Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseDaniel and Kelly talk with Mary Robinette Kowal about the science of murder in space in her new book "The Spare Man"
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Hey, Kelly y'all said for today's episode.
Yeah, I got all my equipment set ready to go.
What about a drink? Is that part of your podcasting gear these days?
You know, you and I usually record early enough in the day that I'm not usually drinking while podcasting and Also, you know, physics bends my brain enough without booze making it all harder.
Maybe there's a cocktail out there that makes physics easier.
Oh, maybe something with caffeine in it.
I thought I saw an energy drink once called dark matter. I think that would work.
No, No, I'm not drinking anything called dark matter because that sounds super scatological. But maybe that's the biologist in me.
I think it was carbonated. Is that health?
Oh? No, it makes it so much worse, so much worse. Thumbs down. I'll stick with coffee, just don't call it dark matter.
Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I usually do physics while caffeinated.
And I'm Kelly Wiener Smith. I'm a parasitologist, a junked at Rice University, and I'm a big fan of coffee.
And we're both parents, which means that we've spent many nights up later than we wanted to and rely it on coffee to get through the next day.
So many, so many.
And Welcome to the podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio. My friend and usual co host Jorge can't be with us today, so we are delighted to have one of our regular guest hosts, Kelly. Thanks very much for joining us again.
Thanks. I'm excited to be back, and I'm super excited to be back for this episode in particular.
Usually on the podcast, we dive into the mysteries of the universe, thinking about where it came from, how it works, how it might all happen, what's going on inside black holes, and whether or not we could ever travel faster than light. Because we view the universe like one giant detective novel, the universe has left clues for us, and we are trying to unravel the rules by which it works. We are like bloodhounds sniffing out the next clue to try to help us understand what's going on out there in the universe.
Oh that's what bloodhounds sound like, right. I guess I don't know much about dogs.
You're the biologist, so I'm not going to fact check your bloodhound for you.
It was spot on. It was fun on.
We have a fun series of episodes in which we dig into the science of fictional universes. We think that creativity and art is an important part of being a scientist thinking about the way the universe might be, rather than the way the universe is. As we stand on the forefront of human ignorance, we don't know how the actual universe is, so we have to hold in our minds several possibilities. Maybe there are lots of particles out there for supersymmetry. Maybe the universe is infinite, maybe it's fine, maybe it's shaped like a doughnut. In order to explore all these ideas, we need someone to generate these ideas. And while theoretical physicists are quite adept at that, there's another group of folks who are also working on the front lines to expand our minds. And those, of course are science fiction authors. Unconstrained by the rules of reality. They are allowed to create whatever universe they want for their stories to take place in. But sometimes those universes and those ideas inspire real scientists to think in new directions.
I love the interplay between these two communities, the sci fi authors and the like physicists space people like. I cannot tell you how many times while I was researching space settlements, the Expanse was cited as, like, you know, a serious reference like, oh, you know, space settlements might be like this as seen in the Expanse, And it's like, oh wow, you guys are really clued into what's happening in these sci fi novels. And anyway, clearly ideas are being generated by scientists while they're reading through these novels.
Absolutely, and it goes both directions, right. Science fiction authors take the science seriously of their universes. They want to make something plausible, something realistic, something that the reader feels like is a real universe out there that they could experience. And physicists like me who read a lot of science fiction do get inspired by the ideas out there. There are some books that are very heavy on the physics. Greg Egan's books, for example, are very creative in terms of the fundamental theories that underlie his universes. He wrote a book recently in which there are two time dimensions, and he worked out all the physics of how it works and came up with all these incredible realizations about how such a weird universe would work, and then wove it into the story with his characters. Really an incredible intellectual achievement.
Yeah, I'll have to read that. That sounds like a lot of fun. And the books that we're talking about today also did an amazing job of world building and helping you really imagine what it would be like to live in that world.
It's a real skill, exactly. And so on today's episode, we're going to be talking about the science fiction universe of the spare Man. So this is a really fun book by Mary Robinette Cole, who's been a guest on our podcast before for her book The Calculating Stars as part of the Lady Astronaut series.
So, Daniel, here's what I'm wondering. Drinks come up a lot in this book. Do you typically sip cocktails while you are reading science fiction?
I do enjoy cocktails with friends usually, and sometimes in the evening. After a bunch of cocktails, I will come home and read a bit of science fiction as I fall asleep, But I'll admit it just makes me fall asleep faster, so I end up reading like a quarter of a page, well a little bit tipsy. Sometimes it makes it harder to stay awake, maybe if I was drinking earlier in the day, but that's.
Got its own downsides depending on how early you start.
How about you do you ever sip cocktails while listening to science talks?
For example, I enjoy sipping cocktails when someone else does the hard work of telling me what cocktails I should be making, But to be honest, I would rather just get a glass of wine. But my buddy Scott Solomon and I used to interview scientists for this series called It Works, and our acronym was discussing our research and knowledge socially, it's a tortured acronym. But we got there and we had people come on and like dork out about the stuff they do. And every week Scott Solomon would pick a mocktail and a cocktail for us to try out. That was sort of along with the theme, and that was really fun. But you know, I usually am sort of lazy and I prefer to just pop open a bottle of line when I'm reading sci fi on my own. But the cocktails were fun when Scott was picking up Well.
I know that the Drunk History series is very popular. I wonder if a drunk science series would do as well. If you find out, like what the scientists really think after the third cocktail.
Oh my gosh, I really want I want to do be the person who does this series that sounds like it would be so much fun. A couple of times I've watched Drunk History, I loved it.
Well, today, we're not here to pitch drunk Science series to Netflix, though, if any Netflix execs are listening, shoot us an email. We're here to talk about a really fun book, The spare Man, which is an unusual kind of book because it's both a science fiction novel and it's a murder mystery.
Keeps you on the edge of your seat.
