Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to cool people who
Speaker 1: did cool stuff, which is sometimes cool people who are
Speaker 1: actively doing cool stuff, because sometimes the people that I'm
Speaker 1: talking about are still alive. I am your host, Margaret Kiljoy,
Speaker 1: and this week I am actually talking to someone that,
Speaker 1: from my point of view, is a living person who
Speaker 1: does cool stuff. Coridoctro. Hi, how are you Hi.
Speaker 2: I'm glad to be classed among these still alive. That's
Speaker 2: one of my bucket list items I can scratch off now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, still being alive. Yeah. This is usually a history show,
Speaker 1: as I think that people who are listening now, but
Speaker 1: I also have been more recently interested in talking about
Speaker 1: things that are currently happening, and you're one of the
Speaker 1: people who talks about the things currently happening in a
Speaker 1: way that I really appreciated. So I wanted to have
Speaker 1: you on for people who don't know your work. You
Speaker 1: do a lot of things, and I think you know
Speaker 1: that I originally know you as a fiction writer, and
Speaker 1: I know you for writing and just an incredible number
Speaker 1: of novels that I've read, including ones that are probably
Speaker 1: very relevant to our listeners, like walk Away and more
Speaker 1: recently The Lost Cause. But also you do nonfiction. And
Speaker 1: I learned this word a while ago. Would you consider
Speaker 1: yourself a public intellectual?
Speaker 2: No, I hate that so much, like I strongly prefer activist.
Speaker 2: I think public intellectual is like how you launder the
Speaker 2: fact that you don't want people to think of you
Speaker 2: as an advocate. Okay, for a specific perspective, if you
Speaker 2: want to maintain the pretext of the you from nowhere,
Speaker 2: I think you call yourself a public intellectual.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: I'd rather be a public demagogue than a public intellectual.
Speaker 2: I want to be on top of a fucking barricade
Speaker 2: with a megaphone. I don't want to be like scratching
Speaker 2: away in a you know, study with a glass of whiskey.
Speaker 2: I mean, I'll take a flask of whiskey up to
Speaker 2: the top of the barricade, don't get right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a good thing. It goes with the megaphone
Speaker 1: very well, because if we're moving in as is sometimes necessary,
Speaker 1: to climb barricades.
Speaker 2: Hard on your throats, screaming through the megaphone, you want
Speaker 2: something to cut the dust afterwards, a little anesthesia.
Speaker 1: That's true. Okay. When you think of yourself, do you
Speaker 1: think of yourself as a fiction or nonfiction writer first,
Speaker 1: or like what do you what? What was your dream
Speaker 1: as a kid?
Speaker 2: Like, oh, definitely to be a fiction writer.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I came up through the first and last approximation of
Speaker 2: formal apprenticeship for science fiction writers in the history of
Speaker 2: the world. And it was all due to this one woman,
Speaker 2: Judith Merril, who was great science fiction writer, editor, and critic.
Speaker 2: And Judy had been married to Frederick Pohle and their
Speaker 2: marriage broke up in sixty eight, which was also they
Speaker 2: were in Chicago. It's when the Chicago police riots happened,
Speaker 2: and she decided she just couldn't raise her kids in America,
Speaker 2: so she went into self imposed exile in torontok where
Speaker 2: I grew up. Like all the best Americans, I'm Canadian,
Speaker 2: and she just had this variety of gigs that she
Speaker 2: used to create this thing that was really like, as
Speaker 2: I say, a formal apprenticeship for science fiction writers. So
Speaker 2: first of all, you should know she got the books
Speaker 2: in the divorce and she gave them to the Toronto
Speaker 2: Public Library System. They formed the nucleus of what's now
Speaker 2: the largest science fiction reference collection in the world. It's
Speaker 2: called the Meryl Collection. Oh amazing, Okay, she eventually let
Speaker 2: us change the name to that. It was originally called
Speaker 2: the spaced Out Library. She didn't want it named after her.
Speaker 2: And when I was like nine years old, I went
Speaker 2: and took a trip with the school to the spaced
Speaker 2: Out where she was the writer in residence. And I
Speaker 2: knew who she was because my dad was in radical
Speaker 2: politics and so was she, and I knew her from
Speaker 2: that because her other gig was introducing Doctor Who on
Speaker 2: public television.
Speaker 1: Oh wow.
Speaker 2: OK. And when my mom was at Teachers College and
Speaker 2: out in the evenings, my dad would cook dinner and
Speaker 2: we'd eat it on the sofa with my baby brother
Speaker 2: and watch Judy introduce Doctor Who. And she basically talked
Speaker 2: about like where the tropes came from. And she was
Speaker 2: like this tough old broad who chainsmoked and had iron
Speaker 2: gray hair and a gravelly voice. And she would come
Speaker 2: out and she'd say, like, tonight's episode is about time loops.
Speaker 2: I remember we invented the time loop at a Futurian
Speaker 2: house spaghetti podlock dinner in nineteen forty seven. I'll never
Speaker 2: forget because Isaac Asimov was there and he would not
Speaker 2: stop squeezing Cmcornblue's girlfriend's ass. He wrote thirteen stories about
Speaker 2: time loops that night. I took them on the A
Speaker 2: train to Rockefeller Center in the morning and threw them
Speaker 2: over John W. Campbell's transom. He published them in the
Speaker 2: ensuing year, and this is where the time loop comes from.
