Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseThe SF Universe of Becky Chamber's "The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet"
Daniel interviews Becky Chambers about her book "The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. " Volume 1 of the Wayfarers series which won the Hugo award for best series. You can purchase a copy of the book here.
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Hey Daniel, I have a question for you about aliens.
Oh, I'm always ready to gobble that up.
When you meet another human culture, it means a lot to share a meal together. You know, like if you visit somebody or in a different country, it's important, you know, to sit down and eat together. But if aliens visit, would you be willing to try their.
Food even if it looks super gross?
You know, the fate of the earth might be on the line. You don't want to offend them.
I'm not sure I could take a bite and smile. I think maybe we should send our Ambassador of weird foods.
Oh wow, that sounds like a prestigious title. Who did you have in mind?
I just admitted the forum to nominate you.
Sounds delicious. Hi am Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comments.
Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, but I honestly do like weird snack foods.
What's the weirdest snack food you ever eat? In Dan?
I don't even know what it was, because we have some Japanese markets here where there's nothing in English, and sometimes we just go in and get a few bags of weird.
And Japanese roulette with the snack.
Foods, Japanese snack roulette, and I'm like, is this a salty snack? Is it baby food? Is it dessert? I don't even know.
Does it have fish in it? Does it have fish and cheese on it?
Everything has fish in it, everything, especially it's the Japanese market. It's all extracted from shrimp somehow. Yeah, yeah, but I love it.
Yeah. Well, Welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge talk about snack foods, eat, weird stuff, and the universe.
No.
Welcome to our podcast. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we talk about all the amazing and tasty and weird things about our universe that we find ourselves in. You have woken up as a conscious being in this universe, imbued with curiosity and look out into the cosmos and wonder why is it like that? Well, we are here to tell you why right?
And what does it taste like? That's important? Does that ever cross your mind, Daniel, I wonder what aliens taste like? You know, maybe they won't eat us, maybe we'll eat them.
No, No, I'm trending more and more vegetarian. But I have wondered. You know, sometimes they talk about like a teaspoon of neutron star weighs as much as whatever, and I wonder what does that taste like? You know, what is a teaspoon of neutron star? People?
Probably kind of heavy?
Maybe you should spread it on toast or something thing, you know, mix it with a little cream.
I don't know, sparkling, thank it toast to toast. But yeah, welcome to our podcast in which we talk about all of the amazing things in the universe, all the delicious things, and all of the things that may not yet exist or happen in this universe.
And we like to talk about the real universe, the one that's actually out there that scientists are trying to figure out, because it's filled with crazy puzzles and amazing mysteries and mind blowing discoveries. But sometimes the best way to explore our universe is to think about other hypothetical universes that might be and also might be our universe.
Yeah, because businesses, I think we think of them as explorers, you know, the universe, trying to discover new things. But even more out there, I would say maybe the advance scout of the human consciousness and search for knowledge are sort of the inventors, you know, the artists, the writers who think of what could possibly be possible and what would happen if we found them.
That's true. Artists certainly are at the forefront of what is possible and what might be impossible. I'm glad that you think about physicists as explorers, so sometimes you describe me as an explorer from the couch, like a.
Couch couch explorer. You probably know that couch really well, every nook and cry.
It's well suited to the shape of my bottom. That's true. So if physicists explore the universe from the couch, then artists explore the universe.
From from from their brains.
From inside there you go.
Well, nobody uses typewriters, but you know from their computers, from their fingers and the keyboards.
No, it really is a mental exercise, though, to think about how the universe is and how the universe might be. And that's why I'm such a huge fan of science fiction, because to me, the fun puzzle of science fiction is figuring out how does this universe work that some artist or some writer has created. And that's the same puzzle we're facing in our actual universe, and so the mental exercise is very similar. It's a big physics, scientific detective mystery.
And so today on the program, we're having the third of our series of interviews and reviews of famous, well known science fiction novels.
Otherwise known as Daniel's Excuse to talk to all the authors he's a big fan of.
Welcome to Daniel becomes a fanboy live in front of thousands of people.
And loves every minute of it. Now, this has been super fun. We talked already to Anne Lecky, who won the Hugo and the Nebula for her great book Ancillary Justice, and we recently talked to Blake Crouch about his really fun book Recursion. And so today we're excited to talk to you about another book.
Yeah, it's a pretty and it's a kind of a different science fiction type of book. I haven't read it, and so I'm looking forward to hearing about it from you. But you're telling me that it's sort of hard science fiction, but it's also kind of a humorous book, Like it has a sense of humor which you don't usually associate maybe unless you think about Douglas Adams, right and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Yeah. Well, you have some science fiction books that take themselves very seriously, and you know, I'm a big fan of those. And then you got the ones that don't take themselves that seriously. You know, Star Trek, where they're sort of like winking at you when they're saying, well, you know they well, then do you know how to reverse the polarity on the Tau generator?
Yeah, FLI, Daniel, I'm not I'm not a scientist. I'm just an engineer.
And then you have your sort of like wacky science fiction hit Tiger's Guide to the Galaxy, for example, filled with crazy characters and silly hyjinks and and all sorts of stuff, and this one, I think sort of stretches all those genres. It's like very hardcore about the physics and how that universe works. She really tried hard to make it realistic and interesting but then it's also mostly about the emotional story of these characters and the bonds they make together and they're antics, and the silly food they eat together, and so it's a really human story.
