Episode 156: Transcript
Episode: 156: Immigration Law in Space, with Victor Manibo
Transcription by Alexander
Annalee: [00:00:00] So, Charlie Jane, when did you first discover Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?
Charlie Jane: [00:00:05] You know, I have no memory of discovering the book, radio show, TV show. I just feel like it was always part of my life. Like, I feel like I was born and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was placed in my tiny little hand. You know, Douglas Adams stood over my crib and told me weird facts about, like, Golgafrincham and stuff. It feels like it’s such a part of my life it’s so integral, I can’t really trace it to anything. You know that and like, Monty Python – which was on PBS when I was a kid – and I saw Monty Python all the time when I was way too little.
Annalee: [00:00:34] Me too.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:35] I feel like these things and a bunch of other stuff just fill me with this great encompassing, huge, sweeping love of all things ridiculous, nonsensical, bonkers, bizarre. So Annalee, what was your first experience falling in love with the absurd?
Annalee: [00:00:52] So, I think this is very on brand for, like, the difference between our two types of absurdism, which is, when I was a kid, like, a lot of kids in the 70s, my parents took me to many, many indie foreign films that probably I shouldn't have seen at the age of seven. And they took me to see Luis Buñuel's movies.
[00:01:12] He was a famous surrealist who started his career in the 20s, all the way up through, like, the 70s. And so I saw this movie he did in the 30s called L'Age d'Or, The Golden Age, which is, like, this classic of just total weirdness, where basically it's partly a fake documentary. It's partly just a story of, like, two people who want to have sex, but, like, weird, like, obstacles keep getting in their way.
[00:01:37] And I remember I must have been old enough that I was like, yeah, sex is cool and this is weird. And then I also saw, I think when I was a little bit older, his movie, The Exterminating Angel, which is from the early 60s. And it's about rich people who are having a fancy dinner and they get stuck inside a mansion. They don't know why they can't leave and they start, like, pooping in the closet and killing each other and being total dicks the way rich people often are.
[00:02:03] And I was obsessed with Luis Buñuel, like, the whole time I was a teen. And, you know, those movies are really funny, but they're also really screwed up. They're really extreme edgelord stuff.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:16] Oh yeah.
Annalee: [00:02:17] I mean, you know, like 1930s edgelord stuff.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:19] Like, French and Italian absurdism is much more just, like, dark and like, “Ha, ha, ha, ha. You thought life makes sense. I'm going to stab you in the face. Ha, ha.”
Annalee: [00:02:27] Yeah. I mean, I think he was in France in the early part of his career, but he made a lot of films in Mexico. And The Exterminating Angel is a Mexican film. And so he kind of was combining, I think, the political aspects of surrealism with magic realism. So I was consuming that and then also, of course, reading a lot of Daniel Pinkwater, you know?
Charlie Jane: [00:02:47] Oh, my God.
Annalee: [00:02:49] The Hoboken Chicken Emergency. So it's like wacky stuff, but with a lot of darkness and also just, like, a lot of political freight to it.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:58] I have a Daniel Pinkwater fridge magnet. I'm like the only person in the world who has a Daniel Pinkwater fridge magnet. A friend of mine made it and gave it to me. My friend, Marilyn Juan, took Daniel Pinkwater's business card, which has a cute little drawing of him, and says, “Daniel Pinkwater: Serious Person” or something, and made his business card into a magnet and then gave it to me as a housewarming present when I went to the apartment I'm in.
Annalee: [00:03:19] Yeah. We were just talking to Greg Van Eekhout, who writes amazing middle grade novels. And I was trying to tell him how, like, Daniel Pinkwater's middle grade novels just completely changed my life.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:31] So true. Mine, too.
Annalee: [00:03:33] I don't know how popular it is now. So I think that if you have a kid who's reading middle grade, read Greg Van Eekhout, you know?
Charlie Jane: [00:03:39] But also...
Annalee: [00:03:40] Also read Daniel Pinkwater.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:42] Daniel Pinkwater is still publishing books. He's still out there doing it.
Annalee: [00:03:44] I know. His stuff is also funny but dark. Like, I feel like even Hoboken Chicken Emergency has some dark moments.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:52] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:03:54] I think that's his classic.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:55] So I think absurdism just keeps meaning new and different things to me, like, as time goes by. It's a thing that has always been close to my heart, but it takes on more and more meanings.
[00:04:04] As I've become an adult, I've kind of reckoned again and again with the notion that life really doesn't make sense, but that we pretend it makes sense. I feel like absurdism is a way of kind of reconciling that irreconcilable contradiction in modern life. But it's also a means of responding to authoritarianism, because authoritarianism is inherently absurd but pretends to have a logic, kind of a fake logic. And it's a way of coping with just, like, change and transformation, and things being unstable.
