Science Behind the Magic Episode One: Ken Liu || Interview with Ken Liu [CC]

[Music] foreign welcome to the first in a science behind the magic interview series I have the wonderful Ken Lou with me and thank you so much for joining for those who are seeing this series it's an author interview Series where instead of focusing necessarily on the themes of the books that they create it's more like where did you come up with the ideas behind the real life science or societal implications for the works because that's something you can't ignore in all of fantasy and science fiction is how it's inspired by subverted and you know and that's the thing I geek out about it's what got me into fantasy as a really young kid I didn't realize till I got older that it was like all of the like SCI fantasy books like his dark materials and things that got me into it I'm like oh I love looking back and seeing the physics and things and your dandelion dynasties and short stories I just geek out all the time I'm glad you've decided that dandelion dynasties is like a fantasy but the Wizards are Engineers I think that's a great tagline for it because I don't I'm always like this is like historical sci-fi I think but a fantasy reader would be more comfortable because it it's more tropes thank you well yes it's a real pleasure to be here and yeah do you want to give people a brief background of who you are besides a writer because that probably at least that informed for me when I first met you at a yeah I've had a pretty weird career um trajectory but who doesn't right these days uh so I um graduated college with a degree in English um but I did not go on to pursue a career um where that degree would be the most obvious choice um I went to work for Microsoft as an engineer um and so uh but I didn't uh and then right after that uh I went and joined a startup um started by some friends and I was a program in there again um so after that first career in Tech I switched over to I went to law school and became a corporate lawyer for uh nine years um with a federal uh clerkship on a federal appeals court in between um and then I went from that to being a litigation consultant um which essentially meant that I was a an expert witness in patent cases um and the thing that I got out of that experience actually is I became an amateur historian of technology I learned a lot about the history of technology and the evolution of Technology uh because part of that job required you to research patents and to discern uh in great detail the the um the slow evolution of of the technology and how um how truly difficult it is to predict which technology will succeed in the moment um so anyway that was my uh my my third major career um and then I went full time as a writer as of uh six or seven six maybe six years ago yes six years at a time has no meaning right um and uh so I've been a full-time writer since then uh I also um I'm a full-time writer and uh and a futurist um so I work for think tanks governments uh large corporations uh universities uh where I my primary focus is on telling stories about the future and how um the very Act of Imagining the future shapes it obviously but it's also um something that's incredibly difficult for people to do and I talk about I go through techniques and work with you as well how they can do that in a way that isn't necessarily more predictive but is more helpful in terms of clarifying their own values and the entire reason for why they're engaging the exercise in the first place well that just gives me a question about the hidden girl Anthology is that a lot of that come from a lot of your futuristic work because that's a lot of imagining what could come at least expectation yeah absolutely absolutely yeah in particular something that I thought was a really striking consistent theme across the collection because you sometimes have collections that are just like author wrote a bunch of these stories and they're putting it together and then sometimes there is like a cohesive three run line and both are wonderful but like the hidden girl I've noticed man we are playing with what how do humans and machines potentially meld in the future pretty consistently um what was like the inspiration behind that and how did you ground that in reality for yourself where did you really go off base okay so my my major um so I'm going to start out by uh saying something that um much more eloquently but I think is worth reminding people of which is that science fiction is not an exercising predicting the future it's just not um science fiction is as a province of fantasy is an attempt to really tell stories about the present it's an attempt to tell realist stories as real as we can be in this technological age it's an attempt to tell stories about the present that reveal aspects of the present that are otherwise invisible to us using the modes of realist fiction if you will um so science fiction as a type of fantasy uses metaphors that are drawn from our technological age so I sometimes say that you know sci-fi is a misnomer for um for this type of fiction it really should be techify because it's really drawn from technology more than it is from science um and a lot of what I um what I do in the sort of stories that you see in the hidden girl and Other Stories is to talk about certain aspects of contemporate of the Contemporary world that give us anxiety that nonetheless promise a lot of Transformations um and the idea here is to work out using metaphors what are the underlying anxieties and what are the ways that we can discern um and realize is our deepest values the values that are worth holding on to so for example the in the hidden girl right there's a series of stories called The Singularity stories um so they're about the idea of uploaded Consciousness so the idea is that you know uh this is essentially the idea that the thing that Silicon Valley has been talking about forever which is we shall upload our minds into the cloud and live there as Gods um so I said okay let's take that premise and say we will make it true let's say that we make that thing that dream actually real um and if we do so what are the consequences um thank you uh my wife just brought me coffee um so um I wanted to uh work that out and uh fundamentally it's a it's a love story it's a story about a Father's Love For um his daughter and for um his uh his wife and how even after this form of Passage to another state of existence uh he nonetheless tries to hold on to that love which for him to find his Humanity but that is not true of the of the other uploaded Consciousness they have their own ideas about what it means to be in this new state of existence and um my inspiration largely was to try to work out literally you know if the dream of the singularity in this aspect were to become real what would it be like what would you know what how would we Define what it means to be human to be alive and how would we Define um as the things that are worth holding on to um you know this is clearly a a thing that we are anxious about