Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseThe Science Fiction Universe of "A Half Built Garden" by Ruthanna Emrys
Daniel and Kelly talk about a novel where aliens give humans advice about climate change.
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Hey Kelly, I have kind of a basic question about your Science farm operation over there.
Your questions make me nervous, But as long as it doesn't involve anything that might scare the kids, I'm willing to answer.
All right, Well, if it's a science farm, then what are you farming science? Do you harvest like raw science? Are you making organic farm? To journal science?
We do actually do science right here on the farm, but it's not all that we farm.
Oh that's right. You also have some humans growing in the farm. Right.
Oh, okay, Look, we have children, but we aren't farming them. There's no harvesting of the children going on.
I mean, have you checked with Zach about that? I know he can be quite literal, you know.
I'll admit I never thought to say, please, don't harvest the children while I'm recording the podcast.
Well, they're probably fine. I mean, at least fifty to fifty.
Hi.
I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I am not much of a gardener.
I'm Kelly Wiener Smith. I'm an adjunct professor at Rice University, and I too am not a gardener, and I once killed a cactus.
But you run a whole farm, I hear.
Woa Zach does the planting. I mostly just sort of mow the hay when it gets too tall, which is fun because I love the tractor. So I'm more of a destroyer than a builder.
I see well. In my marriage, also, the gardening responsibilities are on the other's spouse. Even in the clay soil of our backyard in southern California, my wife has managed to plant greenery which has thrived all over our backyard.
WHOA good for her? That's awesome. What was it she planted?
She's planted a bunch of pretty hearty stuff, mostly succulents in our first years here in IRV and we went back and forth between California and Geneva several times, so we abandoned all the plants. So she would just plant a bunch of stuff, and then we'd come back nine months later and see what was still alive.
Nice. Let natural selection run its course.
I like it.
I can get behind that exactly, though it doesn't produce very much edible stuff. Are you guys actually producing things on your farm that you can eat?
Ah? Like, technically we are. We're trying to do that. But what usually happens is Zach starts the garden and then we get totally bogged down by a project and almost everything dies. So very similar, except we're not leaving the country. We're just being neglectful. But this year our lufah gourds grew and so we have a lifetime supply of squash based sponges if anyone's in need of some more sponges. But that was kind of fun.
Well, welcome to the podcast. Daniel and Jorge explain the universe, in which we try to grow a garden of ideas in your mind, planting seeds of understanding about black holes and quantum physics, hoping to nurture your understanding of how the universe out there works and to grow your mind. So this is large enough to incorporate all of these vast cosmic ideas.
How many of these do you have?
I could go on and on, but my regular co host or he can't be here today, and so I'm delighted to be chatting with one of our regular guest hosts, Kelly. Kelly, thank you very much for joining us again today.
I'm delighted to be back. I had a ton of fun reading this book.
That's right. Sometimes on the podcast we talk about the real universe, the mysteries of nature, how far back we can explore with our minds, all the way back to the beginning of the universe, or how black holes work and what's inside of them. But sometimes we think about artificial universes, universes created within our minds and explored by science fiction writers, because we think that the creativity found in science fiction is actually a vital element of science, that thinking about the ways that the universe might be is a very important way of actually doing science. And so sometimes on the podcast we will read a science fiction novel and talk about the science of that universe, along with interviewing the author of that book to get an insight into his or her mind. And so on today's episode, we'll be talking about the science fiction universe of a Half Built Garden.
This book is by Ruthanna Emerys, and one of the things that I love about her book is that I feel like when we talk about climate change, we're often so negative that sometimes it feels like it's not even worth trying to turn the ship around. But her book is about a near future humanity in twenty eighty three that is starting to turn the ship around. They figured out some ways to start recovering from climate change that involved some new political organizations, new ways of people sort of learning to work together. But no like amazing tech that just pulls all of the carbon out of the atmosphere. Like there's some hard work that needs to get done. But I appreciated that that was sort of like a take on climate change that was, you know, a little bit positive, like a we can do this sort of attitude.
Yeah, this book takes place in about twenty eighty three, and clearly there have been some disasters between now and then, some real climate change and probably some suffering. But you're right, the book is not like a Mad Max in Thunderdome. Everything is destroyed and a few humans are scrabbling for survival in a new harsh world. It really describes a situation where we have adapted to it. We have come up with new political and social organizations that do allow large populations of humans to exist and even to thrive and like have fun and chill out totally.
And those humans sort of work together and exist in slightly different ways than what we have now. So like you still have corporations, and the corporations still sort of have a like let's use all the resources sort of attitude. They're not totally on board with turning the climate change ship around, which isn't too surprising. You still have nations, but the nations have a little bit less power than they used to. And now it seems like most of the activities that happen in people's lives are happening at the watershed level. So within your watershed you make decisions about you know, working together and what you're going to do, and so you're sort of linked globally, but most of the action is happening locally. And fun fact, I believe the word for that is glocal, which is a great word.