Sounds like it's a sitcom space opera, a little.
Bit sitcom space opera. Yeah, and you provide the track. I laughed a lot while reading this book.
Oh really, you actually laugh out loud as you?
Yeah, I left a lot. I woke up my wife several times while reading this book.
Really.
Wow.
Well, maybe maybe I'll check it out. But it's kind of an interesting story for a book because the author self published it first online or through Kickstarter, and then it got picked up by a publisher and then it sort of took off. It won a Hugo Award for the whole series last year.
Yeah, it's a real inspiration for everybody out there who wants to be a mainline science fiction author and thinks they have what it takes but isn't sure and doesn't know how to break in. Here's the story of somebody who has just started writing and then it took off on its own. It's sort of like an Andy Weir story. Right. She voted herself. She published to be a kickstarter, and then later somebody sort of influential found it and funded the rest of the series. And now she's a winning massive prizes and getting paid to do this full time. So it's a it's a real it's.
A prestigious podcast. I mean, that's living the dream.
Is she can I get invited to a prestigious podcast that.
Sounds like fun talking about us? Daniel?
Oh whoops, sorry, Yeah, damn it, Daniel, fake until.
You make it any you're not a podcast host.
No, it's she has a fun story, and she has a lot of personalities I think you'll hear in the interview, and she's really done a great job of carrying that personality into her characters and creating realistic characters in a fascinating science fiction universe.
Awesome. And so today on the program, we'll be talking about the fun science fiction universe of Becky Chambers. The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet.
And even just that title, it really drew me in from the very beginning, like that sounds like a good story, doesn't it.
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. I guess it's the play between like long, small angry. Yeah, it's kind of funny to think of a like a bitter, bitter, little shriveled up planet.
Well, it tells you that there's going to be a journey involved, and you already like that. It's like tolkien esque, right, it's a long way. The story is going to be about traveling, and when you get there, there's going to be something exciting because this planet is pissed.
Off, really interesting. Well, I'm hooked already, So let's talk about what the basic idea of the novel is, and then let's talk about the signs of it, and then we'll play the interview for you guys. But what is this a small angry planet? It's not us?
Is it?
Is it Earth?
We are not the angry planet? No, So it is at the scene in her universe. We all live in the galaxy. But the galaxy is filled with aliens, all sorts of crazy aliens. Aliens have more legs or fins or all sorts of weird stuff. But they're sort of human like, you know, they're very understandable, they have a similar sense of humor, They eat in a kitchen, they sleep, they can be like interspecies romance. So you know they're alien, but they're also not that alien.
Is it more like Story Wars or Star Trek in terms of its budget for you know, special makeup and effects.
I'd say it's a little bit more Star Trek that way. You know, like the Klingons are like humans, but with little ridges on their heads, and they tend to be grumpy, that kind of thing. All the aliens are like humans, perturbed in some interesting way.
I see. It's not like your fall in love with the blob of scentin gas.
I got nothing against that, you know, between consenting blobs of scenting gas can do whatever they like. But in this book, there are no sentient blobs of alien gas.
Only santine blobs of water and minerals in carbon.
Yeah, and it's fascinating, and you know, I think that that's sort of unrealistic. We'll get into that later.
But yeah, for sure, I feel like you lost me already.
But I think that she did this on purpose to sort of make the aliens approachable, because the book is mostly about this gang that lives on a ship and they're like a work gang. They have a job. They're building wormholes, and you know, they've got a contract, got to work together and sort of sort of like what it's like to be on this ship together with this crew that's multi species.
It totally is a sitcom cheers with warmholes.
Yeah, And in order for that to work, you know that the aliens have to be able to talk to each other and share experiences and relate to each other.
I see, I see what you mean. They'd sort of not just look alike a little bit. They're humanoid, but they're also you know, sort of share kind of a human sensibility, you know. Yeah, really hard to talk to a sentient blob that you know, prioritizes different things in US.
Yeah, and it also be hard to have an alien be your cook on your ship if they had no idea how to make human food, or if they had no interest in human food. And so she enforces this sort of to make this this overlap, okay, and you know she acknowledges this. She winks to it in the book, like everybody's wondering why are all the aliens so human? Is there some sort of like common ancestor? You know, she's aware of this. So I thought that was done pretty well. But that's sort of the galaxy, right chopped filled with aliens is all sorts of kinds, more than I can keep track of. But the core structure of the book is about how you get around the galaxy, Like how do you get from solar system to solar system?
Oh, I see, because that you were saying they work at a wormhole factory or a wormhole station or where do they work.
They work on a ship that builds wormholes, and so, of course to get from one solar system to another, it takes a long time. If you're traveling at less than the speed of light, take millions of years to get across the galaxy, you know, at some small fraction of the speed of light, or even if you're moving at the speed of light, it would take you, you know, one hundred thousand years to get across the milky Way. That's not really good for building a galaxy sized society. So you have to have some way to connect these solar systems, and in her book, they do it via wormholes. And you know, wormholes we've talked about in the show, and we'll talk in a minute about whether they're realistic. The thing that's really the cool about this book that's different from a lot of other books that have wormholes in them is that she doesn't just sort of handwave her way to wormholes, like, oh, and there are wormholes she talks about, like, how do you actually build a wormhole?
Oh, she has instructions in the book about how to do it.