Speaker 2: So I knew she was because I'd seen her do
Speaker 2: the shtick every week. And she was like, kids, if
Speaker 2: you write stories, you can bring them to me at
Speaker 2: my library, okay, and I'll make them better for you,
Speaker 2: like scenes to ten year olds. Right, And she's this
Speaker 2: like towering figure in the field. This is to be
Speaker 2: Canadian about it. It's like Retzki offering to help you
Speaker 2: with your stick handling.
Speaker 1: Right, It's okay, this is actually one of the only
Speaker 1: sports figures I know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, me too. And he's turned into a maga guy,
Speaker 2: which sucks, but no, yeah, and he started making the
Speaker 2: shittiest rye anyway. So I had a subway pass I
Speaker 2: used to go down and bring her my stories and
Speaker 2: then she would put the writers who she thought were
Speaker 2: kind of compatible into writing groups. So, you know, seven
Speaker 2: or eight years later, she put me in a writing
Speaker 2: group with Carl Schrader, and then eventually that group included
Speaker 2: people like Peter Watts and Alan Weiss and a bunch
Speaker 2: of other you know, science fiction writers from the city,
Speaker 2: from the region, and it was just one of many
Speaker 2: different groups that she'd started. We were all kind of
Speaker 2: Judy's kids. I went to work at the science fiction
Speaker 2: bookstore at Baca Books, which is the oldest science fiction
Speaker 2: bookstore in the world, when I was about eighteen. That
Speaker 2: store was started when she bullied a local fan into
Speaker 2: opening a science fiction store. I sold my first story
Speaker 2: to a Canada's science fiction magazine on Spec when I
Speaker 2: was seventeen. That's a magazine that was starting.
Speaker 1: I seld it on Spec.
Speaker 2: No, this magazine was called on Spec. I did also
Speaker 2: sell it on Spec. Like. They didn't commission it from me.
Speaker 2: I sent it to them over the transom. Yeah, this
Speaker 2: was how sharp fiction works. Yeah yeah, so or worked
Speaker 2: changes from your to ear.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: But that magazine on Spec was founded by two fans
Speaker 2: out west who she bullied into starting a science fiction magazine.
Speaker 2: I edited a volume of the Testrax Canadian science fiction anthology,
Speaker 2: a series she began. I worked on a Canadian science
Speaker 2: fiction TV show as a consultant called Prisoners of Gravity
Speaker 2: that was started by the people Who basically, like she
Speaker 2: mentored when she was doing The Doctor Who Gig, It
Speaker 2: was on the same public television network on TV Ontario.
Speaker 2: She found this thing called Toronto Hydra that was modeled
Speaker 2: on this New York thing that had happened during the
Speaker 2: Golden Age where groups of writer would gather every like
Speaker 2: six weeks for a potluck and you know, movable feast.
Speaker 2: And so all the writers and editors and critics and
Speaker 2: illustrators and filmmakers and TV people and everyone in Ontario
Speaker 2: would get together, you know, like ten times a year
Speaker 2: at this event that Judy started. So she was just
Speaker 2: like a fucking machine. And she was you know, she
Speaker 2: was an incredible writer and critic and editor. But like
Speaker 2: her great contribution was this right that she created this system.
Speaker 2: Even the weird alternative high school I went to had
Speaker 2: this incredible writing workshop that I found out years later
Speaker 2: Judy founded ten years before I got there through a
Speaker 2: writers in the School grant, and it was modeled on Clarion. OK.
Speaker 2: So when I got to Clarion, I knew how to
Speaker 2: workshop because I had been doing Clarion workshopping at high
Speaker 2: school through this world, and I spent seven years in
Speaker 2: high school mostly because I just wanted to stay in
Speaker 2: the workshop, like it was just she was just a
Speaker 2: force of nature. So I always wanted to be a
Speaker 2: fiction writer. Okay, as to like, do I think of
Speaker 2: myself as a fiction writer or a nonfiction writer. I
Speaker 2: am living in the very strange end stage of a
Speaker 2: lifetime of removing all the Jenga blocks that weren't low
Speaker 2: bearing from my life, such that every activity I engage
Speaker 2: in now is something that cuts into multiple parts of
Speaker 2: my life and work. So everything is doing double and
Speaker 2: triple duty as an activist, as a writer, as a journalist,
Speaker 2: as a novelist, and so it's very hard to like
Speaker 2: kind of take one thing and say, oh, well, today
Speaker 2: I'm doing fiction writing. You know. People say, like, how
Speaker 2: do you know when it's time to write something up
Speaker 2: as fiction or nonfiction? And I'm like, I usually do
Speaker 2: both right, and usually what each one makes the other
Speaker 2: one better. And sometimes they do them at the same time,
Speaker 2: sometimes they do them in succession. They don't always come
Speaker 2: in the same order. And so I'm both and not
Speaker 2: only am I both, but they are inseparable now because
Speaker 2: all the things that I used to do that would
Speaker 2: have just been in service to fiction I've stopped doing
Speaker 2: because I wanted to do more of the other stuff
Speaker 2: in my life, and so I double down on the
Speaker 2: things that serve more than one pillar, and at the
Speaker 2: expense of the things that were uniquely about one thing.
