Latest / Mythmakers / David D. Levine: The Kuiper Belt Job – Part 2

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David D. Levine: The Kuiper Belt Job – Part 2 · Mythmakers

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  So you also have a mystery with a big twist in your story and the problem about mysteries
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  of big twist is we can't really talk about the twist because you then spoil the plot.
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  But what I can ask is did you know this from the outset or was this something that you
• 0:21
  realised was necessary as part of your writing process, somewhere in the midpoint of your
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  outline doc that you were doing? Yeah. The big twist is actually the starting point of the
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  whole story. Okay. That was that secret was the thing that I knew that the book was actually
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  going to be about. And I don't think it's giving away too much to say that the book is fundamentally
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  about identity. Yeah, and I think it's going to be really, really popular with science fiction
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  fans. That twist is, you know, I can see it really appealing. Anyway, we really must have
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  given it away. Yeah, okay. Yeah, so yeah, but this is, yeah, we say, yes, there is, you know,
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  and the thing is one of the challenges that I had and something that I went back and forth
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  with my, with my editor with during the editing process on this book was making sure that
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  all the characters were behaving properly for who they are and what their background is.
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  And when, when you have a character whose background is hidden, I actually had my, had my
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  editor saying, well, you know, this character would never say that. And I go, well, actually,
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  if you knew that when you get to the end of a book, you'll understand why they did. And she
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  did. She came to the end of the book and said, wow, okay. So then the two of us worked together
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  to try to make that character feel very much, to feel very much themselves without betraying
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  the, without betraying the secret, you know, to have them, to have them be all of the people
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  that they are because, because this is, this is about identity and, and, and, I mean, I say,
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  I say right on, right on the, my web page about the book, you know, in a, in a world where,
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  in a world, reminds can be copied. What does it mean to be me? To be quote, me unquote. And so,
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  so yeah, so there, and, and I really do believe that I did not hide anything, that the,
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  all of the pieces are right there in plain sight. It's just that until you know what's really
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  happening, you will never spot them. It's nice to have done, if I done my job, right, you will
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  never spot them. So I really don't want to rest too long on this because it would be a shame to
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  start the book with too many suspicions. So everybody wiped that from your minds. When you read
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  the Kite for belt job, just go in innocent and enjoy the ride because I think you'll enjoy the
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  twist or the more. So we will also, the information about your book tour for those of the listeners
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  in America. If we put a link to your website, is it cool they find information about where you're
• 3:03
  going to be? Yeah, go to my website and click on about me at the top. One of the, one of the
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  options on the about me menu is upcoming appearances. Brilliant. So I will be, I'll be in Chicago, San Diego,
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  Baltimore, Portland, and Seattle. And I think, oh, in San Francisco in early 2024.
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  Okay. So that's called big cities, hopefully one near some of our listeners. So David, we
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  mentioned that you've been writing since 2000 thereabouts. And you've got an overview of
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  the role of science fiction and where it fits within fantasy. What do you think it's places now?
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  So we had the pulp fiction era of the 20s and 30s where it was a cheap entertainment.
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  What do you think's happened to science fiction? And of course, we've now got the rise of TV
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  versions and film versions to sort of thicken up the public understanding of what science fiction
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  is about. What do you think? I've been, I've been a science fiction reader since I was a,
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  since I was a teenager, you know, my, my formative experiences are the early space age.
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  You know, I was born at right around the time, the first Mercury, the first Mercury capsules
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  went up. I was, I was absolutely riveted to the Apollo missions to the moon. I followed,
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  you know, the space, the space shuttle, all of the, all of the real, you know, real science space
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  adventure of the 1960s and 70s is key to my personal identity. And so I have, but as somebody who's
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  been in the science fiction field as a reader and then as a writer since the 1960s, I've seen
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  science fiction change quite a bit. And furthermore, I have a lot of, you know, I know a lot about the
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  history of science fiction going back to the 20s and 30s. So I've seen how science fiction
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  exists as part of mainstream culture. And over the past 50, 60 years, science fiction has grown
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  from being a, a thing that people would look down upon that, that you would literally, like if you
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  were reading a science fiction magazine on the subway, you would hide it behind a newspaper
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  because you didn't want people to know you were reading that sci-fi crap. That if you'd,
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  if you'd told teenage me in 1975, so before Star Wars came out, I was a, you know, I was, I was a
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  trekkie, you know, I was, I was a fan of Star Trek beginning, beginning with, with the, with the
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  beginning of Star Trek in 1960s or seven. And so if you'd told teenage me that you're going to be
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  able to stand on, on a street corner in, in, in any town in the world and see like maybe one out of
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  three, one out of four people walking by is wearing a t-shirt with a science fiction TV show on it.
