Transcript
0:33:50 - Speaker 1
So you also have a mystery with a big twist in your story, and the problem about mysteries of the big twist is we can't really talk about the twist because you then spoiled the plot. But what I can ask is did you know this from the outset or was this something that you realized was necessary as part of your writing process, somewhere in the midpoint of your outline doc that you were doing?
0:34:14 - Speaker 2
Yeah, the big twist is actually the starting point of the whole story. Ok, that was that secret was the thing that I knew that the book was actually going to be about, and I don't think it's giving away too much to say that the book is fundamentally about identity. Yeah, and I think it's going to be really really popular with science fiction fans.
0:34:40 - Speaker 1
that twist, I can see it really appealing. Anyway, we really mustn't give it away.
0:34:46 - Speaker 2
Yeah, ok, yeah, so yeah, but this is yeah if I say yes there is you know what, and the thing is, one of the challenges that I had and something that I went back and forth with my editor with during the editing process on this book, was making sure that all the characters were behaving properly for who they are and what their background is. And when you have a character whose background is hidden, I actually had my editor saying, well, this character would never say that, and I go. Well, actually, if you knew that, when you get to the end of the book, you'll understand why they did.
And she did. She came to the end of the book and said, wow, ok. So then the two of us worked together to try to make that character feel very much, to feel very much themselves, without betraying the secret, to have them be all of the people that they are. Because this is about identity. And I mean, I say right on my web page about the book in a world where, in a world where minds can be copied, what does it mean to be me, to be quote, me, unquote, and so yeah, so there and I really do believe that I did not hide anything, that all of the pieces are right there in plain sight. It's just that until you know what's really happening, you will never spot them. It's like, if I've done my job right, you will never spot them.
0:36:20 - Speaker 1
So I really don't want to rest too long on this, because it would be a shame to start the book with too many suspicions. So everybody wipe that from your minds. When you read the Kuiper Belt job, just go in innocent and enjoy the ride, because I think you'll enjoy the twist or the more. So we will. Also the information about your book tour for those of the listeners in America, if we put a link to your website is will they find information about where you're going to be?
0:36:50 - Speaker 2
Yeah, go to my website and click on About Me at the top. One of the options on the About Me menu is Upcoming Appearances.
0:36:58 - Speaker 1
Brilliant.
0:36:59 - Speaker 2
So I'll be in Chicago, san Diego, baltimore, portland and Seattle and I think, oh, in San Francisco in early 2024.
0:37:10 - Speaker 1
OK, so that's the big cities, hopefully one near some of our listeners. So, David, we mentioned that you've been writing since 2000 thereabouts and you've got an overview of the role of science fiction and where it fits within fantasy. What do you think its place is now? So we have the Pulp Fiction Era of the 20s and 30s, where it was a cheap entertainment. What do you think's happened to science fiction? And, of course, we've now got the rise of TV versions and film versions to sort of thicken up the public understanding of what science fiction is about. What do you think?
0:37:47 - Speaker 2
I've been a science fiction reader since I was a teenager. My formative experiences are the early space age I was born at right around the time the first Mercury, the first Mercury capsules went up. I was absolutely riveted to the Apollo missions to the moon. I followed the space shuttle. All of the real science space adventure of the 1960s and 70s is key to my personal identity, and so I have.
But as somebody who's been in the science fiction field as a reader and then as a writer since the 1960s, I've seen science fiction change quite a bit and furthermore I know a lot about the history of science fiction going back to the 20s and 30s.
So I've seen how science fiction exists as part of mainstream culture. And over the past 50, 60 years science fiction has grown from being a thing that people would look down upon that you would literally like. If you were reading a science fiction magazine on the subway. You would hide it behind a newspaper because you didn't want people to know you were reading that sci-fi crap. If you told Teenage Me in 1975, so before Star Wars came out I was a Trekkie. I was a fan of Star Trek, beginning with the beginning of Star Trek in 1966 or 7. And so if you told Teenage Me that you're going to be able to stand on a street corner in any town in the world and see, maybe one out of three, one out of four people walking by is wearing a t-shirt with a science fiction TV show on it.