Speaker 2: I mean, right now, maybe the one thing I'm doing
Speaker 2: that's very fictionee is there's a writer who I quite love,
Speaker 2: who's incredibly problematic, who I'm convinced we can write stories
Speaker 2: in his mode and rehabilitate his mode without the He's
Speaker 2: a pulp writer from the fifties, and it's just like
Speaker 2: super homophobic and super sexist and often very racist and whatever.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, it's not who I was guessing. I thought
Speaker 1: that we were building up to Hinland. No.
Speaker 2: No, it's John D. MacDonald, the guy wrote Cape.
Speaker 1: Okay, I don't know it, who.
Speaker 2: Wrote seventy plus novels, including a couple of science fiction novels,
Speaker 2: mostly hard boiled detective fiction. Travis McGee series is the
Speaker 2: one he's best known for. I went on eBay at
Speaker 2: the start of the summer and I bought everything from
Speaker 2: someone selling like their dad's pulp collection, like seventy books
Speaker 2: for seventy dollars, And I'm working my way through them
Speaker 2: at the expense of books by people who I really
Speaker 2: want to blurb and review, and I'm reading this instead,
Speaker 2: and there's nothing in there that's in service to activism,
Speaker 2: and in fact, the thing that really reminds me of
Speaker 2: I once ran into a Werner VINGI at an event
Speaker 2: in like August one year, and I was like, how's
Speaker 2: your summer, and he said, oh, my god, I discovered
Speaker 2: Terry Pratchett at the start of the summer, and not
Speaker 2: since I was ten have I discovered a new writer
Speaker 2: at the start of a summer where I could read
Speaker 2: a new book by them every.
Speaker 1: Day, Right, Terry Pratchett would be that.
Speaker 2: And that's what I'm doing. I'm reading a new Pratchett
Speaker 2: novel every day this summer.
Speaker 1: That's amazing.
Speaker 2: Forty one Discworld novels, plus twenty plus and stillary other books.
Speaker 2: And so yeah, Verner was just like working his way
Speaker 2: through the cannon. And that's sort of what I'm doing
Speaker 2: with John Dy McDonald, because the lesser books are really lesser,
Speaker 2: but each one has like one or two just like
Speaker 2: fabulous moves. He's got so many great moves. He was
Speaker 2: Stephen King's favorite writer when he died. Stephen King tried
Speaker 2: to convince the son to let him out this race,
Speaker 2: like he's so many writers, favorite writer, but oh my god,
Speaker 2: Like I'm reading a book now where he's like trying
Speaker 2: to figure out who's murdering a bunch of people, and
Speaker 2: one of them is a woman who's been killed, who
Speaker 2: it turns out has been the lover of a woman
Speaker 2: who we learned as a lesbian. And he goes out
Speaker 2: to see this woman. It turns out she has been
Speaker 2: the lover of this lesbian who was killed in an
Speaker 2: earlier scene, and she is in with the butches, and
Speaker 2: like the description of the butches, because I'm listening to
Speaker 2: it on audio. I was like in the pool and
Speaker 2: I'm just like doing my laps and listening to this
Speaker 2: just fucking surreally, like just like it's like he had
Speaker 2: a catastrophic brain injury between the previous chapter and this one.
Speaker 2: It's so stupid, so bad, and it's sandwiched between two
Speaker 2: amazing chapters, like beautifully constructed, beautifully written chapters, and it's
Speaker 2: just like what the fuck, John? And so I'm working
Speaker 2: my way through and making so many notes about like
Speaker 2: I'm just gonna steal all the good moves right and
Speaker 2: leave the shitty ones on the side of the road.
Speaker 2: And I'm gonna I'm writing a pulp novel right now
Speaker 2: called Once His Enemy Action, which is like a Bond
Speaker 2: reference because three times his Enemy Action and Bond.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, okay.
Speaker 2: And I'm just like, I'm finding so many little grace
Speaker 2: notes I just want to fucking steal, and I'm just
Speaker 2: stealing them like crazy. Is this gonna be so good?
Speaker 2: So I'm just loving it.
Speaker 1: So this brings up a thousand things for me. But
Speaker 1: the idea of taking a pulp mode and applying it
Speaker 1: to the activist fiction or you know, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of words that all sound bad. Activist fiction sounds bad,
Speaker 1: Didactic fiction sounds bad. There's no way of saying like
Speaker 1: fiction that gets across ideas that doesn't sound bad, except
Speaker 1: science fiction. But like when I cite when I talk
Speaker 1: about didactic fiction, like fiction that is meant to teach
Speaker 1: a lesson. The people I reference are you, Lagwin Butler
Speaker 1: and Heindline.
Speaker 2: Holy shit, that's good company to be in.
Speaker 1: And I think you do it the most like Heinland. Okay,
Speaker 1: just to inside Baseball. But I don't mean this badly.
Speaker 2: No he's good at it. He's got such shitty ideas
Speaker 2: and he makes them sound so reasonable.
