Dear Hank & John - 284: Brain Secretions Worthy of Consumption (w/ Charlie Jane Anders!)

Episode Date: April 5, 2021

How do we know if our ideas are original? Are there any serious efforts to colonize asteroids? Why aren't there any space books for teenagers? When does contemporary fiction become historical fiction? How do I write more than a few pages at a time? What unnecessary things do you do to make life more enjoyable?  Hank Green and Charlie Jane Anders have answers!If you're in need of dubious advice, email us at [e-mail] us for monthly livestreams and an exclusive weekly podcast at patreon.com/dearhankandjohn.Follow us on Twitter! twitter.com/dearhankandjohn

Hello and welcome to Dear Hank and John. Or I'd like to think of it, Dear Charlie Jane and Hank. It's a podcast where two brothers and occasionally just two friends answer your questions, give you DB use advice, and bring you all the week's news from both Mars and AFC Limbo then. Charlie Jane, do you know what the hardest part of having a party in outer spaces? I can think of many things that might be the hardest part, like the drinks floating away. I don't know.

What is the hardest part? You can't plan it. That was wow. I'm like the queen of dead jokes, so that was like next level. That was next level. Oh my God. No, what you mean is that that one really deeply, in a lot of ways, was not good.

It wasn't my favorite, but we both write science fiction, and so I wanted to have something that is space-e. And you've also, you're going well and truly to space in your next book, which I'm excited about. I've only read your Twitter thread about it, but it sounds very up my alley. And I also just love how you think about like, we're gonna be operating inside

of the Troops of Science fiction, but we're gonna do it our way. Yeah, I tried to have fun with it. Victory's greater than death. It's, you know, I'm trying to do like the whole kind of guardians of the galaxy, Star Wars kind of like pew, pew, pew, stuff, but with like more of a YA feel and like just a little bit a little bit different, a little bit bringing it up to speed kind of bringing it up to the present.

Right, bringing it up to speed like with awareness of like how we currently understand the world a little bit better. Yeah, I hope so. That's the goal. Yeah, it's funny. It's funny when you're like, I really like a space battle, but I also like to recognize that violence is bad. Yeah.

And you're like, so where do we come to like, war is not, is super not good, and we should not glorify it, but also can I get some space explosions happening? It's a balancing act. It's this total balancing act, and I actually feel a responsibility to kind of not glorify violence too much

because I feel like, you know, when you kill someone that's actually really bad, you know, I've been told, I don't know, no personal experience here, but, you know, I've heard from you the grapevine that murder is bad. Yeah. And so.

It's one of the things that people tend to agree on. Yeah, so I tried not to just be like, murder, like, you know, I feel like in a lot of these movies and TV shows, people just like die right and laugh that you're supposed to be like, oh well, that's taken care of, you know. Yeah, you know, you can sort of like put a mask,

put a stormtrooper mask on them and they don't count is the general idea. And I'm a little bit guilty in my second book of throwing some, you know, just sort of face with security guards into danger, but I don't think that I don't think that I killed any of them. Well, that's good.

But the fact that I can't remember is probably not great. Yeah, I mean, you know, I actually, really this is something that kind of snack up on me as I was writing Victory's Grader the Death. I have a scene halfway through the book, Minor Spoiler, where the main character does have to kill some people. And she has a complete meltdown afterwards,

which I didn't see coming. I didn't just like, okay, she has to kill these people. And then I was like, nope, this, she's going to, this is going to really mess her up. But she's going to be feeling this. And so I ended up that being the second half of the book, kind of, in a way that was like her dealing with that. And it was like something that I didn't really expect. Yeah, one of my favorite things about writing fiction is how your characters can surprise you and you put them in situations

and you think you're gonna go one direction with it and they just like will not let you. They're like, I'm not gonna go one direction. I'm gonna go new kids on the block because I'm old school. Sorry, I had to, I just had to. This is actually a problem I have with my young characters who operated inside of, you know, basically now timeframe rather than future space times is making them have taste

in music that is accurate to them and not to me where I'm like, they shouldn't like queen this much. Oh God. Yeah, I struggled with that. And so I had to like have people send me like me like a bunch of playlists and I was like, wow, Rico and Astie, all right, I'm signed up. Research is important. Research is important.

Do not. Oh God. Yeah, you wouldn't put something in your mouth if you hadn't researched it first, so don't put it on the page. That's... Wow. I like that. And you know, you don't know when it's gonna be poison.

Exactly. You really don't. You know, you're out in the woods, you're like, there's seas berries or colorful. Yeah, exactly. There's so many things that you'd like to write about, or that I like, that I like to write about, and I'm like, oh gosh, I should probably have somebody

who knows about this, read it, and they're like, boy, Hank, I'm really glad you reached out to me because everybody who knows about this would have gotten very they're like, boy Hank, I'm really glad you reached out to me because everybody who knows about this would have gotten very mad at you for this. Story of my life, you know? It's like, I mean, they're not people getting mad at me, but my friends being like, you know, you might wanna actually know what you're talking about

a little bit. God bless friends. Just a little, you know. It's good to have those friends in your life. So is this your, is this definitely not your first book? How many novels have you written? I've written like eight or nine. Okay.

