Latest / Show, don't Tell Writing with Suzy Vadori / 121. Sawyer on Science Fiction: Preventing the Future (Part 1)

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121. Sawyer on Science Fiction: Preventing the Future (Part 1) · Show, don't Tell Writing with Suzy Vadori

• 0:05
  Welcome to the Show, Don't Tell Writing Podcast with me, Suzy Vadori, where I peel back the layers of how to wow your readers with your fiction, your nonfiction.
• 0:13
  Anybody can bang out a first draft, but it takes a little more work to make your book as amazing as it can be.
• 0:20
  Join me as I share the step-by-step writing techniques you could apply to your writing right away as I host successful writers who share a behind-the-scenes look at their own writing lives and as I live coach writers on their pages, giving practical writing examples that will make your own writing stronger.
• 0:38
  Nobody is born knowing how to write an engaging book.
• 0:42
  There are real and important skills that you need to learn.
• 0:45
  On this show, I cut through the noise and get you all the info you need.
• 0:49
  I can't wait to see how this information is going to transform your writing Welcome back to the Show Don't Tell Writing Podcast.
• 0:59
  Today, Robert J. Sawyer, he is a good friend and colleague, and we are here to talk about all things science fiction in honor of his brand-new release, Sawyer on Science Fiction, which is a 225,000-word compilation of his writings and teachings over several decades on the topic of science fiction.
• 1:18
  I am so excited to have you hear this conversation today.
• 1:22
  It actually is going to span two different episodes because we just had that much to say.
• 1:28
  But if you are thinking about writing science fiction, if you're already writing science fiction, this book is a must-read, and this episode is a must-listen because you're gonna learn a ton.
• 1:39
  Just before we get started, I'm gonna read his bio again, but I also wanted to just share with you some of the things that have been said about Robert J.
• 1:46
  Sawyer.
• 1:47
  If you're not familiar with his work and you are thinking about writing science fiction, you need to be familiar with his work.
• 1:53
  This is how he's regarded in the industry.
• 1:55
  John Scalzi says, "Robert J. Sawyer is one of the most prolific and celebrated modern authors of science fiction." Cinescape says, "Sawyer is someone who, more than most others, has the capacity to speak on behalf of science fiction writers everywhere.
• 2:08
  In short, when he talks about science fiction, he knows where he's coming from." The Denver Rocky Mountain News says, "Robert J. Sawyer is just about the best science fiction writer out there these days; compelling stories, believable scenarios, science and fiction that really re- interact." Maclean's, which is Canada's national news magazine, says, "Sawyer, a rumbled and articulate fountain of ideas, is the genre's Northern Star, in fact, one of the hottest science fiction writers anywhere.
• 2:36
  By any reckoning, he is among the most successful Canadian authors ever." Barry N. Malzberg says, "This guy," and he's referring to Sawyer, "is an absolute eminence." And the Ethical Society of St. Louis says, "Robert J. Sawyer is the 21st century's Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein all in one." Robert J. Sawyer has won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for best science fiction novel of the year.
• 3:00
  The ABC TV series Flash Forward was based on his novel of the same name, and his Quantum Night was long-listed for Canada Reads.
• 3:08
  He's a member of the Order of Canada, he's a member of the Order of Ontario, and the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.
• 3:16
  Rob lives in Mississauga Welcome back to the podcast, Robert J.
• 3:21
  Sawyer.
• 3:21
  So good to see you, my friend.
• 3:23
  Thank you so much.
• 3:24
  I'm delighted to be back, Suzy.
• 3:26
  Yeah, it's great.
• 3:27
  So today we are talking about your latest book, which is Sawyer on Science Fiction.
• 3:33
  So my first question is, why this book and why this moment in time?
• 3:40
  This moment in time is kind of a sad story.
• 3:42
  I was diagnosed six years ago this month with, uh, mantle cell lymphoma, an incurable form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
• 3:50
  I'm in remission and indeed have been in remission for five years now, but it has 100% recurrence rate.
• 3:56
  And when they managed to put me into remission here in Toronto where I live at the Odette Cancer Center and the, and St- Princess Margaret Cancer Center, two different hospitals that treated me, they said Probably seven to nine years you're gonna get out of this remission.