Yeah, and the characters in this book live on a ship and work together building wormholes. So they're like flying this wormhole construction ship around the galaxy and each one is kind of a pain in the butt. I mean, later when people use it, it's pretty easy. But actually constructing the wormhole she's thoughted through, like how you would do that and the difficulties, and you know, built up this whole bureaucracy and infrastructure around how that would work and the economics of it. And so you are on a journey of building a wormhole in this book.
Yeah, you call it a wormhole engineering, which sounds like an awesome title for a degree. I'm a wormhole engineer.
Oh, man, are we creating more kinds of engineers already?
You can't have enough?
And I thought you would like that because it's not just like well, the physicists say it's possible, so therefore we have them in our world. It's like, well, how would you actually make one. You know, physicists say a lot of things possible. Space elevators are possible, other orbits are possible. How do you actually make it happen? And so she not just thought that through but makes it sort of the central driving plot of the book is this crew building this difficult wormhole to an angry planet.
Okay, so I'm getting the sentence that it's sort of a mix of Star Trek cheers and Discovery Channel documentary about how.
To build bridges in the best possible way, and then this.
Possible way with food apparently as well.
Yeah, yeah, I think the author drinks a lot of tea, so there's a lot of discussion of different kinds of tea and weird alien tea and all sorts of stuff.
All Right, So the novel spends a lot of time and the mechanics of building a wormhole, which sounds pretty interesting. And then you also noted here that they do have faster than light travel, but they don't use it.
Yeah, it's sort of a toss away in the book. She mentions briefly like, and of course, some scientists figured out how to do faster than light travel. They built a faster than light drive but it led to all sorts of like bureaucratic complications because it's violate its causality and has time travel and basically just gives everybody a headache. So they outlawed it.
Which always works. Obviously, out lawing things totally makes them well go away and nobody ever tries it or does.
That's right FTL prohibition. And I asked her about that in the interview. You'll hear her response. I thought it was pretty fun though. I'll be honest, if faster than light travel was possible, I would definitely be ignoring the laws against it, like I would love to go to another plant for sure. Once you take a bootleg ride to another planet faster than light.
Well, I don't know what do these alien prisons look like? Do you get caught? Sound good? Alien prisons are never good.
But if you have a faster than light drive, how are they going to catch you? Right? You can always get a away from them?
Oh?
True?
True? And you can builate causality, so you could, I don't know, erase them before they catch you.
I don't know, yeah exactly.
All right, Well, let's get into the signs of it and whether or not it's plausible from your point of view, and then we'll get to the interview with Bicking. But first let's take a quick break.
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All right, we're talking about Bickie chambers debut novel Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, which won the Hugo for Best Series. The series is called Wayfarers.
Right, Yeah, And there's three books in the series and they all have fun titles, and they track the exploits of this crew and the rest of the galaxy and all the stuff that happens to these people.
Is a sequel called The Longer Way to a Smaller Angler Planet or The Short Way to a Large Happy Planet.
No.
She has more clever titles. The next ones are called A Closed and Common Orbit, and then the Record of a space Born few And I got to say she has a bit of a knack coming up her cool titles there.
Those are good titles. Yeah, they tell a story on to themselves.
Yeah, they summarize the whole book in just a few words. It's cool.
Well, all right, So then you're telling me that a lot of the book is about building wormholes and the engineering of it, and so let's dig into that. Is it sort of plausible what she talks about in the book, not just wormholes as an idea, but just the way she's talking about describing how you would build one.
Oh, I would say on the large scale, yes, I mean wormholes are totally theoretically possible in our universe, and nobody knows how to build one at all. So she's operating in sort of a void there for like how you would actually build them. If I had to guess how wormholes worked and how you would construct them, I don't think I would have come up with a solution she found. But you know I can't criticize it.
Well, maybe let's reach out for the audience. A wormhole is right now a theoretical kind of shortcut in space, right, Like, the idea is that you somehow connect space here to a bit of space somewhere far away, and the laws of physics actually allow you to do that.
That's right. And the motivation is to get somewhere far away without going through all the space between here and there. And the idea is to somehow shorten the space between here and there, not like a warp drive, which like squeak it, but to actually can make a connection between here and there. And it's like a bad door, like a back door. And there's sort of two different mathematical ways to think about them we can talk about, but general relativity says that they're possible. Like if you write down the laws of general relativity to tell us how space bends and how space is connected, you can find a solution to those equations that connects too far away points in space via this wormhole. You have a black hole on one side and a white hole on the other side.
And so one thing I've always wondered about wormholes is does a mad math suggest that they're you know, you're connecting points, and so you're connecting points, how can you fit anything through it, or can you make wormholes that are bigger than a point?
Yeah, that's one of the problems. If you just make a wormhole that's a point, it will collapse, that it's unstable, it will not stay open, and anyway, you can't get anything through it if it's just a point. So what you need is to keep it open and to expand that hole. And the way you need to do that is somehow have some sort of negative pressure. You need negative gravitational pressure, which is not something we know how to do. But theoretically people think, well, maybe if there were particles that had negative mass. We call this exotic matter, and we talked about it recently on the program, then if those existed, maybe they could hold it open and keep it stable and have the opening be big enough that you could pass an object through, maybe even a spaceship. But there's a lot of steps there.
Right, And she sort of has that in her book. You were telling me, like you in her book, you open a wormhole and then you have to throw buoys in there to keep it open.
