Episode 182: Transcript
Episode: 182: Robots! Witches! Annalee and Charlie Jane talk about their new books
Transcription by Alexander
Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Annalee, what's the most memorable book event you've ever done?
Annalee: [00:00:05] So, when I was on tour for my second novel, Future of Another Timeline, back in 2019, in the before times...
Charlie Jane: [00:00:13] Whoa!
Annalee: [00:00:13] So this is a book partly about riot girls in the 1990s, and it opens with a scene at a concert. And so I had a stop on my tour in Portland where they had booked me at a Barnes & Noble in Clackamas, which is a suburb - a very right-wing suburb outside of Portland. And this Barnes & Noble was, like, in a giant mall. It was actually beautiful. It was like a multi-story Barnes & Noble. And the way they did it was they had me, like, kind of off in a corner with, I don't know, there were probably, like, 40 people there. It was not a huge crowd.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:49] That's a good crowd, yeah.
Annalee: [00:00:50] Sure. But they amplified the reading throughout the store. And the idea was, like, this would provide, you know, a nice thing for the people that were in the store, and it would show them there was a reading happening. And it totally made sense to me that they were amplifying the reading all throughout the three floors of the store. However, in this opening chapter, the punk rock band that the characters are seeing...
Charlie Jane: [00:01:14] Grape Ape!
Annalee: [00:01:14] Grape Ape! They yell, which I'm now performing as the reader. They say, “hey, if anyone has ever called you a slut, I want you to say it with me. Slut! Slut! Slut!” And so when I would perform this, I would kind of get into character and I would scream ‘slut’ and so there I am, like, screaming into this giant mall, and people started complaining. Like, people went to the manager and were telling them to shut it off.
[00:01:41] And, like, these teenage girls who were, like, going down the escalator started yelling ‘slut’ and were really excited about it. And it was kind of this, like, recreation of the thing that was happening in the book. But it was also incredibly weird because boy was I getting, like, dirty looks from people who were, like, in there just to whatever… Buy their Christian cookbooks or whatever they were getting.
[00:02:03] But luckily, the store manager was this really great guy. He totally was like, no, this is a free speech zone. This is like a book. This is a legitimate piece of literature. So, yes, hopefully I will never have to scream ‘slut’ at the top of my lungs in the Clackamas mall ever again.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:19] I mean, if it happens, it happens.
Annalee: [00:02:22] How about you? What was your most memorable night?
Charlie Jane: [00:02:24] You know, my most memorable book event was probably my first ever book event, which was back in the day. Like back in the early, early dawn of time, I published a tiny small press book about trans shit.
Annalee: [00:02:37] Yeah, it was so cool.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:39] We had our launch party at a legendary bar called The Stud in San Francisco. That's like a gay bar that's existed since the 60s. It's where the Cockettes used to perform. And it's where all these amazing drag shows happened and continue to happen because The Stud has reopened recently.
[00:02:57] So for my launch event, I basically was sitting there in my underwear and you and another friend of ours helped me to put together a dress out of caution tape, like the yellow tape that you put across a crime scene.
Annalee: [00:03:08] Yep.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:09] And so we just like wrapped it around me until it like… I actually looked really cute.
Annalee: [00:03:13] It was incredible. Yeah. It looked like a real dress.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:16] It looked very classy. Actually, it looked like a nice cocktail dress. And so, you know, after the book event was over, I ended up going on stage at the drag show later that night at the bar, just be like, “I've got a new book out. I'm going to do a drag show now.” I did a number. And my caution tape dress ended up kind of getting unraveled and passed around the audience. I've got like an amazing photo somewhere of like just caution tape kind of snaking its way into the audience as far as the eye can see. I think every single member of that audience in that bar ended up with like a tiny piece of my dress that night. It was really magical.
Annalee: [00:03:49] Yeah, it was really great. That was an amazing dress. And actually, fun fact, that police tape was something that I got from John Marr who created the zine Murder Can Be Fun. So of course, he just had like police caution tape like lying around in his house. And it was just the perfect thing to use.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:06] That was so wonderful. You know, I think no matter how many book events I do or how many book launches I do, I'll never have one like that. But I do love that feeling of like introducing a brand new book into the world and kind of like setting it free and going like “fly little book fly”. And then it just like goes flat because books actually can't fly.
[00:04:26] You know, having a party and having a fun time and actually come to think of that, Annalee, you and I are doing a hell of a party in Seattle during WorldCon on August 14th, where we're both showing off our brand new books.
Annalee: [00:04:38] Yeah, I'm so excited. We're actually it's part of a queer sci-fi reading at the town hall in Seattle. And we're going to be joined by incredible superstars Andrea Hairston, Cecilia Tan, Darcy Little Badger and Becky Chambers. It's going to be a dream night. And so if you're in Seattle, you should come. It's not part of WorldCon. You don't have to buy a membership to WorldCon. You can just come out. We're going to be queer and reading books and enjoying sci-fi and fantasy together.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:06] Yeah. Tickets are on sale now and it's a ticketed event. So get your ticket right away.
[00:05:10] So you're listening to Our Opinions Are Correct, the podcast that is probably at this point generated at least 10 books worth of questionable statements. I'm Charlie Jane Anders. My new book is called Lessons in Magic and Disaster. And it's about a young witch who teaches her mother how to do magic. It’s out on August 19th.
Annalee: [00:05:31] And I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist who also writes science fiction. And my forthcoming novella is science fiction. It's called Automatic Noodle and it will be out on August 5th. And we're going to be talking about both our books today.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:46] That's right. And on our mini episode next week, we'll be talking about a book that the two of us collaborated on nearly 20 years ago called She's Such a Geek. It's a book about like nerds of all genders other than male, and it continues to have a really nice afterlife. Okay, let's get bookish.