Usually murder mysteries take place here on Earth because they rely on the reader understanding the rules and being very familiar and comfortable with the universe it takes place in, so you can understand the context for the rules and the clues, so that the reader has a chance that leaves of figuring it out. So it's quite a technical achievement to put together a murder mystery in space that also makes sense and keeps you entertained.
Yeah, and one of the things that I loved about this book is that it's it's in the future, but it's in the sort of near future, so you know, we're hearing a lot more about space tourism happening and so that's starting to be a thing that's on people's minds. And the couple in this story are in space for their honeymoon, and they're on this giant cruise ship which is able to simulate the gravity of three different places, so the Moon, Mars, and Earth, which is just an incredibly complicated cruise ship moving through space. But you know, I've been on some incredibly complicated cruise ships, and so maybe this is the direct of things. What do you think are we going to have one of these in the near future.
I'm not sure. I don't even like cruise ships on the water, so I'm definitely not signing up for a giant cruise to Mars with huge spinning pieces that could pull themselves apart. But you know, there are lots of people who are excited about space tourism. It definitely seems to be a thing of the near future, but it's sort of been a thing of the near future for a while. Do you think this is like really the taking off point that it's going to be commonplace, that we're in the generation that sees space tourism is rare, and our kids are going to be like, yawn, whatever. Another sub overdue flight.
You know, I don't really know. I sort of hesitate to ever make predictions because I'm risk averse, I guess, but I mean, certainly we've been talking about space tourism for a long time, and this has been a super exciting year for space tourism. You know, Virgin Galactic had what was it one or two flights, they definitely had one, and then Blue Origin had a couple flights. William Shatner made it to space irl. That was very exciting. Wally Funk made it to space finally, that was super exciting. She was one of the Mercury thirteen, so one of the thirteen women who passed the tests to be able to do space flight but ultimately didn't get their chance. So certainly the pace of it is picking up. There was space tourism before that. I think you could pay something like ten million dollars. Dennis Tito was on the International Space Station for a while, and so it's going from something that only the super crazy, mega rich could do to something that the mega rich could do. So you're like removing some of the descriptors that I don't know that you and I would be able to afford space tourism for quite a long time. But maybe I'm wrong. Who knows?
Are you suggesting that there are people out there who are mega rich who are not super crazy.
I don't know enough rich people to say.
All right, well, let's get back to the book. As you say, it's set in space in the near future, and the basic setup of the book is that a couple are taking a trip to space for their honeymoon. So this is supposed to be pleasureful, right. They're on a fan cruise ship. It's all luxurious. They're eating fancy food, and then there's a murder. And one of the cool things about the murder is that it's not fancy technology. They're not like sapped with a laser or stuffed in a space trash compactor. They just use a knife.
That's true for the first one, but that's all I'll say. Actually, technically the first one requires knowing something about complicated, closed loopy cologies. But yes, yes, the first murder you hear about is with an old fashioned knight.
It's got a really cool sort of tone to it. I think it was inspired by the movie The Thin Man, and so it's got these sort of old fashionedy cocktails and they're sort of on an old fashionedee cruise ship, but then the whole thing is in space, so it's a really sort of fun mashup of styles. I also think it's written in a really fun voice. Mary Robinette, the author, is definitely a funny person, and you can hear it in her prose.
Yeah, I really enjoyed it. She created a very fun environment to spend, you know, three hundred four hundred pages in And not only did she do this really nice thing where you've got this with different kinds of gravity, but she also included a bunch of other cool, sort of near ish future tech, and I thought it was interesting to see sort of her predictions for what will come online in like the next fifty years and what won't. What did you think about the tech that she introduced.
I thought it was really fun. She has, for example, heads up displays, this kind of thing where you can see, for example, messages from your partner that nobody else can see. They're not like on a phone in front of you. There's like appearing virtually in your vision. I thought that was really cool. It seems to me like a very natural progression of technology. And she also has other sort of biological tech like pain controlling devices. It seemed to me like a really important area of research. I hope people are reading about this and going like, oh, that's a good idea, we should make that real.
Yeah. I do think people are working on that already, but yeah, I agree. I would love to see a lot more progress in that particular area. And I also like that she thought through for these devices, like the social implications and how they would really impact the people. And so one of the things that made me laugh was she was talking talking about the heads up display and how you could sort of search for information by like moving your eye to different places, and she said something about how like you could tell that this person was probably searching for information because their eyes were sort of going all over the place and they looked kind of, you know, wild eyed. I always thought like, oh, yeah, if you had a heads up display, you probably would look like a little you'd have crazy eyes sometimes. And anyway, I thought it was interesting the way she had her you know, her people sort of engage with the technologies that they had.
And she didn't go wild with the technological extrapolation. She has like a bunch of semi autonomous robots that come and help people do things. But this is not an AI dystopia novel where you know, the machines rise up and murder people on their cruise ships or anything like that. It's basically like a realistic extrapolation of where AI might be. You know, it's like super Rumba rather than you know, your car has taken over the world.
And it was a really nice mix of technology and then advancements in sort of the other solutions that we have for things. So for example, there's a service dog and not a service dog robot, but an actual service dog with all you know, the things that come along with dogs, like you can lose track of them or something like that, or you have to make sure you don't step on them, whereas like a robot might get out of the way. And so yeah, it was a really nice mix of evolutions of various technologies and then also just sort of some of the things that we have today carried forward.
I'm a big fan of very far future science fiction, you know, space operas like Alistair Reynolds, but I also really enjoy this almost immediate near future science fiction because it feels so tactle, like you can really get there and some of the practical issues are really understandable, you know, you can really resonate with them. For example, a lot of the questions and we'll dig into this in a minute, revolve around law, like what happens when you commit murder in space? Whose rules are? What laws actually apply? All those really funny scenes where she's on the phone with her very angry lawyer trying to figure out like exactly what to do.