Can you spell that word for us? What was that? Global?
Glocal? Glocalization? It's when you've get like lots of exchanges of information and stuff, but like at the local level, it sort of is interacting in people's lives, and those people are taking what is helpful for them and sort of mixing it with their own culture to make something that's a little bit new and sort of a little bit localized.
Well, it's fascinating to me to think about the future of sort of human organization, and you know, you can look in the past and you can see that overall there's this trend towards sort of larger and larger and more and more global organizations. The nations that we have now are really compared to you know, the city states of two thousand years ago, for example. But there also is this sort of periodicities. We build up large empires and then they collapse, and then we build up new empires and then they collapse. And so it's interesting to think about an alternative where we don't just collapse into total disaster and have to scrabble our way through five hundred years of dark ages, but instead we sort of fracture where things become a little bit more local, and we can have like different priorities in different areas and people organizing themselves sort of from the bottom up. I thought this book was really clever in the way that it imagined like this middle ground for humanity not total disaster.
I thought that was a unique take on it also and was very cool. And so, Daniel, do you ever wonder are you living in an era where there's going to be a break and a collapse?
I do wonder about that all the time, and I look around at our lives and I think it's easy to imagine us looking back in fifty years and being baffled at how we lived, you know, just the sheer wealth and the ipulence and the resources that we can assume every day without even thinking about it very much, you know, gas and electricity and money and food waste. It does seem like it'd be easy to look back at this as sort of like the peak of the Roman Empire, just before the fall.
I hope you're wrong, but yes, I think about that too.
Sometimes I think about how I might be living in a cave talking to my grandchildren about you know, what television was or what running water was.
Oh, and you'll be kicking the stone around the old cave to play soccer. Maybe the solution for us will be the same as a possible solution presented in the book, which is aliens. And I also really liked the take on aliens. They were sort of like a fresh look at aliens, and she had a very interesting take on their biology. And these aliens were friendly. They had I thought, a very clever way of letting us know that. But I'll sort of leave that to be unveiled to the reader when they read the book. But they have kind of a scary message. What is their message?
Yeah, I thought this was a really cool way to sort of put a pin in the issues of climate change and how to live long into the future. These aliens in the book, when they arrive, they are very friendly, You're right, but their messages you have to get off the planet. They think about planets as a way to like incubate a new species. They're like planets are like nests. You know, you can create a new species, you can evolve, but they're not a place to live, right Like you basically got to move out of mom and Dad's house eventually and go off into space. And they come with a warning, you know, to say that everybody who tries to live long term on a planet eventually kills themselves. And they even say how they tried to help four other species but they got there too late, be where those species basically exterminated themselves through climate change disasters. And so they're coming with a warning saying get off planet asap, and.
Not only get off planet, but get off planet. And then you're going to need to dismantle that planet for resources that you're going to need to keep going in space, which to me was the point where I was like, oh, man, like I could imagine and if the messages get off planet, you could be like okay, but like you know, twenty five percent of us are going to stay because Earth can totally handle that. But it's like, no, no, no, that's not even an option for a variety of reasons, one of which is we need your parts or you know, we need the parts of the Earth to build stuff. And it's interesting, Yeah, how do you convince the aliens that you should get to stay or and you know, of course humans never agree on anything, and sort of seeing how the human species comes to terms with this ultimatum is an interesting problem to watch get solved throughout the course of the book.
Yeah, and I thought it's especially fascinating because it's a question that we have now, like should we change the way we believe should we try to get off planet? Even if aliens don't come and tell us that they think it's necessary. There are a lot of people who think that the long term solution to human survival is to get off the planet and establish bases on Mars or build dice in spheres or these kinds of things. I know that you're a skeptic though about survival in space and space settlement. What do you think about not just moving out into space but also dismantling this complex ecosystem that we use as like the foundation of our society.
Well, you know, so in the nineteen seventies, the idea was really popular that we need to go out into space because you know, a population numbers are expanding like crazy, We're going to run out of space, We're going to run out of resources. We need to move into space. And you know, the like war induced famine over not having enough resources and the millions and millions of people dying from starvation, like those things never came to pass. And so I think, no doubt there have been famines and there have been problems, but I don't think that space is going to be the solution to these problems the way that a lot of people think. And also you know, so yes, I'm a skeptic. I think we can move into space and we can have space settlements, but it's going to take us a lot longer than I think a lot of people would probably guess or would probably expect. There's a lot of problems we still need to solve, and so I suppose I think we need to figure out the problems down here and not expect on moving people off into space as the solution, because I just don't think we can do it fast enough to make a dent. And I answer your question, I sort of went off on a tangent.
No, absolutely you did. But now I wonder what is Kelly's timeline for human space colonization. You think it's going to take a while, and we're talking one hundred years, a thousand years.