• 4:13
  So the clock is very much ticking on when the cancer's gonna come back, and it's harder to beat a second time.
• 4:19
  And I'm just looking at what my legacy is gonna be.
• 4:22
  My 26 novels are all easy to find.
• 4:25
  They're all either in print from, uh, traditional publishers or they're in print from my own imprint after having gotten the rights back.
• 4:32
  But the 177 articles, pieces, columns, op-eds, speeches, introductions to other people's books, introductions to my own books that are collected in Sawyer in Science Fiction are scattered hither and yon across the internet or not digitally available at all until this point.
• 4:52
  So I wanted to put it all together as part of gathering my legacy.
• 4:56
  I wanna be here to see, you know, 2030, 2040, and the inevitable collapse of humanity in 2050.
• 5:03
  Ooh, I've said too much.
• 5:04
  Oh, yeah.
• 5:04
  We're gonna get- We'll get into that later in the interview.
• 5:06
  How about that, Rob?
• 5:08
  Okay.
• 5:08
  Amazing.
• 5:09
  Yes, and we're very glad to have you with us.
• 5:11
  And- Thank you … what was your goal for this book?
• 5:13
  So that's your very personal reason, but what are you hoping that it will achieve within the science fiction community, within the greater community?
• 5:20
  What, what was the goal?
• 5:22
  You know, it's funny.
• 5:23
  I had a very modest goal.
• 5:24
  I live in Canada, and I figure, and, you know, my business card says, "Big fish, small pond." I figured 100 Canadian library branches would feel an obligation to buy this book, so at least all of these ruminations I had about the genre would be collected and preserved somewhere.
• 5:44
  And then the publisher, Shadow Paw Press in Saskatchewan, and the Literary Distribution Company of Canada, LitDisco, part of Literary Press Group, which is the distributor of the book, decided this was a big book, and they've been heavily marketing it to libraries across North America, not just in Canada, and also managed to get a really good order from Indigo, Canada's largest bookstore chain, also get it into Barnes & Noble in the States.
• 6:12
  And so it's taken on a much bigger life.
• 6:15
  I simply wanted academics and students down the road, 10 years, 20 years down the road, who might've dusted off one of my books and wanted to know more about what I thought about the genre would've been able to find it in the library.
• 6:30
  We sold more than 100 copies just this weekend in Toronto where we had a book launch event for it, and I thought that was gonna be the whole print run of the damn book.
• 6:38
  So I'm very, very happy.
• 6:40
  Oh, actually that surprises me that you didn't realize how exciting this was gonna be for the community.
• 6:45
  Because I know one of the things that you are is very thoughtful about which projects you take on and why.
• 6:51
  And so, oh, that's, that's interesting.
• 6:53
  And I mean, you've been called the Canadian dean of science fiction, right?
• 6:57
  So would this be the textbook that you were preparing if you were ever to deliver that course?
• 7:02
  Is that kind of the idea?
• 7:03
  Well, it's interesting.
• 7:04
  Yes.
• 7:05
  Uh, we just had our first course book adoption, actually textbook adoption, for this fall at the University at Buffalo is using it in a course where they actually, in Buffalo, New York, they have a course on Canadian literature and using this book there.
• 7:21
  So I'm very delighted about that.
• 7:23
  It was a big pivot for me, and maybe that's why I didn't think it was gonna have a big market, because everything else I'd done was science fiction.
• 7:31
  This is a nonfiction book about science fiction.
• 7:34
  And in fact, you know, when it was being, uh, put onto, uh, the various online retailers, we couldn't click the box that said science fiction.
• 7:44
  We had to click nonfiction, then literary cris- criticism or autobiography or whatever.
• 7:49
  And I just felt that it was gonna get lost.
• 7:51
  But of course, bookstores that are stocking brick-and-mortar are putting it in their science fiction sections next to my novels.
• 7:59
  And yeah, I didn't expect it to be a significant book.
• 8:02
  It was just something I wanted to do, a passion project.
• 8:06
  But it turned out that it's got real legs.
• 8:08
  Yeah, it's got real legs.
• 8:09
  And you said that it's being treated as a, quote-unquote, "big book." Now it is a big book The physical book is a, it's a brick.