I feel like the near term sci fi. I like the far term stuff, but the near term stuff is almost more personally motivating because you're like, oh, what would space law be like in fifty years? And then you know, would it build off of cruise ship law? Would it build off of the law for how we run the International Space Station? And I feel like the more near term stuff gives you a little bit more of a sense of hope for how things could go, or gets you a little bit more tied up because you know, maybe some of this stuff will get figured out in your lifetime. And so you know, for me, that's one of the fun parts of more near term sci fi exactly.
And so we're going to dig into the science of this cruise ship and the law of her space law, and then in a bit we'll have an interview with the author. But first we're going to 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 bye bye to your overpriced wireless plans, jaw dropping monthly bills, unexpected overages. You can use your own phone with any Mint Mobile plan and bring your phone number along with your existing contacts. So dit 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 build a 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 speed and restrictions apply. See mint mobile for details.
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So do you think that they'll build that gigantic cruise ship on Earth and boost it up to space? So you think they'll have to build it in space? It's going to be a tricky problem.
It's going to be a tricky problem. And this cruise ship specifically has lots of literally moving hearts. She has several huge rotating rings that can provide centrifugal gravity when at Earth levels, one at Martian levels, so you have two rings spinning differently. It has to be really big for that to work. I don't see how you build that on Earth and launch it. In order for that to happen. I think you're gonna have to build it in space, which means essentially you need like a space construction industry, right, which means like you need asteroid mining and really a large industrial base in space. How far do you think we are away from that kind of thing.
I think we're really far away. I know that there are many people who disagree with me there, but you know, your construction on Earth is difficult and when you're constructing in space, you also have the problems of like you know, when you're away from the sun, it's hard to have a power source, and when it gets cold, sometimes it gets so cold that you hit I think it's the ductile to brittle transition, where when you have some metals, they go from being like something that will sort of bend if you hit it, to something that will like break and crumble. So it's thought that one of the problems that the Titanic had is that it was really really cold when it hit the iceberg, and instead of just sort of like bending in a little bit, like you know, if a baseball hits your car, maybe you get like a little dent in, it transitioned to brittle and so it just sort of like crumbled away in that spot. There's all sorts of difficult things when you work in cold environments, and you know, if you're exposed so for example, the International Space Station is exposed to the sun, it gets really hot and then it gets in the dark and it's really cold. That causes a lot of expansions, and it's difficult on things like the lubricants that you're going to use, and so you know, there's a lot of things that we'd have to figure out that we really don't have a lot of experience with. And you know, if you're talking about building this giant, complicated cruise ship, I would say we're a long way away from doing that using materials that are just in space. But it would be fun to see it happen.
Isn't it very difficult to make these kind of predictions because often they are exponential. You know, they're driven by market forces. But once you create some new technology, it allows things to happen that people didn't envision. And that allows things to happen that people didn't envision. I imagine this is a very broad possible set of timelines where it could take one hundred years or ten years or fifty years. But isn't it possible that it could sort of happen in the next few decades if the right things fall into place in the right way.
Yep, if the right investment happens. It's a little bit hard for me to imagine because it's going to be so incredibly expensive, and that seems like that'll be a limiting factor for a while. But you know, you've got SpaceX driving down the cost of sending stuff into space. So maybe we can build construction equipment on Earth and send it up into space and then get experience with construction in space. So yeah, I mean totally. I think if enough people decide to invest in this, and we get some technologies that really break open our ability to do construction in space, then you know, maybe this could happen in the next couple decades.
And then maybe we could finally build that space based solar power system we've been hoping for.
Yeah, check out our episode where we discuss whether or not that's a great idea.
Surprise, surprise, Kelly was skeptical.
Oh you were skeptical too, if I remember correctly. You were maybe nicer about it, but you were all so skeptical.
I was more hopeful. I want to see that happen. I think it sounds cool, except for the bit where we're shooting laser beams to the surface of the Earth from space.
Yeah, that could have some problems geopolitical and otherwise.
So another really fascinating element of this cruise ship is the gravity. She works really hard to make sure that there's comfortable gravity for people on this cruise ship. I guess she imagines people don't want to sort of float their way through the trip to Mars. Why do you think that is? Don't people want to go to space to experience zero gravity.
If you're in space for a long time, you can have some medical problems related to life in microgravity. But I remembered what we were doing the interview that she had the trip only lasting eleven days, So probably that's a short enough trip that you're not going to get some of the you know, like bone and muscle degradation problems to such a degree that you have to worry about it a lot. But when you're in micro gravity, your body sort of stretches out and you're like vertebra start, you know, separating from each other. And apparently that's a very uncomfortable feeling that astronauts complain about nikes. Yeah, yeah, super uncomfortable. So having some gravity will help with that problem. And then there's also let's say, sanitation issues which are improved by having a little bit of gravity.
Are we talking about like spilling your cocktail?
So spilling your cocktail is one, but I was mostly thinking about bathroom related issues. So, like you know, on the ISS, for example, there's the complicated two hose vacuum system to take care of one and two. And even with this vacuum system, they still get quote unquote escapees from time to time. And so you know, in a world where everything sort of goes down, things are a little bit less complicated when it comes to like, yeah, to sanitation issues and losing track of your stuff. And so it's a bit more comfortable and a more manageable thing when you have a little bit of gravity.
And this really is a solution, right if you have a huge rotating space station, it can provide the experience of gravity. You see lots of fictional portrayals of space travel because it really is a thing. For example, you've ever been on the amusement park ride where they spin you around really really fast and you get pinned to the wall and then they drop the floor out beneath you. You stay pinned to the wall. You do not drop and plummet to your death because there is the experience of the centrifugal force pushing you against the outer edge. If the wheel is big enough or spinning fast enough, you could walk along that surface. So this is a real thing. The science there is real.
It is, but it's also weird. And one of the things that I appreciated about the spare Man was that she incorporated how life in a rotating environment is weird. So you know, there's a story where they're throwing something to the dog in one of the two environments where they're using centrifugal force. So you know, when you're rotating and spinning, if you throw something, it's going to curve a little bit, and getting used to that is probably going to take a little bit of practice. So do you want to explain Corioli's forces and how those work?