[00:06:05] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]
Charlie Jane: [00:06:36] So Annalee, I love Automatic Noodle so much. It is the book that I desperately needed right now. It just like every time I think about it, my heart grows a little bit. I love it so much. What can you tell us about Automatic Noodle and like what inspired this wonderful book?
Annalee: [00:06:52] So it's the story of four robots who are living in San Francisco in the 2060s after California has won a war of independence against the United States. So California is a new nation. And when they join the UN, they are the first nation to join the UN with a very limited number of civil rights for robots. So my main characters are kind of in this new class of person. And they're just trying to get by. They just want to make noodles. They just want to have this little hole in the wall restaurant and kind of just eke out an existence. And there are a lot of robophobes out there, part of the California Vigilance Committee, who want to stop them and who don't want robots to be free.
[00:07:43] And I have to say, I was inspired by a lot of things, including just the idea that if California were to secede, that somehow it would be like a really great place. And, you know, that if robots achieved some kind of human equivalent sentience, that they would be our rulers. I wanted to kind of like, you know, play with those ideas and tweak them.
[00:08:11] But honestly, I have to say the main thing that inspired it was going to New York, not anywhere near San Francisco, and going to Xi'an Famous Foods, which is a small chain in New York that serves Biangbiang noodles, which are very wide, spicy noodles from northern China or sort of northwestern China. Sometimes they're called hand-ripped noodles or hand-pulled noodles.
[00:08:41] And I fell in love with these noodles. I am a huge noodle connoisseur in general. I love all noodles. But Biangbiang noodles, to me, because they're so wide and so chewy and they have such a delicious spicy sauce, to me, they're the epitome of noodle. And so I wanted to write an homage to noodles. And so that's what happened.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:02] That's amazing. And, you know, science fiction is full of like stories about robots. And oftentimes they're kind of scary. There's like the Terminator. There's like the sexy Fembot who turns evil and murderous. And then there's like the cute little robots like Wall-E or like R2-D2 or C-3PO or whatever. Those are kind of like two major robot tropes. Either they're going to be our cute little friend or they're going to try and kill us. And how did you grapple with those tropes in this book? And were you thinking about like how we usually depict robots when you wrote this book?
Annalee: [00:09:35] I totally was. And as I kind of hinted earlier, I was thinking about this idea, and I think this is especially poignant in California right now, this idea that we're going to have robot overlords or like robots will take over and take our jobs. And when I say robot, I'm deliberately kind of creating a slippage between like AI and robots, because oftentimes they're kind of conflated in this discourse, this idea that we will be replaced by AI, we will be replaced by robots. And of course, eventually the dream of a lot of people who are working on AI and robots is that the two things will merge and that you'll have a robot that is self-aware, self-sufficient, capable of learning on the go, and that you would essentially chat with a robot the same way you chat with, you know, ChatGPT.
[00:10:25] So I was thinking a lot about that idea of the robot overlord. And I think if we look realistically at a future where, say, AI or AI powered robots really are able to replace humans, like they become human equivalent, it's not going to be a situation where they're able to take over because humans are creating these robots to be slaves, not to be masters, right? And so there's going to be both technological and legal and social barriers to these creatures, these people gaining any kind of social power.
[00:11:03] And so what I was trying to imagine was something more realistic than the kind of OpenAI vision of all humans become meat sacks or whatever. And think about what would the California, this new California Republic do with liberated robots? And so in fact, what they do is they severely limit their civil rights. They're not able to open bank accounts. They can't form unions. They can't get married. They can't vote because there's a lingering fear that actually was created by people like OpenAI that say, if you had AI as part of a voting pool, that they would infinitely reproduce themselves. And so they would be able to take over the population in terms of, you know, political power.
[00:11:52] And this is actually something that people talk about today, that that's like a fear that they have. And so using that kind of logic, the California government is like, look, we're going to let these robots be free on the free market. They can have jobs. They can live where they want. They can associate with each other. But other than that, their rights are extremely limited. And so I wanted to think about that.
[00:12:14] And it, you know, obviously I'm deeply inspired by ways in which the US government has limited the rights of indigenous people, of black people after they were freed from slavery in the United States. Also the way immigrants are treated, people who are legal immigrants, but still on a green card status. There's all these ways in which we limit the rights of people in our country even though we allow them to do jobs. So we let them work, but we don't let them have any other benefits. So that was kind of a lot of what I was thinking about.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:50] So and like each of your robot characters is really different from each other. They're not all like the same robot or copies of the same robot. And like, can you talk about each of them?
Annalee: [00:12:59] Each of the robot characters has a way that they kind of turn the tables on a stereotype. So one of the characters, Staybehind, is a total military robot. He's very Terminator-esque in a lot of ways.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:12] I love him.
Annalee: [00:13:13] I love him too. I love him so much. But also all he really wants to do is like interior decoration in the restaurant. Like he discovers over time, like that he just loves flowers and he loves like making the paint on the walls look really nice. And so he's on that kind of a path.
[00:13:32] There's a character who's clearly kind of modeled on a Fembot. Her name is Sweetie and her upper body is like a perfect sort of like magazine advertisement for like a clean girl. She's like a white girl with blonde hair. But then she has three robot legs with wheels on the bottom. So she's like half complete Fembot and half total robot. And she also goes through a whole character arc where she's like, why the fuck do I have to look like this? I hate that I was made to look like this.
[00:14:05] And then there's two robots who are actually extremely realistic representatives of what robots are like now. Cayenne is a soft bodied octopus shaped robot who was designed in the story to do things like search and rescue in wet conditions in water or in swampy areas. And Cayenne of course doesn't want to be doing that anymore. And they've like repurposed their bodies so that they can taste things with each of their arms. And so they become kind of the taster bot who can help them with recipes and understands how things smell and taste.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:41] So beautiful.
