Speaker 1: So thanks very much guys for coming on the show.
Speaker 1: And before we dig in, I want to do my
Speaker 1: due diligence and point out that I'm the only one
Speaker 1: on this call to not have won a Hugo Award,
Speaker 1: because Kelly also won a Hugo.
Speaker 2: If you have fewer than three, it's like you don't
Speaker 2: have one.
Speaker 3: Thanks Diy. You know he did write us the night
Speaker 3: we got our Hugo to tell us that.
Speaker 1: Wow, he just rounded you down to zero Hugos. All right, well,
Speaker 1: welcome to that less than three Hugo club. Kelly, thanks me,
Speaker 1: you and most of the planet.
Speaker 3: We'll drink after this.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's The Extraordinary Universe. I'm Daniel Watson.
Speaker 1: I'm a particle physicist, a huge sci fi reader, and
Speaker 1: a big fan of the Expanse.
Speaker 3: I'm Kelly Smith. I study parasites and write about space,
Speaker 3: and I love the Expanse so much because it's got
Speaker 3: like parasites and.
Speaker 1: Space parasites in space space. So, do you only read
Speaker 1: science fiction novels that contain weird, evil micro organisms?
Speaker 3: Unfortunately, No, there's just not that many to choose from.
Speaker 3: But no, I love all sci fi. What's your favorite
Speaker 3: sci fi story.
Speaker 1: Oh, I'm a big fan of almost anything that is
Speaker 1: hard science fiction that you know, picks a set of
Speaker 1: rules and really follows it. I read a lot of
Speaker 1: science fiction, though. I'm a big fan of Ian Banks,
Speaker 1: Alistair Reynolds, Adrian Tchaikovski, and The Expanse. Of course, I
Speaker 1: just can't get enough.
Speaker 3: I love the Expanse. I also really like the Strugatsky Brothers.
Speaker 3: They were writing during this like Soviet Union time, and
Speaker 3: they've got this book called Roadside Picnic, which just like
Speaker 3: guts me every time, and it's just such a interesting
Speaker 3: world and like also kind of gets be sort of
Speaker 3: teary eyed. Anyway, it's it's great. So I don't necessarily
Speaker 3: love the hard stuff. I just love a world that
Speaker 3: is created that is interesting, where they're consistent with the rules.
Speaker 3: That's all I want is consistency in a world that's
Speaker 3: been made that's interesting.
Speaker 1: Another subcategory of sci fi that I love is science
Speaker 1: fiction written by professors. For example, I love verner Vinge,
Speaker 1: and he was a professor in San Diego until very recently,
Speaker 1: And of course I love that because it makes me
Speaker 1: feel like maybe one day I could also write science fiction,
Speaker 1: but also because it's good.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I happen to know that you are a good
Speaker 3: writer in a variety of different genres. Yes, you got this,
Speaker 3: we'll see.
Speaker 1: But today we're not talking about Daniel's science fiction preferences.
Speaker 1: We're talking to actual, massively successful, very influential writers of
Speaker 1: the Expanse.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we somehow manage to get the expans guys on
Speaker 3: our show. We're super excited and let's just dig right
Speaker 3: in so we can spend most of the time talking
Speaker 3: to them exactly.
Speaker 1: So, for those of you who aren't familiar with the series,
Speaker 1: it's a set of books set in the near future
Speaker 1: where humanity has colonized the Solar System but effectively split
Speaker 1: into a few groups folks living on Earth, folks living
Speaker 1: on Mars, folks living in the Belt. Then they each
Speaker 1: end up with their own different culture, and there's lots
Speaker 1: of fun space battles where they really take care of
Speaker 1: the physics and the gravity, and then there's some unexpected
Speaker 1: stuff that happens.
Speaker 3: And they're just so good at character writing. All right,
Speaker 3: let's do this. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.
Speaker 3: Today we have the authors of the Expanse, Ty Frank
Speaker 3: and Daniel Abraham. And instead of like telling you about
Speaker 3: how they got like a hugo and maybe more than
Speaker 3: one Hugo, maybe four or something like that, I'm gonna
Speaker 3: tell you the story about how we all met because
Speaker 3: it explains how Daniel and Kelly managed to land the
Speaker 3: Expanse guys on our show, which is a pretty lucky
Speaker 3: catch for us. So many years ago, back when it
Speaker 3: was possible for little nerds like Zach and I to
Speaker 3: afford booths. At San Diego Comic Con, we had a
Speaker 3: booth for our Sketch Comedy theater, our sketch comedy show,
Speaker 3: SMBC Theater, and Ty came to our booth not to
Speaker 3: tell us that we were funny, but to tell us
Speaker 3: that our friend James was funny. But James wasn't there,
Speaker 3: and so he got stuck talking to us. And it
Speaker 3: turns out that Ty has a really brilliant, amazing wife,
Speaker 3: and so we all got along pretty well. And then
Speaker 3: when Zach and I moved across the country, we asked
Speaker 3: if we could stop at their place on the way,
Speaker 3: and they said yes, and we brought our cats with us,
Speaker 3: and we made a big mistake because the cats were
Speaker 3: in the guest room and I opened up the door
Speaker 3: real quick and they both ran out and they hid
Speaker 3: in their fireplace, and then I went to try to
Speaker 3: get him out of there, and they ran across their
Speaker 3: house and put little kiddy footprints all over the place.
Speaker 3: We haven't been back to their place yet. Probably those
Speaker 3: two pieces of information are not related, but maybe they are.
Speaker 3: But Ti mentioned during that trip that he had like
Speaker 3: a space upper thing that was going to come out soon,
Speaker 3: and it turned out that was the expanse. So, you know,
Speaker 3: after hanging out with us, he became a really big deal.
Speaker 3: Maybe correlated, who knows, But importantly, he virtually introduced me
Speaker 3: to Daniel, who has a book called Unclean Spirits, which
Speaker 3: has a main character who's a parasitologist who is both
Speaker 3: attractive and very smart. Parasitologists are not usually portrayed in
Speaker 3: that light. If we're portrayed at all, we're kind of
Speaker 3: like creepy. And when I mentioned this to my husband,
Speaker 3: he pointed out that book also has vampires and is fiction.
Speaker 3: You know, So if anybody needs someone to rain on
Speaker 3: their parade, I can give you my husband's phone number.
Speaker 3: So anyway, Daniel and Tye are both wonderful, amazing people.
Speaker 3: It's so much fun to have them on the show.
Speaker 3: They write together as James sa Corey for The Expanse
Speaker 3: and other projects. They also do amazing work separately. Welcome
Speaker 3: to the show.
Speaker 4: Thank you very much, happy to be here.
Speaker 3: Is that about how you remember it?
Speaker 4: Ty?
Speaker 3: Did you ever get to meet James?
Speaker 2: Yeahs James. James is in many of your videos wearing
Speaker 2: the Game of Thrones T shirt I gave him.
Speaker 3: Oh nice, Oh fantastic. He's also on a lot of
Speaker 3: our videos not wearing a shirt at all, so lots
Speaker 3: of options there.
Speaker 2: He's very brave. He's a very brave comediic actor.
Speaker 3: Yes he is.
Speaker 4: He is.
Speaker 3: All right, So Daniel, how about you kick it off
Speaker 3: with the first question.