0:39:46 - Speaker 1
I would never have believed that.
0:39:47 - Speaker 2
That science fiction has swallowed pop culture, and so what that means is that so much of our pop culture things that people today don't understand just how dominant Westerns were in the 1950s, that in the 1950s literally every other TV show was a Western. And there's a reason that Star Trek 1966, starts off with the lines space, the final frontier. Star Trek was explicitly pitched to the networks as wagon train and space that Westerns were so dominant. And science fiction has grown up to the point that it is now that dominant in culture, that science fiction and especially superheroes, are so dominant in culture that basically science fiction is pop culture. Look at San Diego Comic-Con. When I was a teenager, comic-cons was a little thing that you'd have at some hotel where you would go and you would trade old comic books with your other comic book fans. San Diego Comic-Con is the biggest convention in San Diego, which is the biggest convention town in the country. San Diego Comic-Con is huge. Comics and science fiction are huge business. They basically become our pop culture, and it is fascinating to me, as somebody who has lived through all of this and also has a lot of information about what happened before I was born, to see how science fiction and wider pop culture have kind of destroyed each other Because science fiction used to be the idea that anybody that reads science fiction has a forward thinking mind and this is somebody who obviously has thought about the future and will have some ideas about what's going to happen next. That's been completely destroyed because just about everybody is a science fiction reader or watcher now. Just about everybody watches science fiction there are.
When I was a kid, we had one science fiction TV show on TV at a time, if that I mean. I remember when Gene Roddenberry came to I believe it was ABC with his idea for Star Trek and they listened to him and they said, sorry, we've already got a science fiction TV show. It's called Lost in Space. That the idea that there was. When I was a kid. There was only one science fiction television show at a time.
Now, admittedly, we have many more TV shows, what we're streaming and all, but still the number of different simultaneous science fiction TV shows, movie series, massively popular Game of Thrones, massive international bestseller Terry Pratchett, largest selling author period in the UK that science fiction and fantasy have dominated our pop culture landscape and so in some ways this is great because it gets science fiction concepts that I think are important for people into the global conversation and in some ways it's terrible because it's turned science fiction into just entertainment that science fiction has been dumbed down by becoming pop culture, as opposed to the days when we would say it's a proud and lonely thing to be a fan. That back in those days, if you met a person and you just happen to meet a person and you start talking, oh, you read science fiction, well then you knew something about that person. And these days it still tells you something, but not as much as it used to.
0:43:32 - Speaker 1
I was thinking as you were talking about the difference over in the UK because we had we obviously imported Star Trek and I can remember it as one of the first programs I saw in color because of the strong the shirt colors. I vividly remember that.
0:43:50 - Speaker 2
And that is exactly why they have those strong shirt colors, because it was a very new technology.
0:43:55 - Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah, it makes the perfect sense. But we also had Doctor who, which is a particular British take on science fiction. I think in the way it's conceived, yeah, no, Doctor who is so British. We had a. Have you heard of Blake Seven? Oh yeah, yeah, that was a really traumatizing experience of my use because it's a very daring program.
0:44:21 - Speaker 2
Again, it's called the End. Oh, Dirk, it's so. It's very, very dark. There's never been a mainstream television series, there's never been a mainstream science fiction television series as dark as Blake Seven, at least not until like the late 2010s.
0:44:40 - Speaker 1
Yeah, I see People think they're being very forward thinking now to sort of do these sort of cynical programs. But it's been done. The 70s were there, you know.
0:44:48 - Speaker 2
Yeah, of course you know, Blake Seven, like Firefly, like the Kuiper Bell job is a story of found family.