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  I would, I would, I would never have believed that. That science fiction has swallowed pop culture.
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  And so what that means is that so much of our pop culture, things that in people today don't
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  understand just how dominant Westerns were in the 1950s, that in the 1950s, literally every other
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  TV show was a Western. And there's a reason that Star Trek 1966 starts off with the lines
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  space, the final frontier. Star Trek was explicitly pitched to the networks as wagon train in space
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  that Westerns were so dominant. And science fiction has grown up to the point that it is now,
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  you know, it is now that dominant in culture that science fiction and especially superheroes are
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  so dominant in culture that basically science fiction is pop culture. Look at San Diego Comic Con.
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  You know, when I was a teenager, Comic Con was a little thing that you'd have, you know,
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  you'd have at some hotel where you would go and you would, you would, you know, trade old comic books
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  with your other comic book fans. San Diego Comic Con is the biggest convention in San Diego,
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  which is the biggest convention town in the country. Okay. San Diego Comic Con is huge comics
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  and science fiction are huge business. They basically become our pop culture. And it is fascinating
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  to me as somebody who has lived through all of this and also has a lot of information about what
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  happened before I was born to see how science fiction and wider pop culture have kind of destroyed
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  each other. Because science fiction used to be the idea that, oh, anybody that reads science fiction
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  has a forward thinking mind. And this is somebody who obviously has thought about the future and will,
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  you know, and will have some ideas about what's going to happen next. That's been completely destroyed
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  because just about everybody's a science fiction reader or watcher now, you know, just about everybody
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  watches science fiction. There are, when I was a kid, you know, we had, we had one science fiction
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  TV show on TV at a time if that. I mean, I remember when Jean Roddenberry came to, I believe,
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  it was ABC with his idea for Star Trek. And they listened to him and they said, sorry, we've
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  already got a science fiction TV show. It's called Lost in Space. Okay. That the idea that there was,
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  when I was a kid, there was only one science fiction television show at a time. Now,
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  admittedly, we have many more TV shows. What was streaming at all. But still the number of
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  different simultaneous science fiction TV shows, movie series, massively popular game of thrones,
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  you know, massive international bestseller, Terry Pratchett, largest selling author period in the UK.
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  You know, that science fiction and fantasy have dominated our pop culture landscape. And so
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  in some ways, this is great because it gets science fiction concepts that I think are important for
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  people into the into the global conversation. And in some ways, it's terrible because it's turned
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  science fiction into just entertainment. That science fiction has been dumbed down by becoming
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  pop culture as opposed to the days when we would say it's a it's a proud and lonely thing to be a
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  fan that back in those days, if you met a person and you just happen to meet a person and you start
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  talking, Oh, you read science fiction. Well, then you knew something about that person. And these
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  days, it still tells you something, but not as much as it used to. I was thinking was you were talking
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  about the difference over in the UK because we had, we obviously imported Star Trek. And I can
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  remember it is one of the first programs I saw in color because of the strong the shirt colors.
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  I definitely remember that. And that is exactly why they have those strong shirt colors because
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  it was a very new technology. Yeah, yeah, it makes it perfect sense. But we also had Dr. Who,
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  which is a particular British take on science fiction, I think, in the way it's conceived.
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  Yeah, no, so rich. We had a, have you heard of Blake seven? Oh, yeah. Yeah, that was a really
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  traumatizing experience of my, my use because it's a very daring program again.
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  There's never, there's never been a mainstream television series.
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  There's never been a mainstream science fiction television series as dark as Blake seven,
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  at least not until like the late 2010s. Yeah, I see. People think they're being very forward
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  thinking now to sort of do these sort of cynical programs, but it's been done. The 70s were there,
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  you know, yeah, of course, you know, Blake's, Blake seven, like Firefly, like the Cuyperville
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  job is a story of found family. Yes, there is, there is actually your right. Yeah,
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  there are just burritos. Yeah, yeah, yeah, wonderful stuff. So I was interested in how science fiction
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  has swallowed up popular culture. And I think if you include superheroes in that, that's absolutely
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  true, isn't it? And of course, you can. But do you think the science fiction of the,
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  the type of Star Trek in particular? Well, I have this sort of mixed feeling. I love Star Trek,
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  but there's a side of Star Trek where it's exploring important themes like diversity.