• 8:17
  Two pounds, 225,000 words, 670 odd pages.
• 8:22
  You could kill a man or a woman with it.
• 8:24
  Love that.
• 8:25
  I love that you're an equal opportunist there.
• 8:27
  An equal opportunity homicide-omaniac.
• 8:29
  Exactly.
• 8:30
  So you put this book together during your writer in residency in Germany.
• 8:34
  Do you wanna talk a little bit about that, how that went and how this goes?
• 8:36
  Yes.
• 8:36
  There's an Institute for Advanced Study in Delmenhorst, Germany, which is near Bremen in the northeast corner of Germany near the North Sea, patterned after the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, the original one that has been copied in various countries around the globe, where Albert Einstein spent his later years, where Robert Oppenheimer, after being the scientific head of the Manhattan Project, became the director of that institute.
• 9:02
  And the German government decided to create one of their own about 30 years ago, where they invited 30 odd, some very odd, academics from all over the world to come and have quiet time in this lovely facility where you get a really nice apartment, and there are nice lecture halls and communal dining halls and so forth, right next to a forest.
• 9:25
  For academics, they come and they, they don't have to do any teaching.
• 9:27
  They just get a, an unstructured time to work on whatever research they wanna do.
• 9:32
  But they also have a writer in residence program that I decided to apply to and was delighted to be accepted for.
• 9:39
  And I was absolutely working most of the time that I was there on a novel.
• 9:45
  But that novel is about a win-win scenario for us and artificial intelligence, and I'm getting less and less confident that there's a win-win to be found, that we're gonna end up on the short end of the stick.
• 9:58
  It seems far more likely.
• 10:00
  And so I was kinda stalled on the project.
• 10:02
  And I thought, "I can't waste this time.
• 10:05
  What can I do?
• 10:06
  What's a tractable project to finish before I leave Germany?" Which I came back on May 15th of, uh, 2026.
• 10:13
  And I thought, "This has been sitting on my desk for a couple of years," or on my desktop on my computer, Sawyer on Science Fiction.
• 10:21
  I thought, "If I just knuckle down and put two or three weeks into it, it'll be done." I got it done in April, and I'm astonished that it came out in August.
• 10:30
  I thought that was an impossibility in the traditional publishing brick and mortar bookstore landscape.
• 10:37
  And, uh, my publisher said, "Yeah, I can't get this out until next year." But he told his distributor about it and they said, "Oh, we can get this out right away if there's a reason Well, there is a little bit of a reason.
• 10:49
  Next year, 2027, the World Science Fiction Convention will be in Montreal.
• 10:54
  That's where the Hugo Awards are given.
• 10:57
  I've already won a Hugo Award for best novel, and I would like this to be at least considered on the ballot nominated for the best related work category in the Hugos, which is for books, uh- Oh, amazing and things about science fiction.
• 11:14
  So it just seemed, you know, it had to be out this year if it was gonna be eligible for next year's World Con in Montreal, and the distributors said, "Done.
• 11:22
  We can make it happen." They went back to Chapters, they went back to b- and Indigo, Barnes & Noble, they went back to their accounts and said, "We're bringing out an extra book, uh, this year pretty fast.
• 11:33
  Do you want it?" To everybody's delight, bookseller after bookseller placed their orders.
• 11:38
  Oh, amazing.
• 11:38
  I love it when, I mean, it's such an, an industry and we could this is a co- topic for another day, but it's such a slow industry in many, many ways and, but sometimes it's not, right?
• 11:47
  Um, so- It sometimes it's not, and usually- Yeah it's not because some vain old fart in Toronto wants to win another award that they move quickly.
• 11:56
  Barnes & Noble type of- Sometimes it's because it's a, a political expose or something like that.
• 12:00
  Yeah.
• 12:00
  That, you know- Yeah … immediately if, if it doesn't sell in these eight weeks, there's no market for it at all, and they can move quickly there.
• 12:08
  Yeah.
• 12:08
  Y- you're absolutely right about that.
• 12:09
  And I'll, I'll just say tragically, a very good friend of mine, another science fiction writer, had written a novel about a worldwide plague- Under contract, sold to a big five publisher.
• 12:22
  Their two years of getting it out to the process to bring to market, by the time that would've been over, COVID had happened, and his story had essentially been obsoleted.