Speaker 1: Right, right, totally, And so for anyone who doesn't have
Speaker 1: any fucking clue what we're talking about. When writers try
Speaker 1: to write about ideas, there's a lot of ways you
Speaker 1: can do it. You can drape it in metaphor that
Speaker 1: Laguin I think is a master of. Sometimes Lagoin's very literal,
Speaker 1: but like you know, sometimes the entire book is a
Speaker 1: specific metaphor things like that. You can also be really
Speaker 1: fucking direct and hindline and you and I actually might
Speaker 1: be pronouncing Highlight's name wrong, but I've read more books
Speaker 1: by him than any other author because my dad was
Speaker 1: really into him.
Speaker 2: No, it's timely.
Speaker 1: Like I remember you wrote a book called was it Pirates? No,
Speaker 1: it was the one about for the Win.
Speaker 2: For the Wind. I thought you wrote a book for
Speaker 2: the Wind. I'm like, this is going to be for
Speaker 2: the Win.
Speaker 1: And that's your most didactic But possibly so if you
Speaker 1: ever want to read a book that just explains capitalism
Speaker 1: and how it works by way of people who play
Speaker 1: World of Warcraft, who gold farm, which is a thing
Speaker 1: that people used to do for a living, especially not
Speaker 1: in America. If you want to hear about gold farmers
Speaker 1: unionizing and how capitalism works, read for the Win by
Speaker 1: Cory Doctro, And you do it. It's not seamless. That's
Speaker 1: the thing that's interesting to me about it. Right, You're like,
Speaker 1: here's an aside about how capitalism works, about how like
Speaker 1: money works, how different exchanges work. But it never bores
Speaker 1: the reader. Sure right. You don't switch to an essay mode.
Speaker 1: You switch to a dactic fiction mode. And I think
Speaker 1: that you do this better than almost any other author.
Speaker 1: Is one of the reasons I wanted to talk to
Speaker 1: you about it. I wanted to talk to you about
Speaker 1: you know, kind of it's the big meta question. It's
Speaker 1: the giant question like how do you use fiction to
Speaker 1: unfuck the world? Or how do you use fiction to
Speaker 1: ask the question how do you unfuck the world? And
Speaker 1: what leads you to different methods of talking about this
Speaker 1: stuff in your fiction.
Speaker 2: We have these these alleged rules in fiction writing like
Speaker 2: show don't tell. Yeah, And I think show don't tell
Speaker 2: is actually advice, not a rule, and it's advice for
Speaker 2: a thing that's not working. So we never really know
Speaker 2: why fiction works. Like there's something foundationally irrational in the
Speaker 2: process of enjoying fiction. Right, you're reading about someone who
Speaker 2: you know doesn't exist, but you're experiencing empathy for them,
Speaker 2: which is like not a it's not a reasonable thing.
Speaker 2: It's like, facially, it's it's kind of stupid right to
Speaker 2: experience empathy for things that don't exist. Like, it's one
Speaker 2: thing to experience empathy for even like an a animal
Speaker 2: or an ecosystem or whatever, but for an imaginary thing weird, right,
Speaker 2: And so we don't always know, like we don't understand
Speaker 2: exactly what's going on, and so when we encounter something
Speaker 2: that doesn't work, we make guesses about why it's not
Speaker 2: working or how to make it better, which are often
Speaker 2: two sides of the same coin. So one thing we
Speaker 2: know about fiction is that it is much easier to
Speaker 2: get a reader in the mode where they experience empathy
Speaker 2: for imaginary things that they know don't exist when you're
Speaker 2: using drama. Yeah, and there's something about that that kind
Speaker 2: of triggers the kind of empathy response that then makes
Speaker 2: the esthetic work of the fiction start to happen. But
Speaker 2: notice I said it's easier to do it that way,
Speaker 2: not that doing it in other ways. Not that being
Speaker 2: discursive or expository is bad. It's just hard, right, right,
Speaker 2: So like if you were, like, if you're trying to
Speaker 2: do like a dance routine, say my kid is a
Speaker 2: com headitive dancer. She's on a hip hop dance team.
Speaker 2: So there are aspects of the choreography as they're getting
Speaker 2: closer to the competition where they'll go, this trick would
Speaker 2: be amazing if we could pull it off, and we can't,
Speaker 2: and better to do a less impressive trick better than
Speaker 2: this impressive trick. Badly, the judges will like it better.
Speaker 2: And I think that if you're critiquing someone's fiction, right,
Speaker 2: if you're an editor, or you're in a writing circle
Speaker 2: or critiquing circle, or if you're instructing someone. I was
Speaker 2: your clarion instructor at one point. Ye, then you encounter
Speaker 2: something that's not working, you go through it and you're like, well,
Speaker 2: there's this like giant chunk of exposition here. And it's
Speaker 2: not that this giant chunk of exposition could not be
Speaker 2: made to work. I just don't know if this writer
Speaker 2: can make it work, or you know, like I don't
Speaker 2: know how to tell them how to make it work.
