SPEAKER_03: 0:15

Welcome to the Where Shall We Meet podcast. Our guest this week is Kim Stanley Robinson, also known as Dan. He is an American science fiction writer best known for his Mars trilogy of novels. Over his career, he has published over 20 books. Many of his novels and stories have ecological and political themes featuring scientists as heroes. Robinson has won numerous awards, including the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award for Best Novel, as well as the World Fantasy Award.

SPEAKER_02: 0:45

The Atlantic magazine has called Robinson's work the gold standard of realistic and highly literary science fiction writing. According to an article in the New Yorker magazine, Robinson is generally acknowledged as one of the greatest living science fiction writers. Time magazine named him the hero of the environment for his optimistic focus on future possibilities. His most recent novel, The Ministry for the Future, presents a vision for how humanity might unite together to overcome the climate crisis. We talk about what is science fiction? The difference between utopia and optopia.

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Being optimistic whilst remaining vigilant.

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Predicting the future.

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What the hell is terraforming?

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Finance as a tool for changing civilization.

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The current state of American politics. Championing scientists. If anything is possible, is nothing interesting?

SPEAKER_02: 1:39

Let's talk about the future. Hi, this is Umida Shnari.

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And Natasha McElhone, and with us today we have I'm Kim Stanley Robinson.

SPEAKER_00: 1:51

Call me Stan, and I'm happy to be with these two. Stan.

SPEAKER_02: 1:55

So great to have you. Welcome.

SPEAKER_03: 1:58

Tell us where you are, where you're sitting.

SPEAKER_00: 2:00

I am on the shores of Long Pond on Mount Desert Island. So I'm on a lake on an island in the Atlantic Ocean on the coast of Maine. In my wife's grandparents' place, it's Heaven on Earth.

SPEAKER_02: 2:15

Oh nice. That's a good setting for this part, I think. We thought for today we wanted to talk to you a fair bit about science fiction before we actually talk about your specific books, more about the genre itself and uh the things that it can do for the human mind and how it inspires us. So with that, I'll jump right in and ask you. You've been talking to some folks I've heard about science fiction as a form of optopia, which is an interesting term, which I think would be great if you explain. You also say that science fiction is the realism of our time, which I also love as a notion. So maybe you want to elaborate and we start there.

SPEAKER_00: 2:58

Yes. And thanks for that. I'm gonna rummage around in the cupboard here in terms of my thoughts about science fiction that I think are still worth sharing. Um definitional questions that I I think people will find helpful. So, science fiction, there's a simple cut. Any story that's said in the future is a science fiction story. Let's call that my base definition. And it means that um stock predictions and demographic predictions by the UN, any story set in the future is a science fiction story. And some people paper it over and try to make this look like a definitive prediction or a uh a trajectory that has to come true. Never the case. So if you keep that in mind, it gives you a good skeptical eye for uh any story that is uh given to you that attempts to be like the real deal. If it's said in the future, it's a science fiction story and needs to be judged the same way you would judge Star Trek or Star Wars. Keep that in mind. Also, the future is big. It's really big. Um so there's you can split science fiction up immediately into uh I'm gonna uh uh use three zones, which is to say how far off in the future. There's near future, like Ministry for the Future, and um anything set like Day After Tomorrow, Thrillers, Um, What Happens Five Years From Now. Often the dates aren't there, but you can see that it's in the near future, and it's a form of realism that is focused on today, but uh pushing a few elements and using the next near future period to push those elements into more prominence. I like near future science fiction a lot. Then there's far future science fiction. Okay, space opera. We're out on the galaxy, we're zipping around faster than light, there's aliens, there's um remarkable things going on out there. It's a story space that is somewhat of a fantasy, but it's interesting to think about anyway. It's quite different than magic fantasy or they're said in some feudal past. It's more like out there in the galaxy are remarkable things, let's tell stories out there, and they can range from silly stuff like Star Wars to quite interesting stuff like Ursula K. The far future is a great story space, it just has to be understood as something quite distinct from near future. Then in the middle, it's a zone that I love. That is um, I call it future history because if you imagine the world a hundred years from now, or maybe even two hundred years, with the laws of physics being more or less as we understand them now. Um, that's a big push. A hundred years from now, what will humanity be doing on this planet and in the solar system? Assuming, being a kind of realism here, that we're not going to the stars in the next 200 years because it's impossible. That's my novel, Aurora, saying, telling that story. And my Mars novels, my 2312, uh, my early novels like Ice Enge or Memory Whiteness, they all take place in this future history zone, this mid-zone, which is a little depopulate compared to near future and far future, which just to me makes it even more interesting. Then continuing, Omed, you mentioned Optopia. There's a very simple dichotomy. The future is either going to be worse or it's going to be better. And you don't want to say it's going to be the same because that's just boring. In our minds, it's worse or better. So you get dystopia and utopia, and there's variants. People talk now about pro-topia. They they try to dodge the word utopia because there's so much political and historical baggage tossed on it. I'm willing to still use it, but I like this term from Joanna Russ, Optopia. What's the best we could hope for given the crappy situation that we're in right now? So, best case scenario, you could say, is the optopia. And I still say that's that can be still, you still want to use the word utopia to stick it in people's face that there could be a better society, and you can write stories about that, and they're interesting stories. Oh, and one last thing about science fiction. On the one hand, you really are talking about the future and saying these things could happen. That's not that they will happen, they could happen. That's what you're saying with think of it at as three 3D glasses at a movie theater.

SPEAKER_01: 7:28

Right.

SPEAKER_00: 7:28

Um, one lens is saying this could happen. The other lens is saying this is what it feels like right now. It's metaphor for now, it's symbolism. Literary symbolism. The world, I feel like I'm a robot. I feel like time is accelerating. Well, you write that down as if it's real, and it's um it's a metaphor, it's a literary metaphor. Science fiction is always doing that. Even the far future stuff is saying this is what it feels like sometimes. So um those two lenses are not the same. You look through them and you're a sophisticated science fiction reader, and there are a lot of those. What happens is like at the 3D theater, the flat thing in front of you pops and has a third dimension, which uh in movie theaters that's uh 3D um physically, uh uh you know, height, uh width, and depth. But uh in science fiction it's um the the the popped artificial third dimension is time. So it's really the fourth dimension. So you read science fiction and the future kind of pops for you. You see your connection to it. It's a metaphor, it's a prediction, or it's a or it's an extrapolation. Um, you begin to uh feel history going forward and you're placed in it, and so you've got these remarkable l like uh virtual reality goggles, which I've never even looked into real life.