that we think about a lot because we are in this very unique moment where machine cognition seems Within Reach it seems to be a reality either truly mechanistic cognition or at least a mechanistic imitation and simulation or Recreation of human cognition both of which are very deeply interesting things and they can transform the way we think about our own reality you know this is the moment when um the biosphere can potentially break into the technosphere in a way that has not ever been achieved before um and and you know we don't know exactly how that would happen and I have no interest in predicting that but I'm very interested in working out what are the implications um based on our present and what are the ways we can sort of twist and skew our present and and see things that we don't otherwise see and is that basically a lot of your motivation behind short story exploration because I see lots of fun ideas that are very I'm a big short story reader I don't think that's like the normal in the Sci-Fi space all the time but like every time someone writes a short story about entropy like you did in Maxwell's demons I'm like oh I love when people describe entropy and then play with it because it's a hard thing to play with because it's such a known fact and in Mexico even you chose to be like okay entropy thermodynamics Second Law we can't break it but I want to add this spiritual component and that's just a heart-wrenching story on Baseline and exploring our history with Japan and World War II so it's just how do you did it start with entropy or did it start with Japan how did that Story come out well that's where I started with Okinawa right so I mean it's interesting that the story is describing the context of Japan um but the the very um uh the inspiration behind that is the history of Okinawa and how uh Japan became Japan um I essentially um destroying the indigenous identity of Okinawa um and and so the entire story is about how um I always find it very interesting to to to to see what readers sort of um discern is the story because it is interesting that many readers focus on the Japan aspect of it when in fact for my characters the focus is on Okinawa not necessarily on Japan and it's exact uh I think that aspect may may be hard for some people to pick up Just Because unless you've studied the history of nation building extensively of this happening the formation of France the formation of Germany the formation of even you know what we would call the United Kingdom all of these Modern Nation States came about essentially um by destroying indigenous identities um and and sort of imposing uh an artificial um uh uh standard identity on the local and Japan is one of the last Modern Nation States to go through that process and Okinawa is one of the victims um so my story was really about that aspect of it it's about the indigenous Roots the indigenous traditions of Okinawa being incorporated into Japan and um and then how an individual really is trying to uh find a place for themselves oftentimes you know uh some of my stories have described as sort of conflicted identities which I dislike intensely because it suggests that somehow um when you are you know Okinawan American or Chinese American or you know some sort of hyphenated Indie that that that's essentially a matter of conflict um I don't know why this seems to be um sort of the thing that a majority I'll just say a white readership imagines that those who are not majority uh feel but that's just not true you know um you have your identity and there's no conflict in that whatever conflict there is about systemic racism uh from the larger um uh society and those who are in the majority um but it's not the conflict it's not the within um you know you live your identity and you live your life there's no conflict there um the issue is rather trying to explain and trying to impose trying to resist the idea that those Outsiders are always trying to lock you into their idea about how things ought to be which is essentially what happened in um uh Maxwell's demon so that part came first but then entropy became sort of a really nice metaphor for working out systemic racism an idea of this larger the the the effort of individuals trying to live a life that feels true that is right for them in the context of geopolitics in the context of large Empires uh trying to step on and Stamp Out local indigenous identities it's um I really latched on to what you were just talking about about there's no conflict in identity it's the conflict with being in your identity in the space I think I'm interpreting that right because that's a theme that you have in so many of your short stories and in the dandelion Dynasty like I think in I think it's the fourth book speaking bones you introduced a character that's only there for like 80 Pages who I adore yeah and I'm just like oh because yeah zankara is great yeah yeah and I'm just like wow that's such a good because I am Venezuelan American and I've always been comfortable with it until I go to the doctor and I have to fill out a form that's like asking me where do I fit within their right you don't you don't we don't live we don't consciously say we must perform our identity right we don't we don't go around unconsciously say uh I am performing by the email until you get into these moments where you know people are like what box do you do I put you in and you're like oh I guess you do want me to perform it this moment right that's the moment when the sort of performance comes into play uh and it's it's funny it's like we don't we don't live in this conflicted State I don't like you know uh until until you must be conflicted because you must put yourself into a box here so which box do you want to pick well we don't we don't pick boxes no on average until someone makes me pick a box it's not until that moment that I personally ever feel that coming that's exactly right yeah yeah that that's that's the theme that I really want to focus on but oftentimes um you know I've seen uh so my sorry the paper Menagerie gets taught in schools a lot um and it surprises me to the extent to which uh students and teachers often present this as a story about identity conflict about the supposed inner conflict that those with none um simple I guess I'll just say nonsense by identities supposedly experience but I just don't I don't really get that I'm not sure where that comes from other than you know this must be imagined because there's obviously conflict in the paper Menagerie but I always took it as more there's always conflict in following generations and all of that is in foreign yeah definitely and there's also the whole idea of systemic racism and how you sort of figure out how do you internalize or not internalize and how do you sort of resist it those are real conflicts but the conflict isn't do I get to be this or that you know I must perform you know that's not really how it works yeah I always um and it's odd I think for some people think it's odd that I'm bringing this up in this but I I'm always fascinated