Yeah, there's an important wrinkle there. If you are standing on the surface of the Earth, you only feel a force down right, the force from gravity. But if you're the inside of Merrygoround or a huge spinning spaceship, you feel almost exactly the same. You feel a force down sort of outwards away from the center, which would press you up against the ring of the spaceship, giving you the experience of gravity. But the spinning also generates another force. Imagine, for example, you're on a Merry Go Round and you're throwing a ball to your friend. The ball is going to travel in a straight line from the point of view of somebody on the ground who's not on the Merry Go Round. They'll see you throw the ball from one spot and it'll fly through the air in a straight line to somebody else. But because you're on the Merry Go Round and you're spinning, you're not going to see the ball move in a straight line from your perspective. It's going to look like the ball curves because the Merry Go Round is sort of spinning under the ball as it flies. So we call this the Coriolis effect. Essentially, it's a force sideways. So if you're on this space station and you do throw a ball to your dog, it's not going to go in what feels like a straight line to you. Again, that's just a product of this whole thing spinning, of this artificial gravity scenario.
Yeah, so if you are playing baseball and it's Earth team versus the rotating space station team, the rotating space station team is going to have a massive home team advantage because they'll be used to the Coriolis effect and it's going to totally throw the Earth based team. I'm guessing.
I think that would be really fun in the far future. The intergalactic baseball champions. It also made me think about another issue, which is that if the wheel is not really very big, then the centrifugal force you feel changes as a function of the distance from the center, so there's like no force at the center and a larger force at the edge. And if you start walking towards the center, it goes down and down and down. So if you're just on the ring, that's fine, but imagine you're kind of tall or the ring is not very large, then the force of gravity you're feeling on your head is less than the force of gravity you're feeling on your feet. That must be a little bit disorienting.
There's so many things about building these rotating space stations that to me are like counterintuitive and complicated. So you know, the big wheels are going to be crazy expensive, and the smaller wheels are going to have problems Like what you just said, you know, your feet are going to feel different gravity than your head. And also when you have these smaller wheels, you get what I think of as the washing machine effect. So if they're unbalanced, you're gonna get like, you know, the kachunk kuchunk thing that happens in your washing machine when you have too many towels on one side and nothing on the other.
Is that what they refer to it in the scientific literature, the Kuchunk effect.
Yes, oh, probably, probably, but maybe not. So we read these proposals when we were reading about rotating space stations, where they were talking about maybe having a water system that would counter the movement of people, so like, if everybody was on one side for a potluck, they'd have to move something like a bunch of water to the other side to counterbalance that, so you don't end up with like something catastrophic happening, like a hole on the side that you've got a potluck and everybody being ripped out into the void of space. That would be bad.
That would definitely be a bad way to end your potluck. And why is this a bigger issue for the smaller wheel. Is it because people are just like a larger fraction of the mass of the wheel, or does it have to do with a sort of lever.
My understanding is that it has to do with the mass. When you get big enough, the puny humans moving around don't cause the same kind of problems. You know, like your washing machine doesn't have to be perfectly balanced but it needs to be balanced enough. And when you get a big enough wheel than humans moving around don't matter as much. But tell me about this this lever thing you think that might matter?
Also, No, I think it probably is just a mass effect. You know, if you have like ants crawling around inside your washing machine, they don't set it off because, as you say, they're a tiny fraction of the mass. So essentially, you need this thing to be so massive that humans moving around is not going to significantly imbalance it. And this thing has a lot of momentum right it's spinning, it's big, it's massive, and so if it gets imbalanced and like comes off of its axle, that will definitely be catastrophic. That happened in the latest season of for All Mankind. I don't know if you're a fan of that show.
Almost everybody in my life who knows about space has told me I have to watch that series, but everything in my life is waiting until my book is done on November first. Then I will enjoy that series, But until November first, there's no time for two.
Well, I'm hoping to get a writer from that series on the podcast to talk about the science of that. But Essentially, you're telling us that these wheels either have to be really really big so they're stable, but then they're hugely expensive, or they have to be smaller to be cheaper, in which case you need very complicated technology to make sure they don't get imbalanced.
That's my understanding. Yes, it's not an easy engineering problem either way.
Right, And then if you have a bunch of guests on your cruise ship and they're all a little tipsy, you can't exactly make sure they're all like staying on opposite sides of the ring at the same time.
When what a drag it would be to have to, like, you know, say, okay, we've got a group of ten people and we're all friends, but we can't be in the same place at the same time, so you know, we can only party with like in groups of five, and we have to be spread out in anyway. If humans are never gonna be able to follow rules like.
That, well I like that. In this book, she really did take a lot of those issues seriously and thought about what it would be like to be on the ship. She also, for example, really worked hard to make sure that realistic time lags were a feature in the experience of these cruise shippers, you know, when they want to talk to their lawyer, for example, as they get further and further from Earth, it gets much more expensive and also the time lag increases, so they have these weird conversations where they have to wait three minutes to hear a response and then six minutes, et cetera, et cetera.
Yeah, she was really careful with detail in that. It really impressed me the way she had the science so clearly figured out, and she weaved it really nicely into the way the story was told. It was awesome.
That was really impressive. And because it's a space murder, there are a lot of really interesting legal issues like what law is actually governing your behavior in space? Who's in charge as a captain of the ship basically a dictator until they get to their destination, And you know, can you do murder in space? Is it legal? Is it illegal? I know that you've done a bunch of reading about that. What is the basic situation? Can you murder in space?
Well, I mean you can technically murder anywhere.
Don't take that as permission, people, That was technically so right.