Annalee: [00:14:42] I love Cayenne. Cayenne is also obsessed with cryptocurrency, which is, you know, failing for that character. But it is helpful.
[00:14:49] And then finally, there's the character Hands, who is basically just two arms attached to kind of like a mixer. And they are also very much like a lot of robots out there in the world that are just arm bots. They have no head. They have no legs. They're just designed to do things with their hands, manual labor, literally.
[00:15:11] And so Hands is incredibly talented at dough, at making dough. They have an exquisite sense of touch. They're very good at tactile feedback. And so they're in charge of the most important job in any noodle restaurant, which is pulling the noodles and making sure that the noodles have the right consistency.
[00:15:31] And so, like I said, I wanted to in some ways represent what robots are actually like, but I also wanted to overturn these ideas of the Terminator killer bot or like the femme bot and have them kind of questioning like, why are people making our bodies look like this? And why do we have to be this way?
Charlie Jane: [00:15:49] Yeah. So, you know, I heard you mention California seceding from the United States, which right about now, that sounds pretty fricking good. Because the United States is it's going through some stuff. Let's just say that. So it's great. Right. It's wish fulfillment. California independence. That's just perfect. Right.
Annalee: [00:16:08] So I don't think so. As someone who grew up in California, I always find it really funny when people imagine that Cal Exit, which is the name for the kind of California secessionist movement, they think that results in some kind of utopian state. You know, California has had a long history of secessionist movements. There have been votes put to the California population about whether California should secede or whether parts of California should secede.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:42] Oh, wow.
Annalee: [00:16:43] And as I was working on this book, I was researching a little bit of the history of California secession. And a lot of it goes back to the Civil War period when California secession was linked really strongly to the Confederacy. There were a lot of Southern Democrats living in California. There were politicians in California. In fact, one of California's very first senators had started his career in Mississippi as a senator. And he was, in fact, a slave owner, plantation owner in Mississippi. He was pro-slavery. And he was really into the idea of California separation because you could imagine that nation kind of being buddies with the Confederacy. This is before the Confederacy was defeated. His name was William Gwin. And Gwin had this like vision of California becoming a kind of slave nation that would be trading with and partners with the Confederacy.
[00:17:43] So California has always had this really strong reactionary political faction going all the way back to the 1840s and 50s. And you can still see it today. If you look at voting patterns in the state, all of the kind of inland parts of California, areas that are rural farm areas, they all voted for Trump. They all went heavily for Trump. Both of the elections where Trump won, and also in the election where he lost.
[00:18:12] And so this is not a happy liberal place. And I think if California did secede, those politics, those political rifts would continue to be really, you know, terrifying and violent at times. And so what I imagine in Automatic Noodle is that, you know, there's this moment where California is liberated and there's certain elements of the California Republic that are a little bit better than the United States, but there's still, there's these California vigilance committees that are trying to stamp out robot rights.
[00:18:49] We also get hints that these vigilance committees may not like other groups either, like immigrants or queer people. There's a major character in the novel, Robles, who's undocumented and he's terrified. It's not like it's a happy time for people to be trying to become citizens of California.
[00:19:10] And of course, like I said, the robot characters have very little in the way of civil rights. So this is not a utopia. Like I said, it might be slightly better, it might be economically better off than the United States, but I wanted to really emphasize that Cal Exit is not a good solution to the problems that we're facing.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:30] Yeah, seriously. I mean, and that makes so much sense. Okay, so you mentioned that you love noodles and that you were obsessed with noodles. Why center this story around food? And why set it in a noodle shop rather than some industrial setting where you might expect to see robots?
Annalee: [00:19:45] I think again, this was just my effort to kind of flip a lot of stereotypes about robots on their heads, to imagine that robots would get pleasure out of something that we think of as being profoundly human, but not very like, it's not like they're stealing human jobs. They're just trying to feed their neighbors and like do something that to show their appreciation for a human art form.
[00:20:12] And, you know, Cayenne can taste and smell, Hands can, you know, feel the dough. They do appreciate food, maybe not exactly the same way that humans appreciate it, but like the robots have a lot of conversations about how they see it as an art form. They also see it as like, you know, frankly, an economic opportunity. You know, they're in a city that has been, the shit has been bombed out of it. There aren't a lot of restaurants, people, you know, are afraid to start entrepreneurial endeavors. Like they're afraid to start new businesses because like things are still really unstable.
[00:20:50] But these robots are living in such precarity that they're like, well, you know, we know how to make food. They previously were employed making food. So they're like, why don't we make food that we actually think is wonderful and great.
[00:21:02] But also like you were asking before about wish fulfillment, like definitely this is a wish fulfillment. I really want like a really good Biangbiang noodle shop in San Franscisco… Like more than one. We have a great one that's really far away from where I live.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:16] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:21:17] So I want one that's like a little closer into the to the area where I live in the city. And so I was just like, this is my ultimate noodle shop. I'm just going to imagine what it would look like.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:29] It is actually a scandal that Seattle has like a bunch of great Biangbiang noodle places. And San Francisco is kind of like bereft. Like, where is our...
Annalee: [00:21:38] We have one.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:39] Yeah, I know.
Annalee: [00:21:40] We have Terracotta Warriors.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:41] Yeah, Terracotta Warriors. Yeah. But I mean, where are the other ones?
Annalee: [00:21:45] Portland has great Biangbiang noodles. Also, Los Angeles does not have any really great Biangbiang noodles. So it's like California is just…
Charlie Jane: [00:21:53] Bizarre. Nowhere in L.A.?