with language and brains because until recently when I started to really try and hone down my Spanish speaking skills because I'm going to South America it's like I would like to be able to function it's like oh wow the information I get's in the wrong order my brain is not prepared to process I have to re-wire things and it gets even more complex when like I'm just going from Roman language to a Roman adjacent language and then we have so many other ones and you really I think make that very clear in the first short story that I read in the paper Menagerie the bookmaking habits of I I'm really bad at long and I'm and then you take those ideas and you make them even larger in the dandelion Dynasty so I figure we could talk about that short story for a bit and then kind of go into dandelion Dynasty which I don't think will be very spoilery because I don't know if you can spoil the dandelion Dynasty in my head because it's not about big moments it's about getting there but yeah I get it I I get what you're saying yeah yeah but you know bookmaking habits that just obviously feels like a lot of everything you love thinking about all the time in one spot that you just kind of you always seem to gravitate back towards ideas in that story in my experience reading your work so if you want to expound on where it comes from and why yeah so the bookmaking habits of slug species is um an example of a particular genre that I write I call them fictional essays so another example that I wrote recently in that genre is called time keeper see time keeper Symphony which is published in Clark's world and essentially these are um these are some readers really hate this form so they are they are short stories yes but they don't really have characters and they don't really have plot um they are you know as I describe fictional essays so they're they're essentially essays written um in some sort of imaginary fantasy world or sci-fi world and they treat a topic the way we would write an essay about the real world um and it's it's essentially an exercising World building and the readers invited to craft their own stories as they read the World building exercise um so that's the brief explanation um bookmaking habits of Select species in particular is an essay focused on the way various different alien species in the universe may um choose to preserve information and to pass information from one generation to the next we do so by Oral storytelling but then now mostly by writing um or books uh so bookmaking in that sense not as in gambling but bookmaking um and um the various alien species that I imagined would do so in different ways some of them do so by passing on parts of their own bodies and some of them do so by mapping brains and some of them do so by recording their voices in a way that becomes uh when when you record your voices in the way that these species this particular species does um you end up crafting something that is uh damaged and transformed each time it is red and so this becomes a very poignant thing because the very Act of reading something also destroys that thing but of course you know if you are um at all you know uh conversant with literary Theory you'll realize that none of these aliens are actually aliens they are just aspects of humanity and these are all reflections of how humans read each time we do read something we in fact do destroy it in the little in some sense because none of us approaches a text as a quote unquote clean thing we all come to the text immersed in The Meta text and every reading changes The Meta text so it is true that every reading destroys the original in some sense um to the point where eventually we even forget what the original was and we don't care about it I mean you know I would say that less than one percent of one percent of the people alive today have read uh the Odyssey in the original uh but it isn't deeply influential story for all of us same thing with the Bible I would say less than one percent of one percent of one percent have read the Bible in the original languages um but you know the Greek Parts probably more than the other parts but um we we all have you know um we all ended up uh sort of uh giving our own readings of these stories um and so you know that that part of the really really fascinates me I I'm deeply fascinated by the ways that reading is both such a simple thing and yet so complicated you know language and writing are Technologies and they are among the most influential of our Technologies in terms of how they shape human society and human history and so these essays these fictional essays are really Explorations using aliens as a metaphor to explore deeper ideas about our own relationship to language our own relationship to reading and I mean this was a connection I made because I'm coming to it with my own biochemistry background of like not only does this happen when you read like all of us who read books chronically know that you're not gonna have the same experience as the person next to you there's no perfect book for everyone but also even in like the brain right you cannot perfectly recollect a memory and I saw them like one of the species there whenever you look at a memory there's a pretty high Theory like it's pretty well known that you look at a memory when you put it back in the memory bank you're changing the neuronal path it's never the same each time yes that's right it's not it's not when you remember something right we the way our human brains work is really fascinating we are not like computers trying to retrieve you know from the wrong we don't do that we actually write it we write it in that process um so every single memory that we recollect becomes you reversibly changed in the very process of recalling and like that's how we get those flash bulb moments which I guess scientists haven't had one since 9 11 to really teach in classrooms that was like a really large communal flash ball moment where everyone can firmly say what they were doing even though they're most of the time completely wrong they've remembered that moment so strongly but yeah I was doing XYZ I can tell you this and then if someone were to have a video recording it's like actually no that's like two days later you're doing those things yeah it's absolutely true yeah so like those are connections that I get to make while I read your books I basically I really love reading your works because you think of things I love to think about but put in all the effort of writing it down because I don't like writing that much I just like consuming things and mulling about ideas which that's why the Vandal huh yeah that's kind of the perfect um uh uh encapsulation of what I think our reading is really about I mean I I really think that reading is deeply fascinating because it's a separate Act of Creation right compared to the writing moment I you know I wrote this in the beginning of the Hidden girl in the intro I say that writing or fiction is a really interesting form of art because it requires two creators right the person who builds