So you shouldn't be murdering anyone anywhere, but in space we still need to work out some of the rules. So the Outer Space Treaty does stipulate that countries are responsible for the actions of their citizens in space, so there is some responsibility sort of assigned in that case. But these things can get complicated. There's this example of a case in the Arctic that was thought of as an exciting case for sort of figuring this stuff out, where they were on an ice floe in the Arctic, so this moves, it can like move between the territorial waters of multiple countries. And an American citizen accidentally murdered I think it was his boss after a fight about some raisin wine which was stolen by a third member of the crew who was generally considered to be an all around kind of jerkface. And the guy who shot his boss it was, according to him, an accident. His rifle went off. It wasn't supposed to go off. But everybody involved was Americans, so it was pretty clear that jurisdiction should go to America. But these things can get more complicated. So there have been some issues on the International Space Station, and the way those are handled is according to this nineteen ninety eight into your Governmental Agreement or IgA that essentially said, okay, so we're gonna call the modules a sort of quasi sovereign territory. So Japan's Keebo module is effectively like visiting a chunk of Japan, whereas the individuals remain under the law of their home nations. So this would be like an American going to visit, like, you know, an Australian base in Antarctica. So there was recently this problem on the International Space Station where there was a hole in one of the soyas is. So this is a spacecraft that, for example, can bring astronauts and cosmonauts from Russia up to the ISS, and someone had drilled a hole in it. It was discovered because the station was very slowly depressurizing, and so they were like, oh, what's going on. And the two competing theories are that in Russia somebody who was building the soyas accidentally made a mistake and drilled a hole and instead of admitting all my bad put a hole in the soyas, they hastily patched it up and the patch didn't give way until it was in the vacuum of space for a while so that would be Russia's fault, but Russia claims that one of the astronauts on the US side had a mental break after getting some bad medical news from one of the medical experiments in space, and that that astronaut kind of went off the deep end and wanted to go home early. So they drilled a hole in the soyas to try to freak everyone out and get everybody to go home early.
What drill the hole in the space station they were currently living in.
Yeah, right, that seems ridiculous, and so the US is like, no, clearly that's not what happened. And Russia was like, okay, well, let us do a lie detector test, and the US was like, one, no, because you're being ridiculous. Two of those don't even work, Like why would we let you do that? And so anyway, there's just been this back and forth where Russia is like, well, it's weird that the camera that was supposed to be watching the soyas at that time wasn't working. What's going on there? And so both sides it's like heat up. And the deal is at the end of the day that the rules governing the ISS say something to the effect of like, you know, Russia can say to the US, we want to prosecute the astronaut under Russian law because we think they put everybody at risk and damaged the equipment. When that happens, the United States gets to say, all right, well, we have ninety days and we're going to try to show you that we're going to prosecute the offender ourselves and deal with this appropriately. And if nothing happens in ninety days, then Russia is supposed to be allowed to go forward with their investigation. But you know, what actually happens in practice is that the US is not willing to just give up their astronaut, and so geopolitics is getting in the way. Like I think in any of these cases where there's any ambiguity at all, it's not going to work out the way it's supposed to, because no one's going to give up their citizen to another country, let alone Russia.
But aside from the fascinating digression here into true crime space murderer that might have actually happened on the ISS. Fascinating are you saying that the situation is that the ISS is multiple countries. As you move from one module to another, you're like under the laws of Japan or under the laws of Russia. So if you kill somebody on the space station, it matters in which part of the space station you did it.
Yes, to some extent it matters. And sorry about the digression. I think it's a fascinating story. But so you know, if you had an American who killed another American in the Japanese module, probably the US would deal with that. But yes, there is some sort of territory that money's waters even more and makes things even more complicated. And I guess the point is, we don't have this all worked out yet. There's not nice, clear rules to follow. So in the story, Mary Robinette sort of created a system to deal with it. And it's interesting talking to her about how she settled on what system to use.
Yeah, and I bet space lawyers get really excited when somebody gets murdered in a new way, in a new place that's never happened before, because like it sets some new precedent for how to deal with these things.
There's a little bit of glee in their voice.
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All right, we're back and we're talking about the novel of The Spearman by Mary Robinette Cole, and here's our fun interview with her. Well, then it's my great pleasure to welcome back to the podcast Mary Robinette Cole. She's been a guest before for her excellent book Calculating Stars, which won Hugo n Nebula Awards. That's a pretty big deal. And for those of you who don't remember, she has a really fun background. Before she started writing, she worked as a puppeteer and also worked for Jim Henson and Sesame Street. Mary Rebinnette, thank you very much for coming back to the podcast.
Thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted to be here.
Well, last time you were here, we asked you our standard set of questions for an author who's come to the podcast the first time. But since you're coming back, I have another question for you. I see that you have served as President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and I was wondering if that gives you, like any broad powers you get to like settle disputes over deep questions like whether Han shot first, or are you in charge of foreign policy letting you declare war against other guilds or Disney.
Maybe yes, yes, In fact, I've gone into battle on the Disney front lines. That's been you know, crowd service that I've done there. It also gives me the ability to herd cats and to shoot laser beams from my eyes. I did have to give up the laser beam power upon leaving office, though that was a skill I miss. I miss that.
That's got to be disappointing, no doubt about it.
You know, it does make reading easier. It was very hard to read while in office.
So one thing that makes me feel better what I'm feeling low is a good drink. And every chapter in the book starts with a drink recipe, and the characters definitely enjoy their cocktails. Does that tell us something about your experience of Lockdown.
Yes, it does. So it's funny because my husband is a winemaker, so you would think that our go to beverage would be wine. But when we were living in Iceland, the cost for a bottle of you know, Scotch was about the same or not much more than the cost for bottle of wine, but it lasted a lot longer. So our cocktail games started there. But during Lockdown, we really really uped our cocktail game.
And is that why there were drinks incorporated into the book? How did you pick the drinks that ended up in the book.
