Episode 124: Transcript
Episode: 124: Why we Disagree About Avatar
Transcription by Keffy
Annalee: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, the podcast that accidentally terraformed the wrong planet, and now you have to pay taxes to giant dung beetles. I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist who writes science fiction and my new novel, The Terraformers, comes out January 31st.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:16] I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I'm a science fiction writer and comic book writer. You can pick up some issues of New Mutants right now that I wrote, plus in April you can get Promises Stronger Than Darkness, the final volume in my young adult space fantasy trilogy.
Annalee: [00:00:31] Today we're gonna talk about fiction that takes place on other planets and what it takes to create a believable world along with a believable planetary society.
[00:00:41] That's exactly what my new novel The Terraformers is all about. So we're gonna be talking about how I mixed scientific realism with rank speculation to create the planet Sask-E, which we’ll probably be terraforming 60,000 years from now since I am a wizard and can predict the future.
[00:00:56] Also, on our mini episode, next week we'll be answering some of your most burning writing questions, so tune in for that.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:05] Speaking of which, did you know that if you support us on Patreon, you get a mini episode every other week in the gaps in our regular episodes? And you get to keep this podcast going because this podcast is entirely supported by you, our listeners. We're an independent podcast. That's right. And if you support us on Patreon, you get access to our Discord channel where we just hang out and talk all the time.
Annalee: [00:01:30] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:30] Think about it. All of that, that amazing community and all that extra content could be yours for just a few bucks a month. And anything you give goes right back into making our opinions that much more correct. So check us out at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect.
[00:01:47] Now let's jump in.
[00:01:49] [OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]
Charlie Jane: [00:02:17] Okay, so Annalee, I've read The Terraformers and I love this book like more than I can possibly say. It is the book I desperately needed right now, but for those of us who haven't read it yet, you know, what is this book about?
Annalee: [00:02:28] Well, thank you for your super unbiased review of this book.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:32] It’s super unbiased. I’m a book critic.
Annalee: [00:02:35] You, actually, you are a book critic. Not actually allowed, um, professionally to review this book because of your slightly personal relationship with the author. But the thing about this book is that I started writing it because I really wanted to imagine a better world, but I didn't want it to be perfect.
[00:02:58] I didn't wanna create some kind of utopia or something that felt like it was so polished that it couldn't happen. So that's why I chose to focus on terraforming as a topic because terraforming is kind of an inherently problematic process, pretty much no matter how you do it. It's really the process of coming to a planet that already exists and trying to turn it into a place that people can live on.
[00:03:25] And in the case of The Terraformers, I focused on the workers who are on the planet. The planet has, when the book starts, it's already been kind of, the atmosphere has been built. And so they're really just building the life on the planet, the ecosystems. And it focuses on a woman named Destry, who is a network analyst for a group called the Environmental Rescue Team, who are kind of the first responders and environmental scientists of the future, all rolled into one. They respond to disasters, but they also study the environment so they can prevent disasters. Destry is out with her trusty steed, the moose Whistle, and Whistle can talk.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:07] Oh my God. I love Whistle. Whistle is my favorite.
Annalee: [00:04:11] Yeah. Everyone who's read the book so far has fallen in love with Whistle. Whistle is amount, but also a person and he can talk through a texting device embedded in his brain. So he looks and talks like a moose, like he makes moose noises, but then he can text you and send you messages into your brain if you're wired up like all of these future characters are.
[00:04:36] So Destry and Whistle are out on a routine mission. Just checking the boreal forest, trying to figure out if anything's going wrong and they stumble on something that is really surprising and basically uncover—this is not a spoiler—they uncover a city that isn't supposed to exist underneath a volcano.
[00:04:57] And at that point, Destry is kind of torn between doing work for the environmental rescue team, which is supposed to just keep the planet in a pristine condition for this company that owns it. And that is a kind of real estate development firm that, you know, goes across the stars and develops land. But she also feels real loyalty to the people she meets and so she has to make this really momentous decision about how to deal with this contradiction between keeping the planet pristine, obeying the orders from her corporate overlords, and honoring these people who she's just met, who have made this kind of pirate city.