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  I can remember the next generation. There was a series about whether or not the walk drive
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  was actually damaging the environment of space. They're very switched on to, you know,
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  issues we're facing about our present. But there's also this promise that don't worry guys,
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  in the future, we'll be able to leap from planet to planet without too much trouble. There will be
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  a federation. There's a sort of imaginatively paving the way. And I always think of that when I see
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  those t-shirts saying there's no planet B. Right. So do you think there's a possibility that
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  science fiction is actually blunting our edge understanding things like the climate crisis?
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  There's no question in my mind that a lot of people, and here I'm going to specifically call
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  out Elon Musk, are betting the farm on their being a planet B, you know, just saying,
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  oh, we'll fix, we'll fix this problem. You know, we'll fix the hole in the ozone layer,
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  we'll fix climate change. And I think that level of naive techno optimism
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  is related to the science fiction mindset. But I think these people would be having the same
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  thoughts even if they're hadn't, even if there were no such thing as science fiction. You know,
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  that there's always going to be, there's right now, right now in my social media sphere,
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  there's a lot of discussion about Mark Andreessen has published an essay just in the past week
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  in which he identifies basically the humanities as the enemy, saying that all these,
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  all these people putting all these these safety restrictions on our technologies, you know,
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  they're just trying to stifle innovation and it's like, no, and the thing is I think he would
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  have that attitude even if that, even if that wasn't science fiction. He certainly doesn't reference
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  science fiction explicitly. He's he's got that same techno that naive techno optimism that you
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  had in the railroad barons of the 1880s, you know, that there has always been this idea
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  since we entered the modern world in say the enlightenment. Okay, we're going back to the end,
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  18th century. Yeah. So since the enlightenment, definitely since the enlightenment,
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  possibly going far as far back as the Renaissance, we have this idea that human ingenuity will be
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• 14:39
  in all states. Renaissance, the Renaissance was was all about recovering what had been lost for
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  recent Rome. And then as you go into the enlightenment that it becomes more along lines of okay,
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  we've got that. Now let's see what we can build on it. So that naive techno optimism is something
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  that science fiction is part of that. But I would not say that we can lay the blame on science
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  fiction. Right. No, I mean, because there's obviously the the former science fiction,
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  which warms absolutely against the the possible crisis we're heading towards. There's plenty of
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  and the thing is that science fiction, science fiction is a tool like any other that science
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  fiction has definitely been used as a way of trying to get people to settle down and not worry about
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  the climate crisis. But science fiction, science fiction is both optimistic and pessimistic. It's a
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  way of saying, I mean, literally, you know, Thomas Moore's utopia of 1520, I think it was,
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  you know, could be considered an early work of science fiction. You know, the idea that science
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  fiction can show, look, we could do this. But you look at Brave New World, you look at 1984, you look
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  at Nick at Neuromancer, you know, these are the science fiction futures of, oh my god, look at
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  this horrible thing that might happen. And science fiction has always been a literature that has
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  both of those arrows in its quiver, both and any individual work is going to tend to be mostly
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  pessimistic or mostly optimistic. And actually, every every utopia is somebody, every utopia is
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  somebody's dystopia, you know, everybody, you know, all utopias, except for there are people,
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  there are people like like Plato, who have created utopias that are purely didactic and not intended
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  to entertain or warn. But I'd say that most science fictional utopia, certainly in the 20th century
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  and beyond, are also cautionary tales, you know, look at Brave New World. Brave New World is a world
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  in which disease has been eliminated and everybody is born to be perfectly suited to their
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  existence. Brave New World is, of course, a dystopia. And into this Brave New World, we bring a
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  20th century man, somebody from a primitive from outside of this culture. And through his eyes,
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  we see how deadening and dystopian this utopia actually is. And I think most science fictional
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  utopias in the 20th century and beyond are also cautionary tales because every utopia is somebody
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  else's dystopia. So David, do you have a favorite film in this genre? Or movie, as I should say,
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  as you're American, but do you have one which you think is your, for some reason, is that a peak
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  of a science fiction portrayal? You know, probably the one that I've rewatched the most times as
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  Blade Runner. I love them. Yeah. One of the things about it is the fact that it was one of the
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  very first movies to portray a future in which the pieces of the past are still visible.