the house that is the text on the story and and you know when I built the house I absolutely have in my mind um my understanding of human nature and my expectation of how the world functions and and so on and so forth but none of that remains in the text all that's left is the text which is a structure that all of us communally shape it's built off language which is a set of cliches we have all agreed upon and and and and therefore had lost their original metaphorical meaning and um we use the second-hand Goods to construct a building that houses the shape the ghost of our own dreams and then the reader comes in and they have to move into this house using their own and unpack their own expectations and their own uh understanding of human nature and put out their own pictures and then make the house come alive um and they're packing it with their own understanding of an interest and their own uh ghosts and and mythologies and so on and so forth um and and that moment is when the book really comes alive for them and of course every reader will have a completely different experience of living in this house and yet they all in some way also Echo the the thing that the writer left so one of the species in species specifically who lives it's literally inside the books created by other species and that was a metaphor for this whole reading experience um that readers actually move in in that way um which is you know on the one then you can say they don't really understand the thing that the writer left on the other hand you can say well the only thing that is left that is Meaningful is the thing that the reader can get out of it so anyway it's just really interesting to me to to use this metaphor to work out that whole passes yeah no it's fascinating so I'm now going to tell everyone here who I guess hasn't read the dandelion Dynasty you really should I'm going to have a video on my channel soon about why you should read it as I do with all my should you read series but I will also it's truly I'm so excited that something like that exists because it's a very unique form of a fantasy epic in my head having read several and a big part of it is all of the engineering and all the problem solving it's truly a series about people who have problems to solve both politically systemically like people problems but then there also are just like War tactics or how to win a cooking competition like there are also mechanical problems to be solved and um those are really fun things that I geeked out about basically in every book especially wall of storms on because that's when we were really entering pre-modern to modern era that's right that's just really where all the fun is so we are going to be talking about them we will attempt to not talk about huge plot moments but also there are some things that happen in wall of storms that we can't I don't think we can easily not discuss so just as a fair warning but I do think you will enjoy the dandelion Dynasty even hearing this discussion even knowing things that are to come because I'm not gonna lie I don't think I was surprised the entire time I read it but even knowing what was coming I was on the edge of my seat being like Oh but how is it going to land I know this is a bad thing on the horizon like when you do like a whole like pseudo-alien Invasion setup which as a Sci-Fi person I'm like oh this isn't an alien invasion but you're setting the Beats like this is Independence Day and I am unhappy but thrilled if you can't tell I finish speaking bones yesterday and I've like watched all the videos you've had because I didn't know what to do with myself oh thank you I was just like oh I don't it's it's one of those beautiful books that grows on you even after you finish it like even after finishing the last like epilogue chapters I'm just like I'm just thinking about it I made my partner listen to me talk about it who I'm just like you're never gonna read this because it's too long for you but I'm just going to tell you what this author did so you can appreciate thank you so I think though the first question I don't know if you'll be prepared for but it's something my friend Pete told me and I think it's actually a really good question what were things you wanted to design for the dandelion Dynasty that didn't make it in that you're just like man I can't fit this thing in but I wish I could have oh yeah that's a great question um that really is a great question so uh okay so I'll tell you um uh my thoughts on this so fundamentally the dungeon Dynasty is an epic about modernity right it's a it's an epic about how does a society from pre-modern pre-modern State emerged into modernity because this is a question that fascinates me very deeply um in in the present world in the world that we live in we essentially had one narrative about how modernity emerged which is the story of the Renaissance and then everything else that came after is about how the rest of the world had to react uh to the exploration or exploitation of Western Europeans and and how we um the rest of us got into modernity either dragged into it or or jumped into it or what have you but it's always in reaction to that Western narrative right so that's the world we live in uh but we are sort of in a moment where we're sort of re-re [Music] conceptualizing that narrative and questioning and thinking about perhaps rather than a single origin story about modernity we can tell a multi-origin story about maternity because um you know that story emphasizes the particular contributions of a group of conquistadors if you will but um we don't tell the story about everybody else who also told their story in eternity and and should feel at home in modernity because so often you know I got to travel around the world quite a bit and what I hear from a lot of writers from around the world is the sense that they don't feel at home in maternity you know they say that you know when I want to talk about economics or science or democracy or all the rest of it I have to use the language of the colonizers I don't or I use a direct translation into my language but it doesn't feel at home the mythologies of modernity the people we valorized the values we care about none of those feel necessarily native indigenous to me um you know this is also part of what I was talking about earlier this destruction of indigenous values and Indigenous stories um and that's something that a lot of people struggle with um and so the dental Dynasty is an attempt to tell a different origin story for modernity sort of a reimagined modernity that includes the stories from multiple sources from around the world that doesn't feel like a single Western drive into modernity and fundamentally the the path from pre-modern to the modern is a technological uh story that's a story about explosion of Technologies but not just in the sense of machines that improve productivity which is you know how we normally think about it I think of technology in very broad terms so there is definitely the the Machinery that increases productivity sure but