0:44:55 - Speaker 1
Yes, there is, there is actually, you're right. Yeah, you miss the Esparados. Yeah, yeah, yeah, wonderful stuff. So I was interested in seeing how science fiction has swallowed up popular culture and I think, if you include superheroes in that, that's absolutely true, isn't it? And of course you can. But do you think the science fiction of the type of Star Trek in particular? While I have this mixed feeling, I love Star Trek. But there's this side of Star Trek where it's exploring important themes like diversity. I can remember the next generation. There was a series about whether or not the walk drive was actually damaging the environment of space, so it very sort of switched on to issues we're facing about our present. But there's also this promise that, don't worry guys, in the future we'll be able to leap from planet to planet without too much trouble. There will be a federation. There's a sort of imaginatively paving the way, and I always think of that when I see those t-shirts saying there's no planet B.
0:46:01 - Speaker 2
Right.
0:46:02 - Speaker 1
So do you think there's a possibility that science fiction is actually blunting our edge, understanding things like the climate crisis?
0:46:12 - Speaker 2
There's no question in my mind that a lot of people and here I'm gonna specifically call it Elon Musk are betting the farm on there being a planet B, you know, just saying, oh, we'll fix this problem, we fixed the whole in the ozone layer, we'll fix climate change, and I think that level of naive techno-optimism is related to the science fiction mindset. But I think these people would be having these same thoughts even if there were no such thing as science fiction. You know that there's always going to be. There's right now in my social media sphere there's a lot of discussion about.
Mark Andreessen has published an essay just in the past week in which he identifies basically the humanities as the enemy, saying that all these people putting all these these safety restrictions on our technologies, you know they're just trying to stifle innovation. And I was like no. And the thing is, I think he would have that attitude even if that wasn't science fiction. He certainly doesn't reference science fiction explicitly. He's got that same techno-optimism that you had in the railroad barons of the 1880s. You know that there has always been this idea since we entered the modern world in, say, the Enlightenment say, Okay, we're going back to then, 18th century.
Yeah, so since the Enlightenment definitely since the Enlightenment, possibly going as far back as the Renaissance we have this idea that human ingenuity will be capable of solving any problem. Renaissance the Renaissance was all about recovering what had been lost from Greece and Rome. And then as you go into the Enlightenment, then it becomes more along the lines of okay, we've got that, now let's see what we can build on it, so that naive techno-optimism is something that science fiction is part of that. But I would not say that we can lay the blame on science fiction.
0:48:23 - Speaker 1
No, I mean because there's obviously the form of science fiction which warns absolutely against the possible crisis we're heading towards. There's plenty of those.
0:48:34 - Speaker 2
And the thing is, is that science fiction? Science fiction is a tool like any other. That science fiction has definitely been used as a way of trying to get people to settle down and not worry about the climate crisis. But science fiction is both optimistic and pessimistic. It's a way of saying I mean literally Thomas More's Utopia of 1520, I think it was could be considered an early work of science fiction, the idea that science fiction can show. Look, we could do this. But you look at Brave New World, you look at 1984, you look at Neuromancer. These are the science fiction futures of. Oh my God, look at this horrible thing that might happen.
And science fiction has always been a literature that has both of those arrows in its quiver, both, and any individual work is gonna tend to be mostly pessimistic or mostly optimistic, and actually every Utopia is somebody, every Utopia is somebody's dystopia, everybody, all Utopias, except for there are people like Plato who have created Utopias that are purely didactic and not intended to entertain or warn. But I'd say that most science fictional Utopias, certainly in the 20th century and beyond, are also cautionary tales. Look at Brave New World. Brave New World is a world in which disease has been eliminated and everybody is born to be perfectly suited to their existence. Brave New World is, of course, a dystopia, and into this Brave New World we bring a 20th century man, somebody from a primitive, from outside of this culture, and through his eyes we see how deadening and dystopian this Utopia actually is. And I think most science fictional Utopias in the 20th century and beyond are also cautionary tales, because every Utopia is somebody else's dystopia.
0:50:43 - Speaker 1
So, David, do you have a favorite film in this genre? Because, or movie, as I should say, as you're American but do you have one which you think is your for some reason? Is that a peak of a science fiction portrayal?