So the book is basically The Thin Man in Space, and in the Thin Man movies, like when we start off, Nick Charles is like drunk from the very I did not want my characters to be drunk the entire time, but it's a film that came out right after prohibition was lifted, so cocktails are just constant and everywhere. I wanted to have some of that vibe, but I also wanted to incorporate some that were non alcoholics. So there's a mix of cocktails that are classic cocktails, like Corpse survivor Number two, Death in the Afternoon, The obituary, and then there are also ones where I made up the cocktail because I needed something that was thematically linked to the chapter, and all of the non alcoholic ones had things like Shirley Temple, So Frisky Business is one of mine. Orbital Decay also one of mine. So playing around and trying to come up with something that was tasty and also had an a thematically appropriate name.
How long does it take to come up with a cocktail that sounds like a fun experience?
You know, it's really difficult having to do that kind of research, so painful. Once you understand the theory, it's actually pretty easy. There are a number of cocktails that you can just swap out one ingredient and you have a totally different one. So the Negroni is a great example of this. It's equal parts campari, vermouth, and gin. But if you swap out gin for bourbon, you come up with something that's called a boole ofvarda. If you swap out the campari for something else, then you get a you know, a different flavor, a different profile. So a lot of what I'm doing there are ingredient swaps or proportion flips. So I can't remember which one it is, but one of them is basically a Manhattan but with the proportions inverted. So usually I would take a standard recipe, I would do a swap. Sometimes there was something that I was going for, particularly like the orbital decay. I wanted something that was akin to an aviation, but that was spaceflight. So my first attempt on that was to take an aviation and do a bourbon swap for the gin, and that results in a cocktail that is an incredibly foul color. It's just gross. So that when I had to play with a fair bit that drifted really far away from the aviation.
It sounds like you suffered for you.
I did. I did. It was really hard. It was really you know, people don't understand the creativity and you know, the research that's involved. So hard, so hard.
So I'm really curious about your writing process for the science of this book. In your other books, you did really extensive research on the various scientific scenarios. What was that process like for this book.
So there are three kind of areas of science that are happening in this One is the deep brain pain suppressor, and the other is the centrifical gravity of the ship and then the third is the time lag. So the deep brain pain suppressor, which I regretted every time I had to say it in the audiobook, is based on my mom's My mom has Parkinson's and she has a DBS which is a deep brain stimulator, So a lot of it is based on that and what they had to do with that, and then it's kind of extrapolated towards what things could be possible in the future. The problem was doing pain suppression via deep brain in the real world is that pain is incredibly specific person to person, and doing clinical trials on pain having two people that have chronic pain for the same reasons, it's rare. You don't want to do that to someone. So that is lagging significantly behind. But they are aware that it's a thing that can be done. And then just last month or the month before, someone announced a thing that where they basically wrap a cooling sheath around the angry nerve for lack of a better way to say it, and like, I'm very very layman's terms here, but that can cool it down. And so we're actually on the verge of that no longer being science fiction.
Wow.
Yeah, the next ten to twenty years I expect that that that's technology that will exist, the centrifugal force and the time lag. I partnered with rocket engineer Max Faken, and I told him what I wanted the ship to do, which was to have moonar gravity, Earth gravity, and Martian gravity depending on where you were coming from on this cruise ship, that you could stay in your home gravity or be in your destination gravity. And so he helped me come up with this wackadoo thing that would work. The only people who would build it would be a luxury cruise liner because it is completely bonkers. It travels under constant thrust, which gives you Learner gravity, and then is spinning with two rings that are progressively larger to give you Martian and Earth gravity. As I said, completely bonkers, but it meant that whichever level they were in, I had to think about, Okay, is the Coriolis effect happening here and how's that going to affect things. I fudged a little bit on some sight lines because the levels would have to be I think was like fifty yards apart, and I'm like, yeah, you can totally see things from one level to the next, you know, And the answer is not really not really, you wouldn't be able to. And then the time lag again because it's constant thrust. The round trip time lag for communications changed, like the amount of time in the morning and the evening was several minutes different because it's a I think it's an eleven day voyage that I've got them on. So Max made this spreadsheet for me, and I had a calendar, and so anytime an event happened where they needed to make a callback to Earth, I had to figure out what day it was on the voyage, what time it was on the voyage, consult with the spreadsheet, and then put that in for the time lag, and then make sure that I had enough dialogue in but you know, like enough action happening locally to account for how long it was going to be for them to get the response back. And there was one point where I moved a scene and then had to like rewrite everything in it because the time lag no longer worked.
Well.
I really appreciate your dedication to being consistent about the science, but I wonder why you seem to have chosen to keep the science of your universe basically right on the science of our universe. It means in some cases that things are quite tricky to engine hear the story. Why didn't you decide to like put it in a slightly different universe where, you know, maybe FTL communication was possible.
Some of it was that I actually wanted the complication of the time lag. The other is that my experience from writing fantasy where I am making up the rules is that it's not easier. You know, with this I can go to Max and I can say, hey, I need a spreadsheet, and he can give me a spreadsheet, and then I have the spreadsheet and I have to consult. But that's fine. When I'm doing my own universe, I have to make up all of the rules and there is no book that I can go to, so I become my own reference library, and I have to keep track of whether or not I have done a thing and what the ramifications of it are. And what I find is that it is equally as hard. It's just that the difficult point is placed in a different part of the process. And people will still tell me that I'm wrong about things for stuff that.
I might up, Yeah, of course they will. How do you track all that stuff? Do you have like a checklist? And after writing every scene, you go back and say, Okay, have I thought about the Coriolis effect? Have I thought about the time lag? Or is it just like in your brain so much? Yeah? How do you do that?
So usually, like the first two two thirds of the book, it's just in my brain because I'm writing it fast enough of the pace that I haven't forgotten what I've been working on. But this book was actually complicated enough that I made a Trello board when I was doing their visions on it, so that to remind myself to check each chapter. It's like, Okay, check your time lag, check cooriolists. Check what's setting Tesla's DBPs is on right now? Does she have it on or off? So yeah, I did actually put up a Trello board for myself for each chapter.