Yeah, So maybe let's talk about the idea she has for a wormhole, and then let's talk about whether that lines up with wormholes in reality. So in her imagining wormholes, the way they work is that our space, our three dimensional space, is sort of embedded in a higher dimensional space, the way like a sheet of paper is two dimensions and it's embedded in our three dimensional space. And in three dimensions, you can twist a sheet of paper and you could leave the surface and come back somewhere else. And imagine, for example, if that surface was rolled up, if that two dimensional she was like a roll of toilet paper, then you might actually be really close to other places on that two D surface without realizing it, because you're close sort of in three dimensions.
Right, because you're folded in that higher dimensional space, and actually you're sitting right next to each other, but to us it seems far away because you have to go all around the toilet paper first.
Yeah, And so she calls this the space between space, the sub layer, and in her universe, you can punch a hole and sort of move off the surface of our three dimensional space into this higher dimensional space, transit through this weird subspace, and then punch another hole and get back. And the job of these ships is to punch that hole and then to navigate through that space. Which is pretty tricky dropping buoys along the way so that ships that come later can just follow the buoys.
So you're saying we're sitting bigger space, but I guess is that possible or is it possible we're sitting in a bigger space.
So it is possible that we're sitting in a bigger space. And by bigger, we don't mean like larger, like more three D space, but that there are other dimensions, There are different ways to move the way that a two D sheet of paper is sitting in a three D space. Try to imagine our three D space in some four D or five D or ten dimensional space. And as we talked about once in the program, we don't know how many dimensions of space there are. There could be three, there could be eleven, there could be twenty six, there could be more.
We just don't know. And it is like it is that you know, like you and I are far apart from each other right now, but maybe there's a dimension that if I just take a step in that direction in this higher dimensional space, suddenly I'm next to you.
Yeah, if if this three D space happens to be folded in that higher dimensional space, so that we're close in this higher dimensional space.
Oh, you have to find those folds. And is that part of the plot, like finding those folds?
Yeah, And apparently it's very difficult to navigate and only certain kinds of beings know how to do it, and that part is kind of handwavy in the book. She doesn't get into the details. It's just sort of like everybody who gets into the subspace sort of like loses their sense of time. But there's this special category of sension beings that know how to navigate it and find their way and build these wormholes.
If you eat the spice, then that lets you.
It's actually if you get this weird brain virus that they pass on to their children, it's quite fascinating virus. Yeah. Yeah, And so that's one way of thinking about wormholes is like moving in some higher dimension and imagining that the constraints of our universe are only because we're not seeing the full picture, and if we could only move in this other way, then maybe we could find shortcuts.
Oh.
I see.
So that's her flavor of wormholes. And you're saying, there's another flavor that physicists have also considered or think is maybe more realistic.
I think it's more realistic. I've considered it, so you know, that's one physicist at least, and that's sort of an intrinsic one. I mean, when we talk about bending of space, we don't think about the bending of space in the context of some higher dimension, like when the Sun bends the space near the Earth so that the Earth is moving in an orbit. It's not bending, it's in some higher dimension, the way like a bowling ball in a rubber sheet bends a two D space. In three D. Instead, the bending is intrinsic. It's not relative to some external ruler. It just changes the relationship between bits of space. It changes how far things are from each other. And so that's an intrinsic kind of bending instead of an extrinsic bending.
And physicist in general sort of think this one is more realistic.
Well, intrinsic bending is definitely what happens in our three dimensional space due to mass and general relativity. So that's definitely the kind of bending we have seen. We don't know if we're in a higher dimensional space. We've never seen extrinsic bending relative to that, but we have seen intrinsic bending, and the equation of general relativity are consistent with this sort of intrinsic connection between two points in space, a black hole in one, a white hole in the other, and then at their core those two points are the same point.
Right, But physicis also think that we might be living in a higher dimensional space, right, Yes, there have other dimensions.
That's right. There may be other dimensions. We've never seen them. We can't rule them out, however, and some theories of physics predict them, like bosonic string theory and superstring theory predict eleven or twenty six dimensions. Those are theoretical ideas. We've never seen those dimensions. We've never seen bending in those dimensions. We have, however, seen bending in these three this intrinsic bending where you just change the relative relationship between bits of space. That's happening all the time. You're doing that right now with the.
Mass of your body, a bending space right.
Now, you blow minds and bend space.
All right, Well, it sounds like it sounds like you maybe want to write the opposing novel The Long Way to a small angry physicist.
And that in that version, if you build a wormhole, there would be no traveling in between, right, the one side of the wormhole is the other side of the wormhole. There's no like working through higher dimensional space or subspace.
It's just instantly connected. Yeah, it's not about navigating the folds. It's just like you, it's just joined together.
But you know, a fair criticism is nobody knows how to build that, Like it's consistent with the laws of physics. That doesn't mean we know how to make it happen, right, It's a big difference.
It sounds like what she did was sort of plausible.
Right, totally totally plausible.
Maybe not the favorite theory of physicists, but it sounds like it's plausible. And how she describes building one, is that sort of realistic or is that, you know, just her using her imagination At that point.
It's her using her imagination because nobody knows anything about what would happen in these higher dimensions, what the laws of physics would be like there. But you know, she built a credible idea and she followed it through and she stuck to the rules of her story. So you know, I give her five stars for that.