SPEAKER_03: 8:53

That's so funny. I was literally my question, my first question to you was gonna be when did you first put on a VR headset?

SPEAKER_00: 9:00

Never. I no, I did once. I did once because I my friends at Arizona State University, they run a Center for Science and Imagination, and I've been helping them for the whole ten years. I love these people. They're they're smart and creative and good, and well funded by Michael Crow, the president of Arizona State University, which matters a lot. And they've got VR goggles, which they put on me. And I was like, you know what? Um this is unimpressive. Um I'd rather do it in my imagination. So um so I'm not a big fan of VR. This these virtual reality goggles to me are are uh yet an they're just an exaggeration of the way that we're all falling into our screens. And our screens are not as interesting as the real world. So it's a kind of gigantic and expensive category error, the whole VR thing. And but this I I speak as a novelist.

SPEAKER_03: 9:58

Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Sorry to push back on the the VR headsets, but there's one that's about to come out, and I tried a prototype the other week. Stan. Your mind is gonna be blown.

SPEAKER_00: 10:12

Well, will it be blown if I don't want it to be blown? This is of course the interesting test question.

SPEAKER_03: 10:19

I even think as I even think if you resist, you're gonna tip into that black hole and think Oh my goodness, I never need to get on a spaceship because I'm here already.

SPEAKER_00: 10:33

Well, but think about this, Natasha, and and uh you're in the visual arts, so you've had a ton of experiences, and I wonder if you've seen yourself through the 3D lenses ever, that would be interesting to talk about. Um, because it would be kind of uh not like your mirror image that you get y used to, but something stranger like being outside yourself. That would be interesting. But here's what I've been saying for a while that I'm more and more convinced, especially since Ministry came out, is true. A novel, the reader has to read it. They co-create it in their head. They have to make an enormous effort, and it takes about 30 hours. And in that time, they're co-creating. The sentences are just black marks on the page. Inside their head, an experience is happening. It's vivid. They even remember it as, and as a reader, I know this, as kind of something that's semi-happened to them, somewhat like a dream, but a little more specific or well remembered than a dream, even. Uh, and it's vivid. Now, you go into the visual media, you go to a movie, and it now it's vivid again for sure. You're s you're a witness. It slaps you in the face, but you don't get to co-create it. You are a witness rather than a co-creator. And you get to interpret it, you get to be involved, you get to be there for the two hours or the uh uh 30 hours. Um, but you don't get to co-create it. You more it's more uh slapping you in the face as a witness scene. To the point where, like I myself, I couldn't, I couldn't watch a horror movie any more than I could watch a horrible event. It's too real. Um the movies are too real, and I don't get to co-create them. If I'm reading a text and the sentences suddenly go sideways and get awful, I can distance myself instantly. I can detach, I can, I can put in the clutch and say I'm not going there. But with a movie, you you could maybe close your eyes, but if you keep your eyes open, then you have to go there. So there's certain movies I won't even go to. I don't want my memory scarred with those kind of images. So the two forms are really powerful, both of them, and they're really different. And I don't know if adding the um the third dimension of VR makes any difference to me. It'll still just be kind of a movie experience uh of of witnessing something powerful. Um I mean the movie Passengers was a great Starship movie. Oh my god, I thought that was a spectacular. You are there, you saw this. Um you don't have to go on a starship and get trapped like those poor people. Uh, because a starship is a jail, and that's a good story to tell. I've told it myself. Um but I I'm uh I'm an amazingly bookish person. I one time lost a game of trivial pursuits because I was about to win with the last question, which was who played the Frenchman in Casablanca? I had never seen Casablanca. And so I I guessed Maurice Chevalier and the and my friends just fell on the floor laughing. Um, because that would have been bad in Casablanca.

SPEAKER_03: 13:37

I I think though, um I don't want to get sidelined into uh uh movie versus books or or versus VR or any of those things because I want to stay on point on on you, in fact, and um how you create these worlds. Um one is transported and I mean th this happens to me with uh quite a lot of books, obviously fiction predominantly, but I think as you say, you you co-create But for me what I really get out of reading a book and particularly a book that's imagining a different world and a different future like yours is I get to be inside someone else's head and create something that I'm not actually capable of creating myself. That's what I find so exciting about it. On that point, could you tell us when you first started creating what I would call other worlds or imagining worlds that you couldn't possibly have had any um insight into? Um how old were you and that t tell us a little bit about that trajectory?

SPEAKER_00: 14:47

Sure. I was a mad reader as a child. Uh uh reading books was uh a kind of a salvation and a beautiful entry into uh many, many worlds in my head. And I lived in a again a very boring California suburbia, and so the world was more real than books than in my daily life, except when I went to the beach and got in the ocean. So that was important too. Books and the ocean. And then and the thing is, as a kid, I was a geeky uh reader of a kid. Um I read murder mysteries, mysteries, locked room mysteries. This was 1930s stuff, and this was all happening in the 1960s, but I didn't know any better. I went to the library, I read what I read. Science fiction didn't hit me till I left for college, so I had this um unusual uh science fiction history because many a science fiction fan ran into it when they were seven and never looked back. For me, it was 18 and it was a college education. I was writing uh poems um because poetry is important to me and it's a great way for a writer to start. You do a page over and over again, it's crap, you go on to the next page, you do another poem, it's a learning exercise, and you never have to be good for it to be fun and instructive, like the power of a sentence. So I was writing poems, and suddenly I was reading science fiction, and I began to write science fiction. Something about the way my childhood home, Orange County, California, had turned into nothing but orange groves, and then it was a city. The orange groves were torn out, five acres a day, every day for 10 years. And this was shocking. But I was young, I was a child, and I wasn't shocked. It was just, oh, the world changes. Um, you know, it goes from agriculture to city almost uh before your very eyes. And so when I ran into science fiction, there was a sense of recognition, like a light bulb going off over your head in a cartoon. Ah, this is the literature that describes the way my life really feels. So again, that metaphor. The all the craziness of science fiction felt right to me because that was the way I had seen the world go as a child. So I began to write science fiction stories that were pretty ignorant, but they had in them the ocean and very quickly the mountains. And what was the future of the planet going to be like? This is an old science fiction question. It was not original to me, but when I ran into that part of science fiction, what I will call the planetary romance, you go to another planet and it's got wilderness and it's crazy interesting. Um, that was the wing of it that I began to write in almost immediately. And then, you know, this is this is the late 60s, but for me, really the 70s. Um a young person in the 70s was having a crazy time, more or less by definition, but especially college students, the Vietnam War, my life in the 70s was um interesting and I enjoyed it thoroughly, but it was quite crazy. Uh but it was a political education for me, uh a leftist education, working under Frederick Jameson at UC San Diego and getting into a kind of um California Buddhism and um Western Marxism and wilderness studies. This is my triad of strange influences combining to make my work. And the leftism led to this uh notion: let's write about better futures, where the political system is smarter, where people are getting to along together better. That's the optopian strand.