we're also talking about other Technologies in the form of Technologies of collective decision making Technologies of social organization Technologies of military tactics Technologies of economic um forms um so right in in the world that we actually live in some of the most important Technologies for modernity are things like double entry bookkeeping and the corporation these are technologies that enabled essentially the kind of age of Western Europe European exploration that led to what we call the modern world um so in the dental and Dynasty I also wanted to focus a lot on those kinds of technology so obviously uh the things that a lot of readers have focused on and and I enjoyed making them are the silk Punk machines so you know how would you design a computer platform that's native to logograms right so that's one of the things that I was really focused on so for example if you if you go back and read that part of it you'll realize that you know even alphabetic language you can just use Alpha the the letters to for for us the units of input but in a logo World um it turns out that the way to break that down is not to use individual logo grounds which they're just too many but rather to break them down into individuals night Strokes used to create the wax logo grounds and so the way you would do input in the silkmunk world is you're essentially playing a kind of zither and the chords correspond to different gestures of the knives cutting so that is how you learn to do input in this world so I found that deeply fascinating that sort of thing and also you know um the soapbox world is deeply inspired by uh Benjamin Franklin and his explorations in electrostatics so the entire silhoumatic force which is their word for electricity um the silkmatic engine that is at the very heart of what they do is drawn essentially from Ben Franklin's design for a electrostatic older um and so you know there's that part of it is really easy to see and it's very very very cool for people who love this sort of thing and I I count myself among them and so that's why I spend a lot of energy designing those machines but I also wanted to spend a lot of energy designing social um collective decision making machines so in the sense of uh social Technologies political Technologies and my only um uh regret is I didn't get to go on long enough to design some of those because I would have loved to design some um alternatives to legislatures to courts and to uh bureaucracies um in this silk Punk world that would uh truly innovate on those kind of Concepts um I just didn't have enough time to work out some of those implications I wanted to come up with an alternative to the corporation for example that would have served similar purposes but that would have been really in interesting in the silk Punk World a silk Punk version of a corporation that isn't like our you know our version of the shareholder Corporation um but I didn't get a chance to really work that out that's something I couldn't really put those in I ended up focusing the vast majority of my uh energy um actual machines and only a very little bit of energy um collected decision-making organs so for example um the way uh Dara's politics works the console versus um uh the the console providing the check um absolute uh monarchical Power is quite interesting and um the epilogue sort of gestures at the idea that this is a world that's going to emerge from this political system into something very different so throughout the Epic right there's the discussion of how do we limit uh the power of of the King right a good king is not enough right that's the refrain over and over again but how do we solve the problem um obviously there's going to be a set of stories in place precedence to sort of lock the power of of of the king and that is one way to do it um but there are more effective ways one of the characters at the very end that says you know hereditary Nobles have no power except in the province of umutasa uh but that's not actually true the royal family the Imperial Family actually also is a hereditary family that has power but the implication is that that's not going to last for a while what is the alternative to that is not a republican hour sense what would that be I wish I had the chance to work that out but you know I just ran out of time yeah I was curious about that as I was getting near the end I I foolishly as a western reader I was like are we going to get to voting is that going to happen but also was like there really is no time like it would be almost too Fantastical so much of the series is grounded and influenced in our best and worst moments in human history yeah and I really do appreciate how you wrap it all up and how you choose to use your imagination to think of what is a different way to solve this problem that is potential like why what if we like for example in the United States we have this history of when we have mass groups of immigrants we want to spread them out we don't want them to form communities where you fight against that idea when you have a lot of these conversations about well how are we going to resolve this what does the surrender look like what makes it potentially fair and not catastrophic not necessarily saying there won't be strife and conflict but what could that problem look like I was fascinated with that and when you were talking about the logograms and the zither a thing that I I work with electron microscopes and so when you made the device to read the logograms I'm like you're just making 2D images and then you're making it I was because I mean when you read fiction you don't get to read the high-tech stuff a lot of the time and I think right I mean I I mean I guess I don't know what someone who doesn't have my background does reading those themes maybe they just glaze over and it doesn't make sense but for me I'm like this is such an eloquent simple way of explaining what would happen if you just took pictures from all angles and you then compiled that data and all right yeah that part was fun too yeah I really had a fun time trying to work that out and I wrote some scripts to see if that would work you know on some logograms that I made anyway it was a lot of fun do nearby I have a bunch so I had to make some of these as part of the writing process so um so here are a couple to show you so there's one this is actually uh mutagay um so this is this is what it actually looks like the one word in your world favorite spend a lot of energy explaining to her children um and this one is renga um and so that's uh this came into play in speaking bones um so I make these um uh out of polymer clay so I can get a sense of what they're like um this one is probably a little bit bigger than how you would obviously write them in normal everyday use so this is more like the kind of uh ceremonial um kind of writing so the way to think about it is sort of think about the way Egyptian hieroglyphics were written I mean obviously hieroglyphics were not a local graphic language and so it's not um quite comparable but the