[00:04:32] So, you know, I really feel like, bottom line, the world would not make sense without a healthy, major dose of nonsense. So in today's episode, we're going to talk about absurdist writing and art, and why it's more valuable than ever.
Annalee: [00:04:45] And later in the episode, we will be talking to author Victor Manibo, whose latest novel, Escape Velocity, is very satirical, sometimes absurd, and just one of my faves this year so far.
[00:04:56] You are listening to Our Opinions Are Correct. The podcast that murders evil billionaires using sexy gay assassins from the future. I'm Annalee Newitz. My latest book is Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:12] It's so good. Run out and get it if you haven't already. I'm Charlie Jane Anders. My latest book is Promises Stronger Than Darkness.
Annalee: [00:05:20] Also fantastic.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:22] Yeah, so on our mini episode next week, we're going to be talking about that Doctor Who x Bridgerton crossover.
Annalee: [00:05:28] Yes!
Charlie Jane: [00:05:28] As we're recording it, it's brand new. By the time you listen to this, it won’t be brand new anymore. But we just really want to process our feelings about Doctor Who and Bridgerton finally making out.
Annalee: [00:05:37] Yes.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:38] A lot.
Annalee: [00:05:39] I have a lot of Bridgerton feelings that I need to process. So I think I think I'm the Bridgerton member of this couple.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:44] You're the bridge with like the Bridgerton part. I just think Bridgerton is a show about Bridgertown, Connecticut.
Annalee: [00:05:51] Like the bridges of Bridgerton County. Yeah. Did you know that this podcast is entirely independent and funded by you, our listeners through Patreon? That's right. So, if you become a patron, you’re making this podcast happen. You're helping to pay for our amazing producer, Naya Harmon. You are going to get audio extras with every episode. We call them mini episodes because they're so meaty and full of protein. Plus you get access to our Discord channel where we hang out all the time. So think about it. All of that could be yours for just a few slabs of gold latinum every month.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:27] Hell yeah.
Annalee: [00:06:27] And anything you give goes right back into making Our Opinions Are Correct. So find us at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:34] All right, let's get absurd.
[00:06:36] [OOAC theme plays. Science fiction synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]
Annalee: [00:07:09] So let's start with the basics here. Do you think it's better to set out to write an absurdist story or should you just like let the absurdism creep in? And I guess that's another way of asking like are certain story ideas or concepts inherently more absurd or how does that work for you?
Charlie Jane: [00:07:28] Yeah, I feel like obviously every project is different. But I do feel like sometimes you kind of start out knowing that you're going to go to an absurd place and that you have a concept that's like kind of destabilizing and absurd and kind of lends itself to lots of random nonsense and you have just like: what if, you know, half the world suddenly had a chicken head instead of a human head? Like half human beings had suddenly had a chicken head instead of a human head.
Annalee: [00:07:55] Only half though.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:58] Only half.
Annalee: [00:07:58] So some of us still have the only half monkey heads and then…
Charlie Jane: [00:07:59] The chicken head people and then versus the monkey people. And you know, I feel like there are certain concepts that do just sort of lend themselves to absurdity. I think that actually is a huge help. In fact, because if you if you start out with a premise that's like more grounded and realistic and then absurdism can slowly creep in, that's a common way of doing it.
[00:08:17] But you know, part of how to make absurdism work for an audience and for readers, viewers, whatever, is to kind of like telegraph it a little bit. So it's not just like they think the story is going off the rails for no reason. It can be fun to like surprise the audience with absurdism. But I also think, you know, when you have a concept, I love just starting with like a bonkers concept and then seeing where I can get my building on that. You're already in a really absurd place and then you go more and more absurd.
[00:08:44] I think that it's just it's different challenges. Like if you start out with a concept that's like more straightforward and you take it to a more absurd place over time, then you have the benefit of kind of bringing the reader with you into absurdity. Whereas if you start out with an absurd concept and then it's getting more and more absurd, you might need something that the reader can hold on to or the viewer can hold on to, like an Arthur Dent character. I guess we're going to talk about that soon.
[00:09:06] You know, there's going to be some aspect that people feel like “I can hold on to this and this makes sense to me.” But it's something I think about a lot.
Annalee: [00:09:13] I have a question about that because I just read this amazing novel that's coming out this fall called Metal from Heaven by August Clarke.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:21] Oh yeah.
Annalee: [00:09:22] And this is not a spoiler. This is I'm just going to describe a structural thing that happens in the book, which is that it does start very grounded. And then by the end, you know, things are less grounded, shall we say. And maybe a better example would be something like the movie 2001, which again starts very grounded. And by the end, there's like floating babies in space and stuff like that. Is that absurdism? Or is that just sort of surrealism or like magic realism?