0:50:59 - Speaker 2
You know, probably the one that I've rewatched the most times, as Blade Runner. I love that movie. One of the things about it is the fact that it was one of the very first movies to portray a future in which the pieces of the past are still visible. Up until Blade Runner, whenever you saw a science fictional city, it would be this shining city on a hill with all these beautiful shiny buildings and flying cars, and there was no sense of the fact that this was a city that was built on the bones of earlier cities, which was in turn built on the bones of earlier cities. I mean, you can't.
This shining science fiction city is very much an American concept. If you go to Europe, you can't walk down the street with oh there's a, you know there's a, there's a, you know, 21st century Chinese cafe built in a Victorian building which is in turn, built on the foundations of a Roman temple. You don't see that as much in America, and Blade Runner was one of the first to really explicitly do that. That. Blade Runner has a layered aesthetic where even the main character's car, you know, is a 10 year old model with new solar panels bolted on the top. See it just briefly, but everything in that movie has that. Oh, there's a specific word that the production designer used that I'm failing to recall, but it's something about layering, something about how and, by the way, if you look it's not Palimpsest, is it?
0:52:35 - Speaker 1
It is not Palimpsest but it's something a little yeah.
0:52:38 - Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah that if you actually, if you know Los Angeles and you look at Blade Runner, you can very clearly see 20th century and even 18th century, 19th century Los Angeles under the neon. There's a okay. So I wrote an essay a long time ago about the climax of Blade Runner takes place, was filmed in and takes place in a building called the Bradbury Building, which is a building that exists in Los Angeles today. The Bradbury Building is a visually fascinating building and a lot of movies have been filmed there because it is so gorgeous. But the Bradbury Building was built in the late 1800s by somebody who was a fan of a book called Looking Backward.
Looking Backward was a utopian, a didactic, utopian book of the 1800s, which was it was written. As you know. Some guy fell asleep for a long time and woke up in the far future and look at this marvelous utopia. Okay, so it was not. It wasn't a, you know, it wasn't a very plot or character heavy book. It was all about the ideas. It was a socialist utopia. But there were these Looking Backward clubs in a lot of US cities where they said you know, hey, you know, this is a cool idea, let's see if we can actually do this. So the guy that the guy that the real estate developer that had the Bradbury Building built was a member of one of these clubs and he said let us build a building in the utopian spirit of this book. So he hired his brother-in-law to design the building. This guy only ever built one. This architect only ever actually had constructed one building in his entire lifetime and he claimed to have gotten the ideas from the building. He claimed to have gotten the ideas for the building from his late brother who had died quite young. So he got the idea in a seance to design a building based on utopian novel.
And it's a beautiful building. I've been there. It's a gorgeous, gorgeous building. It's got this marvelous glass-topped atrium. There's a shot in Blade Runner where Roy Betty looks up and sees a blimp going by overhead with the searchlights coming down through the glass ceiling, and the idea that you'd have this atrium filled with light, with a glass ceiling to let the sunlight in. That was completely unheard of in the 1880s when that building was built and I think that's why it's been used in so many movies.
And I don't know that they specifically chose it for Blade Runner, but I do know that they specifically refer to the Bradbury building. I think they even used I think the words Bradbury building even appear in dialogue and there's a. The front of that building has a couple of twisted columns, very distinctive, and you can see them. The actual columns in that shot were a set, because they didn't have the rights to shoot on the outside of the building but they did shoot the inside. So, anyway, I do love Blade Runner and I do love the layered aesthetic of both its visual aesthetic and also its psychological aesthetic, because it's all about questions of when you add on to humanity, what do you have? You know what? Can you indeed replace a human being?
0:56:04 - Speaker 1
Yeah, and also it's quite fascinating the difference between the film and the Android dream of electric sheep version, which is like the novella sea-corn idea for it. It's definitely worth reading one and watching the other and seeing what you think.
0:56:22 - Speaker 2
It's kind of astonishing that Philip K Dick is like one of the most successful writers in history in terms of having his books turned into movies and TV shows. And almost none of the adaptations have anything to do with the original book. They are worlds apart you know quite literally.