idea obviously is that you have the very high ceremonial version that you write but also the much much simpler form that is used in in a more common context logograms are like that you can you can make them very elaborate for certain contexts um that but again there's there's different versions of calligraphy much simpler versions so I think most people who've maybe seen your interviews know that you have done a lot of this engineering making computer software to figure out what could work or what couldn't what was the most interesting thing to try and make did you was there something you you really couldn't quite create on a small scale for yourself that you wanted to there were quite a few things to do I mean um so for example I was trying to see if I can uh so there is one the sunflower right it's actually the misso that uses um uh feedback loops uh it's a it's a cybernetic device it uses feedback loops to to home in on a particular light source um to to build a 3D version of that uh was too difficult for me I just didn't have quite enough uh skill to to make it work so I built a two-dimensional version of it out of Legos and it could sort of follow a line and it did its job so that's what I ended up doing um so I sort of imagined that the 3D version is a much harder problem but theoretically it could work so that's where I ended and I I guess I don't know enough about um materials I don't know if that material that senses light is exists in our world but it reminds me it's especially like selenium it's it's not terribly different it's it's it's very similar in property to someone anymore yeah but all I was thinking about because again bringing just whatever knowledge I have and science to like make things make enough sense that I like go along and have fun as I was thinking about the rods that we have in our eyes because they're very binary oh yeah like no light systems and I'm like oh that's so fun because most of the things as they come to life and this was another fun thing you did that was very not Western is things became more animalistic they were inspired by Nature when they made a lot of their devices and I actually think a thing most people might not be prepared for is there are actually quite a few sections where you have animal perspectives like they're not main characters but you have moments where you are experiencing what those creatures are which also connects the idea of what is intelligence and language and experiencing the world well I think it's it's one of those things that's becoming increasingly important to us right so we've in in here in the west we've gone through um this deep Evolution right there's there's a period of time when we certainly didn't view humans as separate or separable from the rest of of the biosphere and and from other animal perspectives if you will uh but one of the consequences of the technological explosion and the kind of Enlightenment rationalism is this weird idea that um animals are really like machines that humans are actually very unique we are not machines because of our rationality and so um so machines can animals can be exploited and they have no actual uh perspective to speak of because they have no consciousness they're really machines do they even suffer pain you know this is a thing that we ask all the time um which seems Preposterous sometimes uh when you look back on it um but nonetheless that's that's how we thought but now I think the pendulum is swinging back we are thinking more now in terms of how humans and animals are not in fact qualitatively different and we are perhaps more like different points you know multi-dimensional space rather than even a spectrum per se you know uh to to think about the sentience of whales of elephants of other creatures and perhaps sentience is not even a binary thing but rather a gradation a gradient of some sorts um and to sort of realize that inter-species communication is possible and perhaps um you know if we are now able to even use machine learning to read human Minds right that's already a comp achievable we can actually literally read brain scans and discern what the individuals understand we're thinking the days when we can sort of do so to animals does not seem that far away either so if interest species communication actually is possible we really need to you know stop thinking of ourselves as able to direct animals as though they are mere machines um with no say and no perspective and no staking any of this that just I don't think that's a tenable position we really have to think about the ethical Behavior we adapt towards all the other um creatures and species who who live with us who share this universe with us and we really have to um take a larger circle of empathy in terms of how we approach the problem yeah I know some of my favorite scenes were when you were doing the um I don't I think of them as whales I know I think they're crubens or something else but that's what my brain my brain always translates things like you said we're just always yeah they're scaled whales but yes they're they're essentially whales but speaking of the animal population some things are obviously very one-to-one I can compare to something in our world but then you do things like the garafins which I aren't even very comparable to dragons which is their closest CounterPoint in mythological space yes yes so um where did that come from how did you create that creature so it's actually kind of interesting so I've always had a lot of fascination with uh mythical creatures and and how we sort of adapt equivalences between mythical creatures right so it's interesting that um we like to um extract uh serpent-like kind of mythical creatures from different cultures and call them dragons in some way which is really fascinating because you know even the Western Dragon isn't particularly very serpentish uh but we end up calling them dragons um and then we sort of call these kind of creatures from other cultures dragons as well like you know the East Asian long um or real we we call them uh dragon which is bizarre because they're not actually dragons at all uh but but you know we sort of form these equivalences and and force them to do the same so I wanted to see if I can create some sort of creature that occupies that kind of similar space but it's very different from other um Dragon like creatures I've used the word dragon in the generic sense here even though it's not particularly accurate Dragon like creatures in that Niche um so the garinifens are created in response to uh all of that so I wanted them to be vegetarian so they're really my editor calls them flying hypnos which you know really annoyed me at first but I grown to sort of like it um I was like my wonderful awesome creatures you've just reduced them to Flying hippos that's what you think uh but you know there's some there's some truth to that because they are you know herbivores and they they their fire breathing is largely related to their ability to ferment um you know gas out of the vegetal matter so so if you want to call