’re all one, and man is that a really small pale blue dot, to quote Carl Sagan, right? And what’s interesting to me about sci-fi, the reason I bring that up is, that elimination of geography mattering—sci-fi seems to achieve that for me, or does and has and did; and I’m wondering if that’s true for you, or if you see that sort of effect, like without the luxury and the being able to up and see the planet spinning before you, you still get that sort of mentality of, some of these artificial and arbitrary barriers just don’t matter.
Liz: Yeah, I think so. And especially, like one of my favorite things growing up was the Foundation series, again, which is like kind of massive and expansive and interesting. Still with its problems, but that kind of far-reaching effects of humanity, I guess. And also the positronic man, where you’re talking about what makes a person an person. I remember reading that quite young and being like, “whooaaa” like that’s amazing, and you can kind of, you see that now with some of the other AI books, but it was definitely one of the original ones that did that. So reading those kind of things, and encountering aliens and you encounter all these concepts which in real life come up as prejudice and all these sort of things. But you always see them from the better side of it, of like overcoming prejudice, and that being what the hero wants to accomplish. I think it really does, depending on the novels you’re reading—if you’re reading, like, horror, maybe not, but for me I totally agree that is definitely, I think that has had an impact on me.
Chris: Have you ever seen a website, going back to Infomocracy, called thirty-thousand.org?
Liz: I think I’ve heard of it, but no, I haven’t been to it.
Chris: They are activists who are trying to work in the US—they have no traction, so they’re not very famous—but they want to go to the Constitutional minimum number of people Congressman, which would give us approximately 30,000 Congressmen in the US, basing it on the theory that, if you only have 450 some-odd Congressmen, it’s easy to bribe 450 people, but how do you bribe 30,000 people who all live in somebody’s neighborhood, so if you’re that geographically small, everyone’s going to know their Congressman, and just be able to go over their house and tell them off if they want to.
Liz: I guess it would make it a less prestigious thing, as well. There’s at least 30,000 CEOs, do you care who a CEO is? Probably not. And so maybe it makes it more democratic in the sense that, it’s not a job you might want to have for a long time, and so you see more churn. Maybe just term limits, like the president has term limits, why doesn’t Congress and the Senate have term limits? Like, that seems to be a problem in itself, the fact that you can just become vested in your own office and…
Chris: My opinion on term limits has always been that the ballot box is the term limit, and then the voters can kick you out. And I would rather leave it to the voters. I mean, I was happy to have Ted Kennedy as my Senator for as many years as I lived in Massachusetts.
Liz: Unless your district is completely gerrymandered, and it would be..
Sina: Right. So, I live in North Carolina, even as a blind person I can tell you how messed up the map looks. Like, it is so bananas, and obviously the Supreme Court has ruled on this and they’re re-drawing the maps now, but it’s just, yeah—unless, if you’re a person of color and living in a neighborhood where all of you have been put in one district because it’s been determined that we’re gonna just call that district, we’re gonna lose that one, but then we pick up these other ten predominantly white districts that we know is gonna vote for us. You know, so, it’s a massive problem. Like, voting is not fair in this country, full stop. I used to believe that it was, and then data after data has convinced me it’s absolutely untrue.
Chris: I was just going to say, the term “gerrymandering” however, was named for a former governor of Massachusetts, Gov. Gerry, who literally, when he re-drew the Congressional map after a census, had a salamander-shaped district that ran all the way from Cape Cod to almost the center of the state, that was really narrow and had arms and legs.
Liz: But the interesting thing about democratic conventions. So we have—relatively, I’ll stress, relatively stable democracies in the UK and the USA—but technically, the institutions of that democracy haven’t seen a huge amount of change in the 150 years. They’ve both seen a lot before that, especially, like, the UK’s political system evolved quite a bit in the 18th and 19th century. But now we feel like, this is how you do democracy, and maybe that’s not entirely correct anymore. Maybe there needs to be more participation, maybe there needs to be more Senators, more Congressmen—it’s really hard to innovate once you have that system, and maybe we need to look at things like, …unfortunately, you know, countries that have experienced a lot of turmoil and tend to redraft their constitutions…you look at Thailand, right? They’ve had quite a few in recent years, military coups, but they then have the opportunity, if they manage to then swing back towards democratic norms, to draft a modern constitution. And that’s quite interesting, because maybe that’s not a bad thing, maybe redrafting your constitution isn’t bad. It would reflect the whims of the time, they needs to be consensus, and that would be really hard, but if we had a re-draw modern constitution for the United States, would the right to bear arms be in it? Probably not, because why would you? And there’s things like that, so I think you can look at it as, lots of people say, oh people are becoming lazy, people don’t pay attention to politics, and maybe what we need is less democracy not more democracy, we need more technocracy, or whatever. But I think it’s just like, we just need to innovate like we do with everything else we do, right? Maybe we just need to innovate, examine, democracy and how people are interacting—user research, talking about user-centered-design. Where are the democratic deficits, and where can we self-correct them?