Charlie Jane: [00:09:49] Oh, my gosh.
Annalee: [00:09:49] What do you think? I mean, there's no humor in 2001. Like it is-
Charlie Jane: [00:09:53] There really isn’t.
Annalee: [00:09:55] - one of the most humorless movies.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:57] There's like one or two sight gags in that movie. I feel like there's a there are a few little sight gags where it's like, oh, zero gravity.
Annalee: [00:10:04] There's a lot of sarcasm in that movie.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:06] There's like weird corporate logos floating around. Yes, this is the thing where we talk about science fiction and absurdity specifically, which I think is what we're going to really talk about today. I feel like a lot of science fiction contains elements of absurdity. And in fact, what you see with a lot of classic science fiction, even some recent science fiction, is creators consciously kind of pushing back against the notion that what they're doing is just silly.
[00:10:29] I think science fiction a lot of the time really wants to be taken seriously. And one mode in which science fiction can get very absurd and very kind of weird and unreal is the cosmic kind of like sense of wonder, like, “Whoo, everything is big and incomprehensible.” And like, there's just flashing lights that like whirling shapes and like weird images.
Annalee: [00:10:51] The 2001 mode where it's just like there's like weird goobers everywhere or whatever.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:56] The 2001 mode, exactly. And I feel like 2001 really kind of codified that from at this point, a few generations of creators.
Annalee: [00:11:02] A hundred percent, yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:03] I feel like we've been primed and you can use music and like tone in general, like the acting, the music, the everything. We've been primed to take that incredibly seriously. We are going on a cosmic journey, which we're going to get to in this, as well.
[00:11:15] I think absurdism can be serious. It doesn't have to be funny, but I think absurdism, even if it's serious or dark or scary, there's just a certain acceptance that we're letting go of certain expectations of logic or consistency or things kind of holding together in a certain way. And I think that, you know, something like 2001 and we talked in a previous episode about Clarke's Third Law, which I think is like part of the scaffolding of this, you know, there's this attempt to bridge that gap by being like “There is a logic. We just don't understand it. And like just as long as if we keep repeating that long enough, it'll become true.” The giant floating baby, the weird, you know, apes throwing shit around and then there's an obelisk, all the wacky stuff.
Annalee: [00:11:59] Like most of Arthur C. Clarke's novels… Floating sentient bullets.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:04] I mean, I think Arthur C. Clarke is really into that idea.
Annalee: [00:12:07] So you would say in a sense that that is an absurdist ending.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:11] I mean...
Annalee: [00:12:11] Or you would say it's not because it's trying to claim that this is technology that appears absurd, but actually isn't.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:19] I think that one of the great challenges of doing absurdist science fiction is that it's science fiction actively resists like mainstream, like the kind of central tradition of science fiction actively resists the notion of absurdity because like, I think that science fiction is very into the idea that things are going to be internally consistent. Things are going to kind of, on some level, make sense that where there's going to be logic.
[00:12:44] I think science fiction is really in love with the idea of logic and has found this kind of workaround where we can have bizarro, cosmic stuff, but still claim that there's a logic there and we're just going to not examine that too closely.
[00:12:56] And then you get someone like Philip K. Dick.
Annalee: [00:12:57] Okay.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:58] I mean, I'm sort of thinking this through as we're talking about… Philip K. Dick, part of what makes him so revolutionary in the 1960s is that he is just being like, “Yeah, everything is just wacky and doesn't make sense. And it's not funny either. It's just weird and fucked up.” But I think he gets away with it because it's so psychological. It's so like focused on the psychological damage of his characters that you can be like, “Well, there's a psychological logic to this.” But I think Philip K. Dick is kind of trying to push us into the quarters that we've swept absurdity into as a genre.
Annalee: [00:13:27] I think you're right that he does it by focusing on psychology. And so it's like, “Oh, well, all of this stuff could be in someone's mind.” It's a very modernist move to make. You know, it's kind of like I read some William Faulkner when I was a kid type thing. But I was going to offer a couple of interesting counterpoints. Not to disagree with you, but just to kind of make this a more nuanced argument, because I think that the Golden Age of science fiction, like, let's say the 1950s-ish era, it did have a lot of this, you know, self-serious science fiction, this kind of, you know, oh, it looks like magic, but it's really technology.
[00:14:03] But then you have, you know, novels like The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth, which is really funny and very absurdist. It actually does anticipate some of Philip K. Dick's work.