SPEAKER_02: 18:14

To to pick up on uh the notion of an optopia that you're mentioning here, you can do two things with this, or you can do many things with sci-fi, but I think one thing that was really inspiring for many people was the notion that uh the first kiss between uh black female and a white male was, you know, in Star Trek on TV, for instance. And that and that is an inspiring moment. But you what you can also do is you can get people shit scared so that they actually act, and that is what Ministry of the Future does really so well, because the problem of climate change is one that you know you're the the frog in the in the pot and it's bowling, and you don't realize until it really hits you, and and that's what's happening to us, and you wanted to just show that no, no, no, there's a devastating day at some point that is going to lead to millions of people dying. And how do you strike the balance in an optopia to make it then something that you know still inspires but also has the stick that gets people into action?

SPEAKER_00: 19:05

Well, um the first thing to say there is I don't know. It's a matter of instinctual choices. Um it would be you know, it's it's it would be like asking Natasha, how do you act in this particular scene? And then you realize, or it's like a it would be like a that's a sort of like asking a tennis player, how do you serve? You you just you do it.

SPEAKER_02: 19:34

Right.

SPEAKER_00: 19:34

Um and and and articulating, although you actually do have a craft and you do have a gift, you can't articulate it in in describing it. You can't say, Oh, I do X, then I do Y, then I do Z.

SPEAKER_02: 19:48

I like that.

SPEAKER_00: 19:49

But you know, being being a writer, you it is a matter of sentences and you have to think about it, and you also can revise in a way that you can't when you're serving in tennis or when you're enacting and singing. Although you can have another take, right? You do another take, you try it again, over and over again, reiteratively, until you get to where you like it or the director likes it. For me, being the actor and the director when I'm doing a book, there's a plausibility test and a way a matter of guessing. Uh if I were a reader, uh the feelings would be, or I've now got an audience that has read um many novels by me, they're used to me, I'm kind of a brand, um, friendly, comic, um, low-keyed. When if that writer punches you on the nose, smashes you in the mouth with a kind of a horror scene, that will be extra shocking. Why is Stan doing this? He's never done this before. So I'm not only just playing with Optopia in the abstract, but novel 20 from me with a known readership who uh it's only just my core readership, maybe 25% of my readers that keep coming back. And but those are the ones that I'm thinking about. Unfortunately, uh at this point, I have to do, I sometimes call it the needle in the eyeball. The sentence that is a needle in the eyeball. You don't, it lances in, you can't remove that phrase from your mind. It's awful, the scene is awful.

SPEAKER_03: 21:17

Um and you ring an alarm bell, essentially. And did you decide to bring that alarm bell before you started writing that book, or did it come upon you as you were writing it? Did you have a sort of self-realization of the situation that we were in, or was it very intentional right from the beginning?

SPEAKER_00: 21:34

Oh, it was intentional. Yeah. I read this report about wet bulb 35 in the medical literature, the scientific literature, they began to think about it in a way they hadn't before. This is actually news from about 2010 or 2015 that um that the human body cannot survive a combination of heat and humidity that's high enough unless they've got air conditioning, uh and and unless they've got electricity. But the grid goes down all the time. And at that point, because of climate change, this combination of heat and humidity that they called wet bulb 35, which is just an index, a uh heat and humidity index, everybody understands this now, and everybody's felt it in their own body. A hot day in the desert, you can handle 105, you're sweating, you're kind of cool, you're going, God damn, this is like being in an oven, but you don't feel threatened. A day of 90 degrees Fahrenheit, um, where the humidity is up above 50%, and you're thinking, man, I need to, I need to get shelter here. I'm gonna, I'm gonna overheat. Faces are flushed, sweating doesn't work. And hyperthermia is just as dangerous for uh life as hypothermia. So you you we all understand you could freeze to death, but we don't understand as well that you could cook to death or parboil or poach to death.