But this is my first young adult book, and it's like my fourth published book. I wrote like four books that never came out because publishing is hard. Publishing is hard. Do you, do you think about going back to them after having established a little bit of a career? Yeah, I do. And actually one of them I kind of turned into like a novella, which is a really long short story or a really short novel. I kind of cut it way down, cut out all the bad parts.

And that's now out in the world. But then the other three, I'm like, I'm gonna come back to them at some point, I think, especially one of them. I really wanna fix it up. But it's like one of those things where like, you come back to something that you did five, 10 years ago, and you're like, okay, this really needs a lot of work.

And it's almost gonna be as much work as writing a new thing. Like it's not gonna be just like little bit of tweaks and nips and talks here. It's gonna be like a lot of work, but I love it. So I'm gonna do that at some point. It's in the queue, I guess. Yeah, when I go back and I sort of like look at the things

that I, the fiction that I wrote before, I went through the process of like actually spending five years writing my first novel. I really liked them. And now I read them and I'm like, oh, like the reason no one would publish this is because it's bad. I mean, I think when you come back to something

that you wrote a long time ago and you're like, oh, this isn't as good as I remember, it's because you've leveled up. It's actually a good thing. It shows that you've gotten better and that your skills have improved and you're, you know, I often say that nobody ever really gets better at writing. They get better at spotting their own bad ideas and their own bad habits, you know?

Yeah. And so like, now I just, when I'm writing something, I'm like, nope, not going to do that thing again, you know? I'm like, oh, what if instead of doing this thing that I do that's terrible? I do this other thing that might not be terrible. And then, you know, I think that you just get better at kind of like catching yourself, making bad choices. Do you wanna answer some questions from our listeners, Charlie Jane?

For sure, I'm excited. I'm very excited to hear your opinions on all of these things. This first question comes from Taylor, and this is, and really look, this may be a little bit of an excuse for me to, I wanna talk to more science fiction authors. And so if I hit a lot of science fiction, you questions, maybe that's why.

This is from Taylor who asks, dear Hank and Charlie Jane, how do we know if we have an original idea? I wanna start following my dream of becoming a writer, but how do I know if I have an original idea? Can I even determine if my storyline is free of accidental plagiarism? Is my idea fresh? Is it new? Is it worthy of being consumed? Notebooks? What is this? I don't know what this means. Notebooks not needles tailor. Oh, I see, tailor, because it's tailor. You use needles to tailor. Okay. You guys need to use this for a tour. Okay.

Um, I, sometimes I have actively avoid books that I know are gonna be similar to what I'm writing right now because I don't want to think I'm ripping someone off and feel that pressure. And I also don't want to actually do it where it's like, oh, that's nice. I should have that thing in my book and then people are gonna be like,

well, this is very derivative. But almost never does it matter. Do you agree with me? Yeah, it doesn't matter. The thing is, what, you know, ideas are not the hard part. Ideas are the easy part. There's a million ideas out there, and most of them have something in common

with other ideas that have already been used. Yes. And like, you know, when you think about the things that we tend to love in pop culture, like Star Wars and like, you Wars and other stuff like that, it's usually just a bunch of old ideas kind of swish together in a new way. Star Wars is literally just like some old samurai movies in Westerns and World War II movies kind of swish together. I think that what's not original is the idea,

but it's your kind of personal take on it and what you put into it for yourself. Like, you know, writing is not really about like coming up with like pitches or like, you know, cool concepts so much as just like, you having a personal story that you wanna tell that you're using this idea as a vessel to contain. You're pouring your heart in a way. I don't want to sound

happy, but you're pouring your heart, your experience, yourself into this vessel, and that's the that's the thing that you're producing. That's worthy of being consumed. For some reason, I hear that in like a worthy of being consumed. This planet is worthy of being consumed. This planet is worthy of being consumed. My mind, my mind secretions are worthy of consumption is a very science fiction author way of talking, talking about how books work and stories work. So do you think there is anything to, so I've heard this, that what you're really trying to do is like when you're sort of like reading around your topic, you're not trying to like find ideas that you're gonna steal, but you are trying to make sure that you aren't going over ground that is well-trot, so well-trot that it's almost like anybody sort of,

like so in a genre specifically, that it would be a little like, oh, you know, that was sort of what we were doing in this space 10 years ago and now we aren't doing that anymore. For sure. And I think that there's, that's a mind field. I mean, there's like tropes that are kind of overused and like, you know, we are blessed now to live in an era where people are super, super aware of tropes. Like there's TV tropes that's like a website that catalogs every trop and where it's been used.

And there's like, Even some that are like, it's like it happened twice. It's like, it's on TV tropes now. It's insane. And on Twitter, and people will, I'll see people pitch their books

by listing the tropes in the book. They'll be like, this book has like friends to enemies to lovers. This book has like, and they'll just list the tropes for you. So you know what the tropes are before you even read it. And you know, I think that's awesome. I've done a little bit of that myself. I think that, you know what the tropes are before you even read it. And, you know, I think that's awesome.