• 12:34
  And so they just gave him his money back and the book died.
• 12:38
  Because this, this industry particularly for fiction is not nimble at all.
• 12:43
  In a world where everything moves so quickly, publishing is so hidebound and slow, slow-moving.
• 12:49
  I understand why a great many of my colleagues go directly to self-publishing, because then they can be in the market literally hours after they finish the manuscript.
• 13:00
  Yeah.
• 13:01
  Okay, there's a couple of things that I wanna unpack there.
• 13:03
  The first is we talked about, you know, sometimes it's slow and sometimes it's fast.
• 13:06
  For those of you listening, you writers out there, when Robert says that he worked on it for a few weeks to get it done, this is a compilation of already written work.
• 13:16
  Yes, that's right.
• 13:17
  Absolutely.
• 13:17
  I just wanna be clear because people, like, go back and go like, "Oh, well, he did this in three weeks. I can write something in three…" This is not- You're absolutely right, and let me make clear what I had to do.
• 13:25
  There were two tasks.
• 13:26
  One is 177 pieces.
• 13:28
  What sequence do they go in?
• 13:30
  How do you make it work as a cohesive piece, but also something, and I know well that most people won't read it from cover to cover.
• 13:37
  They'll dip in, "Oh, here's something on Star Trek.
• 13:40
  I'm interested in that.
• 13:41
  Oh, here's a talk at the Library of Congress.
• 13:43
  Wonder what he said there.
• 13:44
  Oh…" You know, that kind of thing.
• 13:46
  So the ordering of it, it was a couple of days of solid work shuffling and trying to make them make sense in a sequence.
• 13:53
  But the other part was there are 177 pieces, and about half of them, or even three-quarters, have introductions that I had to write.
• 14:02
  And I'd written a lot of those introductions a year or two ago, and I just had to sit down and write two, three, four paragraphs to introduce, uh- And context and compete and- Contextualize Yeah.
• 14:13
  Exactly.
• 14:14
  Yeah.
• 14:14
  But you're absolutely right.
• 14:15
  I know people who can write a book in three weeks.
• 14:19
  I don't know why anybody would want to read that book.
• 14:21
  I don't know how that book can have any quality in it, but I certainly have friends who do pump them out at that, uh, frequency or even more quickly Okay.
• 14:32
  So I wanted to also comment, you mentioned the novel that became obsolete because of COVID.
• 14:36
  And, and you say in Sawyer on Science Fiction that science fiction doesn't predict the future.
• 14:42
  It can prevent it, though.
• 14:44
  Something to that effect.
• 14:45
  Like, you can write about it and then make sure that something doesn't come to pass or hopefully doesn't come to pass.
• 14:51
  Absolutely.
• 14:51
  And that's, that's not my little bon mot, that's Ray Bradbury's.
• 14:55
  Ray Bradbury said, "My job is not to predict the future, it's to prevent the future." Mm-hmm.
• 15:01
  And of course, so he wrote Fahrenheit 451 about the banning of books in hopes that the world would recognize that the people who ban and burn books never turn out to be the good guys when history is written.
• 15:15
  And yet today, sometimes here, certainly in Alberta there's been some, and elsewhere in Canada, and quite significantly in the United States, we're seeing banning of books again.
• 15:27
  So Ray Bradbury was right.
• 15:29
  We write these cautionary tales.
• 15:32
  Another great example is Margaret Atwood with The Handmaid's Tale.
• 15:36
  Margaret was trying to warn that increasing control of the government in the United States by the religious right would lead to the curtailing of reproductive freedom by women.
• 15:49
  Well, lo and behold, it turned out, and she says quite rightly, "I didn't mean it to be a, an instruction manual," right?
• 15:57
  It was supposed to be a cautionary tale.
• 15:58
  This is what drives us science fiction writers batty, is that we put out the warnings about AI, about climate change, about the rise of authoritarianism, about you name it, overpopulation, the widening gap between the rich and the poor.
• 16:14
  We've been writing about these for 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 125 years, and 130 years in the case of H.G. Wells, and we're ignored.
• 16:24
  So the title of my book, Sawyer on Science Fiction, was not my title for the book.
• 16:29
  It was the distributor's.