Cool. Well, I am certainly interested in reading this book now. And so again the book is called The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers. And so, now, Daniel, you spoke to Becky recently and asked her a bunch of questions I did.
She was kind enough to give me some of her time and to share with me how she built her science fiction universe, why she made the choices she did, how she designed her characters, and also to tell me, in her own words, a bit about her personal journey from totally unknown, struggling writer to hugo witting science fiction author. Wow.
I guess he's not as angry anymore. She seems like a pretty happy person.
It's been a long way to a large, happy career.
To a large happy shelf full of awards.
Yes, so thanks Becky for spending your time and congrats on all your success.
Awesome. Well, here is Daniel interviewing science fiction author Becky Chambers.
Okay, thank you very much for coming on our podcast. Would you mind first introducing yourself for our listeners.
Absolutely. My name's Becky Chambers, and I'm the author of varied sci fi books. I'm best known for my Wafer series, which currently includes The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, a closed and common Orbit and record of a spaceborne few. I'm also the author of a standalone novella called to Be Taught If Fortunate.
Well, congratulations on all of your success. It's been kind of a journey for you. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got to be where you are?
Yeah, I still don't know exactly how I got to work. It all started in twenty twelve. I was working on The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, and I was doing freelance writing at the time, which you know is not the most stable of professions, and I reached one of those points I think it's familiar to most freelancers, where I ran out of paying gigs for a few months. I was really close to finishing the book and I didn't want to stop, is what it came down to, And pitching and finding gigs is something that takes up a ton of time and effort, and I knew that I kind of had a choice there as to which I was going to focus on. So I turned a Kickstarter and I said, Hey, I've got this idea for a book. I need two months to finish it. Would you help me out? And, to my eternal surprise, the Internet obliged, and I was able to finish it and my self published and put it out there, and I kind of thought that was it, you know, I had given my backers what I said I would make it. You know. I sold a little bit, but not much. And then I had the extraordinary lightning strike good fortune of meeting just the right person at a convention a couple of years later, and we had beers and chatted, and that was that. I didn't talk about the book at all. And then a few months Slater she got in touch because she'd read it and offered me my first book deal. And it's been a crazy ride ever since. So this is now what I do full time, which is the best job ever well depending on.
Which day you catched me on.
But yeah, when people ask me, you know, how do you get published? How do you go about writing a book? I have no idea what to say, because it really has been kind of a crazy ride.
Well, congratulations on all of your success, and I hope that your story serves, like, you know, an inspiration to other folks out there who are hoping to break in and seeing that it's possible from you know, from the outside to just write something wonderful that resonates with people and have it take off, Thank you very much. So in these interviews, we'd like to get to know an author a little bit by asking them some classic science fiction questions. So here's a philosophical question about transporters like Star Trek style. Do you think that it actually moves you from one place to another or that it sort of kills you, disassembles you and clones you somewhere else.
I'm in the disassembling camp, which is really grim. I hate it, but I feel like that's what happens.
And if so, would you use a transporter?
Absolutely not. I'd be like Bones in this situation where I'm like, I don't want to get in that ever. See. The thing is people use them, you know, every day, and they don't think too much about it. But I'm the sort of person who would overthink it, because when a transporter goes wrong, it goes really, really wrong. So I think I'd stick to shuttles unless I absolutely had to.
Well, then, thinking more broadly in science fiction that you read, what sort of technology that you see in science fiction would you like to see actually come into reality?
Ooh, are we talking about technology? That's likely or anything anything. Think broadly, I would like sticking with Star Truk. I'd love a replicator because I hate cooking. It just bring me constant joy, just to not have to put any thought into dinner, just to be like I'm having filet mignon tonight or whatever. I also think artificial gravity would be a good one, because I really want to go to space in that I'd love to see Earth from orbit. I'd like to go out there. But I also get really emotion sick, so I have a feeling that me and micro gravity might not be the best of friends. So you can if you can give me somewhere where I can actually sit on a couch in a cupola and look out, that would be That would be fantastic.
Well, very good. That sounds like a very nice wishler.
It's all creature comforts, now that I'm thinking about. It's nothing revolutionary. I should have said some sort of medical technology, but no, I just want to be comfy and eat my steak.
Right and have a wonderful view of Earth exactly. Well. I really enjoyed reading your book. It was a lot of fun. I read a lot of science fiction, and I don't finish everything that I read, but yours I found a lot of fun. I was really impressed with the characters you created, and I loved how you could really get to know these characters. I mean, they are all facing really different challenges than anything I've ever faced, but I still sort of felt like, Hey, these are real people and they're going through struggles that I can identify with a little bit, or at least enough to get to know them. And it seems to me like quite a challenge to create characters in this alternate universe that are different enough from us that they're like, honestly in that universe, not in ours, but still similar enough that we can identify with them.
Yeah, I'm happy to hear you say that, but yeah, it is tricky. I always have to figure out what that, what the anchor points are right, because yeah, I like to take you on the kind of a journey in that respect. You know, I want you to think outside of your box. I want you to consider other cultures and ways of thinking and other structures of families and all that. But there has to be some degree of relatability, and there's something where you can get in and really, you know, even if you know you're very physically different, or if you're very culturally different, that you can still relate to them on some level. And so I I mess with that in a lot of different ways. Sometimes it's physicality. If it's a character that I want you to be able to trust right off the bat, I'm more likely to make them buypedle because because if somebody walks up to you looking like a giant lobster, you're gonna have that moment of even if they're the nicest person in the world. You know, it's things like that, or just things like maybe sharing food or or you know, just having an honest conversation about well, here's how my family works, here's here's how my language works. Because you can learn a lot about how a person thinks by the way they speak, et cetera. So those are the things I've really I really enjoy teasing out, figuring out finding that good balance between I want to make this weird. I want to make you stretch your brain a bit, but I also want you to feel like this is a person you could be friends with.