[00:05:41] And the thing that's really fun about the book for me and hopefully for readers is that we see Destry make this incredible decision. We see very violent and upsetting fallout from that decision immediately. But then we get to follow subsequent generations on the planet and see what happens long after Destry is dead, and how the terraforming project continues for a thousand years into the future.
[00:06:11] So we finally end the book in a period of gentrification where the planet's been completely occupied. There's cities, there's farms, and now there's a new generation of people coming in who are displacing these original terraformers.
[00:06:27] And so it's a book that's very political. It deals with all of these questions around what does it mean to take control of land? What does it mean to build a city? But also it's really about these people. It's about Destry and Whistle. It's about the mentorship relationship that Destry has with the next generation of people. And finally, in the final section of the book, it's about a sentient flying train who is part of the public transit system and is trying to figure out how to be good public transit on a planet where there's haves and have nots.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:02] Yeah, I feel like the terraforming process is really fascinating because it's one of those things where you're building a thing you won't live to see. You're building a thing that won't be completed in your lifetime and you're just like, one day this will be a thing that people can enjoy. But for now, I'm just helping to create it.
[00:07:20] I find that dynamic really fascinating. And so we've talked before on our podcast, and in life, about how annoying it is when there's planets that don't feel believable, that are just kind of painted backdrop or just like, you know, a gravel quarry somewhere that just, it doesn't feel like a real planet.
[00:07:37] So what do you think makes a fictional planet actually believable and like a place that you could actually visit? .
Annalee: [00:07:44] Yeah. I thought about this a lot while I was writing, and I think for me there's really two areas that are important. One is having diverse environments, and the other is having a realistic history.
[00:07:56] So one novel that I think about a lot is, Tobias Buckell's novel, Sly Mongoose, which I know I've discussed here before because it's such a great book. In that we have the descendants of people from earth, descendants of people from the Caribbean actually, and they are living on a planet that's kind of like Venus, where it's not really habitable on the ground because the pressure is so high and there's this thick layer of clouds where people have set up sort of floating cities where they're living in these clouds. And they still have to mine resources from the surface of the planet. And so Buckell comes up with these really interesting ideas about how people would enter the atmosphere, how they would interact with the planet, how that would shift their culture around, how the different cities interact with each other and what kind of government they have.
[00:08:49] I mean, this is something throughout Buckell’s work that I think is great, is that he gets really deep into a realistic physical geological scenario and then how that changes the lives of the people there.
[00:09:04] I also really on a more fantastical note, I really love Iain M. Banks's novel, The Algebraist, which is set on a gas giant, and it's about how basically humanoids are interacting with life forms on the gas giant.
And again, kind of like in Sly Mongoose, one of the problems with a gas giant is that the pressure, as you get deeper into the planet is so extreme that you couldn't possibly survive as one of us squishy ape people. But in The Algebraist there's a human who has kind of befriended some of the weird, they're kind of octopus-like creatures that live deep inside this gas giant.
[00:09:44] And so, the human, in order to hang out with them, has to put on this incredible pressure suit. And also, the deeper the human goes into the gas giant, the more that time itself changes. And so time is moving at a different speed outside of the gas giant. So the human is going down for much longer periods of time than it feels like.
[00:10:09] But also they're wearing this bulky, crazy suit and we learn again about how different parts of that planet have different weather systems and have different kinds of communities in them. So I love that. I love a planet that feels lived in.
[00:10:27] And I also want my planet to have history, like I said. And I think that one of the best examples of this, of course, is N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, where we learn all about the geological history of the planet. It’s been through a number of mass extinctions. It has problems with earthquakes, but it's also had problems with toxins in the environment. It's had problems with, I think, maybe asteroid strikes, I can't remember. But there's been these different phases in the planet's history that have almost wiped out civilization and then civilization has kind of grown back in a different form.
[00:11:03] And we understand, as the novels go on, how much the present day civilization is based on these previous stages of their civilization or previous types of community forming. And so that I, I just love.
[00:11:20] A couple of other shout outs I would make to planets that feel believable.