I've done a little bit of that myself. I think that, you know, this is why you show your work to people. This is why you share your work with people. This is why you have like a writing group in a community who you can kind of like talk to and kind of like, you're never going to do your best work if you're kind of sitting in a bubble by yourself. I think you need to like, you have need to be in communication

with other human beings in order to really produce work that's gonna be meaningful. Yes, that's absolutely true. And also like we can't, as individuals be aware of, of as much stuff as like six individuals can. Like six people know, maybe not six times as much as one person, but like five times as much. And you know, I think being familiar,

it's funny, you know, like, I, there's work that I find really rewarding right now that turns a lot, that, that like sort of like takes the well-trod ground and does it in a totally different way. And you, you can tell that these people have read a lot of science fiction, like Martha Wells in the Murderbot Books, where you're like, okay, like you, you, like there's been a lot of murder bots in science

fiction, and you are like, I'm going to do this in a deeply different way where the murder bot likes to watch TV and is very anxious. Yeah, exactly. But I don't think that that's necessary. I think that that's kind of candy for people who are really into the genre, but there's also lots of people who are sort of, like, there's lots of genre work that doesn't need to turn tropes on its head. And that can sort of like mash things together

that are old ideas, but like if you put two ideas together, they could, two old ideas together, they can suddenly become quite new. Yeah, and the final thing I would say is, you know, don't overly obsess about like producing a product that is gonna be, you know, in a product that is going to be in the marketplace that people are going to either buy or not buy or the people. Especially if you're starting out, it took me a long time to get published.

I was trying to get published the whole time, and I'm glad I kept trying to try because that was a good experience. I was good learning experience. Don't forget to have fun and just create something that's meaningful to you Rather than just being obsessed with like some marketplace that's gonna judge your work because you know Yeah, by the time anything you write sees the public it will have gone through many many many layers of editing and You know people responding to it and submissions and all this stuff and so you will there will be plenty between you and that Yeah, and in the meantime if you're not having you will, there will be plenty between you and that. And in the meantime, if you're not having fun now, it's not if it's going to matter. Yeah. And the process of writing, you learn a great deal, even in just doing the project.

Even if it's not learning about how to write, even if it's learning about yourself and learning about how you imagine other people, learning about other people, like doing that kind of, you know, getting inside of the heads, that empathy work that is so necessary in fiction is super rewarding even if it's not a thing that becomes another thing. Okay, here's another question from Rebecca who asks, do you're Hank and Charlie Jane? Are there any serious efforts to build colonies or human settlements on asteroids? I know in NASA has goals to set up colonies on the moon in Mars. I mean, not bagg. Goals, I guess.

Goals. Has NASA or another space agency explored the idea of putting humans on asteroids? What kind of challenges would they face? I'm guessing there's no atmosphere there, so it seems like that would be a pretty big hurdle. My favorite polyhedrin is Dodeca Rebecca. Wow, that was a great sign off.

I love that. Oh my God. They work hard on the sign-offs. They know that we examine and we choose based on good sign-offs. I'm glad she didn't go with Trisky Decca, because I'm kind of superstitious. Yeah, so I think on the surface of asteroids will be a very bad place to live.

I think that living inside asteroids is totally doable. I think you could possibly live inside an asteroid. I'm not sure, like you wouldn't have much gravity. There might not be any gravity to speak of. This is the thing. Kim is down here, Robinson, solved this problem in 2312 by hollowing out an asteroid in a cylinder and then spinning it up

and make a giant ring, ring station. Which I like a lot. I like that version because it solves a lot of problems that we have like Earth is not a great place if you think about it. I like Earth. Long enough.

I'm a big son. Okay, I'm sorry. Let me all take that. Let me rescind my comment. This is a great point. Best planet by far. Do want to protect, but. Best planet I've ever lived on.

I mean, you know. Yeah. Definitely. So I think that Earth is probably a better planet than any, literally any other planet in the galaxy for us, because it's like, what we evolved for. But it's got a big, deadly radiation laser up in the sky all the time.

The weather does all kinds of crazy stuff. You don't know what it's gonna do. You can't really predict it, and also climate can totally change. We're not really in control of that. It's got like all kinds of like the earth can just like suddenly like start shaking and buildings can fall down. Like they're so like look on an average day, earth great.

But things can go wrong. I think that like if you lived inside an asteroid, you could control a lot of these things and people who lived inside the asteroid would be like, could you believe that those people just existed with that cancer machine up in the sky? That just mutated their cells all the time? This is how I feel.

I don't know. I think if you lived inside an asteroid, you'd be constantly worried about hitting other asteroids and like comments going by and solar fluctuations. You'd still be close to the sun. You still would have to be somewhere in the vicinity of the sun. You'd be in the asteroid battle, I guess, I guess.

Yeah. You'd be worried about the orch cloud. I don't even know. The orch cloud just sounds scary to me because it's got two o's in it. I don't know. I definitely could see some advantages to living inside an asteroid.

I haven't read that particular chemistry on the Robinson book yet. I heard it's great. But I can definitely see some advantages to living inside an asteroid because of being protected by all that rock around you. And you could probably, I mean, mostly what I hear people talk about is mining asteroids, right?