Speaker 1: So we're going to ask you lots of science questions
Speaker 1: about the universe you created. But first I'm going to
Speaker 1: calibrate where you are in the sort of science fiction
Speaker 1: spectrum by asking you a classic science fiction philosophy science question,
Speaker 1: which is about Star Trek transporters. In your opinion, does
Speaker 1: a star Trek transporter actually relocate you or does it
Speaker 1: kill you and re materialize you somewhere else?
Speaker 2: I mean it clearly kills you because it disintegrates you,
Speaker 2: so your dad, and then it makes and then it
Speaker 2: makes a perfect copy of you. But there's an argument
Speaker 2: to be made that that happens every time you fall
Speaker 2: asleep too.
Speaker 4: So this is like arguing canonicity. This is like saying,
Speaker 4: is Luke really you know? There is a pattern, the
Speaker 4: pattern is recreated elsewhere consciousness is an illusion. Consciousness can
Speaker 4: be two illusions. Consciounces can be eight illusions. Consciousness can
Speaker 4: be illusions in different places. You don't actually exist to
Speaker 4: begin with, So what does that even mean?
Speaker 3: WHOA, This got philosophical fast.
Speaker 4: That's what I was saying.
Speaker 2: The best and darkest transporter story ever written is by
Speaker 2: James Patrick Kelly, fantastic one of the best short story
Speaker 2: writers in side fiction. He wrote a story called Think
Speaker 2: Like a Dinosaur, which was later adapted and turned into
Speaker 2: an episode of The Outer Limits in the nineties, and
Speaker 2: it is the best darkest transporter story ever written. So
Speaker 2: you should definitely if you're into like does the Transporter
Speaker 2: kill you should read that one.
Speaker 3: Think Like a Dinosaur is on my list.
Speaker 1: Now, Well, what I love about this question is that
Speaker 1: the teleporter in Star Trek was, of course invented in
Speaker 1: the sixties or conceived of much earlier. And now that
Speaker 1: we know something more about quantum mechanics and quantum information
Speaker 1: and the no cloning theorem, you know, science has actually
Speaker 1: informed the philosophy of this question. So it's a lot
Speaker 1: of fun.
Speaker 2: Any process that begins with your own disintegration should be
Speaker 2: should be questioned heavily.
Speaker 4: You're as if there were as if there was a
Speaker 4: standard you.
Speaker 1: This is also an argument to be made from a
Speaker 1: particle physics perspective, that all of your quantum objects are
Speaker 1: interacting constantly and therefore transforming, and the process of being
Speaker 1: de materialized and materialized somewhere else is equivalent to the
Speaker 1: process of just moving forward through time as quantum fields
Speaker 1: ripple with energy. So then I have to agree with
Speaker 1: the other Daniel that like, maybe you don't even exist
Speaker 1: in any sense.
Speaker 4: This is a problem of narrative framing. The actual issue
Speaker 4: here is that what's going on doesn't fit gracefully into
Speaker 4: our language, and that's our language's fault.
Speaker 2: When I first met Daniel, he was very powerfully on
Speaker 2: the free will side. I think years of association with
Speaker 2: beating him down to the mechanistic universe.
Speaker 4: No no, no, no, that is not true. I am
Speaker 4: still firmly in the free Will universe.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because that's what the universe has programmed you to say.
Speaker 3: I'm going to pull us back a little. So when
Speaker 3: did you two meet, speaking of meeting each other, and
Speaker 3: how did it transform into a writing partnership at.
Speaker 4: That would have been two thousand and.
Speaker 3: Six, Bubonica, Is this like a festival ce celebrating the
Speaker 3: bubonic plague?
Speaker 4: Where basically yes, it's the local science fiction convention in Albuquerque.
Speaker 4: And because we still have the black plague in New Mexico,
Speaker 4: we have Perry Rodent as our mascot and we just
Speaker 4: kind of lean into the dark.
Speaker 2: It's also the only state in the country where you
Speaker 2: are likely to get a hemorrhagic fever.
Speaker 4: Well not likely. We are, however, number two in the
Speaker 4: world for necrotizing fasci itis.
Speaker 1: This also a huntavirus. Are you a New Mexican, Daniel,
Speaker 1: I didn't realize I am.
Speaker 4: No, I was. I was born here. Tay actually came
Speaker 4: through briefly and that's where we met and started the project,
Speaker 4: and then he fled to someplace with water and greenery.
Speaker 1: I grew up in Los Alamo, so I'm in New
Speaker 1: Mexican as well.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Los Alamos. That actually explains a lot right there.
Speaker 3: All right, so you met at the Bubonic Plague Festival, Yes,
Speaker 3: And then how did that turn into a writing partnership.
Speaker 4: Well, there were a couple of things. We had a
Speaker 4: friend in common who was in the critique group that
Speaker 4: I was part of at the time, and Ty had
Speaker 4: sold a short story and was therefore eligible to come
Speaker 4: play in the critique group and did so we knew
Speaker 4: each other through that. And Tie also, I don't know,
Speaker 4: out of the kindness of his heart, saw the sad,
Speaker 4: lonely Daniel, new dad working too hard guy and said
Speaker 4: one I had the greatest productivity and invited me over
Speaker 4: to play video games at his place on Wednesdays.
Speaker 3: And you said yes, yeah, no.
Speaker 4: I love playing video games and he hooked me on
Speaker 4: left for dead. So then I was screwed and I
Speaker 4: had to go get my fix.
Speaker 3: And then the Expanse was the Expanse, your first writing project, together.
Speaker 4: With some other little stuff kind of along the way,
Speaker 4: but the Expanse was definitely the big one.
Speaker 1: And how does your process work writing together? Does one
Speaker 1: of you outline the other one flesh it out. Do
Speaker 1: you guys brainstorm together? You guys both editing the Google
Speaker 1: doc at the same time.
Speaker 2: Daniel's in charge of consonants and I am in charge
Speaker 2: of vowels.
Speaker 3: That's got to be a slow process.
Speaker 2: Not compared to some Yeah, not when you're typing on
Speaker 2: the same keyboard.
Speaker 4: Generally, we outlined together than one of us to do
Speaker 4: the first draft to a chapter and the other guy
Speaker 4: will edit the first draft and we'll just kind of
Speaker 4: iterate through that.
Speaker 3: Who's the outline guy or does it alternate?
Speaker 4: Oh no, there's no outlining is a group project.
Speaker 3: And my collaboration was Zach, I'm the outline guy, So
Speaker 3: we don't have but anyway, all right, So your books
Speaker 3: are so well written that when I was researching for
Speaker 3: my book on space settlement, I was blown away by
Speaker 3: how many times they came across citations of the expanse
Speaker 3: as though it were a documentary, and that kind of
Speaker 3: blew my mind. And so was it important to you
Speaker 3: that you created a world that followed the rules as
Speaker 3: we know it or not? Really? What do you think
Speaker 3: is it important to follow rules or make up your own?
Speaker 2: We get a lot of credit for being hard sci
Speaker 2: fi that isn't actually accurate. There's kind of there's only
Speaker 2: two rules that Daniel and I never broke in the Expanse,
Speaker 2: and because every other science fiction project breaks those tool
Speaker 2: rules constantly, we seemed like weird and exotic. In the Expanse,
Speaker 2: gravity works the way gravity really works. So spaceships in
Speaker 2: the Expanse are not like ocean liners, where the deck
Speaker 2: runs the length of the ship. Spaceships in the expans
Speaker 2: are built like office towers, so that the deck is
Speaker 2: below you in the direction that the thrust is coming from.