them flying hippos it's nothing accurate um so they're they're herbivores and they they breathe fire I try to work out a plausible waiver that could actually happen and how they can actually do this um and how they can actually achieve lift again all related um but they're very Fierce because again if you look at a hippo skull it's very Fierce and scary looking and you wouldn't necessarily be like oh this is a harmless creature it's just eats grass it's it's quite dangerous so this is this is one of those uh the gruenofins are herbivores but they are quite dangerous um so I wanted to put all that in there and work out a plausible biology and to sort of figure out you know these creatures um which end up being very deeply involved in the cultures of some of the people in my world um how would they as a form of technology or or the hurting and the writing and the use of them in war you know these are Technologies how would they change the history of the world in some ways they're analogous to horses you know the horse has become very important in history and the the adoption of horses um as a technology under that being incredibly important for uh the Native Americans of North America and also for people of of Asia um and uh a lot of what I ended up writing in the Dynasty is a working out of the governments as a form of Technology uh both cultural and during war um how that would change society and the way we relate to animals and to each other did you have as much fun as I think you did comparing Dara's well obviously Dara's culture goes through so much space and time through Grace of Kings to now but we'll say likes veiled Throne Dara where it's at there versus um I'm sorry if I'm pronounced around but the Yuko I don't know yeah because especially when we have the perspective where we get to not be in the occupied part of the liuco culture when we get to be in their Homeland when we have our main character from Dara who's over there how she has to figure out why they don't relate to her relationship with language and the written word and you know they have their voice stories did you have a lot of fun doing that because I was having a lot of fun reading the cultural differences I did I I I mean the the the the the the you know we all sort of have our own um reasons for getting into writing and a lot of my motivation for getting to writing was because I wasn't reading the kind of stories that I wanted the thing that always annoy me a lot about portrayals of different cultures in sci-fi and fantasy is that because of the nature of the medium and then because of the way we sort of approach the subject in sci-fi we often reduce every we often take the approach of stereotyping and a simplification when we approach cultures right so in Star Trek it's like one planet one culture and and and and every every uh culture can be defined by a single wart the Klingons are all about honor so everything must be focused around honor somehow uh the Vulcans are all about logic so everything must be focused around that somehow there's no diversity within like the idea that every like I really take it very seriously the idea that um there is greater diversity within every culture than there is difference between cultures so that is the the this is sort of the idea that you know if you if you any culture that is actually interesting that has survived from Millennia must necessarily have within it a huge amount of internal contradictions and diversity because that's the only way you could have survived so so many different circumstances you know every culture has within it if you will the genes for responding to completely different situations so the idea that every culture could be reduced down to a stereotype is idiotic every culture that seems deeply oppressive in some sense must also contain within it a huge amount of anti-authoritarian aspects any culture that seems to be deeply anarchistic must also have within it some strengths of authoritarianism because the fact that these cultures have survived for so long necessarily means that they've acquired a bunch of things that are contradictory that's just the way it is every culture is a set of internal contradictions that are held together um and and and if you want to you know emphasize so if I were to portray Vulcans realistically I would point out that there must be within Balkans a huge amount of number of thinkers who are deeply anti-logic and who are extremely dedicated to the preposition that this kind of dominant voice is wrong and and among Klingons there must be tons of thinkers who are pushing back against the whole idea of Honor they're sort of like the look who Warriors who do not fight who are pacifists who deeply push those ideas that to me is much more realistic because real world cultures are like that they contain within the multitudes lots of internal contradictions so anyway when I was writing uh Dynasty I had a lot of fun here you know taluku appear to be these Invaders when the Dara first encountered them they appear to be these barbaric Invaders but it turns out that in a different context other aspects of themselves come to the fore they have very Divergent religious Traditions they have very there are elements of the Ruku that are deeply pacifistic and and there are internal debates about what does it mean to be zuku right when you are a small expeditionary Force surrounded by a large number of indigenous people that you are oppressing and trying to hold down of course it's natural to react by defining yourself what does it mean to be Dooku in the same way that you know Japan uh during World War II was very dedicated to the proposition of trying to figure out what does it mean to be Japanese and to impose those ideals on the occupied territory so Luca will be the same they are very dedicated to just it's precisely because they're under pressure that they are trying so hard to figure out what does it mean to be Dooku and of course they have internal debates about what that means you know does it mean that we kill more people or does it mean we kill fewer people does it mean that we are interested in change or not that to me is a much more realistic representation of how real cultures react to those kind of pressures in fact it's it's very much what we do all the time I mean right now in the United States we're having an argument about what is the American story who gets to be an American who gets to tell that American story um and our arguments over uh you know uh over what are American values is the is the core American value everybody gets to own a gun and to point at each other or is the core value that that is not what we do I mean we we have very passionate debates over what do the framers actually mean and we reinterpret their stories um to to to to support our own version of it and that you know the United States is an incredibly complicated culture anybody who tries to characterize the US with a bunch of caricatures um we'll have to get a run because it isn't in fact incredibly uh diverse and internally contradictory