And that's what they're doing in the expanse. They're basically just mining these asteroids and living on moons and things to get at these asteroids and strip all the metals and minerals and things out of them. But I think mostly when people talk about asteroids, they talk about using them as just like raw materials to build our eventual space empire and stuff. Right. I think that, you know, definitely, I agree with you living on an asteroid would be bad, you know, would be uncomfortable. Yeah, very challenging. Most of them, yeah, you could literally accidentally jump off of, which you don't want. I suspect living inside an asteroid would be very, very hard.

It would be like every aspect of your life would have to be just like keeping this thing stable and keeping it going. Yes, yes. You would never be able to just like chill inside an asteroid. Yeah, I mean, you could, but somebody out there isn't chilling. Yeah. And the moment that they make a mistake, no one is chilling. Like, the spin slows down a little and everybody starts floating and you're just like,

oh, shoot, we gotta get the spin going again. Everybody push. Get those hapesters running. That's how it works. I'm assuming it gives Kelly Robinson's book. They're like asteroid hapesters. Yeah, there's a bunch of hamsters, but the hamsters breathe a lot. So then you have to scrub all their carbon dioxide out,

which is not easy. It's just a great deal. See, it's a complicated system. What I guess the point I'm making is your critique of Earth is that it's a complicated system, but I think any place that people are living is gonna be a complicated system. Yeah.

And if it's a complicated system, we built, you're gonna have all the problems that come with us building stuff, which is that we are like, well, that looks like the right kind of screw. I don't have an Allen wrench, but I have a quarter and I don't know. I'm just gonna, that's good enough.

It's in, it's far enough in. Somebody used meters when they were supposed to use feet and suddenly there's just a big hole. Yeah, exactly, humans. Yeah, humans. Whereas this thing takes care of itself as long as we don't mess with it too much. Which, we're not messing with it at all.

We're just totally leaving it alone. Yeah, it's all good. Yeah, absolutely. That's a big problem. Where do your people and victories greater than death live in space? I mean, they basically live on a starship for pretty much most of the book.

They're like, it's like very star trekky, very kind of like artisanal, they're just like zipping around in this starship, you know, fighting bad guys and saving the galaxy. And, uh, you know, it's like that kind of book. Actually, I have a question I wanted to ask because that is, that is in this vein. It's from Selma who asks, dear Hank and Charlie Jane, there are two categories of books about space. One, space books for small kids, and two, space books for adults.

Why aren't there any space books for teenagers? I think more space books for teenagers, pumpkins and planets, Selma. First of all, I got some good news. No, I don't know. Yeah, first of all, there are space books for teenagers, and we'll talk about some of them. But second, most importantly, Charlie Jane,

can you tell me, like, what is different about writing a space book for young adults than writing a space book for adults? I think that, you know, in general, when you're writing for young adults, you want to keep the pace really fast. You don't want to have like a hundred pages of like discussing like orbital mechanics and delta V

and like, you know, the physics of, you know, how you transverse the light speed barrier and you know, you don't want to have like pages and pages and pages of jargon and people just like, which I hate writing that stuff anyway most of this time. I don't really like to write hundreds of pages of people talking about like darkened to each other. Like I know I've read books like that and I know people love those sorts of books, but that's not really me. That's not as a writer.

And so I think that that's actually kind of liberating. I think that when you're writing for teens, you have to keep it really personal and emotional. And the thing about being in space is you don't really survive in space on your own for very long. You need a crew around you, you need a star ship, you need people who are going to keep the thing flying and stuff. And so for a big star ship, you're just going to be a big crew and the teenagers are not necessarily just going to be like doing their own thing all the time. They're going to be helping to keep the ship flying. And so keeping it really personal, keeping it focused on the kids and having the kids drive the story is a little bit of a challenge in that kind of setting.

And it's definitely not a, it's a challenge that you can get past, but it is a challenge. And you know, I think that there's ways around it. You know, a lot of space books for teens I've seen will start out with the, the teenagers stealing a spaceship and going off on their own. And that's like how it starts. And I kind of wanted to do the more Star Trek thing. So there are actual adults on this spaceship with the kids, but but the kids are still getting to do their own thing and have adventures and kind of they become they very quickly become

very important in keeping the spaceship going because there's kind of only a skeleton crew and they need all the help they can get and blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah. Yeah. What are some other, what are some other space books for, for teens that you know off? I mean, the classic one is obviously Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, who is a person who has expressed some very upsetting views.

And I don't really know if, if people are wanting to read him anymore. There's also one that I read recently that I really loved. Actually, a couple that I read recently that I really loved. Once in Future by Amy Rose Capeta and Corey McCarthy, which is like King Arthur in Space in the future with like evil corporations and dragons in Space. And like, it's got a lot of fantasy elements,

but it also does have the Space Ships and Space Battles and like it's got a lot of fantasy elements but it also does have the space ships and space battles and like zooming around the galaxy and I loved that book. I thought it was so fun and so just such a lovely fun ride. Also, I would say, you know, Illuminae by J. Chris off and Amy Kaufman and also they also just wrote Aurora Rising, which is another duology, I think. So there are actually space books for teens that are actually very popular. And it's like, it's one of those things that's like a myth that like there are no space books for teens. But they actually are a fair number, including obviously my victory is greater than death.