[00:14:17] And then you have somebody like Clifford D. Simak wrote these, like, I don't even know how to classify them.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:25] They Walked Like Men.
Annalee: [00:14:26] They Walked Like Men, where earth is invaded by bowling balls - sentient bowling balls - which I feel like that idea, like Rudy Rucker plays with that same kind of thing in his work in the 80s, like the sex sphere where earth is invaded by like also kind of like sexy bowling balls. Simak's bowling balls are not sexy, but Rudy Rucker’s bowling balls are very sexy.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:48] BBILF.
Annalee: [00:14:48] Yeah. I don't even get that.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:50] Sorry, bowling ball, I'd like to, you know.
Annalee: [00:14:52] BBILF’s. Right. Okay, so I feel like something like The Space Merchants, like, carves out this space that is definitely absurdist, whereas I think that Clifford Simak might be much more trading in that kind of technology that looks like magic. But also, I do feel like there's an element of humor because Simak wrote a bunch of books that were like, the premise is, we were invaded by rectangles. The premise is we were invaded by circles. You know, like there's a lot. Like, he really does have a book where we're invaded by rectangles. And so it's like, I think he was a bit of a goofball.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:28] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:15:28] I'm going to just go out on a limb and say that. So, okay, let's bring it back to basically the 70s and 80s and talk a little bit about Arthur Dent, who is the main human character in Hitchhiker's Guide.
[00:15:40] You were sort of touching on this earlier, like when things get really weird, we need a character like Arthur Dent. So say more about that.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:48] Yeah. I mean, this is a problem that I have with writing absurd stories, because I kind of hate the notion of Arthur Dent. Like I think Arthur Dent is kind of by design, the least interesting thing in those books. He's very relatable because he just wants a nice cup of tea. And like, I feel like we found time and time again, like the character who just wants something simple, like Murderbot just wants to watch its stories. Arthur Dent just wants a nice cup of tea. Like the character who just has a really simple desire that's like never fulfilled or that can't be fully fulfilled because stuff keeps happening.
[00:16:20] That's the thing that I think a lot of us nerds who just want to stay indoors and play games and like, you know, not deal with the world at all that we can relate to. But I do think that it always bothers me the idea that in an absurdist story, you have to have the kind of every man / every person character that is defined by basically not being absurd. He's like the factor that allows everything else to be like wacky and weird.
Annalee: [00:16:44] The straight man.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:45] He's the straight man. Exactly. And like everything else in the story can be like colorful and bazonkers. And you know, I get it. He's probably the reason why those books and other media adaptations work as well as they do. But I kind of resent it in a way because I feel like I'm always thinking about like, how can you have a character who is kind of in their own way, is unusual in their own way or colorful in their own way. And this is something that I think I've been trying to do my whole life is like find ways to put characters into stories where like the main character is also colorful and silly and weird.
[00:17:19] But is it a colorful, silly, weird world that they don't just fade into the background or it doesn't just become like an undistinguished mush of like…
Annalee: [00:17:26] Random shit happening?
Charlie Jane: [00:17:27] Bizarro character and bizarro world. Everything's bizarro. We kind of lose interest. I'd like I actually had a talk that I was giving, like a writing advice talk or like a workshop talk that I was giving for a few years in the late 2010s called Writing Believable Characters in Unbelievable Situations or like Writing Believable Characters in Bizarre Situations, which was kind of about this because I thought about it so much that I wanted to turn it into a talk and I had the whole laundry list of like, okay, does the character need to be just like an every person? No, they do not. But what we do need is someone who the audience can glom on to like emotionally. Like there has to be a character who we're following who we're like, okay, I'm in it with this character. And like, I think actually the thing of Arthur Dent just wanting a nice cup of tea is like, probably more than him being in every man or whatever is really the crucial element.
[00:18:19] Like a character who has like goals or desires that we could instantly like be like, yeah, I like a nice cup of tea. I also want a nice cup of tea. Or like, I really want this character to get the nice cup of tea that he's trying to get. I'd like just I came up with a whole laundry list. I should publish this online somewhere.
Annalee: [00:18:35] Yeah, you should. I was going to say the thing about Arthur Dent's cup of tea is that it is relatable for certain people and specifically for people living in a nation that colonized half the world and used the world to manufacture the tea that they wanted. And there's I feel like there's a story perhaps that was never written in the late 19th century about a nice white English man who went to a dangerous weird world and just wanted a cup of tea, but kept running into odd natives with weird, you know, practices who just didn't drink tea. And I'm not trying to harm your love of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. And be like, this is a fantasy of colonialism.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:18] No, I mean, I get it. I mean, you know, counterpoint, I think some of the places that the British colonized actually were better at making tea than the British ever have been.