Just like what's soonish. I always hesitate to make like estimates for when such and such is going to happen, because it depends not just on how long it takes to make the technology, but like how many politicians want to fund the project to make it happen. And so you know, your estimate for how long it's going to take depends on so many things that you can't control that you're destined to be wrong. But what I can say is I think it's a project that if we force to happen quickly, we might regret because you know, for example, we don't know if humans can have babies in space safely, and I think we want to figure that out before we, you know, move to Mars for example, and then discover that actually there's a bunch of problems and we're you know, not happy with how things are going. So I think it would be better if it took longer. Let's say, but I don't know how long it would take for you to like meet the bare minimum standards to move out into space, but I think you should be way past that before we go ahead and start that project.
Well, I was hoping to trick you into giving a specific number so that I could call you up in twenty ninety four and say, see, Kelly, we're not yet in space. You were wrong.
Nope, Nope, there's no trick in me. There's no trick in me.
But I do think you bring up a really interesting issue, which is that a lot of our technological bursts and development do come in response to a crisis, you know, or for example, a nationalistic race, which essentially is a crisis you know, that we see an astory coming and then we scramble to develop the technology necessary for that. And in this book, I think it's quite interesting that the humans have like kind of figured it out, you know, by the time the aliens do arrive and say, hey, you got to get off planet. The humans have sort of threaded the needle and figured out how to live maybe sustainably on the planet. And it's a really fun conversation they have both internally within the humans and with the aliens about hey, do we actually need to get off planet or are we doing okay?
Yeah, and you know, of course, it being a discussion involving humans, there's a lot of disagreement, but yeah, it's interesting to argue, like, how do we know, you know, when we get a handle on this climate change thing, and hopefully it's when, not if, How will we be able to convince ourselves that we've really got things going in a better direction and we don't have to worry anymore. And that's yeah, that's sort of an interesting question that doesn't have a clear answer yet.
Yeah, something else I really enjoyed about this book, We're the disagreements. Often when aliens arrive, they're like monolithic in culture and in politics and in opinion. You know, they all sort of speak with one voice, but here they disagree with each other, they have different personalities, they undermine each other. I thought that was really fascinating and probably much more realistic.
Yeah, yeah, I think so often in the movies that I've seen and the books that I've read, you have sort of aliens with the hive mind where they all can sort of like I guess it's not that different than the humans sort of coming to a consensus with their technology, but like you know, they even still disagree. And yeah, like you said, the aliens are I think very realistically portrayed and that they don't all agree even and it's yeah, it's it's very good writing.
Yeah, Often in science fiction you meet like some species and there's like a president of the planet, and I'm like, a president of the planet. Really, like there's no way humans would ever you know, elect the president who could then also act boldly right, like it'd be so bogged down in you know, disagreements among the planets. And so it's really nice for me to see aliens that you know, don't always get along and make decisions together. I thought that was really fascinating. But I want to dig more into the science of this universe that Ruthanna Emers has created in her novel. But first, let's take a quick break with big wireless providers. What you see is never what you get. Somewhere between the store and your first month's bill. The price you thought you were paying magically skyrockets. With mint Mobile, You'll never have to worry about gotcha's ever again. When Mint Mobile says fifteen dollars a month for a three month plan, they really mean it. I've used mint Mobile and the call quality is always so crisp and so clear. I can recommend it to you. So say Babadi, you're overpriced wire plans, jaw dropping monthly bills and unexpected overages. You can use your own phone with any mint Mobile plan and bring your phone number along with your existing contacts. So dig your overpriced wireless with mint Mobiles deal and get three months a premium wireless service for fifteen bucks a month. To get this new customer offer and your new three month premium wireless plan for just fifteen bucks a month, go to mintmobile dot com slash universe. That's mintmobile dot com slash universe. Cut your wireless bill to fifteen bucks a month. At mintmobile dot com slash universe, forty five dollars upfront payment required equivalent to fifteen dollars per month. New customers on first three month plan only. Speeds slower about forty gigabytes on unlimited plan. Additional taxi s fees and restrictions apply. See mint mobile for details.
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Okay, we're back and we're talking about the science fiction universe of the novel I Half Built Garden by ruth Anna Emris, whose background is in cognitive psychology and sociology, and she's written a really fascinating book, not just about aliens though of course we love the aliens, but also about the future of human civilization, how humans come together to solve the climate crisis and reorganize their own lives.
Yeah, and so one of the aspects of the technology that I thought was really interesting is that everybody has this mesh that they can put on their head and they can sort of network ideas and so, like, if you are about to make a decision that could impact the whole community, you can send that information out to the network and people can like add their input and vote up or down on solutions. And if anybody has sort of like research that's relevant, they can summarize it. And so the experts. I think the experts have like extra weight, and it's like having sort of like a Reddit all the time everywhere, which which strikes me as being like like kind of overwhelming, you know, to be honest. Part of my like, while I was reading it, one of my thoughts was like, I don't think I could handle that. Like just when my phone vibrates in my pocket and I'm having a conversation, I'm distracted, and I'm like, oh, this isn't good. If like my brain were constantly working through threads of information about decisions, I think that would be overwhelming. But you know, maybe that's something you get used to you what do you think?