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  Up until Blade Runner, whenever you saw a science fictional city, it would be this shining
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  city on a hill with all these beautiful shiny buildings and flying cars. And there was no
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  sense of the fact that this was a city that was built on the bones of earlier cities, which was
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  in turn built on the bones of earlier cities. I mean, you can't, this, this shining science fiction
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  city is very much an American concept. If you go to Europe, you can't, you can't walk down
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  street with, oh, there's a, you know, there's a, there's a, there's a, you know, 24th, 21st century
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  Chinese cafe built in a Victorian building, which is in turn built on the foundations of a Roman
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  temple. You don't see that as much in America. And Blade Runner was one of the first to really
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  explicitly do that, that Blade Runner has a layered aesthetic where even, even the main
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  character's car, you know, is a 10 year old model with new solar panels bolted on the top.
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  It just briefly, but everything in that movie has that, how there's a, there's a specific word
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  that the production designer used that I'm failing to recall. But it's something about layering,
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  something about how, and by the way, if it's not, it's not some palimpsest, is it?
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  It is not palimpsest, but it's something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Then if you actually, if you know Los Angeles,
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  and you look at Blade Runner, you can very clearly see 20th century and even 18th century, 19th century
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  Los Angeles under the, the neon. There's a, okay, so I wrote in a, say a long time ago, about
• 19:38
  the climax of Blade Runner takes place, was filmed in and takes place in a building called
• 19:45
  the Bradbury Building, which is a building that exists in Los Angeles today. The Bradbury Building
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  is a visually fascinating building and a lot of movies have been filmed there because it is so
• 19:57
  gorgeous. But the Bradbury Building was built in the late 1800s by somebody who was a fan of a
• 20:08
  book called Looking Backward. Looking Backward was a utopian, a, a, a dactic utopian book of the 1800s,
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  which was, it was written as, you know, some guy fell asleep for a long time and woke up in the
• 20:22
  far future and look at this marvelous utopia. Okay. So it was not, it wasn't, it wasn't a, you know,
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  it wasn't a very plot or character heavy book. It was all about the ideas. It was a socialist
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  utopia. But there were these looking backward clubs in a lot of US cities where they said, you know,
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  hey, you know, this is, this is a cool idea. Let's see if we can actually do this. So the guy that,
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  the guy that the real estate developer that had the Bradbury Building built was a member of one of
• 20:51
  these clubs and he said, let us build a building in the utopian spirit of this book. So he hired
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  his brother-in-law to design the building. This guy only ever, only ever built one, this,
• 21:03
  this architect only ever actually had constructed one building in his entire lifetime. And he claimed
• 21:09
  to have gotten the ideas from the building for the, he claimed to have gotten the ideas for the
• 21:13
  building from his late brother who had died quite. Yeah. So he got the idea in a seance to design a
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  building based on utopian novel. And it's a beautiful building. I've, I've been there. It's a gorgeous,
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  gorgeous building. It's got this marvelous glass-topped atrium. There's a shot in Blade Runner
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  where Roy Betty looks up and sees a blimp going by overhead with the, with the, the searchlights
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  coming down through the glass ceiling. And the idea that you'd have this, this atrium filled
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  with light with a glass ceiling to let the sunlight in, that was completely unheard of in the 1880s
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  when that, when that building was built. And I think it's, that's why it's been used in so many
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  movies. And I don't know that they specifically chose it for Blade Runner. But I do know that they
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  specifically refer to the Bradbury building. I think they even used, I think the words Bradbury
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  building even appear in dialogue. And there's a, the front of that building has a couple of
• 22:13
  twisted columns very distinctive. And you can see them. The actual columns in that shot were a set
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  because they didn't have the rights to shoot on the outside of the building, but they did shoot the
• 22:22
  inside. So anyway, I do love, I do love, I do love Blade Runner, and I do love the,
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  the layered aesthetic of both its visual aesthetic. And also it's, it's psychological aesthetic
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  because it's all about questions of when you add on to humanity, what do you have? You know, what,
• 22:41
  can you indeed replace a human being? Yeah. And also it's quite fascinating the difference
• 22:48
  between the film and the, do Android's dream of electric sheep version, which is like the,
• 22:54
  the, the novella C call an idea for it. So it's definitely worth reading one and watching the other
• 23:01
  and seeing what you think. It's kind of astonishing that Philip K. Dick is like one of the most
• 23:05
  successful writers in history in terms of having his books turn into turn into movies and TV shows.