Annalee: [00:19:26] Yeah, no, and better at lots of things than the British ever were. But the point is that, you know, our idea of what's normal in these situations sometimes does come from these like older ideas of what is strange that grow out of these kinds of political relationships. And so destroying the innocence of Arthur Dent here was just my way of kind of bringing us to the final thing that I really want to talk to you about, which is whether absurdism is inherently political and how we can use it now politically, because I do feel like absurdism is really back in a big way. And it's, it's really hard to wield it. Like you were saying earlier, when politics get absurd, which they do under fascism and other kinds of authoritarianism, how do you make fun of them using the language that they're using to dismantle our society? Sorry, that's just a huge question.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:25] Yeah, I mean, that's like three questions, but I'll do the best I can. First of all, I think, you know, obviously, all storytelling is political on some level. Like, I think there's no such thing as a story that doesn't have politics embedded in it.
Annalee: [00:20:36] Yes.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:37] You and I have both kind of made a career out of that proposition.
Annalee: [00:20:40] Yeah. The first law of Newitz and Anders is...
Charlie Jane: [00:20:44] We have jobs because of that idea.
Annalee: [00:20:46] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:47] All stories are political. But I think that absurdism is the political in a very specific way, which is the thing I kind of talked about at the start of this segment. Everybody pretends the world makes sense. Everybody pretends that there are rules and that things are like predictable and logical and that like, if you do X, then Y will happen, because that's the way it's supposed to work. And like, we know that like basically every single one of those rules, every single one, one of those models of how the world is supposed to work is basically just like a bunch of duct tape and loopholes and exceptions and like only on every third Thursday, blah, blah, blah. Like being a child, you kind of know that the adults are…
Annalee: [00:21:22] Total idiots.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:23] Yeah, full of crap. But being an adult is really like it's just constantly being gaslit by the world. And you kind of in order to function in the world as an adult, you have to go along with it. You have to pretend that you also think things make sense. Things go really badly for you really quickly if you just let on that you are aware that things are just total nonsense. People will just smack you down in a really brutal way, I think.
Annalee: [00:21:48] Or they'll actually lock you up.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:50] They will actually lock you up.
Annalee: [00:21:51] And say that you have mental health problems. Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:53] And that was a huge theme in 1960s and 1970s, like science fiction, but also a lot of literary fiction, this notion that like people are being locked in mental institutions for recognizing the true nature of the world.
Annalee: [00:22:05] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:06] Which is a whole other episode that we should do soon. So absurdism is kind of a safety valve. It's almost like a kind of escapism because it's an escape from this false logic. But it also is a way of like sneakily undermining and kind of tunneling under a lot of these structures and just kind of making them collapse from below because, you know, you can like, again, getting back to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy or Philip K. Dick, they both have a lot of stuff that's just like, whoa, that's really weird and bonkers and stuff. But they're actually saying things about like bureaucracy or about capitalism or about, you know, free enterprise or the entertainment complex or just a million other things that is actually very subversive and very dangerous to the status quo, the orthodoxy.
[00:22:52] But doing it in a way that is sort of like a lot of speculative fiction has like plausible to die abilities. You'd be like, no, it's just a silly story about vogons. What are you talking about? There's nothing here. There's nothing in here about like people having their homes taken away in unjust ways or like about evil bureaucrats who just don't care about human life. You know, I feel like there's a ton of stuff like that. And I think absurdism is really good at puncturing a lot of our like harmful denial about the state of the world.
Annalee: [00:23:23] Yeah, I really like that about the idea that it's an escapism from fake rationality, basically. Like it's like, okay, at last, at least in this story, we acknowledge that everything is completely bonkers and like we figure out how to cope with it. And so I wonder if that's part of why Absurdism is becoming so much more popular now and not just Absurdism in a silly Monty Python way or Arthur Dent in Hitchhiker's Guide, but like stuff like what I was describing in August Clarke's forthcoming novel, like where it's not silly, but reality is warping. And I think we're seeing that like, for example, in K. Jemisin's latest duology, The City We Became...
Charlie Jane: [00:24:08] Yeah. Which is actually really funny.
Annalee: [00:24:11] It is funny and satirical, but it's also a lot about how like reality is being warped by gentrification. Like the physical landscape is being warped, but also like reality itself is, you know, turning into like weirdo crap. Weirdo crap is my word for cosmic horror entering our world. So yeah, I guess you've kind of convinced me that we can use Absurdism against Absurdism. That Absurdism is kind of the critique of Absurdism.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:40] It's tricky, but it's doable.
Annalee: [00:24:42] Maybe that's why the Onion newspaper is being revived.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:47] I mean, the Onion is basically like my main source of news these days.