SPEAKER_01: 22:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 22:57

Uh such that you know you even get in the water, as in the last scene, the uh the last moment in the first scene of Ministry for the Future. If you get in the water and it's too hot and the air's too hot, it doesn't help you, you die anyway. The organ failure. It can happen within about within about five to ten hours if your body temperature is up above and you can't cool it down, organ failure quickly follows and you die. Well, this is actually news. And if I'd said this to you in 1995, you'd be uh you could you could uh with with some justification you could doubt that it's true. Well, you know, you just uh uh you you lay down in the shade, you take your clothes off, you you fan yourself with a with a fan, you're gonna be all right. No, it turns out that's not true. Because of these um temperatures and combinations of heat and humidity, one of the highest wet bulb temperatures ever recorded was outside of Chicago. So this isn't just the tropics. It it's everywhere where heat and humidity combine, which isn't everywhere for sure, but it's a lot of places. Um the Midwest and the Southeast and the east coast of the United States are very humid when they're hot. And so these heat domes and in Europe are killing people. And it's usually the uh people who are ill or old or very young or somehow vulnerable to the to the heat uh wet bulb heat temperatures. Well, okay. Let me put the context also for you. I I'll try to keep it uh brief. But in the time when I learned this, there were a group of people who were saying humanity will just adapt to climate change. Why all this worry? Why this attack on fossil fuels? We need energy, humans are adaptable, the temperature will get hotter, sure, but so what? This was a group group of um uh social scientists, humanists. They usually were not medical people, they usually did not work outdoors, but they were making these claims in academia and also in policy spaces. And it was a kind of let's adapt rather than mitigate. Uh, it was a philosophical position. Humans can adapt to anything. We're so adaptable. And it wasn't true. So I wanted the punch on the nose to land on a certain group of people who were being stupid and pretending they were smart. And it was economically convenient for them. So they get paid massively by the fossil fuel industry to say this stuff, but it turns out not to be true. And one of the reasons that we're stumbling into such a dangerous situation around the world with climate change is because there's an influential group of people saying, Oh, it's not that bad. We'll just adapt. But in fact, many people will die. I needed to tell that story, and then I wanted to continue this story out of a stubborn desire to keep it utopian. Okay, we're in a terribly dangerous situation. That's true. We could escape. That's also true. The could. If we were to do a lot of things right in the next few decades, well, what are those things? And why would we do them? And could uh explain all that in one novel. I wanted to put it all in one novel, and I wanted to squish it uh between, you know, no more trilogies, no more thousand pages. Admittedly, it's like five hundred pages, but I wanted to get the whole story in there of the danger and the escape from the danger by um struggle. And then the last thing that I wanted to say about Omen's question is this I've it had to be plausible to a reader at every single moment along the way. I wanted people reading it never to say, oh, that wouldn't happen. Every chapter had to be constructed as a little plausibility test. Yes, that could happen. I'll I'll give the novel this and I'll read onwards. Yes, I'll I'll agree that that could happen. And at no point do you get kicked out of the novel. But by the time you're done with 500 pages, you're in a very different space than we are now, and it's all happened without you ever having your impossibility flag go up. So that was the that was the working plan.

SPEAKER_02: 27:13

Yeah, and I think one element that you brought up in there is the terraforming, which by the way, you also bring up in the Mars trilogy, which I think a lot of people find very controversial as a as an idea and as a topic. But in the way you introduce it in that book, all of a sudden it makes complete sense, right? That the Indians would say, hey, no, we're gonna unilaterally do something here. Um, you know, I'm not gonna give too much about the book away, but I think introducing the notion of what needs to be done when shit hits the fan is an interesting one. The Mars trilogy is a little bit of a different story around terraforming. I'd love to get your take on terraforming and how you feel about the whole topic as such. And please define terraforming as well.

SPEAKER_00: 27:54

Sure. And I I appreciate this very much because it's actually been one of the main topics out of Ministry for the Future that has grown since the book came out. And I've been um both forced and inclined to follow it as a story. So uh when you get to Mars and and it has no atmosphere and it's totally poisonous, and you turn it into an earth-like space where you can walk around in shirt sleeves, that's called terraforming. It's a science fiction word. You form a terra. Uh and and it's uh an old story in science fiction, but Mars was given to us on a plate in 1976, and the terraforming people and the Mars people kind of became the same people, including Carl Sagan, saying, you know, if humans, our powers are not infinite, but uh there are some things that we can do as a technological species, and we could actually tweak Mars's climate and um melt its water, its its frozen water that's under the surface. There's a lot of water there, it turns out we could liquefy Mars. It's a the recipe for terraforming and the actual conditions on Mars were quite close to each other, and so th a little genre of its own, let's terraform Mars, blew up right before I took up the story and wrote it up in my Mars trilogy, which is a very detailed examination of that possibility. There are some little impossibilities hidden in that story that nobody knew about when I wrote it, so I'm I won't go there. So what we call it here on Earth, it's a bad joke. Let's terraform the earth. Well, it's already, it's what we want. Uh let's keep it going. Then it becomes called geoengineering. And geoengineering now has a very controversial term. Oh, we've already wrecked the earth. If we mess with it more, we'll make it even worse. This is a very common reaction. Um people who aren't quantitative or scientific or intend to uh distrust science or authority or the fossil fuel industries, all this is perfectly justified, but it ends up in an attitude that is saying we might as well not even try to. Fix things when actually we should try to fix things. And there are a few things that we can do. And as we don't reduce fossil fuel emissions, we have people like the Trump administration fronting for the fossil fuel industries, and there's actually a whole lot of not climate denialism. People say, oh, climate change is happening, but I'm not going to do anything about it. What are you going to say? Well, we're going to say that that's irresponsible and terrible, but we're in a battle. And geoengineering as a term is one of these battle terms. Should we we could cast dust into the high stratosphere using planes and imitate a volcanic eruption? This is what I portray in Ministry for the Future. I don't care if we can do spoilers all we want. The book is five years old. Sure. And since we could do that, that would cool the earth by a degree or two centigrade for about five years. Should we do that? Well, I don't know. And nobody knows. It's an argument to have. But then there are other things. Could we make more marine cloud layers like the ones I'm looking at now and bounce um solar radiation back into space before it arrives and cool the planet that way? Could we suck the water out from underneath the big ice sheets in Antarctica that are sliding into the sea that will raise sea level by astonishing and catastrophic levels? Should could we pull the water out from under those ice sheets and slow them back down and cool the planet in the meantime? And then lastly, very importantly, the CO2 that we've pumped out into the atmosphere over the last 200 years, could we suck it back down into forests, into uh rocks, into the ocean itself? Could we pull CO2 out of the atmosphere and thus cool the planet and save ourselves? Same with methane, of course. Uh well, these are all open questions and they all need to be discussed. This is my position on it, and it's I'm not uncommon in that. The resistance to the idea of doing it is a resistance, I think, from like 1980s thinking, 1990s thinking. Oh, the moral hazard. If we talk about this stuff, then the fossil fuel industry will get away with still doing what they do. Well, that was true in 1990. Now, since it was true and we didn't stop emitting fossil fuels into the atmosphere, basically a waste product, like not having a sewage treatment plant for our sewage, and then looking looking around a landscape that is completely immersed in sewage and saying, oh, we needed that uh sewage plant. We didn't install it. Now we've got to remove the sewage from everywhere, a very much more difficult project than having a sewage treatment plant in the first place. But we maybe can do it, and we maybe have to do it. So this uh is the political technological space that we're in right now. People are maybe not up to speed yet on it, still applying attitudes from 1990, but it needs to we need to be brought up to date in 2025 and discuss these things. So I've been talking about it a lot. I have written a taxonomy of geoengineering uh ideas and and what they might entail. Um it's become one of my specialties post-ministry for the future.