[00:11:26] The planets in the show Andor, not all of them, but many of them, I like because we see urban and rural areas on the planets. And that's actually kind of unusual for Star Wars, which of course invented Coruscant, which is the city planet, which I feel like is completely bonkers. I don't believe that such a thing could possibly exist. Maybe if you had a super hyper advanced kind of civilization, but you need resources to run that city. So you have to have farms and you have to have rural areas. So I like that.
[00:11:57] And I also, something that really stuck with me from Battlestar Galactica is this moment in the show where the humans have to live basically on a refugee camp planet. And the idea is the Cylons say, all right, well if you're gonna stick around and still be human, we're gonna put you here and you can rebuild human life on this planet. And of course, it's horrific. It's not fertile. It has all these problems and it really reminds me of things that humans have done, for example, in the early 19th century in the United States with the Trail of Tears forcing tribes to go from their homes in tropical areas like Florida, to Oklahoma, which has a totally different ecosystem.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:43] Oh my gosh.
Annalee: [00:12:44] And they were going in winter when you can't possibly set up homes or plant anything because it's freezing. And it's kind of like that in, in the Battlestar Galactica scenario, too, where there there's just simply no way for them to start their lives again on this planet that doesn't have hospitable ecosystems.
[00:13:03] So I like that. I like stories where we see. The difficulties of planetary life and it isn't like… What is the Star Trek device that turns a barren planet into like a paradise?
Charlie Jane: [00:13:16] Oh, the Genesis device from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
Annalee: [00:13:18] The Genesis device. I feel like so many science fiction stories about terraforming and about planets assume—
Charlie Jane: [00:13:25] Oh, right.
Annalee: [00:13:27] That you could just have a Genesis device and it's like, boop, okay, now your planet is all green. And also Spock is really horny too, for some reason.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:36] Yeah, it's interesting because actually there's was a short story in the magazine Fantasy & Science Fiction years ago, which I wrote about io9, where it was by Charles Coleman Finlay, who later became the editor of that magazine.
[00:13:50] And it was all about people basically terraforming and planet by hand. And how it was this process of basically just digging and moving stuff and backbreaking work that was gonna take thousands of years. And it was just showing how it was something that you forced people to do kind of in this world, where it was like, yeah. But I love a planet that has like diverse ecosystems I love complicated planets that feel like they have a history, like you said. Something that I really, this is something I thought a lot about in my young adult books, actually. You kind of get glimpses of this here and there where I'm like, yeah, this planet, over here, there's like an ice desert, over here there's a swamp, over here there's like this whole stretch of this planet that's boiling hot, and this other plat part that's just a giant ocean.
[00:14:39] And you know, at one point I actually cut this line from the second book in my trilogy where Rachel is talking to her art teacher Nyitha, who's from the planet Makvaria. Rachel's like, oh yeah, that's the planet with the ice desert and Nyitha’s, like, it's got a lot of things. It's a planet, you know, planets have a lot of different things. That's what planets are like. And I had to cut that for length but I liked that line.
Annalee: [00:15:02] I love, the idea of—
Charlie Jane: [00:15:03] It's got lots of things.
Annalee: [00:15:03] Yeah. It's like if, in a far future scenario, if Earth is still habitable, someone who's not from Earth saying like, oh yeah. Earth! That's the one with the Grand Canyon and it's like, yeah—
Charlie Jane: [00:15:15] Exactly.
Annalee: [00:15:15] That’s one thing that we have, for sure.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:19] We got a lot of stuff.
Annalee: [00:15:19] Yeah. No. One of the things I really liked about your novel City in the Middle of the Night is that you did such a great job showing us that there were all of these different ecosystems and different places where people could live. And of course that was very extreme because it's a tidally locked planet, so there's like a sunny side and a and a dark side, and so the environments in those two places are very different, but it still felt very lived in and it had a long history behind it too. And I mean, again, unsolicited, unbiased praise.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:54] Yeah, thanks.
Annalee: [00:15:56] But it was truly a great way of helping us understand how planets are made up of many different kinds of ecosystems.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:02] Yeah. And I had a lot of fun with that. I think I might have actually… I kind of realized after the fact that I might have over emphasized how brutally extreme those extremes might be. But it was was really fun. It was a fun thought experiment, and it felt like a fun way of visualizing like how hard it would be to colonize another planet, even if it's “right” for human habitation. And some of the scientists I talked to when I was doing research said, you know, there's so many ways that planets could kill us that we don't even think about that humans… Like, it might have breathable air, but we still could die instantly. I wanna shout out a couple of novels that are coming out soon, actually.
