Embedded - 408: Room In Your Heart for Your Robot

Episode Date: March 31, 2022

Machine learning engineer and science fiction author S. B. Divya joined us to talk about artificial intelligence, robotics, and humanity. Divya’s first full-length book is Machinehood which has been nominated for a Nebula (as was her novella Runtime). You can find more about Divya on her website (sbdivya.com) or on her Wikipedia page. Divya also co-hosted EscapePod, a podcast of science fiction stories.  Transcript

Welcome to Embedded. I am Elysia White, alongside Christopher White. Robots, Artificial Intelligence, Nebula Awards, and Science Fiction. This week we have S.B. Divya, the author of the 2022 Nebula-nominated book, Machinehood. Hi Divya, thanks for joining us. Hi, thank you so much for having me. Could you tell us about yourself as if we met in the hallway of a large technical company? Sure thing. So I am an electrical engineer specializing in signal processing and machine intelligence. I've been working as an engineer since I graduated from Caltech in 1996 with

a brief break to do a master's at UCSD. And about eight years ago, I embarked on the journey to become a professional science fiction and fantasy author. And I'm currently in transition and kind of in semi-retirement from the tech world and focusing on writing. And you have a podcast. And I'm the co-editor in 2017. And I am about to retire because it's been seven years and it's eaten a lot of my reading time, which I'm looking forward to reclaiming. So you'd say podcasts do suck up a lot of time. Sorry. They are definitely work for sure we want to do lightning round where we ask you short questions and we want short answers and if we're behaving ourselves we will not ask further questions until later are you ready sure let's go science fiction or speculative fiction? Speculative fiction.

In what year will the singularity occur? Probably sometime in the next couple decades, if it occurs at all in the way that Kurzweil describing. I think it depends on your definition. I know it's supposed to be lightning round, but if we're going by the Kurzweil definition, yeah, I think he's got it right. It'll happen in the 2030s or maybe the 2040s. If you could take a pill to enhance your abilities, what would it do? Improve my memory. on a scale of one to ten where one is something entirely pointless and ten is the last slice of cake on earth where do you rank the oxford comma let's make that let's make that a nine i know like i gotta think about that for a second like is a cake level like it's pretty close well good

we can continue this podcast then. I was worried about that answer. Would you rather work on robotics or machine learning? Machine learning. In your home, would you rather have a robot or an AI? That's a tough question. I think it depends on the level of AI, but I'm going to go with robot for more utility. Follow up to that. Favorite fictional robot? Hands down, R2-D2. Yay! Yay. Complete one project or start a dozen?

Complete. All right. Let's go to a non-lightning round question because, well, I guess I could have asked this. You wrote a book. Could you describe it? You know, like 30 seconds or less. Yeah, I wrote a novel called Machine Hood and the log line is basically, well, the log line I like to use is it's Terminator meets The Hunt for Red October, but featuring an all-female cast and a lot more realism in terms of AI in the future.

All right. Yeah. All right. There's so much in the book that I'm not sure you can give it a short description. No. It's pretty complex. And the ideas in the book are pretty complex. You separated weak AIs and strong AIs. What's the difference? nebulous and for maybe not reflecting what a lot of people, especially in the general public, think of as AI. But it started with the difference between computation that has

the ability to do complex tasks versus computational ability to generalize learning for a multitude of different types of tasks. So weak AI being the former, so a chess playing software is considered weak AI because it's really good at chess and not really good at much else. And strong AI or what a lot of people are now talking about as artificial general intelligence is something that is more like human or animal intelligence in that it has different modalities, different applications. And in my novel, I even moved away from both of those because I figured by 2095, there's going to be even different terminology and really who knows. So I went for sentient AI because I think that's really the holy grail of the public conception of AI is we want, you know, the R2D2s and C3POs who seem to think for themselves and have some degree of artificial sentience. There's going to be some spoiler discussion possibly while we talk about the book a little

bit. I just want to warn people that if you haven't read the book, we might reveal a few things, but we won't try to reveal major plot point stuff. It's pretty complex. I'm not sure I could sum it up enough to spoil the book. The weak AIs in the book, to me, like sitting here right now in 2022, if I had a weak AI of the capability of those, I would think, wow, we've done it. We have strong, powerful AI. So what we expect now and what we might expect later might change too. I think the goalposts are continually shifting, honestly. And I don't think we're that far off from the, you know, the personal agents or assistants that I have in the book. We're probably going to get that, you know, within the next 30 years, maybe even much, much sooner. Because if you look at the speech processing capacity of all of our home assistants, right? Google especially, but even Amazon and Apple are getting pretty good

at understanding context. And that's only going to keep improving as natural language processing technology and databases continue to grow. How much of the AIs in the book were based on your personal experience working with machine learning versus research into futurist ideas? I'd say 80% was based on personal knowledge and 20% at most based on futurist ideas. Cause I have a lot of my own futurist ideas of where AI is going just based on the work I've done and papers and research that's happening, which I'm keeping a close eye on even though I'm not currently actively working in the field. As we get to more ascensions in our artificial intelligences, does that mean that how we treat robots truly reflects on our humanity? Or will we treat them like slaves until they overthrow us? I think, yeah, right. And I think, you know, on the plus side, I am not the only one in science fiction having this conversation and not the only one in industry either having this conversation. in practical terms today are looking at ethical AI in terms of machine learning and business intelligence and how we're using people's data. Privacy and bias. Privacy, bias, commercialization, all of those things. But there are more and more people starting to have serious conversations

about as AI gets more complex, what are our ethical responsibilities? What are the rights? AI is writing poetry and creating art. AI is driving cars. So, you know, the lines are definitely getting blurred between human level intelligence and machine level intelligence. And so, and not just intelligence, but capacity to be creative, which was a thing that we used to think was purely human. And so it's like, you know, what about ownership, copyright, liability? Now we're starting to get into legal frameworks and outside of just exploitative capitalistic endeavors. And so I think we do need to start thinking about this. And hopefully because we're thinking about it, we won't go down the road of slave labor uprising. And we will instead really think about how we choose to treat and interact with the machines as we try to build sentience, consciousness, self-awareness, you know, all of those things into the software.