SPEAKER_03: 33:22

Well with the benefit of hindsight, um what would you sort of revise or or double down on in ministry if if you were if you were writing it now, if it was due out in 2026?

SPEAKER_00: 33:36

I I made a bad mistake to mention the word blockchain. Right, yeah. I would pull that. Okay. Um, because that brings in a world of use useless crap. And uh I will say the thing I should have said was uh cryptography, um using computers to uh digitalize all money, that's already been done. And blockchain is one specific technology, very cumbersome, very uh in some ways foolish and um c energy intensive with this proof of work. It's a it's one could say blockchain is in some ways stupid. And yet and so why did I use that word? Well, it was a mistake. If only I had said digital uh rather than blockchain, I would have saved myself a world of grief. Because for one thing, I'm not uh expert on any of this realm, and for another thing, it brings in a whole uh uh mare's nest of components.

SPEAKER_02: 34:42

But but can I say one thing that I really like that that you do, not only in in ministry but also in the Mars trilogy, also in um New York 2140, is you do show that the power of finance, right, is a very strong force that can be harnessed for good, right? And it's actually crucial in many ways to align incentives so that things actually fall into place, right? And and I do think that's really great. And I I love that because not a lot of sci-fi always does that. And I think this goes to the I think the near sci-fi, I guess ministry is near, but near and mid-level, not going super future where it's all, you know, I don't know, world of abundance or whatever. This stuff really matters, right?

SPEAKER_03: 35:24

Um it's funny you regret the blockchain thing because I have to say what I took away was this memory of CABA, of the metric being around um you getting uh credits. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 35:38

Um well, yes, you're right. But that's important. I'm still think that's one of the crucial aspects of the book and of our world um finance. And so it's just it's just that word blockchain is a very specific technology, and I should have just generalized it or futurized it and made up a word, or you just use something like digital tech. For sure, a carbon coin would be great. Yeah, exactly. It would be yeah, an accounting system. How much carbon did you draw down? How much is it worth? These uh there there would be a currency exchange, it would still be finance. And a lot of people are shocked and dismayed, but it's the world we're in. Yeah. And money, money matters so much. Right now, the UN, they'll be COP 30. I'll be there in Belém, Brazil, trying to help the UN. They're trying to help the world. What would make COP 30 more powerful and effective in the world? They're discussing that right now in detail to try to um bring COP 30 up to speed and help the world in this crisis that we're in. Well, what would help it is a gigantic bank account to pay people to do um the necessary work, right? If it wasn't just discussions and agreements and diplomacy, if it was actually grant giving with some deep pockets where you could say, if COP30 could say to the world, we're gonna spend uh 1 trillion US dollars per year on green programs, on decarbonizing programs, make your applications, we'll evaluate them, we'll put out the money, it's gonna be real money. The world would take notice and would instead of being a spectacle and a kind of a celebrity culture or a, you know, the there'd be a week there where COP 30 will be the headline item for the week. Everybody will say, oh my god, climate, and then they'll go away and the the diplomats will gnash their teeth and nothing will happen. And several nations there will be trying to screw things up. And because the COP system works on a consensus model where everybody has to agree to the final statement 100%, a unanimity model rather than a majority vote, the COP system is semi-broken and they want to fix it. But damn, it would help if there was uh um and and I in New York in the New York novel and in Ministry for the Future, I describe it as quantitative easing, which is the s the central banks making up this money from scratch and putting it out there and saying this money is valid. You can only do that in the US, the European Union, and in China, and maybe in the UK. You need really strong currencies. Japan to make up Japan to make up new money without causing deflation or inflation. Like a little country that's in trouble and in debt, it couldn't just print more money. That would devalue it. The big, important strong currencies, especially the US dollar, even though this is now the stupidest country, um, it's still the strongest currency.

SPEAKER_03: 38:45

Yeah. So I wanted to ask you about the stupidest country. What's it like being there right now? We won't call it the fall of an empire. I'm I mean, maybe you've always had this skepticism around the system. I know your politics, as you said, I'm sure you must have had quite strong feelings about um the sort of triumphalism or exceptionalism of America back in the 70s is uh I anyway, I'm curious about that journey, this last what is it? Forty no, fifty years?

SPEAKER_02: 39:21

Can I maybe put a spin on that as well and say that I think in most of your books, what I really find is interesting is that the protagonists are not necessarily American. Yeah. And the main countries are not necessarily always America, right? So you're assuming, you know, a different world order from the outset, right? And so sitting there in 2025 and the superpower that is faltering, maybe, I don't know, but whatever you want to call it. How do how do you feel as a science fiction writer looking at it now and given the things that you've written, how it's playing out?

SPEAKER_00: 39:54

Well, it's so messy and awful. But um, but I want to follow up by with Natasha's uh invitation to take it back a few decades. Um, and at the end of World War II, the United States was immensely powerful, and Bretton Woods was able to set up a world order in which it was first, and you could say first among equals, but you just really got to say first. But there was the Cold War. The Soviet Union objected. China had its revolution and objected. So we had the Cold War. And then in 1990, A, the Soviet Union fell apart and Russia became a kleptocracy and an oligarchy and a and a mess. China uh uh modernized and decided to use capitalism as a tool for its socialist purposes. This is Deng Jinping in the late 80s, after Mao's death, and so China became a third force immensely powerful. And then the European Union formed as at least an economic uh force of its own, a member state, uh new thing in history. So all this stuff was happening in the U.S. was stumbling around, very provincial, very ignorant of the world, very overconfident. Well, we're the U.S., we're always right, and then stumbling from one disaster to another. Vietnam, Iraq, um, the troubles that beset the superpower, because with the fall of the Soviet Union and China being still in a development stage, in the 1990s it looked like there was only one superpower and it went to people's heads in America, in American politics anyway. And in the general populace, there's an ignorance of the rest of the world. Many people don't have passports, many people have never left the United States, and many people's um um physical awareness of the world, but also their education about the rest of the world is is is uh very deficient. So it's a it's a provincial country, uh backward in its uh understanding of the more global situation. And so you get Trump. And Ministry for the Future was written in the first Trump administration. Yes. You know, it written written in 2019, and it looked like Trump was going to win in 2020. So I was very angry when I wrote Ministry for the Future, and you're right, I put the actors of consequence in Europe, and very often in ministry they're talking to each other, well, America will be no help at all here. They're like a big baby that we have to drag along. Um well that was basically right. So now Ministry for the Future still reads with a very solid ring of authenticity, even though remarkable things have happened since the book was written. Uh things I couldn't have predicted, um, uh rather mind-boggling, and yet the book still um serves as an interesting commentary on now because I wrote it during a Trump administration. Here, the um he won like uh 49% to 47%. Um it's a very tight majority, and the people who voted against him, many of us uh hate him with a passion for his fascistic tendencies and his vicious stupidity or his stupid viciousness, whichever way you want to put it, they're both true. Um I vacillate between which one describes him better because they're both quite true. There's something wrong in his head, and there's a lot of sleazy people who have jumped at the opportunity to be his um brown shirts, his black shirts. The people in New York on the ground who are behaving like fascist terrorists in LA. This is disgusting that there's that many people who uh want to do this kind of crap. But then the operating crew, his cabinet, the facilitators, his lawyers, this is a hall of shame. These people are going to go down in history as uh uh wannabe fascists who are actually quite incompetent as well. They can't run an agency, they don't know what they're doing, they're TV commentators running the Department of Defense. It's a shit show. And yet, 50% of Americans didn't like the idea in the first place, and the blue states that voted for Democrats and hate Trump are more than 60% of the U.S. economy. Something like 65% of the U.S. economy comes from the blue states. The 35% that includes a whole lot of people, the red states that voted for Trump, that said they wanted him, are A, not very important in economic terms, not huge like the blue states, and but they're numerous and it's a democracy, and it's also a representative system with this electoral college.