Meru by S.B. Divya is, a lot of the action takes place on an exoplanet, and it feels like a very believable world with like a complex ecosystem. And you really get a feeling of what it's like to be the first human living on this exoplanet. I don't wanna give any spoilers, but it's such a fantastic book.
[00:17:01] Also, The Mimicking of Known Successes by friend of the podcast, Malka Older.
Annalee: [00:17:05] Yes.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:06] Takes place on Jupiter where humans have colonized but they can only live like above the atmosphere in this kind of system of hubs. It's such a cool way of thinking about humans living on a very different world.
[00:17:21] So Annalee. Bringing it back to The Terraformers, which is just such a wonderful book. How is it different creating a planet in a science fiction book versus say, creating Westeros or you know, Narnia or some other secondary world in fantasy?
Annalee: [00:17:38] Yeah. It's funny that you ask that because of course, I mean, the easy answer is if you're doing an exoplanet, even if you're terraforming it, you have to have some kind of scientific realism, right?
[00:17:49] You have to base your ecosystem and your geology on stuff that is plausible. At the same time, I've really, especially in The Terraformers, taken a lot of inspiration from fantasy world building, and I think that's because, and obviously this isn't a universal rule, but you see a lot more ecosystem diversity in fantasy stories. You see a lot more emphasis on the rural, I mean, obviously there's a whole subgenre of urban fantasy. So that kind of assumes in a weird way that everything else isn't urban. And I think that that was true for a very long time. And you see a lot of emphasis and fantasy on different kinds of animals, animals that have human equivalent consciousness, interactions between humans and animals.
[00:18:40] So, for example, we talk a lot about how Star Trek inspires people to become scientists, but a lot of environmental scientists and biologists have said that they were inspired by Lord of the Rings because seeing the environments in that story and thinking about how a balanced ecosystem can be destroyed through industry or destroyed through poor land management practices.
I hate to reduce Lord of the Rings to like, well, Sauron, bad land manager. But there is, especially actually in, um, The Rings of Power where we see the origin of Mordor, it really is about land management to a large extent, and water management. And so, that I find to be just a really fruitful place to put my imagination.
[00:19:28] And of course, Hayao Miyazaki movies like Princess Mononoke and My Neighbor Totoro, and a whole bunch of other ones. Again, these are fantasy stories about magic, but they depict the natural world in a way that feels. In some ways more realistic than what you might see in, for example, Star Wars, city planet. Or sometimes like Star Trek, where it'll be like, this is the water planet.
[00:19:57] Which not to throw shade on that because you could actually have a water planet, but you often get planets where it's all tropical and I mean, that could happen. I mean, there were phases in Earth's development when essentially all the land masses were tropical. But that was kind of unusual and that had to do with having like a very strange configuration of the continents.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:17] I love the idea of summarizing Lord of the Rings as just a story about bad land management and environmental degradation. You know.
Annalee: [00:20:27] But it is, and I, I really do feel like, I mean, one of the things I loved about Rings of Power, I actually really did love that series, was the fact that they, they made… I think there was a conscious effort on the part of the writers to frame that in the context of the environment. Because, again, part of the wonder and beauty of a show like that, or the movie series, Lord of the Rings, is seeing these untouched, natural environments, or undeveloped in the way that we develop them as people.
[00:20:58] So it’s particularly heartbreaking when you see these beautiful verdant landscapes turned into industrial slag.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:09] Yeah, it really did feel like a gut punch.
[00:21:12] Okay, we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back we're gonna talk about using actual science to create a fictional planet.
[00:21:18] [OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]
Charlie Jane: [00:21:24] So when you were building this planet in The Terraformers, like where did you start?
Annalee: [00:21:29] So the planet is called Sask-E which is a reference to Saskatchewan because I can't write a novel without Saskatchewan being in it somewhere. And I started at the beginning, like I called up a planetary scientist named David Catling, who studies basically how planets form atmospheres.