Annalee: [00:24:51] Your main source of escapist news?
Charlie Jane: [00:24:53] No, I mean, it tells the truth in ways that mainstream journalism can, which is part of what's so interesting. Like we could do a whole other episode about satire and we should do a whole other episode about satire because I think that's a related topic.
Annalee: [00:25:05] It is related, but I do think that it's worth saying that Absurdism is a particular strand of satire that becomes useful in very difficult times when everything seems completely wild.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:20] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:25:21] All right. Well, coming up after the break, we're going to talk to Victor Manibo, whose latest novel Escape Velocity is full of very juicy satire and a little bit of Absurdism.
[00:25:33] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Annalee: [00:25:36] And now we are psyched to be joined by Victor Manibo. So welcome, Victor.
Victor: [00:25:42] Hi, thanks for having me. I'm so glad to be here and talk to both of you.
Annalee: [00:25:46] Yeah. So I want to dive right in to talking about Escape Velocity. And I want to talk about class warfare because that's a huge part of the story. And I feel like the theme of class warfare has become really popular in a lot of thrillers lately, including yours. And I'm wondering why you think this is happening now? Like why is the class warfare story like making such a comeback?
Victor: [00:26:13] Yeah. Yeah, that's so interesting. That's so true. When I started writing this in 2019, I think the stories about class warfare were already bubbling up, but we really saw a crust in the last few years. And I think it's because of a lot of things that's happening now. Sci-fi, especially near future sci-fi, is always closely engaged with the current cultural moments. And we are in an era of rampant wealth and income inequality.
[00:26:45] We have a record number of billionaires at a time of inflation and rents are also at a record high. And then we have these issues of wages not catching up with labor productivity in the worst way since like this day that was recorded. And then the pandemic happened and I think magnified all of those problems.
[00:27:12] At the same time, a lot of creative people were at home thinking, “Okay, what am I going to do with all this time with all these issues bubbling up and going on around us?” And that's where all these stories come from, I think. And that's partly where this story came from.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:31] Yeah. So one thing that I thought was really fascinating about Escape Velocity is that we do spend a lot of time getting to know the wealthy characters and the privileged characters. And, you know, we kind of see their agendas and their political machinations ranging from like solving an old murder mystery to like trying to get a leg up on this like Mars colonization scheme. You know, what made you want to center them so much in this book? And, you know, what made you decide to actually give them kind of sympathetic qualities?
Victor: [00:28:03] I wanted to really complicate people's relationships with the idea of a billionaire. I think we all have a picture of what a billionaire is depending on who the hot billionaire in the news is. And it's easy to flatten the billionaire class. And in general, whether it's a character that I like or don't like, whatever “like” means, I want to write complex characters who defy sort of easy categorization as an entire person, if not like it's hard to categorize them in individual scenes.
[00:28:42] So I think it was important for me to show that these billionaire characters were also kids once who have done the same things that the reader might have done to you when they were a teenager, maybe made the same decisions, the same mistakes, and then as adults make the same choices that the reader might make as an adult. And then establishing that kind of complexity that is innate in every character and every human being. But then I wanted to raise the question of like, okay, well, knowing all of this, fleshing out these billionaires, do they still elicit your sympathy once the full picture is revealed? Is there such a thing as a good billionaire? Is Taylor Swift any different from an Elon Musk in a way that would matter to the world of the book, to the characters of the book? So these were questions that I wanted to raise.
Annalee: [00:29:39] I wanted to talk about some of the other characters who we see a little bit less in the book. And, you know, we have our billionaire characters, but then we have this whole group of people, mostly the Filipino staff on this orbiting space, luxury, satellite station. I'm going to just pour more verbs onto it. But we see this Filipino staff kind of like the staff on a lot of cruise ships that exist now. And I want to say they're like our secret heroes because we don't get to know them as much. They sort of come into the story later.
[00:30:16] One of the things that's interesting about having those characters as our heroes is that it creates a much more complicated story than something like, say, Knives Out, which I think is also in this genre. Because in Knives Out, in both of the Knives Out films, it's class warfare, but race and colonialism don't really come into it very much.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:39] At least not on the surface.
Annalee: [00:30:41] Not on the surface. Whereas here, it's very much on the surface, which I love. And I'm wondering, how do you see bringing race and colonialism into it, like changing the usual rich versus poor narrative?
Victor: [00:30:52] It was very important for me to engage with race and colonialism, especially when the political themes were kind of forming in my later drafts. I knew that if I was going to engage with issues of wealth inequality, I cannot responsibly not talk about race and colonialism.