Speaker 2: So when the engine fires, you are pushed into the
Speaker 2: deck rather than being slid backwards the whole length of
Speaker 2: the ship and into a wall. So that was one
Speaker 2: way that one thing that we never broke, And the
Speaker 2: other one we never broke is that light speed is
Speaker 2: a rule, and so there's no faster than light communications.
Speaker 2: So if you send a message to your buddy you're
Speaker 2: on Earth and you send a message your buddy out
Speaker 2: by Jupiter, it takes three hours to get there, and
Speaker 2: by the time you get a reply, it's been six
Speaker 2: hours of past. And because every other sci fi thing
Speaker 2: just hand waves those two things away, there's gravity plating
Speaker 2: or there's hyperwave communication. We seemed very exotic and hard
Speaker 2: because of that, But the rest of it we just
Speaker 2: kind of were you.
Speaker 4: Know, a lot of the science in there came from
Speaker 4: the stuff we were already kind of excited by too.
Speaker 4: So I mean Ty got Ganymede right because he'd been
Speaker 4: playing with astronomy and knew that Ganymede was the place
Speaker 4: that had the magnetosphere and kind of knew what magnetosphere
Speaker 4: were and did so we had that level of kind
Speaker 4: of introductory knowledge, and that level of introductory knowledge has
Speaker 4: a bunch of cool stuff in it, So we stole
Speaker 4: all the cool stuff, and I think that also kind
Speaker 4: of work toward benefit in plausibility.
Speaker 2: I mean, we do sort of ignore the fact that
Speaker 2: anybody living on Ketymiede would be massively irradiated by Jupiter's
Speaker 2: enormous radiation belt. Yep, you know. So, I mean there's
Speaker 2: plenty of stuff you just sort of ignore. And in
Speaker 2: your book on Mars, you know, there's a ton of
Speaker 2: reasons why you wouldn't want to live on Mars, but
Speaker 2: it's cool if people live on Mars. So in the book,
Speaker 2: people live on Mars, even though there's like no reason
Speaker 2: to go there and it would be a.
Speaker 3: Terrible I'm going to push back a little though, because
Speaker 3: you know, Ty was like, oh, we only followed these
Speaker 3: two rules. But I think it wasn't just that you
Speaker 3: got all the physics right, is that you also thought
Speaker 3: through people so well and governing so well, and how
Speaker 3: the environment would impact the way that people interact with
Speaker 3: each other and how they can be governed and stuff
Speaker 3: like that, And so it wasn't just the physics. It
Speaker 3: was you thought through all the different science fields, the biology,
Speaker 3: the psychology, the sociology.
Speaker 4: A lot of that's just you know, Ty had read
Speaker 4: a lot of history, and a lot of the issues
Speaker 4: that you see in the Expanse are things that are
Speaker 4: science fiction reskinnings of how humans have been working since
Speaker 4: we stopped being monkeys. We're a very consistent species. The
Speaker 4: stupid shit we do we have been doing forever, and
Speaker 4: we just projected that into the future.
Speaker 2: Yeah. No, I mean that people ask like, what is
Speaker 2: the theme of the expanse, And you know, the serious
Speaker 2: one is that tribalism is bad, But the joking one
Speaker 2: is people do the same stupid shit over and over
Speaker 2: and over and have done for the last two hundred
Speaker 2: and fifty thousand years that we've been in this shape, So.
Speaker 1: You guys pick these two bits of physics to be
Speaker 1: sort of strict about, and that really changed, like the
Speaker 1: experience of the characters on the ship and what it's
Speaker 1: like to live in low g and Hygi and the
Speaker 1: societies that form there. But why did you decide, unlike
Speaker 1: many science fiction writers to be hardcore about this is it?
Speaker 1: Because you felt like these it changes the stories, and
Speaker 1: those stories hadn't been told yet.
Speaker 4: Because we had an alien weird that comes through pathway
Speaker 4: through book one, and if you don't have things grounded
Speaker 4: before that comes in, then it comes in without any impact.
Speaker 4: The fact that we had something miraculous and strange happen
Speaker 4: halfway through the book meant up until then you couldn't.
Speaker 4: It's a necessity of the narrative that we approach it
Speaker 4: that way.
Speaker 2: The best example of that, I think in modern fiction
Speaker 2: is Game of Thrones, Georgia R. Martin's first novel. Because
Speaker 2: it's a fantasy book, but it's not like every other
Speaker 2: fantasy book. There are no wizards, nobody's casting spells, there's
Speaker 2: no elves or trolls. It's just people and he seduces
Speaker 2: you into believing you are reading a medieval history. It's
Speaker 2: kings and it's princes, and it's fighting families, and everybody
Speaker 2: just uses medieval weapons and they live in castles and
Speaker 2: they ride horses, and by about the midway point of
Speaker 2: the book, you could be reading a history of medieval England,
Speaker 2: and I mean, it would feel exactly the same. And
Speaker 2: then just about the end, Danny Targerion walks into a
Speaker 2: fire holding three rocks, and when the fire goes away,
Speaker 2: she comes out and she's holding three baby dragons, and
Speaker 2: it feels amazing. It feels like this miraculous moment. But
Speaker 2: the only reason it feels like that is because everything
Speaker 2: up till then has felt like medieval England, and so
Speaker 2: it feels super weird. If you're writing a story in
Speaker 2: which you know half the people are wizards and they
Speaker 2: cast fireball spells and the people fly around on flying
Speaker 2: carpets and three dragons show up at the end, it
Speaker 2: just feels like a of course, that's what happens. That's
Speaker 2: that's just like everything else that happens in the world.
Speaker 2: To have that dragon moment matter, it has to be
Speaker 2: weird compared to everything else, and so for us to
Speaker 2: have the arrival of this weird alien technology feel strange,
Speaker 2: nothing should feel strange up until that point, so that
Speaker 2: that actually matters, because if everybody's zipping around with supporters
Speaker 2: and teleporters and magic technologies, then another magic technology doesn't
Speaker 2: feel strange, So.
Speaker 3: Then why does Lost fail so badly? So like that,
Speaker 3: I feel like that's another This is a series. I've
Speaker 3: only watched the TV show. I don't even know if
Speaker 3: it's a book, but like it's meant to be real
Speaker 3: until the magic comes in. But instead of you feeling
Speaker 3: like you bought it and now you're in this awesome,
Speaker 3: magical world, it's just like, no, this isn't right. So
Speaker 3: it seems like it's a hard thing to pull off.
Speaker 2: And I'm not a fan of Loss, but I don't
Speaker 2: want to just sit and bash on Loss. But but
Speaker 2: the reality is it was not a well thought out universe.
Speaker 2: It wasn't They wrote an amazing pilot and jj Abrams
Speaker 2: is a fantastic director, shot an amazing pilot, and they
Speaker 2: kind of had an idea what the first season was about,
Speaker 2: and they kind of had an idea what the show
Speaker 2: is about. But when it got picked up, they had
Speaker 2: to write a bunch of scripts. They had put a
Speaker 2: first season together. They were coming up with mysteries to
Speaker 2: keep people interested, and then they got a second season
Speaker 2: and they had no idea what that was going to be.
Speaker 2: So now they're just making stuff up, and so you're
Speaker 2: just at that point, they're just sort of throwing things
Speaker 2: at the wall to see what sticks. And because there's
Speaker 2: no consistency to it, it doesn't feel I mean, once
Speaker 2: in our books, when the protomolecule shows up, which is
Speaker 2: the weird alien technology, it always kind of behaves the
Speaker 2: same way all the way through, and so each thing
Speaker 2: it does, you go, yeah, that's what it would do.