[00:21:48] And this is very early in the process, like, so I hadn't started writing yet. And I had originally thought that the book would start with literally the company that's making the planet, like finding the planet and building an atmosphere. So I spent a really long time talking to poor David Catling about like, how do you build an atmosphere from scratch and how would you find a planet and like what stage in the planet's development would be the ideal time to intervene?
[00:22:15] And he gave me all this great information that I didn’t end up using in the book because I just sort of assumed that all the stories he told me about how they did it were true and that they'd found a planet at a relatively middle-aged star. So the sort of phases of planetary development, like early planetary development involves a lot of bombardment. There's a lot of just debris in the solar system. So it you can't develop a planet if it's constantly being hit by debris. So you have to wait until the system is a little bit matured. But that planet had to have had some kind of terrible accident at some point. Maybe it smashed into another planet and that knocked most of its atmosphere off.
[00:22:59] So it's this, it's basically a rock that's ready for terraforming. So all of that is in the past. The main thing I used in the book that he told me was that he thought, stretching the truth a little bit, as long as you had like futuristic, hand wavy technologies, you could build an atmosphere in 10,000 years.
[00:23:17] So there are some hand wavy technologies that allowed them to do that.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:21] That's so fast.
Annalee: [00:23:22] I know. It's really fast. And he was very careful to say like, you would have to have some technologies that don't already exist. But yeah, you could jump… What you wanna do is you wanna jumpstart the carbon cycle and that's gonna help you develop like an atmosphere that has the right amount of oxygen, the right amount of nitrogen, because they're building an earth-like atmosphere. And so that sort of has just happened when the novel opens, they've just gotten oxygen up to about 21% and they're super psyched about it.
[00:23:48] And then I actually spent a lot of time talking to an expert in plate tectonics, Attreyee Ghosh, and she helped me think through one of the major plot points in the book, which has to do with the fact that Sask-E does not have plate tectonics.
[00:24:06] So if you were building a planet from scratch, everyone I talked to agreed you would not wanna have plate tectonics because that causes things like tidal waves and volcanoes in places that you didn't expect, and earthquakes. Here on earth, as you may know, if you studied plate tectonics, which most of us did in school. There's a bunch of crustal plates floating around on magma on top of the planet, and these plates dive underneath each other. They crash into each other. They create mountains when they crash into each other, they create earthquakes. And they are incredibly dangerous. Like the most dangerous things that can happen to a planet generally other than an asteroid strike come from this kind of activity.
[00:24:48] So when Sask-E is built, the real estate development company is like, you know what? We want this to be an earth-like world, but we want it to be a happy, entertaining, family-friendly Earth-like world . So we don't want to have earthquakes and things like that. So, the planet does have volcanism, but because the plates aren't moving around, you know where the volcanoes are, they never change. They're always in the same place.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:16] That’s so fascinating. I mean, I never even thought, like, until I read your book, I never even thought that, oh, you could have a planet without plate tectonics. I just assumed it came standard with every planet, you know?
Annalee: [00:25:27] No, and in fact, I talked to another planetary scientist who studies Venus and she was saying that we think probably Venus doesn't have plate tectonics. It might turn out to, but it really doesn't look like it. Partly because they have these volcanic structures where the volcanoes don't move around at all. The volcanoes just have been erupting for like millions and millions of years in the same place. So that suggests that they're not… Because when volcanoes move, when the plates move and the plate moves over top of the volcano, so it's the same magma upwelling, but it's coming up in different parts of the crust.
[00:26:04] So that's why you get chains of islands, like the Hawaiian Islands, they're in this kind of beautiful arc pattern because the crust of the earth is slowly moving over the same magma upwelling, and it's creating island after island as it blows up. So anyway, I talked to a, a lot of these folks and, and got their help in developing this futuristic technology that would build a planet. I talked to Kyle House a river expert who we actually had on the show talking about the Colorado River—
Charlie Jane: [00:26:36] He was so great.
Annalee: [00:26:35] I love him. And, so he's a geologist who studies rivers and he helped me figure out the behavior of a giant river that runs down the center of the continent in the book.