Annalee: [00:21:55] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:55] Oh, my God.
Annalee: [00:21:56] I mean, there probably is one, you know, but I haven't encountered it.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:00] Right.
Annalee: [00:22:01] The best Biangbiang noodles on the West Coast are absolutely a hundred percent in British Columbia.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:07] Oh, yeah.
Annalee: [00:22:07] Well, we have some in Richmond.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:09] We had some great ones in Richmond.
Annalee: [00:22:11] Yeah. Holy moly.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:12] I mean, shameless plug, L.A. has Chin West Noodle, which is like incredible, like Yunnan rice noodles or maybe it's Guilin rice noodles.
Annalee: [00:22:20] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:20] Love those. Super spicy. Love it. But yeah, you know, when I think about some of your previous novels, I don't think of them as like particularly cozy, like especially like Autonomous and you mentioned Future of Another Time. Not like super cozy books.
Annalee: [00:22:35] No.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:36] You know, and this feels like in some ways a little bit of a departure for you. And like what made you want to write something that people are kind of receiving as like a cozy read?
Annalee: [00:22:45] Yeah. I mean, people aren't just receiving it like, you know, my publisher is Tor.com is marketing it as cozy. And they ran that by me.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:53] Oh, sure.
Annalee: [00:22:53] I don't have total control over what they say in their marketing materials, but they don't want me to be sad. And I was like, sure, you can call it cozy.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:00] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:23:01] You know, it was partly because I had just finished the book Stories are Weapons, which is a nonfiction book about psychological warfare and culture war in the United States. So I was pretty fucking depressed after writing that book. And I wanted something cozy. I wanted to live in a world where I felt like the characters were kind and had humble aspirations just to be good neighbors. And like, I wanted the stakes to be low. And I wanted to just really enjoy being in that writing process.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:40] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:23:41] So I just thought of like, what would make me happy? And again, it's like a noodle shop is like 100% my happy place.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:49] Yeah. And yet it kind of like has some of the themes of Stories are Weapons, right? Because there's the review bombing campaign, which is 100% about how propaganda functions.
Annalee: [00:23:57] Yeah. There's definitely a big theme of online coordinated inauthentic behavior, which is basically a fancy term for when you invent a bunch of fake people online to try to persuade people. It's a type of propaganda saying that's very popular right now. And that is how the California Vigilance Committees go after the robots as they try to spread propaganda about them on the internet. They try to make their restaurant fail. And, you know, the character of Staybehind, who's the military bot that just wants to do interior decoration, he's trained in PSI ops. You know, he's a stay behind soldier who's supposed to stick around after the war is over and make sure that there aren't any insurgencies and any pro United States forces that are trying to destroy the new nation of California.
[00:24:53] So he's on the alert for this shit. So he's kind of like me in the story. He's like, all I like can think about his propaganda. What I really want to do is just like decorate with flowers. But unfortunately, I alert to propaganda. So I think a big part of it was I wanted to engage in self-soothing, but I also wanted readers to remember that like the reason we need cozy shit is because there is real danger out there. There's a reason why we want to feel safe sometimes. And it's because the world is super dangerous. And so I think that's a big part of cozy writing in general is that there's always profound trauma and darkness lurking out there.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:35] Yeah. And I feel like that's one of the things I love most about Automatic Noodle is that it really gets to the heart of that. It is about healing from trauma. It's not just about like, you know, nothing bad has ever happened in the past, kind of. It's like, “no, we there's bad shit and we're here for each other. We're like a family.”
Annalee: [00:25:52] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:52] I love how you write robots. I feel like you've been writing fascinating robot characters for a really long time. Like going back, even before Autonomous, your novel, you had, you know, that story Drones Don’t Kill People. You've been writing about robots for a really like from the perspective of robots, from like inside the minds of robots for a really long time. And, you know, The Terraformers also has incredible robot characters. What makes you keep going back to robots and like, are all your robot stories kind of connected?
Annalee: [00:26:20] So I do love writing robot characters and I had all of these stories are connected. So if anybody wants to try to put together the timeline by reading a bunch of my stories and novels, I'll tell you that in my head, what has happened is basically Automatic Noodle is very, very early in the timeline. It's like the earliest moment where California secedes. And I have another story where California secedes and AI is given a tiny number of civil rights.
[00:26:49] So we get this moment where AI and AI powered robots are given some civil rights. Then those rights are kind of taken away. Then there's this kind of civil rights movement for robots, which we hear about in the novel Autonomous. And then in order to give robots civil rights, there's even more bullshit that happens where robots are kind of forced to be indentured in order to pay off the cost of their manufacture. And that's the kind of compromise that's reached. You know, robots can be free, but only if they're slaves for a short period of time, an allegedly short period of time.
[00:27:27] And then that timeline continues on into like the very distant future in The Terraformers, where you have robots and non-human animals and humans are all kind of living together in communities where all of them are constantly threatened with being indentured or being enslaved.
[00:27:45] And so there's a really long timeline where all of these robots kind of fit into moments in history where their rights are being taken away and they're trying to claw them back or where they have rights, but they're being threatened. And so it's really just like a way of thinking about the long arc of how we grant each other autonomy and how we grant each other the respect of seeing the humanity in each other. And you know, it's a rocky fucking road.
[00:28:22] I don't actually believe that the long arc of history bends toward justice. I think the long arc of history is actually more like a tangled piece of yarn being attacked by a cat and that we have to keep straightening it out and unbending it and making sure that we protect our rights because someone's always going to come in and try to take them away.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:43] That is the lesson of the last several years is that battles you thought you won, they always come back. Nothing is ever over.