Speaker 2: That's you know, it feels very consistent. In The Lost
Speaker 2: It's like there's polar bears, and then there's a black
Speaker 2: smoke monster, and then there's this other thing, and then
Speaker 2: there's the Hatch. But the hatch doesn't do what we
Speaker 2: thought it did. And this need to relentlessly create mystery
Speaker 2: but never solve any of them. It's like juggling a
Speaker 2: thousand balls, but all you do is throw all a
Speaker 2: thousand up in the air at one time. You don't
Speaker 2: catch any Absolutely.
Speaker 1: I feel like the contract between the science fiction writer
Speaker 1: and the reader, is I'm going to present to you
Speaker 1: a mystery for which there is a solution that eventually
Speaker 1: this can all make sense in your mind. If you
Speaker 1: get to the end of the book and you're like, oh,
Speaker 1: you were just throwing dragons out every other page and
Speaker 1: you have no idea what's going on, then I feel betrayed.
Speaker 1: So that leads me to ask you, guys about your process.
Speaker 1: How much of the whole series and the whole concept
Speaker 1: had you mapped out before you started writing, you know,
Speaker 1: word one of chapter one, did you outline the entire thing?
Speaker 4: We didn't know that we were going to have a
Speaker 4: whole series when we wrote the first book. I mean
Speaker 4: we with the first book, we had I think a
Speaker 4: pretty rigorous outline of what the first book would be,
Speaker 4: and you know, we knew what the end of that
Speaker 4: book was going to be. We knew what the uh,
Speaker 4: the last scene of that book was going to be
Speaker 4: before we went into the at the front. And then
Speaker 4: for the whole series, actually that got mapped out during
Speaker 4: the writing of book two, when it became clear that
Speaker 4: the publisher was interested in doing a bunch more of
Speaker 4: these and at that point we kind of broad stroke
Speaker 4: the whole series to the point that we did know.
Speaker 4: You know, Tie pitched the last scene of the last book,
Speaker 4: the lasting of book nine, while we were about halfway
Speaker 4: through book two, and that didn't change. So a lot
Speaker 4: of a lot of the pathway along the way was
Speaker 4: not cooked yet, was not identified, but where we were
Speaker 4: going we knew early.
Speaker 3: Did you have any moments where you were like, oh, crap,
Speaker 3: how do we get there? Like we've we've we've built
Speaker 3: and maybe now it's not a clear path back anymore,
Speaker 3: or just knowing where you're ending up keeps you from
Speaker 3: having moments like that.
Speaker 2: That really, I mean, you you you talk through how
Speaker 2: you're going to get there. But I don't think we
Speaker 2: ever painted ourselves in a corner, which can happen in
Speaker 2: fiction writing. You can you can create plot points that
Speaker 2: as you get to the end of the book, you realize, oh,
Speaker 2: I've screwed myself. The plot points that I have created
Speaker 2: do not allow me to have the ending that I wanted.
Speaker 2: I mean, I know people who do that. But because
Speaker 2: we always kind of firmly had an endpoint in mind,
Speaker 2: and we and we, you know, the two of us
Speaker 2: plot pretty rigorously and talk through everything ever really wound
Speaker 2: up getting lost in the weeds. Yeah.
Speaker 4: I mean it's kind of like, you know, the metaphor
Speaker 4: we keep using is a road trip. You know you're
Speaker 4: going from New York to Los Angeles, you know where
Speaker 4: you're going to end up, you know where you're starting from.
Speaker 4: You don't know exactly what restaurant you're going to stop at,
Speaker 4: where you're going to get gas, what little side detours
Speaker 4: you're going to do, but you know, generally speaking, you
Speaker 4: should probably head west.
Speaker 1: And what's your process? Scientifically? It sounds like you guys
Speaker 1: do a lot of reading. You're smart guys. Do you
Speaker 1: also talk to scientists, you have consultants? Do you do
Speaker 1: all your own reading and research?
Speaker 2: We had two people. No, there were three times in
Speaker 2: the writing of nine books that we asked for outside expertise.
Speaker 2: Daniel had somebody help him figure.
Speaker 4: Out a complex physics problem.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, an acceleration issue with a ship doing something
Speaker 2: strange and what that was the experience of being inside
Speaker 2: the ship would you like? And then I had to
Speaker 2: I had a guy who you're talking about, you were
Speaker 2: from Los Alamos. Had a guy from Los Alamos. I
Speaker 2: asked him the question if the entire asteroid Aros went
Speaker 2: up by two degrees? How much energy would that he
Speaker 2: and he figured that out and he gave me the
Speaker 2: answer in jewels and hand grenades. Apparently hand grenade is
Speaker 2: a unit of measure in physics. And then the other one,
Speaker 2: weirdly that you asked that is Kelly's husband. Zach helped
Speaker 2: me with something I had to question, a math question,
Speaker 2: which was, if you have a sphere a million kilometers across,
Speaker 2: and on the inner face of this sphere you have
Speaker 2: rings that are ten thousand kilometers across, and you have
Speaker 2: eleven hundred and seventy three of those rings, how far
Speaker 2: apart are they from each other? Zach is smart, and
Speaker 2: Zach that was funny because you know, I mean, Zach
Speaker 2: and I were friendly, but we weren't like good. I mean,
Speaker 2: we had never stated each other's house at that point.
Speaker 2: It was just, you know, we were sort of friendly.
Speaker 2: We had met a couple of times, and we'd emailed
Speaker 2: back and forth periodically, and so I sent him this
Speaker 2: question and his reply after like a day, I thought
Speaker 2: he was kind of ignoring the email, but a day
Speaker 2: later he just wrote back and said, this is not
Speaker 2: a trivial problem.
Speaker 1: Why did you say this to Zach? He's definitely a
Speaker 1: smart guy.
Speaker 2: But why because we had talked about some math stuff
Speaker 2: and I knew he was really into math and figuring
Speaker 2: out math problems was a thing that he was into.
Speaker 3: And so I don't remember. Did he get you an answer? Yeah,
Speaker 3: nice way to go.
Speaker 4: We didn't check it. I mean, it might have been wrong.
Speaker 4: We have no idea.
Speaker 1: Pranking you absolutely, yeah, could be. What was the acceleration
Speaker 1: problem you were wrestling with?
Speaker 4: If you are in a ship that is accelerating at
Speaker 4: two g's and you have an unbalanced firing of a
Speaker 4: maneuvering thruster at the nose that puts it into a spin,
Speaker 4: what does it feel like on the inside if you
Speaker 4: are if you're on that ship it is spinning while
Speaker 4: also accelerating at uh two g's. Are you thrown against
Speaker 4: a wall? Are you what? What's? What does it feel like?
Speaker 4: What is what is the lived experience of being in
Speaker 4: that system?
Speaker 1: Sounds like a great problem to put on my physics final.
Speaker 4: There there was a wide variety of opinion.
Speaker 1: It sounds similar to the scenario of like a fighter
Speaker 1: pilot doing a loop de loop where they feel very
Speaker 1: different forces at the top of the loop and the
Speaker 1: bottom of the loop, because at one point in the loop,
Speaker 1: gravity is adding to their effective acceleration and the other
Speaker 1: part of the loop it's.
Speaker 4: Contrasting, except the you don't actually have that underlying gravity
Speaker 4: to confuse things because you're not on a planet.