Speaker 2: So I'm going to say, stop trying to do this
Speaker 2: fucking hard thing and do an easier one. Right, But
Speaker 2: exposition that works, Holy shit, it's great. Right. We still
Speaker 2: read fucking Moby Dick, a book that's just about like
Speaker 2: exposition about whale hunting, right, it's a techno thriller about
Speaker 2: whale hunting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Kim Stanley Robinson will make me read about landscapes
Speaker 1: in it Arctica.
Speaker 2: And Mars totally.
Speaker 1: Now I look at geography different because I have read
Speaker 1: hundreds of pages of that man.
Speaker 2: One hundred percent. So yeah, So, like there's so much
Speaker 2: of this right in genre, and genre is not afraid
Speaker 2: to do it, you know, like if genre has a
Speaker 2: thing that a move that doesn't want to make because
Speaker 2: it doesn't want to bore you, right, right, which like
Speaker 2: there's boring fiction that's really good, right, Like there's lots
Speaker 2: of plotless kind of character study fiction. It's very subtle
Speaker 2: and whatever that you know, science fiction, fantasy, pulps, thrillers.
Speaker 2: We just don't want to try doing it right. That
Speaker 2: is fucking hard to do well, to be boring and interesting,
Speaker 2: Like it's it sounds like a contradiction until you find
Speaker 2: someone who does it well, and they're like, oh, I
Speaker 2: just like, boy, I just like I read this whole
Speaker 2: thing and when I was done, I just felt like
Speaker 2: I've been knifed in the guts. And I no, I
Speaker 2: didn't never saw the blade, and I just don't know
Speaker 2: where it came from. And like, yeah, with genre, you
Speaker 2: always know where the blade is, right, there's a great
Speaker 2: will and give some bit. Where he's interview in the
Speaker 2: Paris Review about writing science fiction, He's like, I'm in
Speaker 2: a lineage with dash ol Hammett. I'm a pulp writer.
Speaker 2: I can plot. My tractor has wheels on it when
Speaker 2: I you know, like I sit down to write a
Speaker 2: story and I get that thing in gear and it
Speaker 2: just starts to fucking move. And that's who I am,
Speaker 2: and that's how I write. I might be florid, I
Speaker 2: might be poetic, I might do all this other stuff,
Speaker 2: but I am a plotting writer, and I'm a genre writer.
Speaker 2: I'm a plotting writer too. There's always a lot of
Speaker 2: stuff happening, but it might have exposition, and you know,
Speaker 2: you want to rate a plot. He writer read Neil Stevenson, Right,
Speaker 2: this is a guy who's got so much stuff, but
Speaker 2: also a guy who's never afraid to do exposition. Right,
Speaker 2: there's a bit in cryptonomcons sixty three hundred words about
Speaker 2: eating cereal that is so interesting and cool, and I'm like,
Speaker 2: I just want that expanded to full novel length, right,
Speaker 2: like write his thesis about eating Captain Crunch, which like,
Speaker 2: it's so good and unless a writer could never pull
Speaker 2: it off. And Stevenson, especially as early books, they've got
Speaker 2: problems right there. Every book is flawed in some way
Speaker 2: or another, right, right, he got a lot of shit
Speaker 2: for his endings.
Speaker 1: I think writing a novel is the hardest thing I've
Speaker 1: ever done, huh. And then I keep doing it and
Speaker 1: it's like, but why do I keep doing this thing
Speaker 1: that's impossible?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: Which actually I don't mean to completely derailue, but that's
Speaker 1: actually how activism feels. Is this thing where you like,
Speaker 1: you can't do it right. I've always suspected parenting is
Speaker 1: like this, you can't get it right, but you have
Speaker 1: to do it. And novel writing always feels that way
Speaker 1: to me, because it's like there's just actually too many
Speaker 1: things happening in order to get it perfect.
Speaker 2: Aspiring to make no mistakes as stupid, aspiring to learn
Speaker 2: from your mistakes is great. Yeah, you know, like there's
Speaker 2: that line in Bird on a Wire that Leonard Cohen line,
Speaker 2: I swear by this song and by all that I
Speaker 2: have done wrong, you know, like, yeah, yeah, you know,
Speaker 2: it's just it's such. It's like in love and parenthood,
Speaker 2: in art, in activism, you'll never you'll never get everything right,
Speaker 2: but like you can aspire to make new mistakes rather
Speaker 2: than the same ones over and over again. And you know,
Speaker 2: I think that's what makes groundhog Days such a great movie.
Speaker 2: Is like watching someone like systematically approach making better mistakes,
Speaker 2: although he does eventually get perfect, which I think is silly. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but it makes the story. It gives it a nice
Speaker 2: happy ending, puts it.
Speaker 1: It's stuck in the plot, you know, you like, you
Speaker 1: have to get perfect in order to get out of
Speaker 1: it or whatever. So any given problem you're trying to
Speaker 1: cover and for people aren't used to your work you
Speaker 1: cover like surveillance and technology and climate change and more
Speaker 1: recently I've seen you talking a lot about AI and stuff.
Speaker 1: But like, what works better? What do you communicate better
Speaker 1: through fiction versus nonfiction? Like what are some of the
Speaker 1: advantages of fiction?