Annalee: [00:28:50] Stay vigilant, people.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:51] Okay, great. So we're going to take a quick break and when we come back, we're going to talk about my novel, Lessons in Magic and Disaster.
[00:29:01] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:03] And by the way, besides buying our books and coming to our book events, which by the time you listen to this, we're going to be doing book events all over the country and you should come hang out with us.
Annalee: [00:29:13] Yeah, all throughout August.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:15] Besides doing that, there's another way that you can support us and that's by supporting this podcast on Patreon.
Annalee: [00:29:22] Hell yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:22] We don't have like any money from big robot. We don't have any money from like, you know, the big noodle companies aren't like economically supporting us. All of our financial support comes from you, our listeners, and you are the reason why we're able to keep doing this podcast.
[00:29:38] So, you know, if you can spare even a few bucks, whatever you can spare, we really appreciate it. It all goes right back into making the podcast happen. And you get to be part of our community. You get to be in our Discord, where we're just like hanging out and like sharing deep secrets of the universe like all the time.
[00:29:56] And you get bonus like mini episodes every other week when we're not doing our main episodes. And you know, you get our undying love and gratitude. So check it out at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. OK, back to the show.
[00:30:13] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Annalee: [00:30:16] And now I'm super excited that we get to talk about your book, Charlie Jane, because I have read it in many forms. I read like an early draft. I read a middle draft. I read the final draft. It kept getting better and weirder and more like down the rabbit hole with awesomeness. And this is just I don't know, it's an incredible book. I know people are going to be blown away and like really moved emotionally. It's like it's definitely there's going to be tears in your eyes when you read Lessons in Magic and Disaster. So be prepared. They're good tears, though, cathartic tears.
[00:30:50] Let's start by talking about your characters, because you're like a character mastermind. And this is a book about witches. You've written witches before in your first novel, All the Birds in the Sky. So what was it like going back to them? Did you change your approach to magic this time around?
Charlie Jane: [00:31:07] Yeah, I totally did. All the Birds in the Sky like has a lot of world building with its witches. There's like a witch school. There's like covens. There's like witch politics. There's like a civil war between witches that happened 200 years ago. There's a lot in that book with like the world building around witches. And this time I didn't want to do any of that.
[00:31:26] I wanted to have basically just like the main character is a witch. And, you know, I decided early on, I actually wrote a scene where she's part of a coven. And I was like, no, I don't want her to be part of a coven as the book starts.
Annalee: [00:31:39] Oh, interesting.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:40] She's just a witch on her own. She maybe has like seen people who she thinks are other witches like out and about, but she's never talked to them. She's just like figured it out on her own, which is like, you know, I always think that that's an interesting way to learn magic.
[00:31:55] And the magic in this book is very simple. There's not like spells per se. What there is is a whole thing where you have to find spaces where humans have tried to kind of like impose their will on the natural environment. Like building a tree house in the woods or building camping in the woods, something where it's like the edge of the natural world as we think of it. And humans have built something that it's now falling apart. So like something that's being reclaimed by nature. So it's kind of like in between natural and artificial.
[00:32:28] And you can kind of make an offering and kind of like lay down something that expresses a desire that you have. And then maybe in some way it'll come back to you, but it's really kind of loose and weird. And Jamie, my main character, is a PhD student who is also a witch. And the whole story is about her teaching her mother, who is this kind of heartbroken – just like broken, in general – person. She’s teaching her mother how to do magic because she thinks that will help her mother to kind of recover from a lot of terrible stuff that happened like seven years ago.
Annalee: [00:33:02] Yeah, it's interesting because as you were describing that, I realized that Jamie's character is a teacher. Like she's a teacher by trade. A lot of the scenes are set in classrooms where she's teaching students, but also she's teaching her mom. So there's like a really beautiful subplot about teaching and the nature of teaching.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:19] Yeah. And like teaching is not as simple as you want it to be, I guess.
Annalee: [00:33:26] It feels like, I mean, the other thing about Lessons in Magic and Disaster that I think is interesting is that it feels like a much more intimate book than your trilogy that you just finished. So what was it like focusing on just one family instead of the entire fate of the galaxy, like in the Unstoppable trilogy?
Charlie Jane: [00:33:45] Yeah. I mean, it was so funny. I wrote the first draft of Lessons in Magic and Disaster at the same time as I was trying to like finish the third book of that trilogy, Promises Stronger than Darkness. And I basically decided I was just going to do the opposite of the YA books in every way, partly in terms of like the writing. The writing is like kind of very different. It's much more, it's much more aimed at grownups. It's much more kind of like, “we’re gonna talk about Jean-Paul Sartre a lot and we're going to like have all this like noodly stuff about like, what does it mean to want stuff?”
[00:34:17] But also like even before the YA trilogy where, yeah, there's like, I come up with like 20 different alien species and all these, this complicated backstory of the galaxy and there's different planets we visit and the literal fate of the galaxy is at stake. And my book before that, City in the Middle of the Night, also has like huge world building and a sprawling cast of characters and just like the fate of the world.
Annalee: [00:34:39] It's a planet-wide issue that's happening.
Charlie Jane: [00:34:43] Oh my gosh. So for this book, like originally I was like, OK, it's going to be basically just these two characters, Jamie and Serena, the daughter and the mother. And then, you know, it does kind of grow out of that a little bit.
[00:34:56] Like Jamie's partner became a huge character. Serena's wife, who's dead before the book starts, we end up getting a lot of flashbacks about her. And like it slowly expands outwards. But I wanted something that was really, really small and really intimate. And like you said about your book, very low stakes. The stakes are basically like, can Jamie help her mother kind of return to having a healthy relationship with life again after all the terrible stuff that happened to her mom? That's it. The stakes never get bigger than that. There's no like third act reveal where it's like, actually, if Jamie can't fix things with her mom, you know, Staten Island is going to fall into the ocean. There's none of that. It's just like those are the stakes.