Speaker 2: No, but that gravity is being replaced by the thrust
Speaker 2: of this hip.
Speaker 4: No that, yes, the gravity exists, but there's not like
Speaker 4: that the thing to make one part of the loop
Speaker 4: feel different from the other part of the loop. Yeah,
Speaker 4: there's no directional nothing from a planet.
Speaker 1: Well, I love the realism of your spece scenes because
Speaker 1: it gets me thinking about the physics and actually reminds
Speaker 1: me of another book. I don't know if you've read
Speaker 1: Alistair Reynolds's book, Revenger. He has all these scenes that
Speaker 1: feel sort of like British naval battles because he's thinking
Speaker 1: about the kinetics and his ships actually have like huge sales.
Speaker 1: And I asked him the same question I asked you,
Speaker 1: which is like, why did you go so hardcore about
Speaker 1: the physics? His answer was totally different. His answer was like,
Speaker 1: I actually wanted to write a British naval battle, but
Speaker 1: my agent said it had to be science fiction, so
Speaker 1: put it in this space.
Speaker 4: We all get there through different paths.
Speaker 3: What was the hardest part of writing and what was
Speaker 3: the hardest part of writing together.
Speaker 4: The hardest part.
Speaker 2: Of writing, I think hardest part of writing is writing, Yeah,
Speaker 2: parking your ass in a chair and typing.
Speaker 4: The hardest part of writing together. I mean, I think
Speaker 4: this is this is an an emotionally unsatisfying answer to
Speaker 4: your questions because it's all about logistics. It's all about,
Speaker 4: you know, finding the time. You know, the hardest part
Speaker 4: of writing is sitting your ass in the chair and
Speaker 4: actually writing. The hardest part of writing together is working
Speaker 4: out your schedules so that you're in the same place
Speaker 4: to have the conversation at the same time when you
Speaker 4: both have full lives with distractions and event it's it
Speaker 4: would be great if you know. The hardest part was,
Speaker 4: you know, the having to fine tune your brains in
Speaker 4: such a way that you can think as one. That's
Speaker 4: not how it worked. It was much more.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 4: The process is much more like running a small landscape
Speaker 4: and company than it is like something high sci fi
Speaker 4: and brilliant.
Speaker 1: I think Shakespeare famously said that also, didn't you know
Speaker 1: it was marked. It's always marked twenty marked Twain.
Speaker 2: Now, I mean, I think that the probably the only
Speaker 2: frustration that we have is that I am very, very
Speaker 2: very lazy, and I really want to procrastinate everything, and
Speaker 2: Daniel actually wants to get things done, so periodically he
Speaker 2: has to go, hey, so you're gonna get that thing
Speaker 2: done that you said you were going to get done,
Speaker 2: Maybe we should get something done. So you know, that's
Speaker 2: I am the burden that Daniel's forced to carry.
Speaker 3: But you all picked up a new set of books together, right,
Speaker 3: so like you couldn't have been that bad of a burden.
Speaker 3: What is the new series you're working on?
Speaker 4: We also very much enjoy getting paid.
Speaker 3: Some burdens are worth carrying.
Speaker 4: And I'm just saying now the new series is it's
Speaker 4: a very different part of this kind of space opera spectrum.
Speaker 4: And it was Ty had this. You know, Ty had
Speaker 4: the idea for the Expanse. He did all the world
Speaker 4: building for the Expanse, he did all of the kind
Speaker 4: of groundwork setting that up, and then he had this
Speaker 4: other idea that he thought might also be a cool
Speaker 4: idea for space opera. So now we're doing that one
Speaker 4: and it's pretty fun, it's pretty good stuff. It's not
Speaker 4: the same relationship to history that the expans had. The Expanse,
Speaker 4: you could really see where it grew out of our
Speaker 4: world and how we might plausibly have gotten there. This
Speaker 4: is more like Dune or left handed Darkness or something
Speaker 4: that's just like gazillions of years out and light years away,
Speaker 4: and it lets you approach some very different things.
Speaker 2: But because I'm me, the relationship as to history as
Speaker 2: it's all based on ancient Babel.
Speaker 3: Yeah, why did you pick that time period.
Speaker 2: I'm a big fan of pre classical history. And when
Speaker 2: I was a kid, my parents drug me to church
Speaker 2: a lot. My parents are very religious, and I am
Speaker 2: the least religious person on the planet, so when I
Speaker 2: was there, you know, the only thing you were allowed
Speaker 2: to have is a Bible. And most of that book
Speaker 2: is very I don't know if you've read it, but
Speaker 2: most of it is very boring, very dry. But there's
Speaker 2: a few books that have some interesting stuff, and one
Speaker 2: of those is the Book of Daniel, which has like
Speaker 2: empires conquering and people being drug off as slaves to
Speaker 2: serve in the palace of kings, and I always found
Speaker 2: that story interesting. Of like, what if you're just this
Speaker 2: little agrarian society and the much more technologically advanced Babylonians
Speaker 2: show up and go, oh, you guys all belong to
Speaker 2: us now, and we're going to take a bunch of
Speaker 2: you slaves back to Babylon, and some of those slaves
Speaker 2: will wind up working for the king in port of
Speaker 2: the king as bureaucrats. That just seemed interesting to me,
Speaker 2: So I wanted to write the sci fi version.
Speaker 4: And so now we're in the midst of having this
Speaker 4: human in a very alien framework of very alien society
Speaker 4: and figuring, you know, trying to understand and his own
Speaker 4: context and keep himself human while on the one hand serving,
Speaker 4: on the other hand, undermining the great nation that has
Speaker 4: destroyed him and his friends.
Speaker 1: I love that you guys go into history to find
Speaker 1: these stories, and they say, effectively extrapolate them forward and
Speaker 1: think about, you know, the economics of a solar system
Speaker 1: wide society and this kind of stuff. But does doing
Speaker 1: that change your opinion about it? You know, like, after
Speaker 1: running the expanse, are you more or less bullish on
Speaker 1: asteroid mining or colonies on Ganymede? Are you less likely
Speaker 1: to invest in a startup that's actually going to do
Speaker 1: this kind of stuff.
Speaker 2: There's no economic reason to go out into space. There's
Speaker 2: just there isn't any I mean, there's other reasons to
Speaker 2: go there. There's a you know, exploration, learning more about
Speaker 2: the universe and our place in. All of those are
Speaker 2: very good reasons to explore space, and I'm glad that
Speaker 2: we have a space program where we do that stuff.
Speaker 2: But there is no reason for people to live on
Speaker 2: any of those other bodies other than the all your
Speaker 2: eggs and one basket argument, which is a valid argument
Speaker 2: of you know what, if an esteroid hits Erith, then
Speaker 2: there's no humans left. I would say though, that if
Speaker 2: your answer to that is we'll build a city on
Speaker 2: Mars and there'll be humans on Mars shortly after the
Speaker 2: esteru redistriy is Earth, all the humans on Mars are
Speaker 2: just gonna die. So so it's yeah, you have eggs
Speaker 2: in another basket, but those eggs are going to expire
Speaker 2: very quickly. So unless we get much much much more
Speaker 2: advanced at like turning unlivable hunks of rock into livable
Speaker 2: hunks of rock, which we are nowhere near right now,
Speaker 2: there's just no reason to do that at that point
Speaker 2: you might as well just be building really really advanced
Speaker 2: space stations and putting people in those, because you're much
Speaker 2: more likely to survive in one of those.