A challenge I find for science fiction murder mysteries is that for a mystery to work, the reader has to know the rules of the world, so they know how to interpret the clues they have like a fair chance at figuring out the mystery. But in a science fiction book, often the rules are just made up. And here you've invented several advanced technologies, and so the reader is learning them as they go, how do you handle filling the reader in on the rules of your universe, the technologies and how they change life, while also like leaving them enough breadcrumbs to follow. Isn't that a really difficult thing to balance?
It could be like all of the things that are existing in the world are The hard part is that all of the things are things that are completely natural for the characters explaining it to the reader. The bread crumb question is interesting because when I'm teaching this, what I say is you treat it like a cheese sandwich. So if your character is just like a cheese sandwich is an everyday thing and it's not a plot point. It's just they're eating a cheese sandwich, you just say she ate a cheese sandwich and you move on. If you are needing to you know, if your character is a chef, then your reaction how that cheese sandwich is treated is very different. They're going to really think about the bread as they're slicing it, and maybe they're going to make the bread themselves from scratch. But if your character is an alien, they've never encountered a cheese sandwich before, what you're going to say is, you know, The temptation that a lot of writers have is like, okay, what's a cheese sandwich. Okay, cheese sandwich is made out of cheese and bread, and the alien's like, okay, well what's bread And you're like, okay, so bread bread is made from wheat and it's ground. And what the alien actually needs to know is a cheese sandwich is something that you hold in your hands and you eat. And the temptation is to put in all of this extraneous detail that you don't need. So what I do is I give the character the reader. The reader is the alien in this case. I give the reader just the information that they need in order to move through to the next part. So cheese sandwich is a thing you hold in your hand and you eat, and I try to give it to them before the cheese sandwich is in front of them, so that when it arrives they're like, ah, I know what to do with this thing. But octave devices, yes, the octopode in the octave bot, yes, So that's the other piece. So that those were doing two things, lifting wise three things actually, so part of what's going on there is the other thing. When I say, you let them know about it before it arrives, so they know what to do with it. To keep people in a murder mystery from knowing for sure and certain that something is a clue, you need to use it in a way that is not the way it is used as the clue. And then also to make something feel real part of the world. For world building, you want to use it more than one way. So, for instance, with that cheese sandwich, if I use that cheese sandwich once and never again, it's like whatever. But if cheese sandwiches appear multiple places, you're like, oh, cheese sandwiches are really important to this society. It's like we walk past a cheese sandwich kiosk. You know, she pulled out the microplane that she normally used on her cheese sandwich, but she could use it to slice this apple. That kind of thing helps the reader feel like this is an embedded part of the world. So with the octopode and octobot, part of what I was doing was letting the reader know how those machines worked. The other pieces that I was letting them know is that autonomous robots are just part of the world. I was also letting them know that I was doing some competence porn, which is Tesla is really smart and she knows her stuff. And the third thing that I was doing is letting them know that this is not obvious to everyone else, that this is a non obvious and somewhat complicated thing. So there's a narrow range of people that are going to have the same knowledge that my main character does. So there's a number of different load bearing things that those two devices are doing, which is part of why you do get more information about it.
That is a really detailed answer. And the first time I wrote fiction, I was like, oh my gosh, this is so much harder than I had expected it to be. And now I see that there's there's like all this theory and anyway it's complicated. So now I'm going to transition to a law question. So your main character is like always on call with her a very angry lawyer who has very colorful language, and so I'm wondering what kind of research you did for the law related parts of the book. So I think that I read that you've like organized workshops on a cruise ship, which made me wonder if you've researched cruise ship law or did you research space law. How did you end up like settling on the jurisdiction issues.
I had a space lawyer as a consultant. So my space lawyer was Gabriel Sweeney. He does space law for the US government, which is an amazing It's like basically his whole job is thinking about space law. It's amazing. So the space law is made up, We made some decisions and he let me know where it was like just didn't make sense as an evolution. It turns out that space law in the real world is terrifyingly vague. You know, all the satellites that gets sent up, this international space law is such that if anything goes wrong, the government that they launched from is the one that's on the hook for the money. Like so all of the private space, all of the commercial space flight stuff, the US government is the one that actually has to pay other countries if it like comes down and causes damage whatever you think. And it is not maritime law. It's a totally different set of law.
Well, what I want to know is, would you or would you not recommend doing a murder in space? I mean purely hypothetically.
Purely hypothetically, with the way things are currently, that's a great place to murder someone because there is no one who has jurisdiction over you if you are killing someone who is not from your country. The closest thing that we have to a comparable murder thing is a murder on an iceberg, a research station on an iceberg, because it was in no one's jurisdiction.
So on the topic of space tourism and the laws involved, is a lot of discussion these days about the ethics of the upcoming space tourism industry and the potential for a colonization of the Moon in Mars, and whether we should allow corporations to treat space as a resource or if you should be treated as a public good and regulated. I know that you've constructed it here in your book just as a setting for the murder, but do you think it's a good idea in our universe to build cruise shifts to Mars if it were possible.
I think that everybody should be able to go into space. The question of resources, I think that the model that we currently have for going to a new place is very bad and leads to a lot of harm. I would love to see us come up with different models and I would love to see us come up with different models before we get there. That is not what's happening. What is happening because in order to do that, every country would have to kind of enact that law simultaneously, because otherwise the countries that don't have those laws enacted, their corporations, their private citizens have an advantage. And so right now everybody is basically doing a free for all, and it's gonna stay that way until something goes horribly tragically wrong. And what that means is that everybody who's like to first permission, later forgiveness over permission, all of those places will have established toe holds. So do I think it's a good idea? No? And yes, simultaneously, like two things can be true if it was well regulated. Yes, absolutely, you learn so much about where you are from by going someplace else. But the way that things are moving, we're not on a good trajectory right now.
So does the research you've done for this book make you more or less likely to invest in some space tourism company to buy shares, you know, Blue Origin or whatever.
You ask that question as if I have money to invest in anything. I am a writer.
We're speaking hypothetically, we're asking for actual investment advice.