0:56:39 - Speaker 1
So you've told us along the way some of the places that we might want to read and things want to look at. But do you have one good read that you want to, other than your own books, obviously that you'd suggest people go and look to? You mentioned some contemporary writers that you're promoting. Is there any one between them that you'd like to pick out and suggest we pick up and read?
0:57:03 - Speaker 2
I'm going to call out the Fifth Season by N K Jemison. It is, I mean, I did some what I consider stunt writing in the character belt job. The Fifth Season leaves that in the dust. It is an amazing piece of writing and, okay, and I'm not going to give you any more spoilers than that, read carefully. And another one that I can really recommend is called the Lady Astronaut. No, it's the Lady Astronaut series by Mary Robin at Coal, and I'm suddenly blanking on the title of the first book in the series, because there was a short story called the Lady Astronaut of Mars, which she eventually adapted into a book. I'm sorry, I do not recall the title of the book.
0:57:50 - Speaker 1
But that should be enough for us to find it, and when I do, I'll find the.
0:57:54 - Speaker 2
Mary Robin at Coal. Mary Robin at Coal, lady Astronaut series.
0:57:57 - Speaker 1
Yeah, thank you, David. And just to round up today's fascinating discussion, I've certainly fascinated by this looking backwards movement in the 19th century which I had no idea about. We always end with a where in all the fantasy world is the best place for something? We've done things like the best forest, the best in the best, I know, best place to be a musician, that kind of thing. But in honor of your opening few moves in your book I thought we could do where is where in all the fantasy world is the best place to go to a casino? Because actually casinos crop up a lot in science fiction which is not unconnected to the fact that it's come out of the Western genre Indeed Because there is definitely a sort of growth out of the old bar scene in a Western.
0:58:50 - Speaker 2
So if you got a casino, they would like to walk into.
The first one that comes to mind is the casino in the most recent Star Wars trilogy, I think in the second, the second movie of the Ray trilogy. That movie I find kind of weak and that that scene actually, in terms of structure and plot is, it leaves much to be desired, but the visuals are phenomenal and I mean, I'm thinking, and you think about, you think about casinos, I'm thinking of oceans 11, which you know I'm gonna. I'm gonna claim that oceans 11 is science fiction, because it is fiction that depends upon technology.
Okay you're expanding the going to adopt oceans 11 into the science, into the science fiction genre. But, yeah, there's a lot of, there's a lot of casinos and there's a lot of, there's a lot of casino heists in science fiction. So so, yeah, but unfortunately at the moment the best, best science fiction casino I can think of is the one in the Kuiper Belt job.
0:59:53 - Speaker 1
But of course, yeah, it's an excellent casino, nice and grungy and full of danger. I think, personally, I'd. We've been talking about Star Trek. I think I'd quite like to go to a Star Trek casino, though it might be quite fun to go to the Galaxy Quest version of it. Oh, yes, yeah, because I was going to say that my favorite science fiction film is, oddly, Galaxy Quest, because it's like it manages both to be a homage and a sort of spoof, but a very respectful spoof and it's, if you're a science fiction fan, it manages to both gently mock you and reassure you at the same time, which is a great.
1:00:32 - Speaker 2
It's a loving it's a loving parody.
1:00:35 - Speaker 1
Yeah.
1:00:36 - Speaker 2
And yeah there's a. There's a great well, there's a great casino on Deep Space Nine. There's a there's a great casino in Babylon Five. You know, interestingly, you've got to get people. You've got to get a sufficient mass of people together in order to support a casino.
1:00:51 - Speaker 1
Yeah, I wouldn't mind one on the holodeck if I get to hang out with a crew. I mean probably next generation crew.
1:00:58 - Speaker 2
Yeah, dangerous places be aware, yeah.
1:01:02 - Speaker 1
Thank you so much, David, for spending your time with us today and just to say again for everyone who's listening, David's new book is called the Kuiper Belt Job and it's out imminently, so do preorder it now and some of you might be able to join David on his book tour as well.
1:01:19 - Speaker 2
Thank you very much Okay, thank you.