But I was a little scared to get into it because there was that myth out there that this isn't a thing that exists. And I think, you know, not to get on my soapbox, but we want kids to be excited about space and space exploration and science and, you know, exploring the cosmos because they're the ones who are going to have to do it, you know? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I, there's plenty of space that I read when I was a teen. Like, I read Doon as a teen, and it felt very much to me like a book

that was designed to be appealing to young men specifically. I don't know if that. Doon, reading it isn't as like sort of a 40-year-old, I read it maybe five years ago again, and I was like, oh yeah, this is like, this is really gai. It's really sort of like focused on patriarics and traditional, like, you know, if you're writing it in the 60s, like it's based on like how society was structured, which

was a bit of a turn off, but still a really beautiful book. I read a book called Losers in Space. Good title. 10, 15 years ago. And it's a basically, it's basically about a bunch of kids who want to become social media stars. So it's like got a little bit of, it's got a little bit like, and this was even before like social media started and was a thing. It was when it was written. And so it's very cool to sort of see it in some ways predict what people will do to get attention, especially when they're young. And then a little bit of like we have to rely on each other actually now because we've created an actual real problem for ourselves and we have to be a team and get through this

even though we're not entirely sure if everybody's on the same side as each other. And maybe some people are worse than you think. Nice. I loved that. It was very weird. And I feel like I've never heard anyone else who's ever read it. And the other thing is, well, maybe we should save this

because there's another question about John. Here's a question from Cheyenne, who says, dear Hank and Charlie Jane, I work in a library. And before that, I worked in a bookstore. Something is always sat in my head that nobody seems to have a simple answer for and always seems pretty pressing. At what point does contemporary fiction become historical fiction?

At what point does historical fiction graduate to become a classic? I have never once been to Wyoming, Cheyenne. Wow. Genres are fake. Genres are fake. I mean, you know, genres are real if you want them to be, but they're also fake. And you know, wow, I mean, I don't think contemporary fiction ever becomes historical fiction. Well yes, yes.

Because historical fiction is specifically someone writing about the past. And if you're writing about the present and then the present you were writing about becomes the past, it's still not the same thing. It's still, you know, it's just dated. Right. It's dated contemporary fiction. Yeah. And I feel like there's something different in like,

when you're in 2021 writing about, you know, 1890 or 1990 or whatever, you are writing about a time that is distant from you and you were consciously trying to bring it to the reader and conjure it up as like, this is a historical setting and like things were different in 1990. We didn't have all the things that we take for granted today. It was a hard, terrible time. We had to watch television as it was broadcast. It was like a whole thing and other stuff. There was other stuff, but

that was the main thing that was different. And, you know, I think that if you're writing about the time that you're living in, you don, I think that if you're writing about the time that you're living in, you don't have the assumption that you're kind of conjuring up a historical time for the reader. You're just like, here's this is now. And, you know, also, I've noticed that nobody writes contemporary fiction lately. Like, it just doesn't exist.

That's not true. Because people don't want to write about this time we're living through. I don't know. I just, the last several, like, literary kind of like mainstream novels I've read have all been set in the late 20th century. Right. I have seen this. Yeah, little fires everywhere. I was like the big thing and that was

late 20th. Yeah, and it's very weird to read these books about like the times when I would like it's about grown-ups who were were grownups when I was a kid. Like those books always, they're the ones that make me the most uncomfortable. Where I'm like, oh God, all the grownups when I was a kid were grownups. Which I like, I know my parents are grownups now, but back then they weren't people.

And none of my friends' parents were people. They were just grownups. They weren't like living lives and making mistakes. They were, yeah. Anyway, yeah, that does feel like a thing, but there are definitely people who are writing about now. Though I think writing about right now is very hard. And I've, that's gonna be so hard.

Yeah, in my opinion, write out. I'm like, no way would I write about right now. I'm gonna write about 200 years from now if I write another fiction book. I think 20 years from now, if I'm lucky enough to still be writing books 20 years from now, I might write about now. Like I might write a book set in 2020 or 2021 in 2040, you know, because by that I'll have some perspective. When we know what any of it means. Yeah, exactly. What do you have to put? I mean, I had to write a new short story recently for something and I was like,

I had like a throwaway line where I was like, yeah, this was before we spent all our time indoors. And like, you know, that was like what I, yeah. That was what I threw in there just because I was like, it was a person talking about their life and I was like, okay, I'm just gonna, just kinda scoot that in there.

But I don't know. I feel like it would be really hard. But I also think books, in terms of books become a classic, that is a thing that is like kind of impossible to control and kind of, oh sure. You're actually very unlikely. Like, you know, when you look at the number,

like you might look at like, oh look at all these books that are classics, there's like hundreds of them. But that's like 0.000001% of books that were even popular. Like and most books that are like beloved and like best selling and like embraced and like carried around like little talismans by people today

are gonna be forgotten in 20 years. It's just the way it is. Oh yeah. And it's sad, but it's life. Yeah, John and I once did, once did this exercise where we were like, what's, we wanted to see if we could do it on idea for a podcast. It's a good idea for a podcast, except for some things. And the idea was, let's read the books.