Speaker 2: I mean, fiction is like it's the fly through the
Speaker 2: architects rendering of the emotional state of what things will
Speaker 2: be like if we let them get worse or if
Speaker 2: we make them better. So, you know, the architect designs
Speaker 2: your new house, they make the architects rendering, then you
Speaker 2: fly through it and you get a sense of what
Speaker 2: it would be like to inhabit that house. Yeah, And
Speaker 2: the dystopia is like if we let this go on,
Speaker 2: And the utopia is what if we do something different?
Speaker 2: And you know, it's so hard to feel what things
Speaker 2: might be like if they're better. You know, there's a
Speaker 2: famous Marx quote about like not writing recipes for kitchens
Speaker 2: that haven't been made yet, right, And I think that,
Speaker 2: like science fiction is often about writing recipes for kitchens.
Speaker 1: That haven't been made yet.
Speaker 2: You know, like, what would it be like to live
Speaker 2: in this if we were different? And you know, I
Speaker 2: think that, like I can say as a matter of
Speaker 2: policy advocacy that so I should say. I've worked for
Speaker 2: the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is the most important and
Speaker 2: most established digital rights group in the world. I've been
Speaker 2: there for nearly twenty five years as an activist, and
Speaker 2: I am cursed with object permanence which means that I
Speaker 2: can remember the policy fights we had twenty five years
Speaker 2: ago where we said, if you do X, why is
Speaker 2: going to happen?
Speaker 1: And then they happen.
Speaker 2: So now that we're living in why I can go
Speaker 2: like this is because we did X, right, because these policymakers,
Speaker 2: these advocates whatever, they did it and like we shouldn't
Speaker 2: do that again. It's very frustrating having object permanence among
Speaker 2: people who don't even the people who lived through it,
Speaker 2: but also the people who didn't now get why it
Speaker 2: sucks to be old because you're surrounded by people who
Speaker 2: didn't see the mistake the last time and want to
Speaker 2: make it again. But like all my friends who are
Speaker 2: like AI sucks, so we need more copyright, I'm like, dude,
Speaker 2: like crawling the internet is theft. Fuck off, Crawling the
Speaker 2: internet is not theft. That is how we killed Aaron
Speaker 2: Swartz is calling crawling the internet theft? Yeah, shut out
Speaker 2: about this stuff, right, ye, Like we have a labor issue,
Speaker 2: we don't have a copyright issue. We've expanded copyright for
Speaker 2: forty five years, and we are poorer and our bosses
Speaker 2: are richer than they've ever been. And it's because like
Speaker 2: we have more to bargain with, but because we have
Speaker 2: no bargaining leverage, it's just more to bargain away, Like
Speaker 2: giving us more copyright is like giving a bullied kid
Speaker 2: extra lunch money. There isn't an amount of lunch money
Speaker 2: that advises us to lunch. Right. We need labor rights,
Speaker 2: we need solidarity. We don't need another alienable right. Like
Speaker 2: an alienable right only makes sense if you really think
Speaker 2: that you're an LLC with an MFA, right, like if
Speaker 2: you think you're a small business bargaining with another business.
Speaker 2: But we're not. We're workers, right, and so we need
Speaker 2: to think in terms of labor rights, not in terms
Speaker 2: of copyrights. So it's very frustrating right to I've lived
Speaker 2: through this. And sometimes with fiction you can say the
Speaker 2: world we're in now did not have to be this way.
Speaker 2: We could have a different world. You can say the
Speaker 2: stinging rebuke that vulgar Thatcherism deserves, and you can say
Speaker 2: there is no alternative is a thought stopping cliche intended
Speaker 2: to extinguish the imagination. It's really a way of saying,
Speaker 2: stop thinking of alternatives. And when you write the alternative,
Speaker 2: like when you write the recipe for the kitchen that
Speaker 2: hasn't been built. You create like the imaginative space to say,
Speaker 2: lots of recipes could be cooked in this kitchen. Yeah, right,
Speaker 2: Like I always say this, the most important thing about
Speaker 2: the technology is not what it does, it's who it
Speaker 2: does it for and who it does it too. This
Speaker 2: is Bill Gibson's version of the street finds its own
Speaker 2: use for things, right. And you know, I know this
Speaker 2: is not what Audrey Lord meant. But you know so
Speaker 2: many people say, oh, you can't dismantle the master's house
Speaker 2: with the master's tools. Why are you talking about using
Speaker 2: the internet for anything good? Obviously that's not what Audrey
Speaker 2: Lord meant. She was talking about patriarch blah blah blah
Speaker 2: blah blah. But right, this idea that, like the tools
Speaker 2: we have are steeped in so much sin we shouldn't
Speaker 2: try to use them, it's so anti Promethean, it's so
Speaker 2: anti leftist, right, Like, you know, this idea that like
Speaker 2: every peasant should live like a lord is like the
Speaker 2: idea that excites me about Leftism, not the idea that
Speaker 2: it'll all live like peasants. Like fuck that noise, right, right,
Speaker 2: And so like I'm really interested in the Promethean project
Speaker 2: of stealing the nonsense from Elon Musk because he didn't
Speaker 2: invent it, right, he did like built it. Yeah, workers
Speaker 2: built it. The fact that he like capitalized it or
Speaker 2: jack you know, uh, directed it, that doesn't change the
Speaker 2: fact that it came from workers and that workers made it,
Speaker 2: and that it's it is the people's technology to use
Speaker 2: and choose. And the fact that it's the master's house
Speaker 2: doesn't mean that it wasn't built by the.