[00:26:47] And then I also talked to folks who think about technology and city planning. And I had a great conversation with Jeffrey Tumlin, who's the head of the Department of Transit here in San Francisco about how you would just build a global system of transit, if you could, which they can. They are starting from scratch, so they're thinking about how do you connect every single city in the entire world and what's the best way to do that? And how do you get agreement between cities about how these, these transit systems are gonna run?
[00:27:26] So it's important to me, I guess, or what was important to me as I thought about this, was I wanted it to be, geologically accurate. I wanted it to be accurate to how ecosystems work, how sensor networks function, because there's a sensor network throughout the planet. Because again, if you're gonna build a planet, why not do that. But then I also wanted the things like transit systems to be realistic, too. You know, I didn't want it to feel like, oh we have really realistic geology, but then they just magically make a giant transit system and there's no arguments over it. And nobody gets pissed about like where the train stations are and things like that. Or even gets pissed about the idea of having trains because of course there's all these questions that come up about how having train stations kind of makes real estate go down in price. Which is actually the opposite of how it is on earth right now. But on this planet, there’s economic reasons why having train tracks might be encouraging the wrong sort of people to move in, you know, dear.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:34] Even on earth, like you, you have like rich neighborhoods where there's very little public transit on purpose. Like when I lived in DC it was like, yeah, Georgetown, there's no metro in Georgetown because they don't want poor people to be able to come there.
Annalee: [00:28:46] Yeah. And that's one of the conflicts in the book and a huge part of the book deals with characters who are trying to, first to set up this transit network, and then of course, it deals with one of the parts of the transit network, one of the trains. Who is sentient? All the trains are sentient because why not? And it was actually a huge stretch for world building to have to think about all that stuff.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:15] Yeah, and it's all the stuff that we usually skip over in novels about planetary colonization, and usually either you have people just like showing up and like setting up their dome or whatever. Or, you are like in my novel, The City in the Middle of the Night, it's like, oh yeah, we've been here for generations and we just live here now. How does it change the story when you actually kind of deal with the process of terraforming a planet from scratch rather than just showing up on a planet that's already more or less habitable and then adjusting to it.
Annalee: [00:29:43] Well, one of the big themes of this book is commercialization of real estate, right?
Charlie Jane: [00:29:47] Yes.
Annalee: [00:29:47] Turning land into property, which I think is probably one of humanity's worst inventions, one of the greatest crimes against nature in humans. So of course I wanted to tackle that. There's a lot of great stories out there that have dealt with this already. I certainly didn't invent the idea of Interstellar real estate development. I'm a huge fan of the novel The Space Merchants, which is by Cyril Kornbluth and Frederick Pohl. And that is a story set on earth, but it's dealing with a guy who's in marketing and he's constantly seeing advertisements for colonies off world. He sort of lives in this barrage of ads. But also I was thinking a lot about The Expanse, um, which is very much about colonizing the solar system and the economics behind that as well as the politics. And I also love the movie Moon which I feel like is kind of a modern classic.
[00:30:50] It was written and directed by Duncan Jones, and it's basically about a guy who is essentially enslaved, whose entire job is to do mining on the moon. Our, moon here, that orbits earth and it's such a lonely, sad, fucked up story and it's basically all about how life is kind of wrecked when resource extraction becomes the primary reason for inhabiting any kind of place.
[00:31:24] So I was thinking a lot about all that stuff and I really wanted to foreground labor, the labor of maintaining a planet or building a planet. And you were saying this is the kind of stuff that we don't normally see in a terraforming story. And I think that's because we don't normally think about it even here on earth.
[00:31:48] We don't think about the people very often who maintain our streets, who grow and pick our food, who are building our houses, painting our houses, building freeways, driving buses, all of the people who actually make everything run. Those people are kind of Terraformers. They’re the ones who make sure that you don't fall into a pothole and that your forest doesn't burn down and consume your house. And so those are the terraformers in my novel those people. And part of what this book is about is a very long revolution against property owners. It takes a long time.
Charlie Jane: [00:32:26] And it feels like very much an extension of the themes of your first novel, Autonomous, where it's all about like first we developed this indenture category for robots and then it becomes applied to humans. And it's just like, it's a slippery slope every time. And I mean, it's interesting to think about terraforming here on earth because of course we have people who are doing huge projects to try to do environmental remediation and building, in some cases, massive structures, massive projects to try to fix damage to the planet.