Speaker 4: A generationship in orbit would be a better basket.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a better answer than Mars.
Speaker 4: And I think generally, the experience of having fictionalized these
Speaker 4: things and talked about them in ways that are compelling
Speaker 4: and plausible, but not actually ground that in anything has
Speaker 4: I feel I could help me understand. Like Elon Musk,
Speaker 4: I think, you know, he's got a lot of great
Speaker 4: stories on how things are going to work, and I
Speaker 4: recognize that they're not grounded in anything. And and there's
Speaker 4: a there's a level of bullshit detection. I think that
Speaker 4: comes with having spun up a bunch of your own bullshit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think anybody has spent any time really thinking
Speaker 2: about what it would take to colonize Mars Caesar right
Speaker 2: through Elon Musk. I can't see you and Zach signing
Speaker 2: up for the first rocket to Mars.
Speaker 3: Kelly, No, No, But I also can't see us signing
Speaker 3: up for the like one thousandth rocket to Mars. We're
Speaker 3: just not very adventurous people.
Speaker 2: Hey, when Mars has like strip malls and movie theaters
Speaker 2: and all of that, then yeah, sure I'll got there
Speaker 2: for a vacation.
Speaker 4: I will not. I barely want to go to New York. Yeah,
Speaker 4: it's a it's a very long commute.
Speaker 2: Daniel is a medieval peasant in that he will be born,
Speaker 2: live his entire life, and die with than of one
Speaker 2: mile radius and be happy.
Speaker 4: It's not I'm sure I'm a mile and a half.
Speaker 3: Well, I wouldn't want to leave my bugs, So I
Speaker 3: get it.
Speaker 1: So you make a compelling argument that there's no economic reason.
Speaker 1: But what's your prediction for the future. Do you think
Speaker 1: a thousand years from now, five thousand years from now,
Speaker 1: humanity has colonized the Solar system, or we're all effectively
Speaker 1: Daniel and still just living in our own backyard.
Speaker 2: I think it's very optimistic that we're all still around
Speaker 2: in one thousand or five thousand years. But if we
Speaker 2: are the one thing and Daniel, I'm sure we'll have
Speaker 2: his own answer for this. But from my perspective, the
Speaker 2: one thing that science fiction does really, really badly is
Speaker 2: predict the future. That's true, we're good at inspiring, but
Speaker 2: we're terrible at predicting, and I think anybody who thinks
Speaker 2: they know what the world's going to look like a
Speaker 2: thousand years from now is laughably wrong and probably a
Speaker 2: little to do.
Speaker 3: You think fiction is usually trying to predict the future, though.
Speaker 2: Yeah, some people actually call themselves futurists who are science
Speaker 2: fiction writers, and they believe that what they are doing,
Speaker 2: or what they are attempting to do, is accurately predict
Speaker 2: these changes in the near future. You can do some
Speaker 2: stuff some even then, look how wrong cyberpunk was. You know,
Speaker 2: we were all reading William Gibson and going, oh, this
Speaker 2: is an amazing accurate prediction of the future, and then
Speaker 2: twenty years later it's laughably silly. And that is often
Speaker 2: the case with sci fi, where we try to predict
Speaker 2: what the future is going to look like and then
Speaker 2: and just silly.
Speaker 4: The actual world has a much more kind of florid
Speaker 4: imagination than any one of us.
Speaker 1: But individually, well, that brings me to a question I
Speaker 1: wanted to ask about how you build your universe. You
Speaker 1: guys are really careful about the gravity and you know,
Speaker 1: the kinetic energy and what it's like to fight these battles,
Speaker 1: But something that would really change those battles are things
Speaker 1: like you know, AI controlled drones. We don't have you know,
Speaker 1: delicate meat sacks in every ship in these battles, but
Speaker 1: you don't see a lot of that in your universe.
Speaker 1: Was that a conscious choice because it would really change
Speaker 1: the story or was there some of the reason for
Speaker 1: not including that.
Speaker 4: We like writing stories about humans because humans are going
Speaker 4: to be reading and buying them. So yeah, No, One
Speaker 4: of the choices that we made early on was not
Speaker 4: to include the kind of automated space stuff because once
Speaker 4: you include that, there is literally no reason to have
Speaker 4: any people out there.
Speaker 2: And we do and we do have smart drones for
Speaker 2: fighting words, they're called torpedoes because there's no reason to
Speaker 2: build an automated little spaceship and mounted gun on it.
Speaker 2: Just put a big bomb on the end of it
Speaker 2: and run into the other guy, and then you just
Speaker 2: have a torpedo. The idea that there will be like
Speaker 2: little fighter planes driven by robots shooting at the other ships,
Speaker 2: why just have it fly into the other ship, explode
Speaker 2: really big, and then you win. And if you know,
Speaker 2: if it's if it's a little robot driving a cheap ship,
Speaker 2: why put a gun on it? Just have it blow up.
Speaker 4: The thing is we do have kind of unmentioned expert
Speaker 4: systems and AI. We do have that kind of you know,
Speaker 4: you flick on the light switch and the light comes
Speaker 4: on level of normalized technology. The only weird that we
Speaker 4: have is we also kept the meat sex.
Speaker 3: So is it difficult when you start working on a
Speaker 3: TV version of your work which you know maybe one
Speaker 3: day will happen with me who knows, but like to
Speaker 3: go in from like you're completely in control of the
Speaker 3: narrative to now you're in a writer's room and it
Speaker 3: might go into direction that you hadn't anticipated. What is
Speaker 3: that experience?
Speaker 4: Like it's like having a partner that you're writing with,
Speaker 4: only there's more people. I mean, we were, in a
Speaker 4: sense kind of building a government lab to move into
Speaker 4: a writer's room because we were already in an artistic
Speaker 4: project where none of us totally owned it. Now we
Speaker 4: just included Narraine and Dan Noak and Georgia Lee and
Speaker 4: all of those other voices became other voices that were
Speaker 4: also contributing or in you know, for Narraine in charge.
Speaker 4: But that kind of divesting your ego from the the
Speaker 4: project had happened for us on day one that's great.
Speaker 3: I feel like when I work with professors, the more
Speaker 3: professors that are in the room, the less we get done.
Speaker 3: And it's great that I know. I'm sorry, but it's
Speaker 3: great that you all have managed to be so amazing.
Speaker 3: With so many people working on a project together, sometimes
Speaker 3: it makes it harder.
Speaker 2: The thing that is true of a TV show is
Speaker 2: that it has a showrunner and they have the final say.
Speaker 2: If you have a room full of professors and one
Speaker 2: of them is the boss and gets to tell all
Speaker 2: the other ones what to do after the conversation is over,
Speaker 2: that they make a decision, things will get done. It's
Speaker 2: when nobody's the bass and everybody thinks that their version
Speaker 2: should be the one that happens, that's when things done.
Speaker 4: And we got really lucky with our show runner. We've
Speaker 4: got a guy who was really smart, really invested in
Speaker 4: the project, and probably the best manager that I've worked
Speaker 4: for in any industry. So you know, go us.
Speaker 2: He only says that because he never worked for it
Speaker 2: was awesome.
Speaker 1: What's something that you see in the TV show that's
Speaker 1: visualized differently than how you imagined it as you were
Speaker 1: writing it, but that you know you're happy about. I
Speaker 1: don't want you to throw anybody under the bus. But
Speaker 1: what's something new that came into the visual element of.