• 23:12
  And almost none of the adaptations have anything to do with the original book. Yeah, they are
• 23:16
  worlds apart, you know, quite literally. Yeah. So you've told us along the way some of the places
• 23:24
  that we might want to read and things want to look at, but do you have one good read that you've
• 23:28
  want to, other than your own books, obviously, that you suggest people go and look to you mentioned
• 23:35
  some contemporary writers that you're promoting is only one between them that you'd like to pick out
• 23:40
  and suggest we pick up and read. I'm going to call out the fifth season by N. K. Jemisin.
• 23:47
  It is, I mean, I did, I did some what I consider stunt writing in the Kite Bell job.
• 23:54
  The fifth season leaves that in the dust. It is an amazing piece of writing and, and, okay,
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  and I don't, I'm not going to give you any more spoilers than that. Read carefully. And another
• 24:05
  one that I can really recommend is called The Lady Astronaut. No, it's The Lady Astronaut series
• 24:12
  by, by Mary Robin at Coal. And I'm suddenly blanking on the title of the first book in the series,
• 24:20
  because there was a, there was a short story called The Lady Astronaut of Mars, which she eventually
• 24:25
  adapted into a book. I'm sorry, I, I do not recall, I do not recall the title of the book. You
• 24:31
  should be enough for us to find it. And when I do, I'll find the, what Mary Robin at Coal,
• 24:36
  while Lady Astronaut series. Yeah. Thank you, David. And just around up today's fascinating
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  discussion, I've certainly, I'm fascinated by this looking backwards movement in the,
• 24:49
  in the 19th century, which I had no idea about. We always end with the, where in all the fantasy
• 24:55
  world is the best place for something we've done things like the best forest, the best in the best,
• 25:01
  I know, best place to be a musician, that kind of thing. But in honor of your opening few moves
• 25:08
  in your book, I thought we could do, whereas, where in all the fantasy world is the best place to go
• 25:13
  to a casino, because that, a casino's crop up a lot in science fiction, which is not
• 25:20
  unconnected to the fact that it's come out of the Western genre. Because there is definitely
• 25:26
  a growth out of the, the, the old bar scene in a Western. So if you've got a casino that you'd like
• 25:33
  to walk into. The first one that comes to mind is the casino in the most recent Star Wars trilogy,
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  I think in the second, the second movie of the Radiology. That movie, I find kind of weak.
• 25:48
  And that, that scene actually in terms of structure and plot is, it leaves much to be desired,
• 25:56
  but the visuals are phenomenal. And I mean, I'm thinking, and you know, you think about,
• 26:02
  you think about casinos, I'm thinking of Oceans 11, which, you know, I'm going to,
• 26:06
  I'm going to claim that Oceans 11 is science fiction because it is fiction that depends upon
• 26:10
  technology. Okay, you're expanding the, why not? Going to adopt Oceans 11 into the, into the
• 26:16
  science fiction genre. But yeah, there's a lot of, there's a lot of casinos. And there's a lot of,
• 26:21
  there's a lot of casino heists in science fiction. So, so yeah. But unfortunately, at the moment,
• 26:29
  the best, best science fiction casino I can think of is the one in the Kyberville job.
• 26:33
  Yes, of course. Yeah, it's an excellent casino, icing grad G and full of danger.
• 26:39
  I think personally, I'd, we've been talking about Star Trek. I think I'd quite like to go to a Star Trek.
• 26:46
  Casino though, it might be quite fun to go to the galaxy quest version of it. Oh, yes. Yeah,
• 26:51
  because I, that's, I was going to say that my favorite science fiction film is Oddly Galaxy Quest
• 26:56
  because it manages both to be a homage and a sort of spoof, but a very respectful spoof. And it's,
• 27:04
  if you're a science fiction fan, it manages to both gently mock you and reassure you
• 27:11
  at the same time, which is a great, it's a loving, it's a loving parody. Yeah. And yeah, there's,
• 27:17
  there's a great, well, there's a great casino on deep space nine. There's a, there's a great casino
• 27:23
  in on Babylon 5. You know, the interestingly, you've got to get people, you've got to get a
• 27:29
  sufficient mass of people together in order to support a casino. Yeah, I wouldn't mind one on the
• 27:34
  holodeck if I get to hang up with a crew. I mean, probably next generation crew. Yeah,
• 27:39
  it's a dangerous place and be aware. Yeah. Thank you so much, David, for spending your time
• 27:46
  with us today. And just to say again, for everyone who's listening, David's new book is called
• 27:51
  The Kuiper Belt Job. And it's out imminently. So do pre-order it now. And some of you might
• 27:57
  be able to join David on his book tour as well. Thank you very much. Okay, thank you.
• 28:01
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• 28:11
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