Sina: One thing that comes to mind, I was reading this paper recently on virtual democratic agents, and so, the idea being that we have such a lossy-system rightnow, and basically the only entities that benefit are the ones we’ve been discussing, big business, etc., so whether it’s 430 or some odd Congressmen, you’ve got 100 Senators, etc., there’s a limited number of people; and what happens is, they are representative of a lot of other people. There’s no way this one person is going to be remotely equitably representative of even, frankly, 20 other people, much less 20,000 or in some cases, millions, right? And so the idea is, can you come up with agents that are reprsentatives of all of us, so we all have bot, if you will; it is granted the right to vote on issues, on all issues. And over time, as you grow up, as you mature, as you change your beliefs etc., you inform the bot of issues, and you inform the bot of your philosophies, and then these agents vote on your behalf. Because, you don’t have time to look at an appropriations bill on parks funding, but you might care about the parks, so you would want to set a set of criteria that would say, yeah, this is something I want to vote on. Whereas something else might be something that you don’t, and obviously for anything contentious, something that can’t have an automated decision made about it, that’s the one that the bot emails you about, or texts you about and says, listen, a vote’s going to go down in 7 minutes, you got an opinion on this? Or with more time, etc. So, I was really attracted by the idea of just eliminating these lossy humans, maybe we keep them around for coming up with the legislation and such, but removing, decoupling the impetus they have from creating the legislation and passing the legislation, almost separating those two.
Liz: That’s super interesting. That would make a great sci-fi story. I find politics really interesting, well, I find governance really interesting, less politics. And especially, you look at all the different institutions that exist across the world, like from multi-lateral institutions, and we have such a variety of them, and yet everyone seems unsatisfied with them in some way, which they’ll, the phrase that like, democracy’s the worst option except for all the rest—there’s still value in the systems we have, it’s just like, I think we’ve just stopped self-correcting, and why have we stopped self-correcting? Or at least, maybe it’s just our perception as people who are politically aware, and of an age where we have seen the past and don’t think it’s as good as now, maybe it’s all fine and it’s just our present-ism which is the problem. Or—I was talking to someone I know in Finland, and some other parts of Europe have, like, a far-right party who has a lot of power, or a lot of percentage in the parliament, but actually all the other weight against this larger, and so they probably won’t have political impact. And they have people who say, the kind of far right nationalists are going to last ten years, because it’s a demographic shift and things like that, and so maybe we’re just in one of these periods, you know, progress isn’t a straight line, it goes back and forth, and we’re just currently in a slight recession and then it will all race ahead again in ten years when everyone accepts climate change is a thing, and everyone accepts love is love, and everyone can marry whoever they want, and all these sort of things, and it’s just this kind of crunchy period of like, getting through this backlog of people who haven’t updated their bots! At all, in the last 50 years, they’re still operating on this assumption that is very outdated.
Chris: So, do you believe that the arc of history, as Martin Luther King suggested, does bend towards justice?
Liz: I think so. My PhD looked at a certain period in time, and it looks at the history of secularism. And 150 years ago, you couldn’t be an open atheist in Parliament, right? Charles Broadlaw*, who was the first open atheist—OK, slightly less than 150 years, maybe a 140—he was elected in the 1880s as an open atheist, small “r” republican. So the first thing he has to do as an MP is swear an oath to God that he’ll uphold the Queen, right? It’s a bit difficult. And so he faced tremendous opposition getting into Parliament. And then eventually he passed a law which harmonized all the kind of affirming and swearing practices in the UK, and then it wasn’t problem for the people who came after him. And progressively, over time, over the last 150 years, being an atheist isn’t being a problem any more, it’s actually fine. Growing acceptance, just like being gay, LGBTQ+, all of the things, has much faster become more of an accepted thing across more and more parts of the world. You have to look at everything objectively, and I think when you’re in a period of just, like, “oh my God, the Amazon’s on fire, oh my God everything’s terrible, oh my God Trump,” all these things, you’re necessarily going to dwell on the things that are bad because you’re already in that mentality. But there are still things, maybe not like Steven Pinker-eseque, like, everything is totally great and better than it has ever been, because I think that has its flaws as well—
Chris: Steven Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now felt like I was being beaten over the head with ideas with which I already agreed.