Yeah, it seems like you spend a lot of time thinking about how the various aliens would interact with each other, which food from this species would work for the other one, and how social ideas from one culture could be different from another. I imagine in our universe it would be much more difficult than what you describe. I mean, I think real aliens would be so vastly different that you couldn't have tea with them or share a kitchen. But if you want to have a culture and have them interact in some way, then you have to Is that what motivated you to make them all sort of human like, to make them, frankly a bit unrealistically human.
Absolutely, it's very intentional on my part, and it's not with the Wayfarers universe. It's not reflective of what I think life in the universe would actually be like. Much as I'd love to go have tea with an alien, I don't think that would be possible. I imagine something much more like say Arrival, for example, where they're so odd and they're so alien that it's upsetting and disconcerting, and even though you're trying to figure each other out, it's difficult and painful, and you never even when you get there, you can't really explain it to anybody else. I think if we were lucky enough to exist the same time as another civilization level species, that's more what it would be like. But with the Wayfarer's books, the intent is to follow in the footsteps of things like Star Trek and Farscape and Star Wars, all these wonderful multi species universes that I grew up with, and to make you feel like you could be part of it, that you could easily inhabit it. So it is a very conscious choice on my part to make them more a little more human than I think they would be.
Well, I think you succeeded because I would love to hang out with your aliens and have a meal with them. I mean, in general, I would love to hang out with aliens. I have so many physics questions for aliens. I would like to ask the aliens about wormholes and interstellar travel and all that stuff. So it frustrates me to imagine that they might show up on Earth and then we'd have like no way to talk to them. But let me turn that into the physics of your verse. Because I'm a physicist and our show is mostly about physics, and I was really intrigued by the physics of the universe that you built in your novel. My take on it is that in your novel, to get around the galaxy, you use wormholes, but these wormholes require like actual work to construct. This is unusual to see in a science fiction book to really think about how the wormholes would get built. I mean, in your universe, you have to like punch a hole into this sublay or of space, this space between space, and then make these connections sort of manually before people can actually use them for transport. Is that how you would describe sort of the major physics of your universe?
Would I would say that's accurate?
Yes, okay, awesome. Wanted to make sure I got that right. So what gave you the idea to build your universe your story around that? I mean, did you start from this sort of science and engineering concept of having wormholes that are difficult to actually build, or did you have a story you wanted to tell and you needed something with that sort of story restructure in it.
So it's it started with the characters in you know, I wrote this crew first and liked them a lot and was like, okay, well where do they live and what do they do? And propulsion became the first obvious question, you know, because that shapes so much of what kind of science fiction story you're telling. Are you living in a Star Wars future in which or past? I guess because it's a galaxy a long time ago, but you know, are you living in a Star Wars style universe where you can get anywhere instantly? Or are you talking sort of a generationship style thing where it's going to take you decades or centuries to get between systems? These are very different kinds of stories, and so I wanted to be somewhere in the middle, but closer to faster travel and that I didn't want it to take years to leave a system, you know, I wanted you to be these people, to be able to hop between planets from chapter to chapter, and wormholes just seemed like the obvious fit. Wormholes have been something or something that have captured my imagination for a really long time. So my my biggest bory or it likes, entry points into into science fiction, you know, were Carl Sagan's contact. The movie came out when I was twelve years old, and I was wrapped and and uh, you know, then read the books and whatnot, and then you know, around about the same time, Deep Days nine was on TV and I watched that every week, So wormholes were just sort of this this I don't know. They had a moment there in my tweens and and and stuck with me. So yeah, it just it felt like the obvious choice for me personally, and also something that I thought would be fun to play with.
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So tell me what's fascinating to you about wormholes? What is it about wormholes that really sticks in your brain?
The whole concept of it's this sphere, right, it's we think we it's so easy as for us to think of it like a door that you just kind of open and you walk through space on the other side. But no, it's an it's an object and no matter where you enter from, you're coming out somewhere else. And that is the most mind bending, uncomfortable idea to me because it doesn't make it, you know, to us three dimensional beings. It makes no sense whatsoever, and there is a degree of magic in it. To me, I think it's you know, I try not to make things too fantastical, but the fact that you know, wormholes are you know, something that mathematically have been talked about as to whether or not they could exist, gives the universe this this wonderful esoteric quality. To me that that just shows how much we don't know and how much we don't understand, and how we are very locked to our dimensional understanding of things.
Yeah, my favorite thing about a lot of these topics in physics is that they're very counterintuitive. Right, we don't experience any of these things in our everyday life. But then learning that our experience is not representative of what's going on out there in the universe that could be totally weird and different. That's super fun, especially when you discover that these things could be real, like wormholes could actually be happening out there. So I want to ask you a little bit more about the mechanics of it. If you don't mind what is going on in this sort of sublayer, this space between space. How do you build a wormhole in your universe?
All right? So I'm going to preface this by saying I don't actually know how to build a wormhole, but I tell you nobody does.