I don't know. I was sort of amazed. First of all, I love the richness of the experience that she imagines. She really seems to have thought about what it would be like to have read it in your head all the time and to have these sort of constant communal discussions and debate. I'm not sure I would enjoy it also, but you know, it's really hard to know whether you would appreciate a completely different human experience. And the thing that made me wonder was, you know, would people really be so well behaved. I imagine if a bunch of people had access to like injecting ideas into my brain, it might just be dominated by like the loudest, meanest voices, the bullies. Basically, it sort of requires everybody to be civil in a way, and to agree to the rules and to be moderated. And I was wondering, because you know, in today's society we are struggling with exactly just that, how much speech to allow on social media platforms and how much to moderate it. I was sort of wondering how they figured out that balance in a way that we could all live with Reddit inside of our brains.
Yeah.
No, that's a good question. It'd be interesting to talk to software engineers about how they're tackling that problem right now. I don't think it's easy.
But sociologically, I think it's really fascinating, this idea of devolving control, rather than having it be centralized in some distant foreign government, having it be more local and community oriented, people making these decisions themselves. And in some sense that seems empowering, because maybe you want the people on the ground to be the ones who are like taking care of the wildlife and understanding really the water flow issues, but it could also really lead to issues of like inequality. You have a bunch of wealthy people get together and build their own school and have their own fire department and their own police force, and pretty soon they're living in like literal bubble, and if the wealth is concentrated there, it can be very difficult for people without those resources to have access to it and have opportunities. And then where you live determines basically the course of your life. So I think there's definitely pluses and minuses to that sort of reorganization of society.
I agree completely.
Yep.
This stuff is super complicated.
But in her books she takes all of this on and she talks about the ups and the downs. The network crashes at one point, which creates, you know, maybe literal headaches for people trying to make decisions. So you know, she doesn't shy away from all of this. She really seems to have done a lot of research into how this would actually operate. Tell me what your impressions were of the biology, because her aliens were really quite inventive. Did you find it realistic?
Yeah?
I mean I really enjoyed reading about the aliens, so I'm not usually a great person to talk to about like critiquing the science of a sci fi universe, because I'm pretty much willing to accept anything as long as the person is consistent with the rules that they lay out. But I will say that she had some really interesting aliens. One was kind of like an insect and one was kind of like a spider. And seeing how you know, those different you know groups sense their environments in very different ways, and you know, figuring out how they learned to communicate with one another and appreciate the ways that they were different and learned how to compliment one another, and how they how they essentially ended up living in symbiosis and were reaching out with humans to try to make them another symbiotic partner. I thought that was really interesting. And additionally, how they engineered their environments so that, you know, both species could interact even though their you know, their body plans were really quite different. Thought it through quite a bit. What did you think of the aliens?
Yeah, it's super creative. I had never thought about having two aliens in symbiosis come and visit and like invite us to join their little club. You know. I thought that was a really cool way of thinking about things. I also really enjoyed our insights into the alien culture. You know. On one hand, it was very easy to talk to the Aliens because by the time they arrived that already heard a bunch of English in our bride cast and train themselves on it, so we could just like chat with them immediately. On the other hand, there were important cultural differences, Like the Aliens were weird at when people didn't bring their children along to you know, diplomatic meetings, because apparently in their culture, that's a real sign of trust, right that you brought your children. So I thought that was really clever. So much in this book of that was just really different from anything I've ever seen before.
Yeah, I definitely found myself thinking afterwards, like, oh, would want to live in that world, Like it certainly would have made being a mom and maintaining my career much easier if it was just expected that my kids would come with me everywhere. On the other hand, I find it really hard to think sometimes when my kid is getting up, you know, when my kids were getting upset and I had to make a big decision. But she has her characters deal with that kind of stuff too, and so yeah, it was. It was an interesting way to imagine the world that I think would have some big benefits but would be difficult to implement.
Something she described in her novel as sort of an eventual end point for civilizations is not just moving out to space, but also constructing sort of like mega projects, things like Dyson spheres, which capture a large fraction or all of the energy of a star, allowing civilizations to like vaporize planets or construct enormous other technologies that require so much energy. I thought it was really interesting to think about whether that's actually possible, you know, whether that's the only way to live as an interstellar species, or whether there are other ways to do it.
Yeah, I found it to be a very depressing prospect, the idea that you would have to like grind up the Earth in order to make a dice in sphere to keep a subset of these species alive right now on Earth, you know, alive in space stations or something. I hope that's not the direction of things, And it sounds complicated. What did you think of it?