Annalee: [00:35:37] That's funny because that is totally what you would expect in like a typical narrative about magic like this, where it's like because the magic is quite powerful, right? And so you would kind of expect it to be like, and actually by doing their magic, they've opened a crack in space time and like they're letting the demons in. And like now we have to focus on that.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:57] Yeah, no.
Annalee: [00:35:58] So one of the things that you've mentioned a couple of times is that a lot of this book is about kind of articulating what you really want. And that's like key to the magic is like asking for something that you want. It's kind of just like you're noodling on what it means to even have wants and desires. And so I'm wondering, could you talk a little bit about that? Like, is there something about it that's kind of therapeutic, like reconnecting with desire or what's going on there?
Charlie Jane: [00:36:28] Yeah, I mean, it's so interesting. Like, again, I wrote the first draft in 2020 during COVID, during lockdown. I was sitting there like with a glass of whiskey in bed, like scribbling in a notebook. And I was really like the thought, the question of like, how do we let ourselves want things in a world that is so scary and upsetting? How do we even want anything? That was the thing that I thought about a lot, because like it felt like having any kind of wishes for what life could bring us during 2020 was like really kind of like outrageous in a way.
[00:37:02] But like, it's interesting over the course of the book, there's this kind of thing that happens where Jamie is like, my mom just needs to want things again. And there's a lot of talk about like, how do you know what you want? How do you actually connect with the part of yourself that wants things? But you know, by the end, it's also like, you can't really want stuff until you can heal from your trauma. And you can't really have honest desires. And that's the thing that Jamie kind of like, not to give spoilers, but that's kind of the arc of the book.
[00:37:31] And that was kind of what I was realizing as I was writing the book is that we have to heal. Like, it's not just enough to be like, “I'm going to just throw myself back into life. And be like, I'm just going to like reach for all the things I want,” because trauma is real, grief is real, like loss is real. And you have to grapple with those things. And that's kind of the thing that Jamie realizes over the course of the book. And that's kind of the key to her reconnecting with her mom. But it's hard and it's hard in real life. And I still struggle with that whole tangle of like desire and grief and trauma.
Annalee: [00:38:05] Yeah. I love that magic becomes kind of a metaphor for thinking about that. You've successfully done a spell. I know you said it wasn't spells, but like that somehow you're... it's a way of like tangibly measuring like, do your desires actually make sense? You know, like, are you asking for something that's real?
Charlie Jane: [00:38:25] Do you actually want the thing you're asking for?
Annalee: [00:38:27] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:38:28] It's like a huge thing in the book. And what happens when you ask for things that you don't really want or what you're really asking for is something dark and terrible kind of.
Annalee: [00:38:36] Yeah. So this book has something that is catnip to me and probably lots of other people, which is that it has a lot of books within books because Jamie is studying 18th century literature. This is not really a spoiler, but part of her quest is she's looking for some missing books by 18th century women writers that she's pretty sure are out there, but she can't be certain. And again, like for me, I just, I love stories where we like learn about hidden missing books from history. And I know that when you were working on it, because I was there, you were collecting all these books about 18th century literature, especially women writers and women performers. So what was that all about? Like, what were you studying? What were you looking for in your quest?
Charlie Jane: [00:39:26] Yeah. So I've always been obsessed with like 18th century literature. Like when I was at university and I, for a couple of years I was majoring in English and I just became obsessed with like, especially like that period when Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson were kind of like subtweeting each other and like attacking each other.
Annalee: [00:39:46] There was so much subtweeting in the 18th century.
Charlie Jane: [00:39:48] There was a lot of subtweeting. It was kind of wild. And like, you know, that whole like colorful world of people like trying to take each other down by writing novels about like making fun of each other's stuff or like lobbing them back and forth. It was super interesting.
[00:40:03] And I went into it like thinking, oh, you know, that was what was going on was these two guys, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson. They're the guys. And so in my original like version of the book that I was scribbling in a notebook, I had some super gauzy idea about like, Jamie is just researching those guys.
[00:40:21] And then I started reading more about it. And like, I started to discover that, oh no, that mid 18th century, like the 1730s, 1740s especially, there's all these women writers. They weren't like obscure women writers. They were famous at the time. They were bestselling authors.
[00:40:37] Henry Fielding had a sister, Sarah Fielding, who was, you know, a major bestselling author whose work was super influential. She was like, you know, a huge important writer of the time, maybe as important as her brother. And, you know, there were just tons of other women writing incredible books. And it's just that, you know, at a certain point, mostly in the 19th century, the fucking Victorians, we just decided that, you know, oh, the only writers that really mattered from that time were men, and of course, the men are what really matters. And it's just, it wasn't contemporaneous. It was like much later that we just decided to kind of pretend these women hadn't existed when they were really, really, really important.
[00:41:21] And they had like all these utopian visions. Like Sarah Scott wrote this book, Millennium Hall, about an all female kind of women separatist community. And they actually tried to make it real. They tried to found that community in real life near Bath in England. And it was just like super wild.
[00:41:39] So in my book, it's not that the book is missing. It's just as in real life, there were books that were super popular at the time that people just don't talk about anymore because of that thing where we decided the only writers who mattered were men. And in the 1990s and 2000s, there was a process of like, no, wait, look at all these female authors who were awesome. But still a lot of these books don't get talked about.