Liz: I know! you have to look at statistics, and you have to look at all of the other things that are progressing, and you can identify the things that aren’t progressing as you’d like. There is, it feels like, worldwide, a stall in human rights and democracy, so it’s not huge, but it is slightly regressive, so you get more authoritarian governments and things like that. As well, like, poverty is reducing, disease is reducing, there’s generally more toleration for human rights in a greater variety of places. Doesn’t mean we have to be complacent, but I think we also have to recognize that, like, not everything is bad, we’re not heading towards a complete dystopia. And going back to the book I read, Why Nations Fail, the really interesting argument they had was that not everything is linear but contingent; so you’ll have events where one thing can happen, and one thing—well, multiple things can happen but it takes one path over another. And I think instead of looking at things as straight lines of inevitable utopian future, inevitable capitalist dystopia of like a William Gibson variety, or whatever, all of these things are contingent, and it’s going to take a huge amount of decisions over time for one future to occur over another. And they might go back and forth, they might swing one way and swing another way, and it’s more like, how do we make those important contingents swing the right way rather than the bad way? We don’t have to be angry all the time about everything, but focus attention on the important things maybe. I don’t know! I really like the argument, and it oddly made me more hopeful..(laughs)
Francis: One of the things that was coming to my mind when we were just talking is how, with capitalism and power in general, there’s very little problem with thinking globally, and organizing things globally, and I think when you see in science fiction a lot of the time, the future is usually one where there’s some sort of process resulted in a world government that is fair and works a lot of the time; but what it seems to me in the left and in progressive movements is that, it’s always very local—and they even say, think globally, act locally, that sort of thing—but it’s really hard to compete with capitalism and these other forces that are working on a global scale, and we’re all trying to figure out things in our own individual countries and…I was wondering if that might be something that changes whether we have, within the left, internationally, say like a set of goals or a set of principles that inform parties internationally.
Liz: I have no idea.
Francis: You know, I’m wondering, in science fiction, how often that is the case, that there is sort of an evolution that leads to the world functioning as one whole, and the government being a force of good and benign, and how did they get there?
Chris: I’ve seen that in science fiction, where the reason the human race ends up all organized as a species rather than a bunch of separate nations fighting amongst each other, is the result of an alien invasion or the threat thereof.
Sina: Some annihilation event, yeah, that’s what I was thinking. I think it would be horrible, but I almost want somebody to scam, like a message from some aliens saying we’re going to attack in ten years, because it would lead to some temporary unity that, even after the scam is exposed, might have enough [histories?] to hang on.
Chris: Hire some Russian hackers and get it done on Facebook!
Sina: Like, that’s the fake news campaign I could probably get behind!
Liz: There’s like three branches of that—there’s one, there is this like existential threat, either alien or increasingly, kind of, like we’re killing the planet and it’s an environmental push; and then two, it’s just this kind of gradual seep, right? We decide we need more resources, so we go and mine the asteroids, and we kind of spread out into the local system and then someone just always discovered faster-than-light travel or something, or wormholes, blah-blah-blah-blah. And so you get this kind of gradual thing, or this like massive leap in technology or everyone banding together. I said a third one—I think the third one’s just dystopia, that we just generally collapse. I don’t know, like it’s, someone’s either going to luck out on one, or it’s going to be completely different, right? We’re just going to either continue as a species, or we’re just not. And I don’t know what one would be. It would be lovely if it was more utopia-driven rather than, like, we need to scavenge asteroids to keep our planet alive, but, at this moment we’re probably betting on the asteroids keeping the planet alive.
Sina: For sure.
Chris: Well then, informed by science fiction, what do you, all three of you, think the future might be?
Sina: Liz, do you want to go first?
Liz: I’m still thinking…
Chris: Francis, do you have an idea on what the future might look like?
Francis: There could be a crystallization of a generation that comes along and then just decides, hey, we could just create our own rules. And somehow, technology gets to a point where its potential is explained to people in a way that facilitates a much grander vision than we have right now, which is kind of like everyone for themself. It could be one of these things that just unfolds, really fast and in a really big way, and becomes like a source of excitement and, I feel like, because capitalism is sort of strangleholding the potential for technology to be used for the benefit of all, that when it finally does become something that’s used for the benefit of all, the quality of life and the creative outpouring—I think it just become immense, and the standard of living could go up hugely in a very short period of time. I think that’s inevitable, because it’s just a choice, ultimately, it’s a choice that’s not been given to people, or even had them be made aware of for the most part. I mean, you have people like Buckminster Fuller, but for some reason there’s no traction there. And when that does happen and the collective goodwill and the collective creativity is connected with the technological potential that we have today, it’s just gonna be amazing. I hope I live to see at least its beginnings.