Speaker 2: The show that you liked everything Daniel and I are
Speaker 2: not We are not prop designers, we are not costumers,
Speaker 2: we are not set builders. So you know our plan
Speaker 2: in writing books, and this was how Daniel basically educated
Speaker 2: me to do this is you describe enough that you
Speaker 2: get the reader to do all the heavy lifting. You
Speaker 2: get them to imagine the rest of it. You don't
Speaker 2: give them detail instructions. You just kind of say, give
Speaker 2: them a little hint and then they go imagine the rest.
Speaker 2: You can't do that in the TV show. You actually
Speaker 2: have to build things, and so you hire very smart
Speaker 2: people to do that. You hire prop designers, and you
Speaker 2: hire costumers, and you hire set builders and production designers
Speaker 2: and all those people. So everything they brought was something
Speaker 2: I hadn't thought of before, but in almost every case
Speaker 2: it was better than the version I would have done,
Speaker 2: because I'm not a professional at that. So there was
Speaker 2: every day there was a new thing I hadn't thought of,
Speaker 2: but I was like, oh, yeah, that's great, that's totally
Speaker 2: what I would have put in the book if I
Speaker 2: had thought of it.
Speaker 3: I had that experience as a reader too, you know,
Speaker 3: I read the books, I had everything in my head
Speaker 3: about how it should look, and then when I watched
Speaker 3: the TV show, you know, like so often you see
Speaker 3: it and you're like, oh, that's not really how I
Speaker 3: imagined it. I'm sort of disappointed. But almost every time
Speaker 3: I was like, Oh, that's even cooler than I had
Speaker 3: imagined it. That was awesome. Like it just the team
Speaker 3: was so so incredible.
Speaker 1: I love how they really centered the physics. I really felt.
Speaker 1: Of course, when you read the book you see that
Speaker 1: it's in there, but when you watch the show, you
Speaker 1: like con that there's you know, parabolic motion and they're
Speaker 1: really considering gravity and it really it feels almost like
Speaker 1: you're in a British naval battle, you know.
Speaker 3: I like how they really centered an alien being that
Speaker 3: could sort of mind control. That's that's what I thought
Speaker 3: was the cool thing. But I guess we come from
Speaker 3: different fields.
Speaker 1: Bring it back to parasites. Everybody sees a part of
Speaker 1: themselves in.
Speaker 2: It, right, what. Daniel and I are big, big fans
Speaker 2: of parasites.
Speaker 3: So what's your favorite parasite toxin?
Speaker 4: Plasma GANDHII. Yeah, yeah, I'd go for the classics.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's the best one for sure. I mean, I'm sure,
Speaker 2: I'm sure that the reason that I'm a very aggressive
Speaker 2: person is because I'm filled with cat poop.
Speaker 4: It's at this point, it's not cat poop. It's just
Speaker 4: a lot of little cysts in your brain.
Speaker 3: I'm actually working on so one of our next episodes,
Speaker 3: maybe the one after this one, is going to be
Speaker 3: about that parasite and mind control and how actually the
Speaker 3: evidence is really thin for a lot of this stuff,
Speaker 3: and it's like really hard to pull apart. Like is
Speaker 3: Tie infected because he's aggressive or did the parasite make
Speaker 3: him aggressive? You don't know. Maybe his aggressive behavior has
Speaker 3: caused him to encounter the parasite and there's like a correlation, Like.
Speaker 2: I was aggressively owning cats, yeah sure.
Speaker 3: Or you were aggressive about not washing your hands after
Speaker 3: changing the little box.
Speaker 4: If you're just too manly to wash your hands, that's
Speaker 4: that's how you get it, all right.
Speaker 2: No, I'm actually Daniel will attest to this. I'm actually
Speaker 2: freaked out by people who don't watch them.
Speaker 4: That's true.
Speaker 2: The hell's wrong with you? Wash your damn hands? I know.
Speaker 3: I am the kind of person who in a restroom.
Speaker 3: If somebody walks out without washing, I'll be like, oh gosh,
Speaker 3: this happens to everyone. Sometimes you forgot to wash your hands,
Speaker 3: and they'll be like.
Speaker 4: Turn around, turn around, turn around. Yeah, I'm a parasitologist,
Speaker 4: Go wash your hands.
Speaker 2: Now Do you ever do that? Do you ever say, like, look,
Speaker 2: I'm a parasitologist. Don't make me catalog all the things
Speaker 2: that are on your hands right now, you should wash those.
Speaker 3: I don't say about washing your hands because that's like
Speaker 3: more bacteria, which is not quite what I do. But
Speaker 3: I will say, like when we're, you know, eating sushi,
Speaker 3: I'll be like, I'm a parasitologist, don't make me catalog
Speaker 3: all the stuff that's in the raw food that you're eating.
Speaker 3: Is good to see you.
Speaker 2: You didn't know I was going to be talking to you.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Oh, I hope I get to see you against
Speaker 3: soon Jenney for Yeah, for the for the folks who
Speaker 3: aren't watching the.
Speaker 2: Video, I hope she gets to see you against Oh good.
Speaker 3: All right, Tie's amazing wife just came by who I
Speaker 3: talked about at the beginning of the show.
Speaker 2: That's doctor wife to you, Mabe, I'm sorry, put a
Speaker 2: little respect in that.
Speaker 3: Right from from Oxford, right, doctor from Oxford Cambridge.
Speaker 2: I'm wearing my Cambridge sweater ring out which I did
Speaker 2: not go to Cambridge, but my wife nice.
Speaker 3: That's close enough. It's all in the family. It's all good.
Speaker 2: So back to parisit, Yeah, I feel like I'm I
Speaker 2: don't have a PhD, but I am PhD adjacent, So yeah,
Speaker 2: I feel like I should get the same respect as
Speaker 2: if I doesn't work that way.
Speaker 4: All but dissertation and classwork.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, all but doing any of the world back.
Speaker 1: To parasites and the experience parasites in our actual world
Speaker 1: inspire the protomolecule behavior at all in your story, like
Speaker 1: the mind control aspects of it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, Yeah.
Speaker 4: It's anytime you start dealing with stuff that's messing with
Speaker 4: consciousness and repurposing somebody else's body to their own ends,
Speaker 4: you're kind of in that in that playground.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and the proto molecule does, it goes through sort
Speaker 2: of phases. In the early phase, it is very much
Speaker 2: a parasite. It is very much a In my sort
Speaker 2: of original creation of it, back before even Daniel showed up,
Speaker 2: it was sort of this weird mix of like ebola
Speaker 2: and what's the what's the mold that grows out of
Speaker 2: ants heads?
Speaker 4: Card recept Yeah, cordyceps.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, so it's it was sort of a mix
Speaker 2: of the two. I had written a short story many
Speaker 2: many years ago. One of the scenes takes place in
Speaker 2: a health camp where they're treating people who have a bola,
Speaker 2: And so I did a bunch of reading about a bola.