• 16:30
  My title was Cassandra Screaming, 'cause Cassandra is the female prophet in Greek mythology who could foretell the future, as science fiction writers try to do.
• 16:42
  But was cursed that nobody would listen to her predictions.
• 16:47
  And I thought that metaphor, Cassandra screaming, summarized the lot of the science fiction writer.
• 16:53
  And we- it's no fun being Margaret Atwood or being me on, on warning about AI or anybody else getting to say,"I told you so." We would much rather have people say, "Ah, you failed in your prediction, Sawyer or Atwood.
• 17:07
  It didn't turn out anything like what you said it was going to." And we go,"Yeah, that was the whole point, was it wasn't supposed to turn out this way." Yeah, absolutely.
• 17:16
  And, and that's, you know, I think it said, um, something to the effect of when science fiction becomes science fact, right?
• 17:22
  Yes.
• 17:22
  And, and that you have plenty of examples in your own work where you have predicted things or things have come to pass or something similar, and in some circles you call yourself a futurist as well, right?
• 17:35
  And so how does- Yes … how does that work?
• 17:37
  You know, is, is it Robert J.
• 17:37
  Sawyer with his crystal ball?
• 17:41
  How do you do that?
• 17:42
  So first, a futurist and a science fiction writer, if you call yourself a futurist, they fly you to the event first class and pay you thousands of dollars.
• 17:51
  They call yourself a science fiction writer, and you're flying economy class or main pay, even paying your own way there, and you're lucky to get a speaker's fee at all.
• 17:59
  So it's a branding thing that's been very effective for me.
• 18:03
  I've given over 100 futurism keynotes around the world, in China, in Turkey, in, uh, Switzerland.
• 18:10
  All over the world I've been invited to give these futurism keynotes.
• 18:14
  It's the same skill set.
• 18:16
  A lot of people try to write science fiction, make a mistake, and think they just look around today and wonder what's coming next.
• 18:22
  What you have to do is go to the past and look at how we got to where we are, because that gives a direction of movement, and then you just extrapolate it forward into the future.
• 18:33
  And, uh, business leaders, banking people, all kinds of, uh, academic groups want to hear where we're gonna be five, 10, 15, 20, 30 years down the road.
• 18:44
  For a science fiction writer, you often look at what's coming down the pike and decry it and, uh, say, "You know, this is gonna be horrible unless we make a course correction." As a futurist, you're just giving people heads up since the course correction isn't too likely to actually occur that this is going to be the state of AI or healthcare or whatever, and what the impacts it's gonna have on whatever your particular industry is.
• 19:09
  I've speak- spoken at the Sloan Kettering Cancer Research Center in New York.
• 19:15
  I've spoken at the Guarantee Bank in Istanbul.
• 19:18
  Depending on what they're interested in, you focus on what the extrapolation they need to hear about is going to be, and you, you present yourself as somebody who can see the future.
• 19:28
  And really anybody can do it if they start in the past and reasonably extrapolate forward.
• 19:34
  Well, I don't know that anybody can do it, but yes, it is a skill that you can hone, uh, if you are paying so much attention to the patterns, right?
• 19:40
  And the, the extrapolation of the trajectory.
• 19:43
  And it-- we all- And the big thing is, is not just seeing the easy, obvious things, but looking two or three orders beyond that.
• 19:52
  Uh, the famous example is that, you know, before the Wright brothers did the, their first, uh, flight, anybody could've predicted powered flight who had seen a bird fly.
• 20:02
  We'd been predicting it for a long time in science fiction.
• 20:05
  But only a science fiction writer would've predicted frequent flyer miles, airport lounges, and that we would be in a crisis as we are right now with s- more airplane failures, more crashes now with our highly computerized and highly technological society than we had when it was all just done by human air traffic controllers Yeah.
• 20:26
  And I mean, it's, we think of science fiction a lot of times as just the technology, but also, you know, you mentioned this future state of healthcare or politics- Right … or, or things that are also part of what it is that the whole genre can predict or can- Exactly… explore.
• 20:42
  Like, when you're planning out a book then, do you think about all the different alternatives?
• 20:47
  Like, how many ti- how many different extrapolations would you go?
• 20:50
  Or do you usually just land on something and know that?