[00:33:04] But then you also have people burning down the fricking rainforest who are kind of like, in a way, anti-terraforming. They're making the planet over time, less habitable to humans and threatening to turn the planet into something that we can't live on at all. Which it feels like there's this weird tug of war on earth right now between terraformers and anti-terraformers. And at times it feels like the anti-terraformers are winning. So it's actually… one of the things that's utopian is to imagine a world where the terraformers are actually kind of in charge, even if they're not entirely doing it for pure motives in some cases. I mean, just like, to have people in charge who actually give a crap about making the planet habitable would be nice.
Annalee: [00:33:44] I like your idea of terraformers and anti-terraformers because I think it captures something important, but I would have a well actually moment there and say, all of that is terraforming. Burning down the rainforest is a form of terraforming, and terraforming is kind of in the eye of the beholder. Like one person's negative type of terraforming is another person's positive. And there's so many science fiction stories about this, including that Doctor Who episode, where the, what the heck are they called? The Vorons, the whatever. They come down to earth and they're filling the atmosphere with carbon because they want to terraform. They want to terraform it for them.
Charlie Jane: [00:34:22] The Sontarans?
Annalee: [00:34:24] Sontarans! Sontarans. Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:34:27] There have actually been a few Doctor Who monsters who tried to customize Earth's atmosphere. That’s like a theme in Doctor Who.
Annalee: [00:34:31] It really is.
Charlie Jane: [00:34:32] The Ice Warriors did it once, the Silurians did it once.
Annalee: [00:34:35] Right. And it goes back to War of the Worlds, which is also basically about that. So there's, I guess you could say there's like non-consensual terraforming or there's…
Charlie Jane: [00:34:45] I mean…
Annalee: [00:34:46] There's terraforming that creates a world that's better for humans. And then there's terraforming that creates a world that's better for Sontorans or Capitalist Sontarans.
Charlie Jane: [00:34:59] Or Ice Warriors. In “The Seeds of Death”, the Ice Warriors have these like weird fungus bombs that release a gas, that will transform Earth's atmosphere to be more like Mars. And it's like a whole freaking thing.
[00:35:12] What I want to say is, I want to make a distinction. I feel like we're ratholing, but in an interesting way, hopefully. I wanna make a distinction between the Ice Warriors who are kind of rationally trying to convert Earth to someplace that they can live and the people burning the rainforest, who maybe, obviously it's intentional, but at the same time they are terraforming earth into a place where humans can't live.
Annalee: [00:35:36] Well, they're terraforming it into a place that's good for capitalism, and—
Charlie Jane: [00:35:41] In the short term, which is all that capitalism thinks about.
Annalee: [00:35:44] Well, that's what I mean. And there is a sense of futurism there where they're thinking well, rich people will always be able to survive because we'll have our climate controlled habitats fueled by all of this wood that we've harvested and all of this coal that we've harvested and extracted. And so, who cares? We’ll always be able to survive, so it doesn't really matter.
[00:36:13] I think when we think about terraforming, ultimately we have to say terraforming in the name of what? Why are we terraforming?
Charlie Jane: [00:36:19] Yes, yes.
Annalee: [00:36:19] Are we doing it for the Ice Warriors? Are we doing it for capitalists? Or are we doing it for the ecosystems that are here now that we hope to have survive for as long as possible? .
Charlie Jane: [00:36:30] Yes, exactly. You totally put your finger on it. Like what's the goal? Who benefits?
[00:36:36] Actually, that's a good way to think about the next thing I would ask you, which is, oftentimes, and we obviously just did an episode about Avatar, which kind of deals with this a lot. Oftentimes when you visit another planet, in science fiction, it's a metaphor for something about Earth or something about human interaction on Earth. There's a long tradition of that going back to Dune, going back, I would say to, John Carter of Mars and a lot of Ursula K. LeGuin’s novels and some of Samuel Delany's early work.
[00:37:07] So, in The Terraformers, do you see Sask-E as a metaphor for something to do with Earth or our history?