I think that is an interesting question. And you know, if we were to build a Dyson sphere here in our Solar system, I wouldn't start with grinding up the Earth, you know, I would start with like mercury. Mercury has a lot of really heavy metals in it, and we don't really need it for anything else. We could like lose mercury and not really notice. But it's a good point that if you wanted to build like a full dice in sphere, if you wanted to capture like all of the ten to twenty six watts of energy that the Sun puts out, you would need a lot of material. Right, If you built like a sphere at the radius of the Earth like radius of one AU, then the internal surface of that sphere would be like mind bogglingly large. We're talking about five hundred million times the surface of the Earth. So we've never built anything the size of the Earth. Now we're talking about building something like hundreds of millions of times the surface area of the Earth. It's like, we're not even close to doing that. So I think I'm more realistic. Trajectory is that you build a bunch of stations in space that are capable of absorbing the power of the Sun, and you use that for your space based infrastructure. You don't necessarily need to go from zero to complete dice and sphere in an afternoon.
It's where where would you live in the Dison sphere? So, like you'd build the dice in sphere, do you live on like the outside part of it? Are you just floating around inside of the sphere?
It's a tricky question, right, Like you could imagine living on the inside of this mega project, but there would be no gravity, right, You're not going to be able to like walk around in the inside of it. And then you might think, oh, let's spin the thing. Right now, you have this enormous thing which is also spinning, and it would be really unstable. You know, a Dyson sphere that surrounds the Sun. You can stay there stably, just sort of in orbit, but as soon as it gets off center a little bit, now the part that's closer to the Sun is going to feel more gravity towards the Sun and it's going to very quickly fall into the Sun. And so this thing would be very unstable. And now you're spinning it also, which makes it less stable, and it would need to be much much stronger. Right, this thing would require like a tensile strength that exceeds any known material that we could even imagine building it out of so it'd be very hard to build. It'd be very unclear to know, like where you would live on it. I think instead, much more realistic is not to build a huge dice and sphere that encircles a whole star, but just to build a bunch of satellites that like roughly circle the Sun, don't block it entirely. That just gather a bunch of energy. Because the Sun has so much energy, we don't even need all the energy that the Sun puts out. What would we even do with that other than building like giant space lasers.
I don't want to live in a world with giant space lasers. I don't think would you have to like replace these satellites regularly that would be an incredible job. Or do you just imagine that these satellites are gonna work forever.
No, you definitely need to replace them. And I think the most realistic plan I've ever heard for building this kind of system is that you build a few of them manually out of materials from like mercury, and then you build robots that make more and you power those robots using the system that you build, So you sort of build a few bespoke ones self using human mining and industry, and then you use that as a launching point for your like automatic self replicating robot arm that can make more of these things. And then it basically like devours mercury and turns it into a whole network of these things. And yeah, some of them will go offline, but you just keep building them where you can recycle the materials somehow, and.
Then you beam it to the Earth or to your I guess, to your stations because you're living around the sphere.
You and I have talked about the prospect of getting solar power in space and beaming it down to the Earth. That's tricky, right, because you've got to get it down to the Earth. But you don't want to fry people, and you don't want to build a giant space laser and hand it over to politicians for so many reasons. But instead, if you build it in space for use in space, then you know that mitigates some of those issues. You don't need to beam it down to the planet. You can just sort of beam it around space. I suppose do.
You feel like there's any ethical argument against destroying a planet just because we're not personally super interested in it right now.
I think there's definitely a question of you know, colonization and treating it like a resource. We don't know, for example, whether there's life on mercury, and we also don't know the sort of spectrum of possible life. Potentially there is life on mercury that we don't even notice, we don't even recognize, and we just like devour it and turn it into our battery system essentially without even being aware of it. Or maybe life would have evolved on mercury in another one hundred million years, just sort of like slow going chemistry, and we've prevented that from happening. So there are definitely important questions about how we treat resources in space and also who in our society gets access to those resources. You know, should it be corporate barons who are launching their own satellites, Should it be national governments, or should be like decisions made by a bunch of local communities with Reddit in their brain. You know, these are important questions.
They are, And I've been reading a bunch of papers by philosophers about you know, conservation of things in space, and you you know, you mentioned Mercury's value if it has life on it. But I think they would argue that, like I mean, it's a whole planet, you know, has scientific value, and even if it doesn't have scientific value, it might be nice to look at and should you know, should we value it just because it's a giant thing that exists? And I think that's a very popular argument with many people. But it's interesting to think about.
Yeah, that is interesting in the same way that you might say, hey, let's not demolish that mountain because of the cold inside of it, it's kind of nice to look at and to hike around on. We prefer it in mountain.
Form, right, And what are we going to do with all the acronyms that we use to memorize the planets if there's no M at the beginning and we're going to have to start over, and that's going to be tough.
That's really an ethical issue. All those children we've taught this acronym and now they have to start again.
Yep, not fair. What are we doing to our children? Think of the children?