Speaker 2: And there's a phase of a bullet that they call
Speaker 2: the zombie phase, where it has basically melted your brain
Speaker 2: and you're still ambulatory. So you're sort of wandering around
Speaker 2: with a melted brain, but you can still walk, and
Speaker 2: your and your stomach you're vomiting up, your stomach lining
Speaker 2: because your internal organs are melting, and the stuff that
Speaker 2: you vomit up, the black bile that you vomit up,
Speaker 2: is the single most infectious substance on earth. If you
Speaker 2: get that shit on you, you have a bola. So
Speaker 2: that always fastened. The horror of that fascinated me. I'm
Speaker 2: a horror writer at hard And then the idea of
Speaker 2: if if there was something that infected you and took
Speaker 2: you through that zombie phase like a bulla does, but
Speaker 2: it had a purpose. It had it had to design,
Speaker 2: there was an in It was a goal that it
Speaker 2: was trying to get to in the way that cordyce
Speaker 2: Ep says with the ants, it infects them, makes them
Speaker 2: climb up the tree, makes them explode so that they
Speaker 2: infect other ants. Right, But it has a design, and
Speaker 2: it has a thing that is trying to achieve by
Speaker 2: taking over the end, so that combination of it's taking
Speaker 2: over humans, it's making them very infectious so that other
Speaker 2: humans get infected, and ultimately, when it has enough infected humans,
Speaker 2: it's trying to achieve something. I just found that sort
Speaker 2: of cool and horrifying at the same time. So that
Speaker 2: was really ultimately where it sort of came from.
Speaker 3: So you said this was from a short story.
Speaker 2: The research I did on a bola, Yeah, what's the
Speaker 2: name of the story? Scene? And I don't think that
Speaker 2: one ever got published.
Speaker 3: There's an opportunity there. But your stories about parasite should
Speaker 3: always be published.
Speaker 4: Have you read peeps, Scott Westerveld.
Speaker 1: I've eaten peeps. I don't think that counts them.
Speaker 4: Scott Westervelt, who is a lovely writer, I've never met
Speaker 4: him as a human being. I can't speak to that,
Speaker 4: but he knows his way around a book. Wrote a
Speaker 4: teenage romance vampire book that is also introductory parasitology. What
Speaker 4: it is called peeps peeps eat, yeah, peaks just like
Speaker 4: just like the thing stands. Actually, I think in the
Speaker 4: book for parasite positive.
Speaker 3: All right, awesome, I can't wait to check that out.
Speaker 4: It's like if Twilight was being secretly used to teach
Speaker 4: people science, if only seriously great, it's a great little book.
Speaker 4: I read it to my kid when she was of
Speaker 4: the age, and it stuck.
Speaker 3: Peeps are Twilight?
Speaker 4: Peeps peeps? Twilight was not a thing for us.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, my kids aren't old enough for that yet.
Speaker 4: I'm not sure I am all right, So I'll.
Speaker 3: Give you this idea, and you know, do you just
Speaker 3: cut me in a little bit when you write the
Speaker 3: book about it. Parasites that manipulate host behavior. Very underrepresented
Speaker 3: in the literature are the trophically transmitted parasites sort of
Speaker 3: like Taxoplasma gandhiy. But like this fish that I study
Speaker 3: that has the brain infecting parasites like I found a
Speaker 3: bunch of like viruses where it it's transmitted from one
Speaker 3: person another where you bite each other, but not a
Speaker 3: lot of these trophically transmitted things. And I you know,
Speaker 3: there's a real opportunity there. There's some of the best
Speaker 3: zombie makers out there.
Speaker 2: I don't know what trophic transfer, oh I should have.
Speaker 3: Yes, sorry, that's good. So trophically transmitted means it goes
Speaker 3: from like when one when a predator eats something else.
Speaker 3: So for example, when those rodents that are attracted to
Speaker 3: the smell of cat urine. I'm a science communicator, but
Speaker 3: I'm awful at identifying my own ecology jargon. But so
Speaker 3: like when a mouse is attracted to the smell of
Speaker 3: cat urine and the cat eats it and then gets infected,
Speaker 3: that's trophic transmission. And I studied a fish with a
Speaker 3: brain infecting parasite, and when a bird eats the fish,
Speaker 3: that's how it gets transmitted up the trophic levels.
Speaker 4: And this is when you stopped eating sushi. This is
Speaker 4: I'm guessing.
Speaker 3: That was when I stopped eating sushi. That or when
Speaker 3: I had this job where over the summer I had
Speaker 3: to jump into dump trucks full of dead fish. That
Speaker 3: put me off of fish. All I can see that
Speaker 3: it was my worst job.
Speaker 4: That seems legit.
Speaker 1: Can I ask one more physics question since we've been
Speaker 1: talking about cat piss and rats for a minute, Boop,
Speaker 1: I was really interested in this Epstein drive. I love
Speaker 1: that you guys invented a scientist who came up with
Speaker 1: this new drive. How much did you think through the
Speaker 1: physics of the Epstein drive, this fusion powered drive that
Speaker 1: moves so many of your ships through the Solar System.
Speaker 2: It is based on a paper I read many years
Speaker 2: ago about a way to maximize I mean, because you
Speaker 2: can't get around the Irocket equation. You have to throw
Speaker 2: something out the back of the ship. You have to,
Speaker 2: and that is the problem. And I had read a
Speaker 2: paper many I might have been an Omni or similar
Speaker 2: magazine way back in the day, of a way to
Speaker 2: take the exhaust and throw it almost at light speed,
Speaker 2: like throw it so hard at the back of the
Speaker 2: ship that even tiny amounts of matter are imparting a
Speaker 2: lot of thrust. And I just sort of stole that idea. Physically,
Speaker 2: it doesn't actually work. It doesn't make any sense. Your
Speaker 2: ship would just melt from the heat. If you're generating
Speaker 2: that much energy and a fusion reactor in the middle
Speaker 2: of your ship. You have to have a way to
Speaker 2: get rid of that heat, and you know, we just
Speaker 2: sort of go the heat is fixed. There's a heat solution.
Speaker 2: They invented it. Thank god we invented the heat machine.
Speaker 2: But other than that, I mean, the physics behind throwing
Speaker 2: stuff out the back of the ship really really hard.
Speaker 4: Those make sense, and we're not ever gonna like say
Speaker 4: what paper that was, so that when it was discredited,
Speaker 4: we're not we're not taking we're not taking down with it.
Speaker 2: But plus I probably misunderstood everything the guy's side, so
Speaker 2: it would probably be our heat or she would probably
Speaker 2: be very offended that I had used their paper to
Speaker 2: create my terrible fictional ship engine.
Speaker 1: Well before I was a particle physicist, I was actually
Speaker 1: a budding on plasma physicist, and I worked in a
Speaker 1: plasma physics group in your backyard, Daniel, in Los Alamos.
Speaker 1: And there's a guy there, Glenn Worden, who's a plasma
Speaker 1: physicist who's been writing a series of papers about how
Speaker 1: plasma powered engines are the only way we could ever
Speaker 1: like intercept an asteroid or get around the Solar System.
Speaker 1: So I think you guys were ahead of your time.
Speaker 1: The science is now catching up to you.
Speaker 4: Well, this is this is one of those things where
Speaker 4: when you're vague enough, you get to take credit for everything.
Speaker 3: All right, writing advice. On that note, we're going to
Speaker 3: wrap things up. You told us a little bit about
Speaker 3: the history behind your new book, but I don't think
Speaker 3: you ever said the name of your new book.
Speaker 4: The new book is The Mercy of Gods. It's the
Speaker 4: first in a trilogy called The Captive's War.
Speaker 3: And are they going to come out one year at
Speaker 3: a time or something like that.
Speaker 4: If I can get tied to sit in the goddamn chair.
Speaker 3: Yes, podcasts, well, we hope you're successful with that, Daniel,
Speaker 3: and good luck to both of you, and thank you
Speaker 3: so much for being on the show. I had a
Speaker 3: lot of fun. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced
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