Once a year we'll read a book. That is, that was the top selling book exactly a hundred years ago. Oh. And so like bestseller lists existed back then. And you read, and so like we picked it up, and the first one was like a garbage monstrosity of racism. It was like just straight like everything about it was like it wasn't like there were there was racism in it. It was like it was like, it wasn't like there were, there was racism in it, it was like, it was racism. Like, that's all, that's the whole story. I feel like we couldn't have taken it on as like two white guys. But the bigger problem was, it wasn't that good of a read.

Like it wasn't that interesting because like, hastes have changed dramatically. And like, it was the biggest book in America and nobody has ever heard of it. Yeah, I'm not surprised. I mean, you talk about, I think even you talk about books that were big in the, you know, 20, 30 years ago, people will be like, the what now?

Yeah, yeah. And, you know, the books that become classics are often the ones that just kind of get slowly discovered over time and passed around and, you know, the hype has died down. It's almost like we require that of them. Like there has to be a better story than it was really popular. Like we want more to within that.

We want there to be a deep story about like, it was underground and then the author was tortured and died or something and then, and then and I don't mean like factually tortured, just like lived a couple of lives. I was like, you know, this is getting really dark. That's it. You know, because I think that we want a story about our stories to some extent.

But and I also, like I'm disappointed in some of the books that are classics to be honest with. Oh gosh, yeah, a lot of, I mean, I think we're right at the point where a lot of books that have been held up as classics are gonna to be honest with. Oh gosh, yeah, a lot of, I mean, I think we're right at the point where a lot of books that have been held up as classics are going to start just fading away. Yeah. Like catcher the rye, like catcher the rye is going to just fade gently away. Yeah, word of the flies can go off a cliff, please.

Oh gosh, yeah. I can't believe they made me read that. Yeah, no, so many books they made me read in school now. I'm just like, nobody should ever read this again. Once a lot of your fans get past a certain age or get past, you know, or no longer around, it just gently fades away. I do think that books that become classics

are often the books that are kind of weird. Like, because, you know, they were maybe too weird for people at the time, but then people afterwards were like, whoa, this book is really weird. And like, you know, what the heck, this book is just, what's going on? Let's make up a bunch of high school kids read this. Exactly.

Pretty much. God. Charlie Jane, I have another question. It's from Duncan, who asks, do you're Hank and Charlie Jane? I'm an aspiring writer, but I mostly just write very short stories about my D&D characters and their backstory.

I really want to be able to make more substantial and proper fiction rather than one to three-page short stories. Part of my problem is that I find myself struggling to sit down and actually write what I have in my mind. Any advice would be very appreciated. Panic and pumpkins, don't can't. No, don't can, don't can. Don't can!

Don't absolutely can. And you know, I bet those one to three-page short stories about your D&D characters are awesome. And like the backstory, I love backstory. I feel like backstory gets a bad rap. But I love that. And like, you know, the thing is that there's a point at which backstory becomes front story or whatever we call it, the, the, the, the, the story. Yeah. And you know, I feel like you're kind of working, probably working your way up to finding that. You're just getting in that direction. And thinking about, if the backstory is interesting,

then it's gonna make people want to do things like in the present. It's like, that's what I love about backstory is that if my parents were murdered by murder hornets or possibly murder chinchillas, I don't know, some murder creatures. Let's possibly murder chinchillas. I don't know, some kind of murder creatures. Let's say murder chinchillas, murder chinchillas killed by carrots.

And so, you know, and so I've just, what does that make you do in the present? Does it make you want to wipe out all the murder chinchillas? Does it make you want to protect everybody else's families from the murder chinchillas? Do you want to just wear like all clothes made out of murder chinchilla fur? This is getting a little dark out of it now.

It's so soft. But I feel like you're stretching your creative muscles and that's really awesome and exciting. And it's for the part of like, you don't feel like sitting down and writing, don't sit down and write, don't sit down. You know what I do? I will sometimes, and I hate how I can't even imagine how this looks to other people,

and I don't care because I'm a terrible person, but I will just walk around town, I'll walk around the city with my phone out, and I'll just talk into my phone sometimes. That's awesome. And I'll just have like a blank email, and I'll send an email to myself with like just a giant wall of like me talking, and like then later I'll sit down and I'll be like, okay, there's some stuff in here that I can push together. Like, I wrote like a whole essay like that the other day.

So, you know. That's awesome. I have never, I've never, I've never even thought to try and write linearly like that in voice because of how much of a mess I tend to be on the page. But I think that writing backstory is a thing that has propelled me because if I know more about the character, I know more about the decisions they're going to make. I know more about what positions I can put them in that are going to be really interesting

and hard for them or empowering for them or whatever. Like I want it to be when I know more about that character. And so like writing, I did this with all of my characters, I would like write a thing that happened to them when they were younger that I wasn't gonna put in the book. It's just like something. It's a short story that's just for me, that's just about this character,

and I actually did end up putting one of them in the book because I liked it too much. And John, my very successful novelist brother, gave me two pieces of advice when he read the book the first time. One of them was, you should take that out, and I didn't. I left it in.