SPEAKER_01: 44:37

Right.

SPEAKER_00: 44:37

It's a mess. It's a mess. There's a, I would say a minority of the country is driving America into a destructive downward spiral. Now, the empire ending, that's a good thing. And empires are never good. There's a sense of owning other people, of controlling their work, of sucking the value out of their countries and taking it back to your country, the British Empire. It fell. And now Britain's a better place and a more international place than it was when there was a British Empire. Uh the American Empire was more economic than it was physical, but there are 800 American military bases scattered around the world, so it's physical as well as financial, and it's a bad thing. Now, if Trump destroys it by accident, thinking that he's expanding, or thinking that he doesn't care, and the people with him, we don't want to be um the policeman of the world, we don't want to be the financier of the world, we don't want to be the customer for the world, we want to be what they don't know. They have an image that is vague and foolish. But if the if the bad parts of the American Empire get destroyed by Trump by accident, it's kind of a hilarious irony that he's doing some good work along with all of the terrible stuff that he's doing, and he doesn't even want to do that good work. He would like to not do that good work, but accidentally he's giving the world over to an international crew that is um the powers are the European Union, China, um, Brazil, India, and the the fossil fuel powers are in terrible trouble. That fossil fuel is poison and it's being quickly beaten in the marketplace by solar power.

SPEAKER_01: 46:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 46:25

It's as simple as that. So all those countries are going down because their power was based on oil and coal and natural gas, and it it that's not gonna work anymore. This is why Russia is so desperate and so messed up. This is why the Middle East is such a mess.

SPEAKER_02: 46:42

Let me take this thread and pull at it. Basically, you're saying, okay, they don't know what they want, right? They don't want to be the world's customer, they don't want to be the world's policeman and all that. There are obviously some people who are trying to articulate what they want it to be. And I think the tech bros in Silicon Valley are one of the strong voices right now, right? And so their notion is this uh, I'd say world of abundance, right? And you're a sci-fi writer. The sci-fi that you write is not a world of abundance. I think I can tie this together with this H.G. Wells quote, which is um, when everything's possible, nothing's interesting, right? So the world of abundance sounds kind of boring sometimes, right? So uh are they completely misleading? Are they completely deluded? What's what's your thinking um when it comes to that?

SPEAKER_03: 47:26

Surely that's just a justification for being extractive. Anyway, sorry, go ahead.

SPEAKER_00: 47:32

Yeah, there's both going on at once. That's why it's so interesting. And uh this word abundance is maybe uh taking on too much weight so that it breaks, like like freedom or something. Um but nevertheless, um because it seems to speak to material wants. Abundance. What but but but but before abundance, what about adequacy? So abundance is trying to say that uh a rising tide floats all boats, and so I can be stupendously rich because there's so much abundance out there that eventually it's gonna trickle down to everybody. So there's a libertarian uh right-wing inequality, uh uh one percent ish version of abundance, which is I don't have to worry about being so stupendously rich when people are poor because there is abundance or there could be. And if there isn't abundance, it's somebody else's fault. That's abundance coming from the right. Coming from the moderate left, the Ezra Klein and his co-author, their book Abundance, um, why don't we create adequacy for everybody because we could? Well, that's a different statement, isn't it? And adequacy, what we need and what abundantly is first, as a as a first step, housing for everybody, food, housing, clean water, toilets, electricity, health care, education, and then um a feeling of political uh representation that you that you matter. These everybody needs to have adequately. And so I would say the word abundance is now a red flag for people uh saying, look, everything's okay. It's the only thing getting in the way of us of being great is regulations. Um let's just go ahead and build crazily. And these goddamn Democrats and environmentalists have created a world where we can't build like we used to build. We built the Empire State Building in one year. Why can't we build high speed rail from Bakersfield from Los Angeles to San Francisco? It's because of regulations, which are basically a democratic thing. So uh a Democrat like Ezra Klein's saying abundance is a political mistake. He's made it, he's naive, he's young, he's smart as could be, he's one of the greatest interviewers on earth. But as a political thinker, him, all the tech bros, they are oversimple. They want one solution that fits everything. They're not complex thinkers, they're not historical thinkers very well. They they say they are, but their their understanding of history, to my way of thinking, anyway, is simplistic and and leads to an acceptance of inequality. Oh, inequality is just an accident and these regulators getting in the way. We we could we have such technological abilities that we could create abundance for everybody. Well, damn. Well, how about creating adequacy for everybody? In other words, public housing, um uh uh uh some kind of maybe universal basic income. I I mean, I'm not absolutely down with any of the um more obvious plans for creating adequacy, but sustainable development goals, the idea that nobody should be going hungry at night, like two billion people on this planet are, that it's more important to focus on adequacy for all, and then also tax the hell out of the rich. There should be a floor and a ceiling to human prosperity. The floor should be for everybody is at adequacy. The ceiling is once you've got uh assets of, say, 10 million US dollars, you should be uh intensively taxed and um be just like everybody else, except that you've got more. So this is my politics in a nutshell. And it all comes out of, but abundance is a good way to get into it. Uh what are they really talking about?