Annalee: [00:42:03] But also like I want to underscore, it isn't just that these were women writers who were awesome that had like some little book that they'd stored in the fucking closet. Like these were mega best selling authors, hugely influential. They were the influencers of their day. And it's only basically a generation later that like scholars were like, oh, well, we're not going to pay attention to those people, even though at the time people were paying attention to them. I just wanted to like emphasize that.
Charlie Jane: [00:42:29] A hundred percent. And like Samuel Johnson, who I sort of thought of as just like a shithead, he actually acknowledged these female writers and he was like into them. He was like, yeah, they're good. He was a supporter of some of them. You know, Pope was a different matter. Pope really was a shithead and Swift, fuck that guy.
[00:42:47] But yeah, so in my book, there's a novel that I invented out of whole cloth called Emily, which is about a young woman who is raised to be a paragon of virtue by her adoptive father. And he decides that she can only marry a man who is also a paragon of virtue. And it's like my way of kind of playing with the themes of a lot of these books. Like moral romance, which is a phrase that Sarah Fielding was really into, the idea that there's like, romance just means novel basically at the time. It doesn't necessarily mean romance the way we mean it.
[00:43:20] And it's like a story about morality and what it means to be good and virtuous, but also can you be happy and be virtuous? Can you find love and companionship in a world that is so wicked? And that's a major preoccupation for Sarah Fielding and for a lot of these other writers. So in my novel, Emily is this book that was actually written by Sarah Fielding's best friend, Jane Collier, who I personally think was Sarah Fielding's girlfriend, because they live together.
Annalee: [00:43:48] She's a real life person.
Charlie Jane: [00:43:49] She was also a real life person.
Annalee: [00:43:51] Right. But Emily is made up. Okay. Got it.
Charlie Jane: [00:43:53] The only thing that's made up is Emily, the book. And it turns out that there's like secrets about magic buried inside Emily because it just felt like it had to come back to the main story-line. And my editor, Miriam, to her eternal credit, and I'm just so glad she did this, she read an earlier draft and was like, “you know, I need way more of this. I need way more of Emily. I need to know way more about this book. I need to know way more about, you know, what these writers were doing.”
Annalee: [00:44:19] Yep.
Charlie Jane: [00:44:19] And so the 18th century segments of the book grew from like, you know, kind of a tiny subplot that you see here and there to being a major part of the book. And I ended up having to write like big chunks of this fictional book, Emily, and also like correspondence about it and stuff. And it was just, it was so fun.
Annalee: [00:44:39] It's so awesome.
Charlie Jane: [00:44:41] It was a huge challenge, but I love how they turned out. And in the audio book, we've got like a British lady who does like the kind of Bridgerton voice. And it's just, I'm so excited.
Annalee: [00:44:50] Yeah. Anyway, like I said, for me, if you love a book within a book, I can highly recommend that this will give you all the feels. Okay. So before we move away from the 18th century briefly, I want you to tell us about Charlotte Charke, the actor who became a character in your book.
Charlie Jane: [00:45:07] Yeah. So Charlotte Charke, also a real life person, and I don't know why she's not like more famous than she is because she's incredible. So she was the daughter of Colley Cibber, who was maybe the most famous actor, playwright, poet of the age. He became poet laureate of England.
Annalee: [00:45:28] Like early 18th?
Charlie Jane: [00:45:29] Yeah, like early mid 18th century. So Charlotte Charke becomes a famous actor in the 1730s when her dad is pretty old. So Charlotte Charke from an early age only wanted to dress in men's clothing. She dressed up in her dad's clothes when she was like four and paraded around in her dad's clothing and made sure everybody could see her. Like she was very much like, “look at me. I'm awesome.” Like four-year-old Charlotte, just like strutting around in like a giant powdered wig and coat and hose and all of the 18th century fripperies that men would wear.
[00:46:02] And as she got older, she was even more committed to like being masc, being kind of a dude. And so her main thing on stage was that she would play men. She didn't only play men, but she tried to play men as much as possible. Not just like in plays where like Twelfth Night or whatever, where a woman disguises herself as a man. And it's like part of the story. She would just play male characters and do kind of her own version of masculinity, which was kind of a parody, but also kind of real.
[00:46:31] And her dad was famous for playing this kind of like very over the top peacocking gentleman named Lord Foppington, who would like have the biggest wig and the biggest outfit and be like, “hey, Lord Foppington.” Charlotte Charke started making fun of her dad on stage, playing a parody of her dad.
Annalee: [00:46:52] Oh, so how do you parody Foppington? So she was like even more Foppington-oidish.
Charlie Jane: [00:46:57] So she was in these plays by Henry Fielding, who we mentioned earlier, who hated Colley Cibber and wrote plays to attack him. And so the plays were kind of talking about how Colley Cibber was just kind of this like full of hot air. He only got to be poet laureate because he basically paid off the right people and sucked up to the right people.
Annalee: [00:47:16] Amazing.
Charlie Jane: [00:47:17] So it was like plays making fun of her dad. And she starred in them. And it was like, “yeah, I'm going to make fun of my dad on stage.” And then her dad disowned her. And she was like, “wait, what? Why? What did I do?” She spent the rest of her life trying to get her dad to take her back. And it never worked out, unfortunately.
[00:47:33] And when she wasn't acting, she would just like be a man servant. She would be a butcher. She would do like men's jobs dressed in men's clothing. She called herself Charles Brown. And she had a wife named Mrs. Brown who traveled around with her for years and years.
[00:47:47] So, you know, I couldn't not include her because she's so incredible. And like the theme of this book is in some ways like queer liberation and queer family. And so, you know, it turns out that she's connected to the author of that book, Emily. And the secrets within Emily are partly about how to deal with a situation that arose involving her, that’s kind of a little scandal that was averted using magic.