[00:31:16] I knew that if I was engaging in a world that has been ravaged by climate change, I cannot talk about that without talking about race and colonialism. So that was already something that was very important to me. And something that, as you were saying, I wanted that to be more explicit.
[00:31:34] At least with Knives Out, we see that the main sympathetic character, Marta, she has an immigrant background. We see a little bit of her family. And the rich family constantly gets her country of origin wrong. So they do a nod to her being an immigrant, a slight nod to race. But here, it's important for me, especially as a Filipino, because I come from a country where more than 90% of the people come from the same race. And so my conceptions of class and class issues are different from the conversations that I encountered when I moved to the United States as an adult, because it's never just about class anymore, because that's all I knew. There are so many axes that need to be grappled with.
[00:32:31] And then setting this story, a space station, a space habitat, a luxury liner in space. It was just natural for me to port what I know about Filipinos and how they are treated as maritime workers. A third of all maritime workers in the entire world are Filipinos. And they are overworked, underpaid. They go through the same difficulties that the characters in Escape Velocity go through. So bringing all those together, it was kind of a no-brainer. It was almost impossible not to engage with that directly. It just took a matter of, well, “I have to be able to engage with it directly, but also not just on the axis of like, ‘well, these are Filipinos against wealthy, mostly white people.’”
[00:33:33] I needed to represent as well other characters from the global South. I needed to make sure that race was also a factor even in the billionaire class and the characters of the four Point of View billionaire characters; they're not all white as well. And there is some complication in that as well. And I think that hearkens back to the earlier question about, well, “okay, now we're seeing that let's say this brown character who also happens to be a billionaire, maybe that makes the reader a little more sympathetic. But does that matter? Should that matter?”
[00:34:11] I hope the book doesn't present easy answers. I don't want to present easy answers, but those are definitely things that are like rippling through my brain as I was writing this.
Charlie Jane: [00:34:22] Yeah, and actually, I wanted to talk about that because among your billionaire characters, you know, you have Laz, who is actually of Filipino origin and, you know, has this kind of uneasy relationship with the other Filipino characters in the book, which I found super fascinating. You have Ava, who's not only like a brown woman, but a trans woman. And so you have these kind of marginalizations among your billionaire characters. But when they have to choose whose side they're on, or, you know, they never consciously choose, I feel like, but they unconsciously choose their billionaire cohort over everybody else, over and over again. And I'd love to hear you talk about that some more, because I think there is this idea in a lot of mainstream culture that like, if we can get more marginalized people into that position of being corporate overlords, then everything will be fixed.
Victor: [00:35:15] Yeah, that's a concept that I always really want to push back on. It's not about diversifying the billionaire class. That is not the goal, at least for me. I don't think that should be the goal. But at the same time, there are these still like kind of pervasive ideas of, well, “when we have more queer people in positions of power, when we have more non-white people in positions of power, then once they're in, they will start to make change.” And the longer I live on this earth, the more that concept feels like fallacious, like the trickle-down economics.
[00:35:58] So I think with putting the Laz character and the Ava character in the book, I wanted to show what class solidarity looks like on the 1% level and also for the staff of the Altaire, and how the class solidarity is affected or not affected by their race or their queerness.
Annalee: [00:36:24] Yeah, I love that. As a reader, I definitely felt like as a, you know, a queer person reading about the high school romance, the queer high school romances, I'm like, “I love these characters. I care about them. But also, oh, no, they're proving you right that, like, just because, you know, I have some kind of connection to these characters, they can also be billionaire bastards.”
Charlie Jane: [00:36:49] So, you know, one of the things I'm obsessed with about Escape Velocity, which I talked about in a recent issue of my newsletter, is the meritocracy component. You have this like very nuanced exploration of this thing called the merit points system, where like basically everybody is competing or trying to get more merit points to allow them to go live on Mars, and to be among the first humans to abandon what they decide is a dying earth, and go and like colonize this sort of terraformed Mars instead. And, you know, it's like, oh, it's the total meritocracy. It's only just the best and brightest, except that very quickly you start to see all the loopholes and all the ways in which it's actually slanted towards the wealthy. I'd love to hear you talk some about that and where that came from, and whether that was something that was part of your original idea of the novel or something that kind of developed as you were writing it.
Victor: [00:37:39] Right. So the merit system was always there in the very beginning of the book. I knew that it was going to be part of it somehow because I wanted to bring in my own experience from my professional background. I'm an immigration attorney, and the idea of who gets to go into this country and who is not allowed to go into this country is very similar to all the stories that we read about the colonization of space. Right. It's always there's always stories about, “Well, who gets to go? Who doesn't get to go? Who gets to decide who goes or not? “
[00:38:18] And I see a lot of themes and patterns with my job where I'm defending immigrants from being kicked out of the country under laws that specify, like, “You can't be here because you're X, Y or Z.” And those criteria are so malleable and those criteria are created by our lawmakers who have a certain view of immigration and immigrants. A certain view of brown people, you know, because not all immigrants are really treated the same.