Think of the children. Indeed, all right, wonderful, Well, we have a specialty coming up for you after the break. We're going to talk to the author of a half built garden, and hear about how she came up with these ideas and why she is so fascinated my thinking about them. But first we're going to take another break. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth or enjoy a rich spoonful of Greek yogurt, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact of each and every bite. But the people in the dairy industry are. US Dairy has set themselves some ambitious sustainability goals, including being greenhouse gas neutral by twenty to fifty. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. Take water, for example, most dairy farms reuse water up to four times the same water cools the milk, cleans equipment, washes the barn, and irrigates the crops. How is US dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digestors that turn the methane from maneure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. So the next time you grab a slice of pizza or lick an ice cream cone, know that dairy farmers and processors around the country are using the latest practices and innovations to provide the nutrient dense dairy products we love with less of an impact. Visit us dairy dot com slash sustainability to learn more.
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Then it's my pleasure to welcome to the program. Within. She is a prolific author of many novels and has been shortlisted for several awards, including being a twenty eighteen finalist for the Locus Award for Best First Novel. And she's here to talk to us about her recent science fiction book, A Half Built Garden. Rithanna, thank you very much for joining us, and welcome to the program.
Thank you for having me so.
First, we'd like to get to know you a little bit before we ask you in detail about your process of writing the book. Tell us a little bit about your background and how you came to write a book about aliens.
How do I come to write a book about aliens? I don't know I've been writing about aliens, honestly, most of my life. It's always been one of my favorite sub genres of science fiction. How I came to write a book about climate mitigation that had aliens in it is that I've lived in Washington, d C. For about ten years, and one of the first things that happened when I came here was that I got involved in the local citizen science movement, and I got involved with people who were running projects that were bringing ordinary people into the process of punning science, collecting data, analyzing data, and seeing the way that that changes the way that people think about the world and the ecosystems around them. So, when I started to think about what sort of governance structures could be really different from what we have now and maybe do better at dealing with the huge existential problems that we face as a species, I started to think about that sort of crowdsource system. And because I am always interested in what challenges systems, and I was thinking about the way that our current systems are challenged by these problems, I started thinking about, Okay, here's a system that works much better for these problems. What makes this system break? And the answer was aliens, Because why would it not be aliens?
That's a good answer. When I was reading the book, I found myself wondering if you have a background in either ecology or political science, because both of those sort of themes were done so well in the book, And so do you have a background in either of those topics?
Thank you? My background is in the social sciences more generally. I'm an experimental cognitive psychologist by training, but I spend a lot of time working with anthropologists and political scientists, and I also spend a lot of time working with ecologists and other people who are working on other disciplines involved in solving climate issues. So I'm always working on the how can humans screw this up end of things? But I love talking and looking with the people who are working on the how do we get carbon out of the atmosphere? How do we improve the resilience of our systems from uh energy standpoint? And then I'm coming back with, okay, and how do we get people to actually implement the solution? Now that you've come up with.
Something I really enjoy in science fiction novels and in particular in yours, is imagining other ways that we can live, other ways that we might organize ourselves. And your book describes a pretty novel political and social organization, the watershed. Can you explain this concept to our listeners?
So the Dandeline networks in a half built garden are they are built around watershed and a lot of that was trying to think about what sort of geographics and breeze would have some basis in shared interests and shared problem solving and would make people think more deeply about the world around them. They are also technological system The networks are sort of mini internets that are based around watersheds or in some cases around just knitting or other shared interests as well, and people can belong to more than one of them. But the central thing they do is decision making, so they include both systems set up for people to provide input into a problem like how do we reduce the level of runoff into the Anacostia River, And then they also include algorithms that, if you think about the way that modern machine learning algorithms often unintentionally bring in biases from their data sets, the dandelion algorithms deliberately bring in biases that we want to have, So they include algorithms that bias problems solving towards human rights or towards advocacy for the local ecosystem, and so those algorithms also contribute to solving problems and waiting solutions.
One of the things that I really enjoyed about the book, in addition to the things I've already mentioned that I enjoyed about the book. So you talk about a law. You know, there are people who are arguing that living on Earth isn't a viable long term solution, And I just finished reading a bunch of books about space settlements, and it was interesting to hear some of those arguments sort of coming back and being heard from different characters in your book. So what is your feeling about the future of humanity? Can we eventually make civilization work here on Earth or are we going to need to move out to the stars to solve our problems?
You know, I kind of wrote the book to argue with myself about that. If I had to take an insight, say, I think that we ought to get both. I love to see us going out and colonizing space. At the same time, I think that a lot of science fiction that valorizes the destiny of humans in the stars tends to underestimate the value of having a complex ecosystem that you evolved to live in, and the distance that we are from actually being able to make other places more amenable to human life when we're currently in the process of making this one less amenable to human life. I probably did come down on the side of the characters saying, you know, we need to maybe figure out how to make this work on easy mode in order to do it right anywhere else?
Is that the viewpoint you had when you started writing the book, or through the process of writing the book you sort of formed that more like solid viewpoint.