Annalee: [00:37:15] I was thinking about some types of land use on Earth that I wanted to basically make fun of in this novel. There's a bit of satire here of things like Disneyland and Disney World. There is a real estate company that swoops in and buys a bunch of land that basically is trying to create kind of a cross between Disney World and an Ecotourist resort, and they have set up their large land area so that when you enter it, you have to agree to license their media exclusively while you're there for entertainment. And they will also be able to use things that you do in the space to produce media. And all of the buildings are branded with their characters. And all of the games that are available, of course, are their games. And it's kind of like going into a bar where there's a two drink minimum. When you enter their area, there's a minimum that you have to spend on their media products, whatever those are.
[00:38:21] So I was really concerned about making fun of the Disneyfication of environments. And I also, of course, was thinking a lot about the colonization of the Americas. I mean, I grew up in the United States, surrounded by ill-gotten land, lived on ill-gotten land. I grew up on stories of the Wild West, which were all basically completely made-up propaganda from white settlers. And a lot of the story in The Terraformers is about that made-up propaganda and how it works to get people to buy things.
[00:38:54] This is not a story like Avatar where they get to the planet and there are already existing indigenous people there or anything. It's just a rock. As much as possible it was a rock. And so instead I'm thinking about waves of workers, waves of terraformers who've come in and have made the land hospitable. And then what happens to them when the property-owning class comes in and is like, oh, this is our land. And the terraformers are like, but I built it. And so that kind of process of ownership of the land forcibly being handed off to a new group, is something, I don't know if that's metaphorical, but I just find it to be a super interesting story and very, very plausible based on what I've seen in the land I live in, in California.
[00:39:54] So I wanted to show all that stuff, but I also wanted to show, like you said, a lot of hope and I wanted my characters to feel joy.
Charlie Jane: [00:40:04] Yeah. Can you say more about that?
Annalee: [00:40:07] Yeah, I feel like one of the things about stories about revolution, especially in a very dystopian world where everyone is property and there's this corporation that's controlling everything, it's easy to kind of get stuck in this grim meat hook future and not remember that, you know, many times in earth history have been just as oppressive and people have found time to party. They've found ways of connecting with each other, and that's really what helps us overcome systemic oppression, I think. I mean, obviously organizing and, and having political resistance, but I think the smallest unit of that resistance is. our friendships and our trust for one another.
[00:40:49] And so I wanted to make sure that, you know, my characters, they do go to parties, they get drunk, they go to an amazing cosplay performance that I hope people will enjoy. And I made sure that people got to fall in love. The moose got to fall in love. The flying train gets to fall in love with a really awesome cat.
Charlie Jane: [00:41:11] Oh my God, I love it.
Annalee: [00:41:15] There's characters who fall in love and get together that you would definitely not expect, and by the end you'll be very excited that they found each other. And I just, I think that revolution without romance is just not a story that I wanna tell, especially if you're in it for the long haul. If you're having a slow revolution that takes 1500 years, you've gotta fall in love along the way otherwise you lose sight of what you're fighting for.
Charlie Jane: [00:41:43] I feel like Emma Goldman would approve.
Annalee: [00:41:46] Emma Goldman would probably approve. And so would generations of queer people who partied secretly in order to have love in times of oppression. So, yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:41:57] Hell, yeah.
[00:41:57] So I think that's a good place to wrap up.
Annalee: [00:42:00] Yeah, so thank you so much for listening. This has been another episode of Our Opinions Are Correct. Remember, you can find us on Patreon and please do support us. We're at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. We’re on Mastodon at ouropinions@wandering.shop, and you can find us on TikTok and Instagram.
[00:42:23] And thank you so much to our incredible producer, Veronica Simonetti, who puts up with all of our microphone problems, and our inability to like stop saying “um.” Thank you so much to Chris Palmer for the music and we will talk to you later. If you're a patron, we'll see you on Discord.
[00:42:40] Bye!
Charlie Jane: [00:42:40] Bye!
[00:42:40] [OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]
Annalee: [00:42:44] We are gonna take the month of February off to do some housekeeping, do some relaxing, and we will be back in March with brand new episodes. And in the meantime, we're gonna post a couple of our favorite classic episodes.
[00:43:00] And we'll see you in March.