SPEAKER_02: 51:38

I I agree. I I wanted to put a different spin on the question, though. That uh you sometimes say you're the defense lawyer for science, right? And and I'd love to unpick that. And why do I bring this up? Is because I do feel that and there's this book by David Deutsch, The Beginning Affinity. I bring it up a lot. But but it it's just um it's just that when we use the scientific method and the notion of science, we can really invent everything that is physically possible, that is within the laws of physics in a way, right? And so it does feel like it is the driving force to abundance in some shape or form. Now, obviously, it's co-opted by this uh particular group in a way that is distasteful. But but as a science fiction writer and as a defense lawyer for science, I would love you to talk a little bit about the value system of science, the fact that it actually starts on the left in a way and is aligned with your political thinking, which I don't think a lot of people actually realize.

SPEAKER_00: 52:31

Well, I love this, and thank you for uh leading me down this line. I would have always thought and have been writing consistently about science and the scientific enterprise as a utopian effort in the real world that tries to um slip by politics and just say, let's make better medicine, let's make more food, let's make uh more powerful protection for humans against death and disaster. And so science has this utopian underpinning in its basic value system. We need to understand the world uh realistically, without an overlay of human preconditions or ideologies or religious positions. How does it really work? And then how can we manipulate how things really work? These questions I love. Um I'm married to a scientist, I've spent 40 years watching scientists think and interact as a community, and I'm absolutely filled with admiration for it. It is a living utopian force in this world. And then the Trump administration attacking science itself is seriously cutting off your nose to spite your face because science is what gives them all their um food, their shelter, and their toys. These are uh scientific discoveries. And you're thinking, wait, food? But the Green Revolution, eight billion people. Growing enough food on this planet to feed eight billion, even in the inadequate way we're doing it now, is a scientific technological accomplishment of agriculture. Modern agriculture. And and it has to be said, fossil fuels were really a big part of it by oil for fertilizer and tractors. So um you never want to be too condemnatory of uh moves in the past that look like they were good that then turned out to have uh a downside, like uh the sewage in the atmosphere. Um it's done. Science has done its best, but at all points there's been a power gradient that you could just talk about as feudalism or the 1%. The ways in which we talk about massive inequality somewhat disguise how awful and horrible it is. That a few people live like gods, and there are many people in cardboard shacks without toilets. This truth is so appalling that everything else should be cast in the shadow of that truth. So are we a civilized world? Uh are we a civilization? No, we're a technologized feudalist state that is actually quite horrid. Um admitting that and then working on it, well, science has been trying. It's just that it can be bought, it can be uh directed, it can be overruled, it can even be wrecked. The attempt to uh wreck the National Institute of Health and the National Science Foundation in the United States by defunding them, by kicking out of their buildings, by firing their people and hiring incompetents to take their place to wreck science, this is um shocking uh in in its nihilism and its misunderstanding of the the welfare of even the people doing the destruction. I don't understand these poor people. They really are um uh there's a suicidal homicidal. There's a kind of Goethe Damerung. If I can't have everything I want and everybody tell me I'm great, I'm gonna wreck the whole world. There's an attitude there that is kind of disgusting. But back to science, the force for good. You can't go against science for long before you begin to wreck your own lives. You can't buy a cure that doesn't exist. So these rich people are thinking, well, I'm I'm rich, I can get private health care. But that health care won't include the cure that would have saved your child. So um these people are are uh rather shocking in how badly they understand how things work. And science is something to hug, to say, um, okay, it's human, it's not perfect, they're a bunch of geeks, they're hilariously bad at certain things, but they are also um doing the work, the real work, of understanding this world and trying to make it better for us. So, yes, it's been fun to be a science fiction writer, partly because I get to write about science.

SPEAKER_03: 57:06

Yeah, they're they're my heroes. You always say that you're not a scientist and that you're an English major and that you are a writer, which is of course all true. But I love the fact that you build this beautiful bridge between what a lot of people separate, as you've just said, discarding of one of the most valuable resources and assets. Um and in fact, I I remember being at a a dinner or sort of conference where an awful lot of the scientists were saying that they were coming to live in Europe so that they could pursue and continue their research and they were getting funding from elsewhere. It wasn't nearly as much as they would have gotten in the States, but there was just this sort of degradation of twenty years of research in a specific area, which of as you said, would at some point in time affect the lives of the very people who are discrediting um their endeavours. Anyway.

SPEAKER_00: 58:28

Uh there's so many stories been told, and they begin to get a little repetitive. Novels and um movies. Where's the news stories? And then science discovers that you know humans were walking in New Mexico 23,000 years ago. It's a news story. Oh my god. New stories are are like fountaining out of the sciences. And if you're looking for news stories to tell as a as a storyteller, then the sciences are just this cornucopia of new stories. So I've been lucky in that perception and and lucky in many, many ways. What is that?

SPEAKER_03: 59:02

I want to actually Sorry. No, I you there's some quote that we scribbled down that you said um most fiction is about the seven deadly sins, whereas science fiction is about everything else.

SPEAKER_00: 59:16

Well, that's a I don't recall saying that, but that's a good quote. I'll claim it anyway.

SPEAKER_03: 59:21

Maybe it's not you, is it someone else?

SPEAKER_00: 59:25

It's good. It's good. And and um, but and also the seven deadly sins never go away.

SPEAKER_01: 59:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 59:31

And the the scientific enterprise is shot through with these stories. Um and so uh like I'm doing a deep dive into John Le Carre, and um, you know, these are spy novels, but the seven deadly sins, and especially um since they're spy novels, he needs to write about betrayal. But it isn't just spies betraying no their spies, it's everybody at all times. The risk and the dangers of betrayal and of trust, the opposite. So, okay, look already. He's always about trust and betrayal. Science fiction is always about what we could do with what we know. And that's a big question, and uh and it's a gigantic playground for good news stories.