And I don't know if this is okay to say, but my favorite part of D&D is writing the backstory for my character. Like straight up, it's me alone being like, this person's gonna have this drama and it's gonna have this adventure in their past and their father was this kind of profession and just to know all that stuff. And then I like sat on a play D&D and I'm like,

this is fun, but not a fun of throwing that backstory was. I just, it makes the characters richer and have like all that backstory. And like you just know them in a different way. Like, you know, I always say if somebody has never changed in the past that they can't change in the present. Like you have to show how this person has been changing

so you can keep seeing them change. And like, you know that, I think if you just sit with those backstories that you've been writing a Dunkan, that you will find that, you know. There are questions forming in your mind about like how is this person gonna keep moving forward and changing and how are they gonna be different

from this the next time we see them or whatever. I also think for any DMs out there, one of my favorite things that a DM ever did was like, I'm gonna have each of you have a thing that I want you to bring up at some point during the campaign and I want you to write it down beforehand. It's just like one attribute of your character that no one else knows about. It's a secret that your character has. And you have to reveal it at some point in the campaign. And I was like, oh, that's frickin' great. That's awesome. I love it. Yeah. Anyway, that

reminds me, Charlie Jane, that this podcast, one of our sponsors, very weird coincidence, is Murder Chinchilas. They feel as if they've gotten a bad rap, so they're buying podcast advertisements now, they do not want their skin to be turned into coats, and they promise to not murder anymore, though I'm not sure if I ever one trust them. I feel like they should change their name

if they're really serious about not murdering anymore. Like maybe they should just like, why are they so attached to being called murder chinchilla? Maybe consider a rebranding, like higher, higher branding consultants, you know, who I'm a picture is being some kind of badger with like a little like waistcoat. Badgers are the best branding consultants.

As an amazing coincidence, this podcast is also brought to you by Astorite hamsters, you know, they're really, really fast and they're doing it for us. They're keeping our gravity going. They're running on their little treadmill and you know, send them pellets, send them from some freaking pellets so you don't float away, okay?

People come on. They can't stop. I'm so happy that we're getting so much sponsorship from rodents these days. Like, I didn't, I'm, we've must have gotten on somebody's radar. It's very good news for the podcast. This podcast is also brought to you by Weird Books,

Weird Books, just a little bit too much right now, but in the future, they might be classic. People turning it to roaches, it's a thing. And our final sponsor for this episode is Brain's Decretions worthy of consumption, which, you know, I feel like they should be at your neighborhood grocery store, like there should just be like a rack of brain secretions worthy of consumption, which, you know, I feel like they should be at your neighborhood grocery store. Like there should just be like a rack of brain secretions worthy of consumption. And it should be just like, you drink it and you're, you just get like

thoughts and ideas like the future, my friend. If I could bottle that, that'd be so much better than writing books. If I could just like squeeze my brain and like put it in bottles and put it in grocery stores, I feel like that would be the way to go, for sure. I worry what would come out the under other end of that process. I need the filter. I think you definitely need some kind of filtration system. Like all the gunk just goes into your like,

it goes into your grout. It just turns into grout. Good. OK, I think this is a really cute question. It's from Kyle. And maybe our, as I'm going to be our last question, because I do want to tell you some news from Mars. Kyle asks, do you surely Janine Hank what unnecessary little tasks like putting ice in your water or making your bed?

Do you do to make your life just a little bit more enjoyable? No sign off. Kyle says no sign off just leaving uncomfortably long silence here. I can't do it. I'm incapable of doing that. If you're listening to this, you could just hit the pause button and have as long as an uncomfortable silence as you want. Perfect. So I have a thing. I have a thing that I do that I only do for my own personal comfort just to make my life a little better. And I probably have several, but what I have is in the mornings, I have a special robe

that I wear. It's like a big blanket. It's like it weighs like 13 pounds. It was swag from a YouTube event for some reason. And I will put on this stupid, giant blanket robe and I will walk around my house like the Michelin man. And then when the morning is over, when like morning time has ended

and I'm gonna come out to my office, I take off my robe and I put it on a big wooden hanger and I put it back onto the, and I only do this during the winter when it's cold in my house. I put it back on the thing and it's a nice sort of like Mr. Rogers-esque ritual. I've always loved that about Mr. Rogers where it's like,

here's my transitionary time. I'm going to take off my coat and put on my sweater and change my shoes and I'm like, yes, yes, ritual. Bring me ritual. I feel like the thing that's been bringing me comfort, which I actually for a while was like, why am I doing this? Is like organizing my books. And like, I actually was talking to my partner, Anneli, recently, where I was like, God, instead of getting any writing done or answering the hundreds of emails that I'm supposed to be answering, all I did for the last three hours is just like rearrange the books on my bookshelves. Because I was like,

these books should be friends with each other. And I want to make sure all the authors, all the books by this author are in the same place. And okay, these books will all, and like, just like, just organizing the books. And like, I was like, this is a really, this is a huge waste of time. But for some reason it's making me feel really happy and calm and just making me feel like everything's gonna be okay. Kind of. Oh man, yeah. I haven't done that in a long time.