• 20:52
  Or, or are you going through lots of different scenarios, and how do you, how do you decide which one is the most interesting one to either warn about or to write about?
• 21:03
  So for me, it's a, a thematic question.
• 21:06
  I start by just researching the heck out of a topic.
• 21:11
  For The Downloaded, cryogenic suspension, being able to freeze human bodies for eventual revival sometime in the future, and the technology of whether we could ever scan our brains and upload them into a virtual reality simulation or, or store them in a computer so that if you had a catastrophic head injury, that there was an off-site backup that they could reload into your skull, right?
• 21:35
  And with no preconceived notion of what I want to say about those things.
• 21:39
  I just dive into the topic and learn everything there is about it, and start looking for a dramatic situation that can come out of it.
• 21:50
  And then also start asking myself what is the most likely scenario.
• 21:56
  So I don't flesh out a lot of alternative scenarios.
• 21:59
  I really do wanna write about the most plausible thing that's going to happen, good or bad.
• 22:04
  Good, great, let's have a nice utopian story.
• 22:07
  Hard to find drama in them, but a, a talented writer can find drama anywhere.
• 22:11
  Bad is so much more common than good when you start thinking about where this is going to go.
• 22:17
  And you know, I mean, right now we have the huge debate about putting guardrails on AI.
• 22:22
  Nobody who was talking about AI, even in science fiction in the 1940s, '50s, at, when Asimov was first talking about it, was thinking that AI was going to talk despondent teenagers into killing themselves, right?
• 22:36
  Which is the reality we're facing right now, that there are- Yeah, it's like usage- multiple, multiple cases … but just wasn't even on, yeah, wasn't even on the radar.
• 22:43
  Wasn't even on the radar.
• 22:44
  Yeah.
• 22:44
  But the idea that people would have unnaturally close relationships with things that weren't human at all, that AIs that, that didn't share that, that goes way back in science fiction.
• 22:56
  We didn't take it far enough, because it's such a repugnant notion that a, that a, a young life might be cut short because some programmer somewhere failed to think through what his code might actually do.
• 23:08
  It makes it all the more important, I think, that our leaders engage with science fiction.
• 23:14
  I was very happy, you can argue his policies, but Justin Trudeau was a science fiction reader, and I was very happy that Barack Obama chose my friend Liu Cixin's Three Body Problem as one of his summer reads a- about a decade ago.
• 23:28
  We have current leaders who are not nearly as engaged with the already extensive body of thinking In science fiction about all the problems they're trying to either ignore and hope will go away, which is never the right answer, or are actually being forced to make laws about without really understanding the thinking that many, many decades of good, solid science fiction writers have put into those questions that's free for the asking.
• 23:59
  Just go and open up the books.
• 24:01
  Yeah, absolutely.
• 24:02
  And I think, you know, you've had a, a strong relationship with China over the last decade in traveling there because, and I think you've shared that they're a little bit more forward-thinking and realizing that if we get young people involved in reading science fiction, they're going to pursue those STEM careers.
• 24:19
  They're going to be- That's right … interested in the world.
• 24:21
  And can you say more about that and, and what you're seeing out there in terms of the interest?
• 24:24
  Yeah, and particularly in China, I asked them why they so assiduously encourage the reading of science fiction, which they do.
• 24:31
  Every university in China has a government-sponsored science fiction club.
• 24:37
  And the reason is, yes, they know from the experience of the West, uh, Europe, Canada, United States, that people who read science fiction when they're young preferentially go into STEM careers, science, technology, engineering, mathematics.
• 24:52
  China's problem is their young people don't wanna go into STEM careers.
• 24:55
  Left to their own devices, they're all, despite China being a communist country, they're a billion little capitalists who all want to get rich, and so they want to get an MBA.
• 25:06
  They want to go into international relations.
• 25:08
  They want to do that sort of thing.
• 25:11
  And so China realized that they needed a very science fictional kind of course correction.
• 25:17
  Get people excited again about science, technology, engineering, mathematics, basic research, applied research, technology, because China knows, and it's very much in the news, as you know, this particular week as we're talking, where China is, uh, leaping ahead of the United States in a lot of areas in artificial intelligence.