[00:38:52] And I wanted to put that into this book. And the interesting part is the language of the document in the book, this interstitial document, is mostly taken from how our own U.S. immigration laws are drafted. There's a list of diseases in the book that you can find also in our immigration laws. If you have these diseases, you can't come in.
Annalee: [00:39:19] Wow.
Victor: [00:39:20] Yeah. The way that our immigration laws say, “If you have been convicted of these crimes, you cannot come in.” So what qualifies as a serious crime, again, is an area that is very malleable. It kind of is unpredictable. It sometimes depends on which judge you're in front of. And so when people think about our immigration system as complex as it is, they think, oh, on some level, it must be fair. It is the law and it went through this process. But really, it isn't because there are people who drafted it, who implement it, and they will deal with that system what they will, according to how it will help them or people like them.
Annalee: [00:40:05] It's very real and it makes complete sense to me that that actually would come to pass in the future as we colonize other worlds.
Victor: [00:40:12] Because that's one of the things that this book is also kind of grappling with. When these characters only know how to do something the same way, we only know one system, then how do we get out of it? As human beings, if we ever get to colonize the rest of the solar system, we will probably decide the questions of who gets to go according to our current immigration laws and how we decide these questions. Right?
[00:40:41] So in the same way, when you have a system like capitalism, that people think, “Oh, this is the only thing we've known. Can we fix it? Well, we're not going to fix it. It's just going to be it for now. And then when we move on to a different place, a different planet, we're going to just port in what we know and implement that there.” And my book hopefully raises the question of, well, how do we push back against that? What are the ways that we can think about in terms of pushing back against or changing the systems that we live in?
Annalee: [00:41:18] Yeah, definitely. So just to finish up, tell us what you're working on right now.
Victor: [00:41:23] There's a couple of things. It's a little bit of a change of gears. My next novel that's going to come out probably next year, middle of next year, is a gothic horror.
Annalee: [00:41:35] Nice.
Victor: [00:41:36] It's coming out from Erewhon Books as well. And it deals with dictatorships, basically. It’s probably my most Filipino novel to date. It's set in the Philippines at a crumbling ancestral manner where we have a transracial adoptee who comes to the Philippines for the first time and spooky things happen. So that's one.
[00:42:03] And the other is, I’m in edits for Serial Killer Thriller. It's a historical thriller because it's set at the turn of the millennium, which is historical now.
Annalee: [00:42:16] It is.
Charlie Jane: [00:42:16] Wow. Makes me feel old.
Victor: [00:42:18] Yeah, I know. I know. And it's based on the My Way Murders, which happens in the Philippines. And for those who don't know, this is a phenomenon that happens where when somebody sings My Way by Frank Sinatra at karaoke, they have a very high chance of ending up murdered for various cultural reasons. And so I wrote a serial killer thriller about that phenomenon. And that's going to come out from Zaffre Books in the UK also Summer of next year.
Annalee: [00:42:53] Awesome. Well, I can't wait to check those out. And for folks who haven't yet read any Victor Manibo, definitely check out Escape Velocity.
Charlie Jane: [00:43:01] Yeah. Where can people find you online?
Victor: [00:43:03] I can be found online everywhere. I am terminally online, which is a horrible thing, I think. It's @Victor Manibo. That's just my name @Victor Manibo. Everywhere.
Annalee: [00:43:16] Awesome. That makes it easy. All right. Well, thanks again. And looking forward to your next work.
Victor: [00:43:22] Thank you so much for having me. This was great.
[00:43:25] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Charlie Jane: [00:43:28] Alright, thank you so much for listening. This has been Our Opinions Are Correct. If you’ve randomly stumbled upon us, we’re in all the places, and if you like us, please leave a review. It helps a lot. You know, you can find us on the various socials. We’re on Mastadon at ouropinions.wandering.shop. We have a Patreon: patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. And we have an Instagram: Our Opinions, which is also our handle in a few other places, like on Bluesky.
[00:43:56] Thanks so much to our brilliant, incredible producer and engineer and all around sound wizard: Naya Harmon. Thanks so much to Chris Palmer and Katya Lopez Nichols for the music. Thanks again to you for listening. And we'll be back in two weeks with another episode. But if you're a patron, we'll have a mini episode for you next week, and we’ll see you on Discord. And we'll be showing up at your house with cupcakes.
[00:44:18] Bye!
Annalee: [00:44:19] Bye!