Like I said, I wrote the book in part to argue with myself. That is frequently why I write books.
Well, something I thought was really fascinating are these political structures that you described to as this dandeline network. It seems to me like sort of an opposite trend to what we're seeing today where we're lurching towards globalization. In your book, you have sort of these smaller, more local communities that operate semi independently. Do you think that that's a future for humanity, That these larger national governments and international corporations are going to break up in favor of more local solutions.
I think it depends on the direction that we choose to go, but I really see trends in both directions. In the modern world, we get many things that push towards greater globalization, but we also you know, over the course of this last couple of weeks, I've been anxiously watching Twitter breakdown and started up masted on account just to make sure that I still had something. And there's something much more granular and localized about the masteredon instances, And you know, people talk about that as both drinks and a weakness, just as the globalization of Twitter has been a great strength and also turns out to make it kind of brittle. I also see a lot of the best quietest work towards sustainability and resilience happening at the local level, you know, in towns and cities where people really have concretely shared needs that let them negotiate politics locally in a way that can be more challenging at higher scales.
Do you think we're going to need a major political realignment, like having little watershed governments before we can actually start to address some of these bigger problems like climate change.
I don't think it's the only Way. As I said, I live in the DC area. I'm a Felt Way person, and I have fondness for the executive branch agencies and the hard work that people do in them. The NASA people who are running around trying desperately to be relevant in the book are kind of a love letter to all the people that I have seen around here working utterly thankless jobs and trying desperately to solve problems while people denigrate them in next door. And I hope that we figure out how to solve problems with the nation's thing we currently have, because it's honestly easier to do things with systems that you've already got in place. But I also think that having subsidiary and overlapping systems provide some really implotant ability to address problems in different ways in a different level, I'd like.
To hear more of your thoughts about how technology plays a role in allowing that to happen. I mean, I know that in the early days of the Internet, we all imagined that the Internet would be a powerful force for direct democracy, and now we see there's another side to it that can also amplify hate speech and connect pockets of extremism, and in your book, it was fascinating how the networks and the discussion seemed to be the core of this communal, bottom up style government. It was almost a utopian at the same time as being a little bit dystopian because we're facing this crisis. Do you think that Twitter or Mastodon or these other social networks are going to be sort of a framework for reimagining our priorities and government strategies.
I mean, I think they have been. You know, Twitter has changed the way that we do some types of governance. I have a friend who is currently completely freaking out because Twitter has been the backbone of vastly improved disaster response over the last decade, and she's fairly certain that when a new natural disaster happens in the next few months, people are going to die because Twitter is broken, and as we will be losing infrastructure that we were depending on to you know, put people in touch with resources and to get help quickly where it's needed. Most technologies they can be used in many different ways, but they also have affordances that make some things easier and something harder. Twitter unfortunately makes some good things easier and some bad things easier. And I think that as we design new technologies, we want to think very deeply about what affordances we're building in and trying actively to prevent or mitigate the worth of the negative loss. I also tend to think about technology in a way that I think a lot of people don't. It's not just the circuits, it's the social structures. And for the dandelion networks, there are algorithms involved, but there are also new modes of social organization and new ways of teaching people to expect and the incentive devised by certain types of engagement. And then I'm also very fond of Poll's idea of humans's natural cyber worms. That built into our neurology is the expectation of being tool uses. So literally, when you pick up a stick, you change the way you represent space around you, in your occipital globe where you normally represent space, because the distinction that you actually make and representing space is places that I can reach and manipulate and places that I can't reach and manipulate. So every time we take on a new technology, it changes our representation of ourselves and of our ability to impact the world. And that was something else I was thinking of with the Dandelion Networks, was deliberately designed something to create that cyborgnis in a way that was good for the world and good for the people who use it.
I really appreciate the considering technology in the long term from both the perspectives of how it can go well and how it can go poorly. And I had a project that I did once and I interviewed a bunch of people working on emerging technologies, and I was really surprised by how many of them didn't have the answer to well and explain to me all the ways your technology could be bad. And I can't tell if they just didn't want me to know, or if they really hadn't bought it through. But I do feel like in general, we tend to be a little bit rosier about technology and we try not to think about the negative implications until they sort of hit us in the face.
When people do have answers, they go in very interesting directions. So I was involved in I think a similar project many years ago now, I think about fifteen years ago. I got involved with a group of people who were trying to do foresight work around nano technology and to come up with policy recommendations in advance of actual capability. And after a while in these rooms you would find that everyone wanted to think about the great new problem, which is, you know, very speciative nanotechnology that reproduces itself, optimizes for paper clips and turns the entire planet into paper clips and zero people wanted to think of about inhaling nanoparticles, which was in fact a actual problem with actual nanotechnology at the time. Or you know what happens if there is uh bug in your paper clip optimizer, which there will be, and how does it break down. People love the big dramatic and I love the big out of futures still I'm a science fiction writer. But it also got very interesting to me psychologically the types of futures that people are going to think about and the type that they found uncomfortable to think about it.