Liz: I kind of still have hope in politics, or the ability for collective action, like through countries and things to change. I think the recent example that I will pick on will be the New Zealand government; they’re a small country, they can kind of experiment with these things easier than something like the US or maybe the UK. Where they had like—was it the wellness budget? Basically, instead of focusing the outcomes of their national budget being on, like, GDP and growth and the kind of traditional economic markers, they were focusing on well-being of their populace, and so they had to re-think how do you base your entire economy, and measure it and implement programs, that focus rather on the outcome of increasing GDP on the increasing happiness and wellness of their country? And that’s really interesting, right? LIke that’s the kind of first of its kind, and with all the kind of markers of traditional capitalism being kind of undermined by capitalism itself. So like we said with the foreign direct investment basically being a sham, or like, you know, all these offshore banks and that sort of thing happening, if you start changing the parameters of what you’re focusing on as a country, then maybe that’s enough to twist the dial? To be like, allright, we’re going to focus on outcomes. So once you’ve looked at health and education and all these things, then maybe you start to find the investment for more kind of things like space flight and advancing technology. So maybe all it needs is that slight focus shift of an actual government to say, we want an outcome that’s not based on finances. And then there’s also, we have this, not just a demographic shift in the US that might benefit the Democrats, but an overall decline in population, which most of, I think, I’ve read several things which are like, at the point in time where you don’t have more people, and you actually have a declining population, that’s gonna have really weird effects on a traditional economy, right? Like, you can’t be focused on growth unless you can manifoldly increase the amount of productivity one person can have, and maybe that’s when automation takes off and things like that. But then, the pressures won’t be on employment, the pressures will be on, like, how do we actually make stuff? If there’s not enough people to make stuff and things like that. So I’m wondering if just the kind of sheer forces of economics and the shifting of how people are thinking about government, will ultimately shape the world in unintended ways or unforeseen ways that even sci-fi hasn’t speculated, because sci-fi has existed in economies of constant growth and GDP output economies and things like that. So, who knows?
Sina: I think it’s going to be really messy in the short term, but I’m still long-term optimistic. I feel like that’s an intrinsic character trait that, through biology, nurture, education, etc., I hope I never lose. And so I am very pessimistic about certain short-term things, whether it’s political, whether it is access to water, is something that’s very concerning in terms of just the percentage of the world population that will have access to clean and potable drinking water in the next decade and so forth, but zooming out and kind of looking more, longer term, I love, I really love Liz’s kind of puzzle-piece putting together of automation with declining population, that really resonated to me. And I think that things like that should hopefully lead to some emergent effects, to speak to some of Francis’ points. So, for example, when you have ubiquitous access, not only to information—which is sort of what the web has started us down the path of, and things like infomocracy explore a little bit more, but also the access to synthesize and to use that information through things like 3-D printing and personal manufacturing, then maybe technology can start to be used to reduce our reliance on systems which are perpetuating all of these things that, in this conversation, we’ve kind of all agreed are bad, or not productive for society. So that’s why I’m long-term optimistic, because I’m hoping that through my belief in just humans, as individuals, instead of humans in groups, that by increasing access to manufacturing, to personal knowledge synthesis and creation and review etc., that we would enable that generation that Francis is talking about to actually exist. But change periods are really messy and hard. Once you zoom after it, that you can see so many of the benefits, so, maybe I’m not necessarily relishing some of those change periods, but they need to happen, because the outcome is worth it.
Chris: OK. Well with that, we’ll ask Liz the same question we ask every guest we have, and that’s is there anything you’d like to promote or tell us about that you’d like our listeners to take a look at?
Liz: Just check out my podcast, that’d be lovely. But I think the thing that I really enjoyed about changing my reading habits was just how much new and interesting science fiction it brought to me. So I would recommend everyone to do a reading challenge—not like a hard one, but say read ten books. If you look at your book collection, you realize you’re mostly reading male authors, then just like read ten books by someone who you wouldn’t read, so either like a non-white author or a woman author or someone from another country or translated book or something like that, because what I have found is that it has made science fiction that much more richer. So I would recommend that, just challenge yourself to read differently, even five books, it would be great and I hope you enjoy the result.
Chris: Great! Well, with that, thank you Liz so much for coming on.
Liz: Thank you! It was really fun.
Chris: Thanks Sina, for helping us out with this episode
Sina: Always a pleasure.
Francis: Yeah, thank you both.
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