Nobody does.
How bs my way around it? Sure? So the idea is that you first punch a hole, right, and that there's this space between space and you build a tonnel through it by using these and you and you're building through space and time. This is important. This is why you have to be licensed to build a wormhole, because you want to make sure you're coming out at the right time, otherwise it causes a lot of problems. So you are creating a tunnel through this space between space, and you drop these buoys that basically hold it open right so that it doesn't because it naturally would just collapse back then on itself. So you're you're creating this corridor from point A to point B, and then around the entry and exit points, you have this cage that keeps space. It keeps the hole open, but it also keeps it from ripping further so that you know, you're not you're not causing damage, You're not getting you know, having planets get sucked in or what have you. It's it's a stable it's a it's a stable highway essentially. Now as to the mechanics of how any of that works, I have no idea.
But in your mind, is our three toomal space sort of embedded in a higher dimension and you're making a tunnel through that higher dimensional space, or are you like connecting three D space in a new way. That's just sort of changing the way the space is organized.
Right, So I imagine that there is there we're talking about a higher dimension, as you said, like that there's some there's a connective tissue there that we're not aware of, and that instead of like folding space necessarily you you are able to traverse through that, you know, the sublayer as it's called, in order to take shortcuts. It doesn't behave you know, distances don't mean the same thing there that they do here. So that's that's that's how I picture it.
At least, well, I really enjoyed it. It was really unusual. Your universe sort of sits between the various kinds of science fiction universes I've seen before, one where you just like sort of get anywhere instantly, and then another one where you can sort of and then other ones where it like literally takes forever to get and then other ones where it takes almost forever to get anywhere. Here, it's like it's a struggle to get somewhere the first time because you actually have to build this wormhole. And I sort of like that that nod to the engineering, you know, like hey, maybe physicists can come up with the idea for the wormhole, but actually building one is real work, like it's the project of this whole novel, and it's not just like boom, you got a wormhole. It's like, let's build one. I think Jorge would like that thanks to his engineering background. So then my next question for you is do you imagine that this might actually be possible in our universe? Do you think that it requires different physics, or do you think that these wormholes might actually work in our universe?
I think it would require different physics probably, or at least it would require technology and an understanding of physics that we do not currently have. That's the caveat. The internal caveat I always have with all of these books is that I just assume that, you know, centuries and centuries in the future, people have a much better understanding of how to work with the stuff, and they're able to do things that now seem impossible given my understanding of the universe. You know, here in twenty twenty, I don't think what I've written is possible. But if somebody six hundred years from now wants to prove me wrong, that would be fantastic, but I am definitely taking a few flights of fancy with it.
I think, well, I think that's a really important point about what's possible. Like if physics hasn't said it's impossible, but we haven't figured out how to do it yet, you can just speculate about how it might just take a few hundred years to figure it out. But it sounds to me like you're specifically not doing anything that physics would say no to day So in that sense, you're sort of placing it in our universe bar in the future and handwaving you know some of the technological solutions. Is that fair?
Yeah, that's that's it exactly. And and that too is done very intentionally in that I want to make the reader feel like this is a place they can inhabit really easily. And so that does require things like you know that the ships will have artificial gravity so that you can actually like eat off of a plate on a table, and you know, have scenes where you're having tea with someone or creature comfort right, creature comforts, or you know, a trip between planet takes several weeks or months, but it's not going to take your whole life. You know these are these are little shortcuts that I take to make sure that the reader's having fun and can easily imagine themselves there. But I'm also trying to not break the laws of physics too much, or if I do, I often will not at it intentionally with somebody to be like, I don't know how that would work, and then be like, you know, whatever, it works, because ultimately, what I want is for the reader to feel a connection to our universe as it exists, you know. And that's why I shy away from too much. You know, it's straying too much into the space, magic realm of things, because I want people to get interested in the real thing, and I want people to feel that connection to the larger universe. And so if I mess with the rules too much, I'm worried that I might shoot myself in the foot in that regard.
Okay, very nice, So then let's talk about the rules in your universe, because wormholes are such a big part of the universe. But then you also include faster than light travel, but then it's sort of outlawed because it creates too much trouble. Tell me more about why you wanted to do it that way. Have both faster than light travel and wormholes in your universe.
I think that faster than light travel would be an absolute logistical and bureaucratic nightmare. You know, how do you because since I'm not breaking the laws of relativity, how do you deal with that? How do you deal with with people aging at different rates, or you know, showing up seventy years in the future and they've only aged two years or what you know. That to me is that's a very different kind of science fiction story, and it would break the universe as I've written it, in which you can have people who aren't you know, in an interstellar sort of way, you know, like leaving their families behind and seeing that their kids have already aged and died and et cetera. Like that. That's not what I was intending to write. So I just I wanted to give that little nod of like, yeah, it's a thing we can do, but we decided we decided not to. It's too much a mess.
Oh but that was such agony for me though. I was like, oh my gosh, what really tell me more about it? And then you just sort of like put it aside, and it seemed like a tease I also thought it was it was pretty fascinating as a solution to this story issue like fast and life travel would break your universe, and so you decided to fix it with like a bureaucratic obstacle. I mean, if I were writing it, I'd be like, you know, handway, woo woo, some science obstacle. I think it's kind of hilarious and creative that you say, oh no, no, that's possible, we just don't do it because it's you know, against our cultural rules. That's kind of fascinating.