I have a question about the sort of emotional side of it. In your story, humans and aliens have like really big and important cultural differences, but they can also successfully empathize with each other and in some cases understand each other's social and political issues. There's even a thread where we get a sense that when character develops romantic feelings for an alien Do you think that's something we can expect to happen in our universe when we meet aliens or is it more just that in the hard realistic take, where aliens are incomprehensible emotionally doesn't make for a very satisfying science fiction story.
I mean, certainly, that's part of why I choose to write aliens who are somewhat comprehensible emotionally. But I think it's you know, it depends on the species. If you look at the more intelligent to others species with whom we share our planet currently, humans get along better with some of them than others, and when we get along with them, we have very weird and unexpected places of breakdowns and communication. The things that humans can agree on with a dolphins are very different from the things that humans can agree on with a part and the relationships that we go with them are also very different. Expect the whole even for something where we could learn to speak each other's languages better than humans in Paris.
Do so, then if aliens do arrive, do you think that we should send cognitive psychologists to go talk to them first? Are you volunteering?
Yes, yes, I'm totally volunteering.
Most people ask that question backpedal rapidly, so I'm glad for you usiasm.
So I have sort of a light question here. So what alien in either you know, literature or movies or TV is the best done alien? Are the best written alien that you've come across? And what was your thought process as you went through and like designed your aliens for the book?
It depends on how you defined I know I've said it depends a lot. I am very annoyingly scientifics there. I really love the aliens in Mary Deriah Russell, the sparrow, and the mix of you know, understanding and horrible misunderstanding that happens there, and the interesting relationships between the different species there. And I'm sure that that was part of my own influence. I'm wanting to write two species that have the relationships and then come to this context the humans together. I was also thinking about my first two books are in fact deconstructive love Crafty and historical fantasy, and they use aliens that love Craft made up. And Lufcos had many serious issues as a person, some of which my books are about arguing with. But he was really good at coming up with not even remotely humanoid aliens, and then you know, having whole slide bars of just here's all the biology that I just made up. It is this fun oh look fungus. And so when I went to create my own aliens, I did set myself the bar of that they have to be at least as interesting in terms of body planned as the aliens that I got to borrow for my last.
Actually, yeah, I really enjoyed you know, all the biology that you incorporated into the aliens' lives. They were very interesting aliens to think about.
Speaking of aliens, why do you think we haven't been visited yet? You know, what's your personal answer to the Fermi paradox? Given how old the galaxy is and how common rocky planets seem to be, why have we not yet been visited by aliens?
We've been looking for a century. That is a minuscule amount of time. Us for the fact that we haven't found aliens yet is very much like my kid looking for her stuff animal for two seconds and then screaming that she hasn't earned her stuff animal.
You make us sound very immature as a species.
I feel, at least I hope we're immature as a species. If we're mature as a species, then I have a whole new answer for the Fermi paradox. Any of the answers from you know, we missed them to everyone kills themselves with climate change to be accurate. But I also feel like we just haven't been looking that long. And also I do feel and this is one of the things I was arguing with myself about in the book, Like a lot of the why haven't we found the people who colonize the galaxy already? A lot of the answer to that is I think the sort of mindset that it takes to try and grow endlessly is the sort of mindset that it takes to kill yourself off of climate change. And I did ask myself as I was writing, this is what would it take for someone to build a dicen sphere and still be worth talking to? Because I personally think that most species you can imagine building dice and spheres, you hope they stay very far away from your solar system.
Agreed, so speak the far off tech? What tech that's either existing in your book or other sci fi books would you like to see made real?
Most of all, I really like the part of the networks that involves making it easier and more organic for people to sense the details of the food around them. So the sort of augmented reality where it's not going to block your ability to hear bird sell when you got for a walk, but you can also, you know, dive into the health of the trees or find out what kind of a bird it is if you're not surfers who already has that memorized. I'm also very fond of the sensory substitution stuff that exists that I gave Judy. I just like the idea of being able to have more senses.
That would be awesome.
I would like to be able to see the universe and alters of new ways. I think that would really fundamentally change our view of it wonderful. Well, thanks very much for telling us about the process of writing your book and giving us a little bit of insight into how you think about aliens and humans and the prospects of their interactions. It's been a pleasure.
Thank you. Grabbing me on and can.
You tell our listeners about any upcoming projects of yours. If they've enjoyed your book as much as we have, what can they look out for?
I don't have any upcoming publications at the moment. I have a novella that is sitting with a couple of publishers, so I host. There will be a publication date on a couple of things soon. You can also find me on a regular basis at the Leading the Weird column on tour dot com, where and am to work and I do commentary on two hundred years of your fiction with equal parts and criticism. Nothing being published, just now hoping to have more stuck out.
Since wonderful well, best of luck and very nice to chat.
With you, to chat with you, Yes, thanks, beat out of the show.
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