Speaking hypothetically, there's a couple of really interesting companies, one of which I can't remember the name of it right now, but they basically do crowdfunding for space. It's like a kickstarter kind of thing. There's a I think you can buy in for one hundred dollars I think is your minimum, but you can support some really interesting space research as a private citizen for a very low And if I were going to do it, that's probably the direction I would go, because the smaller places seem to be doing things generally speaking because they're curious about the science of it. But otherwise, yeah, I mean, if you're talking about investments, it's a longer investment than I think most people think. But the trajectory that we're on is the same trajectory that we were on when airflight first happened, which is heading towards commercial stuff. I think people should be looking for stuff that's doing sub orbital flights because those are the ones where I think people are going to see return on investment and are likely to become a thing again. You know, we always say twenty years to Mars, but I think the suborbital flights. Looking at where we are right now, that actually seems like that's coming.
So, speaking of space tourism, would you hop on the line Gren and take the cruise ship to Mars?
One hundred percent?
Yes.
I think of Mars as like a colder, irradiated, airless version of Antarctica. But that's that sounds like a good destination.
Well, so if a ship like the Lindgrin exists, then that means that there's stuff at the other end. So it's not just going to desolate wasteland. It's going to resort in desolate wasteland. But yeah, I would absolutely go own a ship like the Lindgren which and eleven day is the longest transit. Would I go now under the circumstances that we have. No, I go to the Moon under the circumstances we have. But I'm like, I have a cat. I want to be with my cat.
What about the husband You've mentioned a.
Couple times he doesn't travel, so again you know that he might go with me to the Moon. He might actually go with me to Mars because it is a desolate He desperately wants to go to Antarctica.
See Kelly, some people do want to go to Antarctica.
I guess I'm definitely not one of them.
There's a bunch of people here in the physics department who love going to Antarctica to set up their experiments. Mary robinet, I want to ask you about your sort of vision for the future of humanity. When you were last on the podcast, it was early on in the pandemic and you were talking about your book The Calculating Stars, in which humanity comes together to use science to solve a crisis. So now two years later, how's your idealism surviving contact with reality? Do you still think humans will come together in the face of an urgent crisis or even like a slow boiling one like climate change? Or should we interpret your pivot to murdering space as a sign of a dark.
Great question? And that's all the time we have. It actually has survived because what we saw supports my central thesis, which is that humans do pull together, and that so much of it depends on who is in the leadership. In the tone that they said, so when you look at someplace like New Zealand, when you look at the early days of the pandemic, where everyone's like, yeah, Okay, yeah, no, we're going to do this lockdown thing when we thought it was only going to be a couple of weeks. You know, people did pull together New Zealand. The leader that they had and the way they weathered that was it perfect. No, But yeah, I think when you look globally at the way different governments reacted, you can see that we have this capacity, and you can also see how easily we are shaped by someone modeling what to do. You know, it is the bystander effect large that no one knows what to do in this circumstance, and so you look for someone in a position of power and authority to tell you how you're supposed to behave And if you're getting conflicting information, then you're gonna wind up with conflict, literal conflict. But if you have people who are steady and give you consistent information and are clear and transparent and trust you and you can trust them, then you have a totally different experience. So my optimism remains, but in that we have the capacity, My actual feeling on how things happened did lead to a murder.
Mystery context dependent optimism, yes, yes, So why did you decide to name your main character, Tesla. To be honest, for a second, I found myself wishing I hadn't named my daughter Ada and had gone with Tesla instead, because now I think it's a great woman's name. Why did you decide to go with Tesla?
So this is definitely not in the book one hundred percent. My head canon for Tesla is that her dad is or was, say, an armored superhero maybe that happened to have a thing that flew and could shoot things out of his hands. It's definitely not a copywriting character. So that's my head canon for her. And you know, obviously, because there is all sorts of reasons, I wanted a name that said this is somebody who values science. The name that I kind of wish I had gone with in the after the fact is Delta, which is named that Kelly Gespari named her daughter. And I'm like, oh, that's such a good name for someone who's into aerospace, because Tesla, unfortunately is tied up in a lot of people's brains with Elon Musk. But you know, it's such a such an out of the box thinking kind of name.
Delta is a great name if your middle initial is V.
Also, yes, I think Delta's middle name does have a V.
That's incredible.
Well, thanks very much for coming on the podcast and telling us about your latest book, The spare Man. We encourage all of our listeners to check it out. In the meantime, I'm sure you're involved in lots of other projects. What else do you have on the horizon that all of your fans can look out for?
Well, I am. I'm writing the next Lady Astronaut book, but that doesn't come out until twenty twenty four right now. That's the Martian contingency. So my life is full of very complicated calendars. But the thing that I'm spending a lot of time doing and enjoying these days is teaching on Patreon. So if any of your listeners are writers, I want to learn some narrative theory and stuff. That's the thing that I would say, come hang out with me there.
All right, Well, thanks very much, everybody, go check that out. And thanks again Mary Robinette for joining us today.
Thank you so much.
So, Kelly, did she answer your space law questions adequately?
Yeah? She did. I really enjoyed hearing her talk about you know who's responsible, and I think she did a great job.
I think it's amazing that when you write a murder mystery in space, you have to not only construct the murder mystery, but think about the science of it and the legal issues of it. Like what a big project. Kudos to Mary Robinette.
She's so good at that. And like all the different layers. It's so fun talking to fiction to authors and hearing about the different layers that they have to consider when they decide they're going to introduce something and how it has to be like multipurpose for the story. It's incredibly hard.
Is one question forgot to ask her though, What's that? Can she use her laser vision to turn her cheese sandwich into a grilled cheese sandwich?
You know, I think that was probably the most important question, and you really dropped the ball.
Yeah, well, we'll have to have her back when she comes out with the sequel. Thanks everyone for tuning in. We encourage you to go check out The Spearman by Mary robin at Cole wherever good books are sold. Thanks Kelly for joining us.
Thanks for having me. It was fun.
Tune in next time everyone. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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