SPEAKER_02: 1:00:22

How do you feel about AI? I mean, you're depicting it in interesting ways in in your books. It is fallible, it is very different than what again, I would say the Silicon Valley Brigade would say AGIs in 2030, right? Like it's not at all like that in in your books. How do you feel about the current progress that we've made there? I I know your opinion on it, so I just want you to articulate it. And maybe that has changed actually since last I've I've heard you speak about it. But uh, you know, we've making some progress clearly, but directionally, what how do you feel about it?

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:56

Well, I'm interested, but I'm an outsider uh um because uh there's so much that escapes me in the technical details of it. But I'm uh it's I'm always asked, and I as a science fiction writer, I need to say um AI, especially okay, AGI in 2030, artificial general intelligence, that's a science fiction story.

SPEAKER_02: 1:01:15

Yeah, it is.

SPEAKER_00: 1:01:16

It will not come true. Uh these stories are everywhere now. But also um the science fiction story of AI as an agent, in other words, as a consciousness that makes decisions of what it wants. This comes from 2001, a Space Odyssey. But it's way older than that. But it's if Hal's famous articulation of that moment when um he says, Dave, I can't do that. Um, and you realize you've got a malevolent actor on your hands somehow. That story has infected our minds. And the AI that we actually have can be put to malevolent uses, but it itself, right now, does not have agency. Although, as even as I say that, there are reports coming in that there are certain programs that when you instruct them to shut down, they try to seem to dodge that.

SPEAKER_01: 1:02:05

Right.

SPEAKER_00: 1:02:05

So self self-preservation. Is that true, or is that another um hallucination of our own because we are constantly attributing agency because these sentences come out?

SPEAKER_03: 1:02:17

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:02:18

We are, yeah, yeah. We want it in a way, or but we're scared of it too. So um uh just to regard all statements about AI as being science fiction stories that we're telling ourselves, and uh be aware that it's both a metaphor and a prediction, like I was saying, and then interrogate it. A lot of it is hype because you can get massive amounts of investment. You can get more money for an AI proposal to um get closer to AGI than you can get for saving the biosphere, right?

SPEAKER_02: 1:02:52

Yes, for climate. 100%.

SPEAKER_00: 1:02:54

And but this is a tech bro mistake. This is um uh a bunch of notice how they are almost all men. Young men, wealthy young men who think that their luck comes from their brilliance. And they don't oh but that that's overgeneralizing because I have now met quite a few Silicon Valley people who are fully aware that it was the luck of being at the right place with the right uh product.

SPEAKER_02: 1:03:25

I agree.

SPEAKER_00: 1:03:27

And so you can't over-generalize, but there are some famous ones who are um obviously gone uh bonkers. Uh uh and and and are pronouncing in the way that it used to happen to emeritus scientists. They would know one science really well, then they would go emeritus and they would begin to pronounce on philosophy and politics, right? And it was clear that they were as bad as anyone else. Well, the uh there's a good book called More of Everything by uh Adam Becker, and he's done a deep dive, and it'd be worth talking to him into what the tech bros say and why they say it, and how when you push them hard enough, even the uh what what do they call it, ethical altruism or altruism?

SPEAKER_02: 1:04:17

Yeah, effective altruism.

SPEAKER_00: 1:04:19

Yeah, yeah. Um their core beliefs are horseshed. Um and they again they're lying to themselves. And we I don't want to go into too much detail about that because it actually takes a somewhat detailed explanation. But Adam Becker has done the work.

SPEAKER_02: 1:04:34

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 1:04:34

And I um so there's there's um yeah, it's worth it's worth talking to him.

SPEAKER_02: 1:04:40

As we are on book recommendations, and I just you know, I again I have to ask you this question before we wrap. Um, what are your favorite science fiction novels? I I'm a big fan, I think you mentioned also Court Vonnegut. I'm I'm a big fan of his. Uh and I mean Asimov, yes, for many reasons, but like Vonnegut in in particular, I think, is is one of my favorites. Uh, but you tell me yours.

SPEAKER_00: 1:05:02

Sure. And uh these are different kinds of writers. Asimov's from the 40s and he's golden age. Vonnegut is from the 50s and he's the counterculture. And I love both of them.

SPEAKER_02: 1:05:11

Yes.

SPEAKER_00: 1:05:12

Um, I I I like a whole lot of science fiction, but to um to get to people who are both entertaining and educational, I would say uh Corey Doctoro is fantastically good, Ken McLeod up there in Scotland, um um Ian McDonald in North Ireland. Actually, British science fiction is really good. Nice. Um as a general statement, I would say that the cutting edge of British science fiction is way ahead of the cutting edge of American science fiction, which is kind of m morphed into fantasy and kind of a um they don't they haven't captured the the lessons that Ian Banks taught British science fiction. They uh um so um uh almost any science fiction whose name begins with M C or M-I-C, the Macs. The Macs are fantastic.

SPEAKER_03: 1:06:04

Um what about uh where are the new Stanislav's Lems?

SPEAKER_00: 1:06:09

Oh gosh, I love him so much. I'm a Lem um completist. Um he's um uh weird but wonderful, a great uh science fiction writer. And he's kind of a pure science fiction writer. He's really interested in the ideas. He he scorned the idea of individual characterization being particularly important. He's like Wells in that. His characters are types, but his stories are fantastically interesting. Um the Strogotskys are worth reading too. These Soviet brothers, the uh Arcady and Boris Strogotsky. These are again marvelous science fiction stories.

SPEAKER_02: 1:06:48

Well, you added a lot to my to-do list there. That's great.

SPEAKER_00: 1:06:52

Yeah. Send me also uh uh to do I I love to read um and I I've been getting some suggestions from Natasha, but send me books that you think will help me or entertain me.

SPEAKER_02: 1:07:04

My pleasure. I I'll I'll do that. I'll try my best. But uh I I really appreciate you taking the time stand. This was a romp through so many different topics and very surprising and entertaining, and uh really enjoy your books as well. So thanks for for all your writing. I I can't wait for whatever else is coming next.

SPEAKER_00: 1:07:21

Oh, my pleasure.

SPEAKER_03: 1:07:22

Thank you so much. I dearly wish that we were there with you on that uh bank of the lake rather than on Zoom. But um you you brought us into your world, so thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00: 1:07:33

Oh, it's a great pleasure, and I look forward to uh seeing you both again in person and we'll party again.