I think ultimately, you know, I am so interested in astronomy and in the sciences and all of it. But the sciences to me also, you know, definitely includes the social side, and that's something I obviously really like exploring in these stories and the universes. I've imagine it is kind of a bureaucracy. It's this, it's this, you know. Ever, you know, they have to get permits to build wormholes, and it's all reliant on these treaties and having the right sort of licenses and you have to go to piloting school and tunneling school and all of that. So it's it's the books are just as much about how to live in this society that as they are, Here's all the cool technology we have, and here's how we jump between planets.
And you think in that universe everyone would sort of follow the rules, like you wouldn't get FTL pirates or you know, FTL smugglers or something. People wouldn't be like trying to skirt the rules and get around them.
I think you definitely do. It's something I've never written, just because the types of stories I'm writing aren't quite the right venue for that. But I think people do try to get around I mean, there are obviously some of the later books that we encounter cultures and worlds that are estranged from the galactic commons, which is the main setting that I'm describing, in which people are doing things that are very illegal or that would be culturally taboo. So I specifically with FTL, though, I think that the resources you'd need to do it would require the right connections or you know, enough enough money to do it. I think it would be difficult for your average you know, just sort of scummy pirate to get their hands on an FTL drive. You know, it just sort of like be somebody, you know, like someone getting i don't know, a nuclear weapon, something less that's going to be so tightly locked down and it requires such high tech development that it's going to be hard for the average person.
To get cool. Well that makes sense. Well, again, congrats on thinking through this amazing universe, building it out and taking us on a fun tour in your book. That's really wonderful. So congrats on all of your success. It's very well deserved, and thanks for taking some time to talk to us before we go. Do you have any upcoming projects you'd like to tell our listeners about.
Sure, So, I'm currently working on the next Wayfair's book. It is currently untitled, but it will be out early next year. I also have a pair of novellas coming out from tour dot Com also next year. Those will be Solar Punk Space Opera. So that's a fun departure for me. So it's a busy year and I'll be stuck in my writing cave, but I'll have a lot of stuff coming out in twenty twenty one.
Wonderful. Well, thanks again for coming on our show.
Thanks so much for having me.
All Right, that was science fiction author Becky Chambers, and she sounds really fun and pretty amazing. It sounds like you guys had have a really great conversation.
Yeah, we had a lot of fun. She was very kind to spend her time talking to me, and she clearly thought this stuff through and did her best, like make a universe that made sense. And he heard her say she really wanted to set it in our universe. She was not trying to invent new laws of physics. You're just sort of trying to fast forward hundreds or thousands of years to what people might do with our laws of physics. And I totally respect that.
It sounds like she did her research. You know, it sounds like she's pretty knowledgeable about these higher dimensional ideas. And did she just do a lot of research. Did she always been sort of a physics fan.
I think she was. Yes, She's been watching Star Trek and reading science fiction for a long time and that's led her to be curious about physics. And so kudos to her for doing her research. And also you can hear on the interview she acknowledges when she's at the edge of her knowledge and the things that she like needed a handway over, like at some point nobody wants to see like equations in a science fiction book, right, I mean, okay, I.
Do, I do.
Where's the appendix?
Is? I want the hardest science fiction possible.
That's right. This should be a paper and it should be published.
It should just be equation. It's the whole novel. Should just be one long equazy.
Hey. You know, I always say math is the language of physics. So maybe someday somebody will write pros and even poetry and songs in mathematics.
Oh well, there you go. We can always dream.
No, So she did a great job, and she totally acknowledged where she ran up to the limits for her knowledge and where she was inventing stuff. And I think she told a really fun story. I got sucked into and I wanted to be in her universe. So I think she did a great job, and I recommended to all the fans of science fiction out there.
Awesome. And what do you think she's trying to say? Like, what's the takeaway message from you know, interacting with all these different types of species and kind of closing closing the distances in our universe? What does that do to humans and the human consciousness.
I think she was just trying to imagine, you know, how humans would experience this other kind of universe, interacting with aliens and trying new things, and it's sort of like a travel novel writ large, you know, like going to Japan and trying weird stuff, and it sort of has that flavor of it. And I think she just try to like paint that on the whole galaxy instead. And you know, she could have made it like super alien. She could have made it like, oh my god, we go to this planet and they're all just blobs of gas. We can't even talk to them. We don't know if they're angry, or if they're just happy to see us, if they're just farting all the time.
They couldn't make salk.
Who knows, she could have made it super alien.
All their jokes are fart.
Jokes, and aren't all our jokes are our jokes too.
Yeah, that's the great common that's right.
But that's the thing is she wanted to find the commonality. She wanted there to be aliens we could relate to, and that was her constraint, because it's not that much fun to read a book where you find aliens and then you can't communicate with them at all. Right, there's no satisfaction there.
Well, it sounds pretty cool, so again, if anyone wants to check it out, it's called The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, part of the Wayfarer series, Hugo Award winning Wayfirs series by Becky Chambers.
So thanks to everybody who's been sending in your science fiction recommendations. Please keep it up. I'm reading those books and if one of them strikes my fancy and we can get the author on the podcast and we will do more of these episodes.
And thanks again to Becky Chambers for being on the podcast. We hope you enjoyed that. See you next time.
Before you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge That's one word, or email us at Feedback at Daniel Andhorge dot com. 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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