Annalee: [00:48:13] OK, so you're just going to have to read the book to find that out. But you've called this the gayest book you've ever written. That's a pretty big claim. So why don't you unpack that? It's not just about Charlotte Charke, right?
Charlie Jane: [00:48:26] It's partly about Charlotte Charke. I mean, when I found this like transmasc icon in the 18th century and I was like, OK, you know, she's got to be in there. She used she/her pronouns when she was alive, so I'm using those for her. But, you know, who knows what pronouns she would use if she was alive today.
[00:48:41] But also, I firmly believe that Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier were like basically married because they acted like a married couple. All these women who were like, we're going to start our own female-only commune, just happened to only live with other women like as like in couples. I don't know. Maybe they were just best friends.
Annalee: [00:48:59] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:49:00] And then, you know, in the present day story-line, Jamie is a trans woman whose partner is an NB. All of their friends are trans and, you know, nonbinary. And then Jamie's mom, Serena, is a lesbian. And I ended up writing a lot of stuff about like Jamie's mom's life and like her being a lesbian activist in the 1990s and the fight for like queer liberation and her marriage to her wife. And just like that became a huge part of it.
[00:49:29] So it's kind of a book about the queer struggle for liberation going back to the 1730s into the 1990s into today and how all of these things keep coming back. All of these fights, kind of like what we talked about with your book, like these fights never end. They just keep going. You don't ever really win, quote unquote. You just keep fighting.
Annalee: [00:49:50] Yeah. Sometimes there's times when you do get some victories and you get a safe space that happens, like a historical safe space, but then there's always the threat outside the space.
[00:50:05] So let's finish up by talking about the business, business of books. So, both of us, in fact, all people who are writers right now, we have to worry about pre-orders. Like we have to, you know, how many people pre-order a book. In other words, order it before it's out actually determines like its placement in bookstores. It determines its placement on the bestseller lists. It's like a huge thing and it's kind of a recent thing. And so, you know, you've done this really creative pre-order campaign. Why don't you talk about how you're spicing up the pre-order ask for your book?
Charlie Jane: [00:50:42] Yeah. And I do really want to emphasize that pre-orders are more important than ever because bookstores are ordering fewer copies of a lot of books. They're shelving less books. You really got to like let them know in advance that this is a book people are excited about, or the book may just slip through the cracks. So if there's a book you're excited about, pre-order it.
[00:51:00] And in my case, you know, what I've done is basically I wrote a big chunk of a sequel to my novel, All the Birds in the Sky. It's currently about 35,000 words. We'll see how long it ends up being. I mean, I try and cut it down a little bit. But I'll send that and a PDF to you if you give me a receipt showing your pre-ordered Lessons in Magic and Disaster.
[00:51:22] Plus, you get like deleted scenes from All the Birds in the Sky and you get the alternate ending I wrote for All the Birds in the Sky, which I rejected for reasons that will become obvious, but it's a really fun ending. So you get like a pretty hefty PDF of like bonus materials for All the Birds if you just pre-order this other book. And I'm hoping that motivates people who loved All the Birds and probably would have bought Lessons at some point. But I just want you to buy it early to get the momentum going.
[00:51:50] And so, well, you know, so far that's going pretty well. You can find details of that in my pinned post on like Bluesky and like elsewhere.
Annalee: [00:51:58] Yeah. And I also do want to emphasize that like this isn't just about Charlie or me, like any author whose work you like. And if you know they have a book coming out, it really helps a lot to pre-order it. You don’t have to do it on Amazon. Like you can go to your local indie bookstore and say like, “Hey, I know this book is coming out in a month. Can I buy it now?” And like you guys will get it in the day it's out.
Charlie Jane: [00:52:20] Yeah. Or bookshop.org.
Annalee: [00:52:22] Or bookshop.org, which is an online service that deals with indie bookstores. But one thing that people don't realize is that often if you pre-order a book through your local bookstore, you do get it a couple of days early. Not always, but sometimes you do. And so it's kind of a neat thing.
Charlie Jane: [00:52:37] It’s a life hack.
Annalee: [00:52:38] Like sometimes they'll let you know, and I'm doing a pre-order campaign for Automatic Noodle as well. And if you want to see the silly campaign, you can go to AutomaticNoodle.website.
[00:52:47] And if you want to see Charlie's pre-order campaign, like she said, you can find it on Instagram and on Bluesky and all the other places.
Charlie Jane: [00:52:55] It's also CharlieJaneAnders.com. It's on the front page.
Annalee: [00:52:57] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:52:58] All right.
Annalee: [00:52:59] Thanks for listening to us talk about our books and talk about how the sausage is made with the pre-order campaigns.
Charlie Jane: [00:53:07] You know, first we talked about how the noodles are made. Then we talked about how the sausage is made. And it's just like a complete, you know, all the food groups.
[00:53:15] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Charlie Jane: [00:53:18] This has been Our Opinions Are Correct. If you just stumbled on us, like please subscribe. Please leave a review in all the reviewing places. We really appreciate you listening. If you want more about us, we have a website: ouropinionsarecorrect.com. But also, we’re on social media. We’re on Bluesky, we’re on Mastadon, Patreon, we’re on Instagram. In most of those places, we’re either: “Our Opinions” or “Our Opinions Are Correct”.
[00:53:44] Thank you so much to our wonderful, like intrepid, just incredible audio producer and engineer, Niah Harmon. Thanks also to Chris Palmer and Katya Lopez-Nichols for our fantastic theme music. And thanks again to you for listening. If you’re a patron, we’ll see you in Discord. We’ll have a mini episode for you next week. Otherwise, we’re taking a month off, so we’ll be back with another episode in a month. And we’ll see you around.
Both: [00:54:11] Bye!
[00:54:12] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]