Speaker 1: Right the people's house. He's just the master's squatting it basically,
Speaker 1: and like yeah, yeah, Like I think, like there's one
Speaker 1: thing to hit over and over is that lunites didn't
Speaker 1: hate technology.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Sure, they loved machines. That was their thing. Yeah.
Speaker 1: They were like, no, I prefer working in a cottage
Speaker 1: to a factory.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, and also like I want machines that produce
Speaker 2: good outputs and not bad ones. But we're going to
Speaker 2: adopt this new technology. Let's have the people who are
Speaker 2: the technologically skilled workers, which is, you know, to be
Speaker 2: his textile worker. In pre industrial Revolution England, you need
Speaker 2: a seven year apprenticeship r right. It was like doing
Speaker 2: a master's in mechanical engineering at mit. They were the
Speaker 2: most skilled machine workers in the world at the time,
Speaker 2: and the law at the time said that new machines
Speaker 2: had to be built and deployed with their co determination,
Speaker 2: and they were insisting on enforcement of these laws, which
Speaker 2: were instead jettisoned, and the machines that existed at the
Speaker 2: time made extremely bad cloth among all the other problems
Speaker 2: they had, right right, the fabric of the industrial revolution
Speaker 2: that the Industrial Revolution produced was bad. Oh so a certification,
Speaker 2: it was a sertification, yeah, yeah, yeah, And it was
Speaker 2: a certification in lots of ways. So like one of
Speaker 2: the reasons that the mill owners loved the new generation
Speaker 2: machines is they were quote so easy a child could
Speaker 2: use them. And there just happened to be these war orphanages,
Speaker 2: Napoleonic warorphanages in London filled with children who were kidnapped
Speaker 2: and indentured to work in the dark satanic mills of Manchester.
Speaker 2: You know, this was like we actually, like one of
Speaker 2: the great forgettings we've had is like how central the
Speaker 2: Luddite cause became to the conception of labor and science fiction.
Speaker 2: So Mary Shelley was a Luddite sympathizer. Frankenstein was a
Speaker 2: lutdite allegory about what happens when you let capitalists decide
Speaker 2: or entrepreneurs decide which technology we're going to use and
Speaker 2: how it's going to be used without any say from
Speaker 2: the wider society. Yeah, her husband, his maiden speech in
Speaker 2: the Lords was a pro ludite speech. Right. Science fiction
Speaker 2: was invented to advance the cause of Luddites, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: but not just that. There was one of the children
Speaker 2: who was kidnapped to work in the factories after his
Speaker 2: tenure of indenturies survived, and he wrote a memoir. His
Speaker 2: name was Robert Blinkoh, it's called The Memoir of Robert
Speaker 2: Blinko's a giant English bestseller. One of the people that
Speaker 2: influenced was Charles Dickens, who used it as the basis
Speaker 2: for Alliver Twist, which is Luddite fanfic.
Speaker 1: I love the strings across the board. I love the
Speaker 1: fact that everything we try to teach history as these
Speaker 1: like concise separate things. Sure, and this is so completely
Speaker 1: untrue and it separates us, yeah, from where we come from.
Speaker 1: That like, yeah, like no science fiction being invented to
Speaker 1: advance the ltte, Cause this is not a thing that
Speaker 1: gets discussed, you know, or even you're talking about coming
Speaker 1: up in a science fiction where like you're talking about
Speaker 1: this woman who built so much of the infrastructure that
Speaker 1: underlies modern science fiction, and that y'all were sort of
Speaker 1: family friends because both your parents are radicals.
Speaker 2: Like I remember she was radical and my parents were radicals.
Speaker 2: She was my parents' generation.
Speaker 1: Yeah right, right, sorry, yeah, like family friends. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: but that's not People have this like stodgy idea that
Speaker 1: science fiction was this, you know, fundamentally conservative thing, because
Speaker 1: often conservative stuff tends to linger longer. I don't entirely know.
Speaker 2: And John W. Campbell was a fucking fascist who's the
Speaker 2: most important editor in the field.
Speaker 1: Right, So it's like it's not like all science fiction
Speaker 1: was inherently liberatory and good and you know whatever. But
Speaker 1: like I remember getting introduced around a convention and you know,
Speaker 1: being introduced like, oh, you have to meet Margaret. She's
Speaker 1: an anarchist and like writers whose works I've read, like
Speaker 1: one of them was like, oh, me too, and I
Speaker 1: was like I had no idea, huh. But so there's
Speaker 1: this whole legacy. Okay, I remember when I first started,
Speaker 1: Actually you were the one of the people who told
Speaker 1: me this. When I went to Clarion West was just
Speaker 1: six weeks writer's boot camp in twenty fifteen, and Corey
Speaker 1: was one of my instructors there, and I remember I
Speaker 1: was coming in and being like I had actually even
Speaker 1: published some stuff, but always with radical presses. And I
Speaker 1: was like, I don't know, my stuff might be too
Speaker 1: radical for mainstream presses, and you were like, no one cares, Like,
Speaker 1: that's not going to stop you. The quality of your
Speaker 1: pros might stop you, right, And it's not because science
Speaker 1: fiction is inherently leftist either, although I would say that
Speaker 1: the editors at modern science fiction magazines is probably skewed progressive.