• 25:39
  And both countries, United States and China, recognizing that AI is a transformative technology, and whoever controls it, ahaha, wa la la, controls the world, and that's what they're looking to do.
• 25:55
  Yeah, absolutely.
• 25:56
  Okay, so we talked a little bit about how you research your books and, and what makes you able to do this extrapolation, and you've said that even a dash of fantasy can spoil science fiction, but some science fiction can amp up fantasy.
• 26:11
  And, and while I'm a fantasy writer, and so I should be offended by that, I'm actually intrigued.
• 26:15
  Can you say a little bit more about why that's true?
• 26:18
  For one reason, I wanna keep science fiction separate from fantasy, because fantasy is so much bigger as a marketplace right now than science fiction, and has been for 30 years, uh, at least 20 years anyways.
• 26:30
  Yeah.
• 26:30
  I don't want us to get lost inside some big, you know, wee little minnow swallowed by the whale.
• 26:36
  But also, I think it's a straightforward distinction.
• 26:40
  Science fiction is about things that plausibly might happen Fantasies about things that never could happen.
• 26:47
  There's a, a great Canadian academic still alive at 96 named Darko Suvin.
• 26:52
  What a great name.
• 26:53
  It sounds like a science fictional name.
• 26:54
  I love it.
• 26:55
  Uh, emeritus professor at McGill, who was the founding editor of the first, uh, academic journal devoted to science fiction, Science Fiction Studies.
• 27:04
  And he says all science fiction stories have a novum, N-O-V-U-M, a novum, something new in them that doesn't exist in the real world.
• 27:13
  But he didn't make a clear enough distinction that new thing has to be something that could exist in the real world.
• 27:21
  So we don't have interstellar travel yet, but we technically could.
• 27:26
  We could even launch a sh- a, a ship to another star right now.
• 27:29
  It'd just take forever to get there, but we could, we could do it right now.
• 27:32
  In fantasy, the novum, the new thing that doesn't exist in the real world, is something that never could exist.
• 27:38
  It's, uh, actual magic.
• 27:40
  It's transmutation.
• 27:41
  It's telepathy.
• 27:42
  It's something that is completely a f- uh, a psychic power that's a fantasy power.
• 27:47
  So I think- Says you.
• 27:49
  I don't know.
• 27:50
  Maybe that's possible in somebody's world.
• 27:51
  Well, so this is it, right?
• 27:53
  Every once in a while, you know, we used to… Uh, there was a, a movement in the 1970s for science fiction to stop using faster than light travel in its stories.
• 28:04
  Hmm.
• 28:05
  Uh, the movement said, "We have, ever since Einstein, there's no theoretical basis. Despite Star Trek's warp drive, there's no, you know, there's no basis." And lo and behold, along came a physicist named Alcubierre, who said, "No, actually, here's a good fai- theoretical framework for moving fast, moving physical objects faster than the speed of light." And now we're letting it back in.
• 28:29
  Some of our… Every writer has their own, um, filter of what they'll allow in and what they won't allow in, uh, including in every kind of writing.
• 28:37
  In YA writing, do you allow F-bombs?
• 28:39
  Do you allow sex scenes, right?
• 28:41
  Yeah, absolutely.
• 28:41
  Everybody is filtering what they accept and what they reject from every category of writing.
• 28:46
  But now faster than light is kind of sneaking back in there.
• 28:49
  So you're right.
• 28:50
  S- but this is the beauty of science as opposed to religion.
• 28:53
  Science is a provisional enterprise.
• 28:58
  It is always a work in progress.
• 29:01
  It is always subject to change based on new information becoming available.
• 29:08
  Whereas religion, though, you gotta have faith, and this is the holy writ, and we don't question it.
• 29:12
  If for sure 20 years from now I say psychic powers have no place in science fiction, 20 years from now we may finally find some way to, uh, justify it in science fiction, and I'll be the first one in line.
• 29:26
  I just like to, I just like to stir the pot 'cause I, I you know, I know this is gonna be a fun conversation Thanks for tuning into the Show, Don't Tell writing podcast with me, Suzy Vadori.
• 29:42
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• 29:48
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• 29:52
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• 30:02
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• 30:04
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• 30:20
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• 30:25
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• 30:35
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• 30:37
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• 30:47
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