I really need to because it is lovely. It's just, yeah. It's like gardening, except you don't have to get dirty or as dirty because some of the books get dusty, but you don't have to get as dirty, you don't have to be in or as dirty because some of the books get dusty. But you don't have to get as dirty, you don't have to be in nature, which you know, yuck, but also, I'm just kidding, that was a joke. I love nature.

There's a thing to it that it's like, once I'm done, I'm done with gardening. You're never done. You're never done. Oh my God, it's true. And also, you can mess up and kill something, which almost never happens when you're reorganizing a bookshelf.

You do a kitchen running to the book that is actually disintegrating, and you didn't know it until you pulled it off the shelf, and then you're like, oh, I'm holding just a pile of weight flakes. This book that I've loved to cherish is just a flake pile now. And that's upsetting.

But that was going to happen at some point. Yeah. Like, you can't, you didn't kill the book, you just kind of found its corpse. Yeah, what I need to do is take off all the books I haven't read. Oh, I'm like, what are you doing here? What am I even, why are you still here?

But maybe not. Well, this is a thing. I think I'll read that someday, but it's not even on my pile and my pile is very tall. I have I'll read that someday, but it's not even on my pile, and my pile is very tall. I have hundreds of books that I'm going to get to one of these days. And like, you know, some of them I will, some of them, I will read the first 10 pages, and then be like, okay, now I feel like I've given this a shot, and I'm getting rid of it. But I feel guilty or about getting rid of unread books than red books. Yeah. Oh, let's go on. I have a little bit of Mars news that I want to share this week. I don't think Charlie Janus brought anything to do with AFC Wimbledon.

I can look up the legal on table real quick since it's been a couple weeks since John's been here. He's working his butt off on the Anthropocene Reviewed book. AFC Wimbledon is now not in last place anymore there. In 21st, they had a win. Woohoo. They won a game. It's their first win in an awful long time. Yay.

And who was it against? Who knows? Was it Bristol Rovers, the one team that's worse than them? It was not. Oh, that's great news. AFC Wimbledon won against North Hampton town who are also quite bad.

But go AFC Wimbledon. I believe in you. We believe in you. There are one spot out of the relegation zone now, so it is possible that they can do it. In the news from Mars, there is a new theory about where all the water on Mars has gone. So traditionally, the theory has been that it evaporated into water vapor and then that sort of floated up into the upper atmosphere, and then through various interactions with the sun's rays, it gets knocked off the planet.

And out into the further reaches of the solar system. But there is some new data that has been gathered by various missions to study how much water has been on Mars over time. So they were doing this by looking at the composition of the planet's atmosphere and crust, particularly the ratio of deuterium to hydrogen because deuterium is just hydrogen, but heavier. Hydrogen is just one electron and one atom usually,

but sometimes it has a neutron, and then it's heavy, and that will escape at different rates than regular hydrogen. And so you can sort of like, because regular hydrogen is lighter, it will escape more quickly. And so you can tell by this ratio, how much of Mars' water leaves every year, basically. I'm simplifying things. We have a side show up, is that about it, if you want to watch the whole explanation.

As the team presented out the 52nd lunar and planetary science conference, the different measurements they made both past and present could not be explained entirely by water escaping from Mars' atmosphere. So they have proposed that in addition to atmosphere escape, there's also water trapped in the minerals of Mars' crust. This also happens on Earth by the way. There's tons of water trapped in like clays

and hydrated salts and stuff. So they think that it might be down there, not as big like lakes, like aquifers, but just sort of trapped between little bits of stuff in the crust. And that could account from anywhere between 30% to 99% of Mars's water, which is a very wide range, but they don't have enough data to be more specific than that.

But they know for sure that it is a pretty big hunk, so that's very cool and interesting. Now, that isn't gonna be water, we can just suck out of the ground and drink. I was gonna say, that's gonna be a really hard to get at. You know, I like the aquifer a lot better. And there does look like there are a couple of aquifer-like things on Mars. They're probably very, very salty

and they're very deep down. So not something that we could easily drill to. By far, the way that we're gonna get water on Mars is surface ice, which there is actually a fair amount of. You just have to know where to look and be in the right place. So I mean, good news. There's good, but mostly interestingness.

Charlie Jane, thank you so much for joining me and talking all about books and science and science fiction. It was great. Thank you for having me. This was a blast. I can't wait for your new book. I have enjoyed your work in the past and so I'm excited to re-borrow it.

Yay, thank you. Congratulations. Victory's greater than death. When is it come out? April 13th. Nice. So you have to wait a little bit until after this podcast comes out,

but you can pre-order it wherever books are available for pre-order and as I could say, as an author of pre-orders are really, really useful. They are so important. This podcast is edited by Joseph Tunameda, it's produced by Rosie on a Halsey Rojas and shared in Gibson. Our communications coordinator is Julia Bloom,

our editorial assistant is Deboki Trockervardi. The music you're hearing now, and at the beginning of the podcast, it's by the great Gunnarola, and as they say in our hometown. Don't forget to be awesome!