Speaker 2: Certainly what the right would tell you, well, they're.
Speaker 1: Like they're underpaid people who love books, and they're really
Speaker 1: well educated and really poor. You're probably a progressive or
Speaker 1: left right. But science fiction like has fascists and radicals
Speaker 1: going all throughout it, like it's.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no total I mean the Futurians, which was this
Speaker 2: like polyamorous leftist science fiction group house that Judy Merrill
Speaker 2: and Fred Pohle lived in along with Sam Kornbluth and
Speaker 2: a bunch of those other people. They were banned from
Speaker 2: attending the first Hugo banquet for being two left very famously.
Speaker 1: Okay, so that is actually huh okay.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so this fight is as old as the as
Speaker 2: the modern genre as we understand it.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: There are two great books about this. One is Damon
Speaker 2: Knight's The Futureians. Damon lived in the Futurian House.
Speaker 1: Two.
Speaker 2: Damon was my clarion instructors. The guy wrote many many
Speaker 2: things found in science fiction writers of America, but if
Speaker 2: you're a Twilight Zone watcher you'll know him for two
Speaker 2: Serve Man that was his Yes and Mary to Kate Wilhelm,
Speaker 2: another great figure in the field. The other is Judy
Speaker 2: Merrill's autobiography, which won the Hugo Award, which she co
Speaker 2: wrote with her granddaughter Julia Paul Weary, which is called
Speaker 2: Better to Have Loved. And they are really two very
Speaker 2: different accounts of the same events, and they're great to
Speaker 2: be read one against the other. They're terrific, terrific books.
Speaker 1: Okay, well, I think this is probably where we should
Speaker 1: end episode one. But when we come back, I really
Speaker 1: want to talk to you about how to unfuck the world.
Speaker 1: Some of your ideas about unfucking the world. The book
Speaker 1: The lost cause, changing our conceptions of what it means
Speaker 1: to protect the environment from don't build anything, to build
Speaker 1: high rises and all kinds of really challenging but really
Speaker 1: important ideas. But do anything you want to plug? What
Speaker 1: have you been working on? What's your latest stuff?
Speaker 2: I mean, the latest book is The Reverse Centaur's Guide
Speaker 2: to Life After AI. It's a nonfiction book about being
Speaker 2: a good AI critic. It's doing super well. If I
Speaker 2: can toot my horn here, I just got an email
Speaker 2: saying it's the for the sixth consecutive week the best
Speaker 2: selling paperback nonfiction book in Canada.
Speaker 1: Oh wow.
Speaker 2: It was a debut on the New York Times List.
Speaker 2: It's selling well everywhere, so it's doing great. The book
Speaker 2: before that was called in Shitifications, book about how tech
Speaker 2: platforms go bad. Paperback's about to come out. I had
Speaker 2: a call with the publicist marketing people. They've had massive
Speaker 2: orders for the paperback, so it's looking like it's going
Speaker 2: to do really well. It's going to be a Hudson bookseller.
Speaker 2: So the Hudson has originally said, oh, we won't take
Speaker 2: a book that has the worst shit on the cover.
Speaker 2: They're the ones in the airport. We won't take a
Speaker 2: book that has the word shit in the cover, and
Speaker 2: now they've taken a giant order. They keep calling every
Speaker 2: couple of weeks increasing the order, and the word in
Speaker 2: shitification just made it into the Oxford English Dictionary, which
Speaker 2: is definitely a bucket list item.
Speaker 1: Yeah. That I also love that. Like, that's the thing
Speaker 1: about capitalism is that, like they'll be like, oh, we
Speaker 1: don't do that, and you're like, look, this sells, and
Speaker 1: they're like, you know what, Yeah, you could publish your
Speaker 1: book about hanging us. It sells. I'll want to hear it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, And then you know, as I said, I
Speaker 2: work for the Electronic Printier Foundation e FF. Dot orger
Speaker 2: is where we find out more about our work where
Speaker 2: a member supported nonprofit. Beyond writing us a check and
Speaker 2: joining you, there's lots of ways you can get involved,
Speaker 2: and if you join our email list, we will tell
Speaker 2: you about them all the time, things that are local
Speaker 2: to you, things that are national and international. And then
Speaker 2: my newsletter is pluralistic dot net Open Access Creative Commons attribution.
Speaker 2: I write five or successays a week there and they
Speaker 2: are a CC attribution, which means that you can take them,
Speaker 2: share them, sell them, dapt them all without my permission.
Speaker 2: Just cite the license, cite the original, and note if
Speaker 2: you've modified it.
Speaker 1: Hell yeah, all right, Well that'll do us for today,
Speaker 1: But when we come back Wednesday, we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about more of all of this stuff. Cool People Who
Speaker 1: Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media.
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