and so I try to portray my fictional cultures with the same kind of broadness in the same kind of um complexity and Nuance um and to the extent that I even succeeded even like five percent I think I feel pretty good about that yeah I mean my interpretation is although like it's fascinating because you can see the similarities between what humans try and do when they form groups you know what they want identities but there also is the individual that struggle but it's like the Luco do feel different than the people of Dara but then even within the people of Dart it's like you know they have all the philosophy tenets you have the people who just don't even care about philosophy they're just trying to eat and exist like so the cohesiveness comes through even though you know if you look up close at the portrait you can see all the paint Strokes like that that's right that's right yeah yeah so I think you accomplished that at least for me extremely well and we're getting near the hour for you so I guess I wanted to open it to you is there anything I know I mean I want to respect your time but I could talk to you for literally hours about all the ideas that are in your heads I know we could go out forever this is really fun yeah but is there anything that we haven't touched on that you want to highlight that maybe you don't always get to talk about in interviews about the dandelion Dynasty a great question um so I guess I'll I'll say uh something about the downtown Dynasty that I I don't think I've got to talk about a lot which is um you know the Denver Dynasty is fundamentally um sorry a fantasy and um this is something that I I think is really interesting to me um it's it's a fantasy from a particular thing right so the first book The Grace Of Kings especially took it's essentially a fantasy reimagining of the truhan contention um so that's why it feels very historical because it's actually based on this period of Chinese history um but then the the rest of the downtown Dynasty is not historical in that sense anymore it's a sort of a working out of the implications of a society that is perched on the on the on the border between pre-modern and modern and how does it actually step across that Chasm um and because of the way I structure that it's it's it makes the whole thing very difficult to classify you know people who are really interested in historical fiction will end up sort of feeling like this is not what they sign up for the first book Is but then the rest of it isn't and people who want sort of Pure Fantasy in the sense of um fantasy that has no tethering to the real world are annoyed because the first book to them feels like um actually historical retelling and my answer to that would be just that you know the fact that we want books to fit into a box is sort of like the way we want people with none simple identities to fit inside a box the conflict comes from us rather than from them the book itself is the book that I wanted to write the series itself is the series I wanted to write um and if we could just for a moment imagine a world in which we don't have to put books into Cubbies on shelves like those genre boundaries those classifications those sort of expectations are just that they are things that we build up they don't have to be there we don't have to actually say that every book must belong very comfortably Within one of these categories sometimes books are what they are um because they want to do their own thing and they may Define their own categories or they just don't care about categories and that's okay um sometimes if we don't expect things to be a certain way and just go with it we may end up enjoying ourselves more I guess that's what I would say I mean I definitely I I read primarily speculative fiction that's the new word I use because it's just like all encompassing it's still imperfect because it's a box but the more I read speculative fiction I notice more often people who aren't having simple identities they're not the simple white author male or female that's usually where I see these boundary lines the broken Earth Trilogy by MK jemisin you can make Arguments for sci-fi or fantasy all day yeah what every day yeah yeah both both groups are right um as someone who makes a booktube channel where I recommend books I'm like I don't like any of these subgenres I don't know what they mean but if you read books and you are looking for these components I can tell you that they are or not here and what's funny to me is with the dandelion Dynasty if I had to pick a if you like this I don't think anyone else would pick it but I think a foundation by Isaac Asimov where it's very much like at at least at the start with crazy Kings it's a thought experiment of like here are the problems and we're hopping through time to see when a new problem shows up and how we solve it but in your case it's much grander and I like it more but like in terms of like why I think of it as a Sci-Fi for me as a Sci-Fi reader I think of them as deductive thought experiments oh yeah absolutely absolutely I mean I I think that you know fantasy is really a very interesting as a genre and sci-fi is a sub-genre of that because fantasy ultimately is about um Excavating um what is within right I mean Lagoon is the one who talked about this the most but I I think she's very right I mean her as a theorist of fantasy I I really her ideas resonate with me more than anyone else's but the fundamental idea is that when we're writing fantasy the the big distinction between Fantasy Versus realist fiction is that fantasy is very much about Excavating within you go deep inside yourself to excavate the collective unconscious that's what's so weird about it right you are going within your own Solitude and yet you're Excavating this Collective unconscious which is shared with every single person who is alive and who has lived and who perhaps will live um and you you find the stuff of Dreams and Nightmares out of that landscape of the collective unconscious and I can't help but think of the game control which does a great job of sort of portraying that Collective unconscious but anyway you excavated you excavate you excavate and you bring out these metaphors that are um images that are not explainable right novelist fantasy novelists in particular are trying to say with words what what cannot be said with words that's the thing right so we we bring this out um and sci-fi as a particular sub-genre of fantasy is about Excavating the images of Technology within the collective unconscious because as we invent as we extend ourselves right so my theory about technology I just this is a slight sight um side quest if you will but it really does it really does matter um my theory about technology is that Technologies are inseparable from Human Nature every time you work with a piece of technology like this you're really interacting with the tangible manifestation of some body's mind right this particular device represents the combination it'

2023-07-05 18:27

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