It's funny that we do talk a lot about how we treat robots badly. But if you talk to folks at iRobot, when Roombas are sent back to be fixed and somebody says, oh, we'll just give you a new one, people get so attached to their particular vacuum because it has what they see as a personality. Talk much in your book, or I haven't seen much talk about how we might over-anthropomorphize the robots such that we treat them too much like they're sentient and not enough like they are objects. That's how they're going to get us. But maybe that's how they should get us. I mean, in some sense, if you think about ecology and the amount of e-waste, getting attached and working towards the right to repair and reuse what we have might be a good thing. Rather than treating them as disposable objects. And it's similar, and this was an analogy I made in the book that maybe not everyone agrees with, but I think it's similar to the way we treat our pets. They are living creatures. They're not human beings, but we certainly get attached to them. And I don't think anyone wants to practice detachment with their animals. And I don't think anyone would say one dog or cat or bird is replaceable with another. They do have personalities. And even from a software standpoint, a neural network that is allowed to continue adapting is going to learn your house all over again. It has to learn your

habits all over again. They're not able to just take everything from the old one and replace it in the new one because the new one has new capabilities and features that it needs to incorporate. It's like waking up with new sensory organs. You're not going to be the same person once you've incorporated those into your daily life. And so, on the one hand, it sounds, you know, ridiculous to say that we have feelings for these objects. But on the other hand, I think it's very natural. And I think that relational aspect of how we interact with the things around us is part of what makes us human and not a bug. It's a feature. Yeah, I agree with that. And I think there are things non-technological that we do that too.

Like for myself, I have a bunch of musical instruments and I wouldn't want to part with any of them. And some of them are 30 years old and I will repair them forever. Uh, and have personnel to me, they have personalities because they sound a certain way or feel a certain way. Uh, and so I'm attached to them in a different way than I am to say my coffee maker. Um, I was thinking paintings paintings we have some paintings that i would that i am very attached to but uh yeah yeah so i can see that and it's it's a it's both easy to imagine us getting attached to ai things and also easy to imagine us doing that incorrectly. The interesting thing is, you know, we're starting to build AIs that are reflecting that attachment back to people, especially in terms of robotics and companionship, right? So then I think the question starts to get even more weight because we're simulating attachment from the device,

and now, you know, you have two-way sadness. And we had a guest on recently, Jorvan Moss, who basically that's why he got into robotics was because he wanted to create a companion for himself. And there's some fear there that we may become, it may be easier to attach to something that reflects, is able to learn and reflect us so well and lose the attachment on other humans. There is, and I think I'm going to always go with the why not both that's fair angle yeah there's no reason that one has to replace the other i mean as as many many poets have declaimed um and humanists love and the

capacity for love is pretty large possibly infinite and so you can have room in your heart for your robot companion, as well as your friends and family that are human. You mentioned detachment, which reminds me that Buddhism was a large part of the book. Yeah. Is that part of your life or was it specific to the book? I do not practice any religion. However, philosophy, especially the philosophical underpinnings of both Hinduism and then Buddhism, which grew out of that, were a large part of how I was raised. And I love philosophical discussions. I love getting into metaphysics. And I find that there's a lot of interesting aspects of Buddhist philosophy that

appeal to me. And so I felt like it made a nice framework, especially for the conversation around artificial intelligence, because of Buddhism's attitudes towards what it means to be alive. Can you expand on that? So both, you know, both Buddhism and Hinduism look at things like reincarnation in the sense that it is possible for a human to come back to earth as something not human. And that's where I think it gets really interesting in the intersection with machine intelligence. Not that you have to believe in reincarnation, but the idea that, you know, your ancestor. And so from that comes, I think, this attitude that we should treat all objects around us with reverence, whether or not they are alive in a biological sense. And from that, I can step over to robots and software intelligence and say, why should we not also then treat these with respect? And I think that, you know, that plays very counter to Western monotheistic or even Abrahamic religions that espouse human exceptionalism, the idea that

God made human beings to be special and different from everything else in our universe. And I think, I don't know, I find that to lead to a lot of the types of behaviors that we are struggling with and we are dealing with the consequences of today and probably through the rest of the century. Changing subjects a bit, you were an engineer and now you're pursuing a writing career. Are you worried that writing will become a chore now that it's your job? Thankfully, I am not. Mostly because I did did engineering for so long. It's been 25 years since I graduated from college and I could go back to it at any time. But I think because of that, you know, every day with

writing, like the actual act of sitting down and writing stories feels very much like icing on the cake of my life. And I'm so appreciative that I get to do it at all. The chore aspect, and I wouldn't even call it a chore, I would say the stressful aspect of being a writer comes on the side of publishing, sales and marketing, you know, all the grungy parts of the business side of writing. The act of being able to just sit and do research and build new worlds and think about the future or the past, I can do that all day long and I don't expect that it'll ever get old. But if it does, since this is my second career, I can always retire from that too. Machinehood is your first full-length novel. Is that right? Yes, that's correct.

Is it your first published or your first first? It is my first full-length novel that I ever completed. I have one other that's kind of in my ash heap, metaphorically speaking, that I think I got about two-thirds written and then bailed on. Did you sit down one day and say, okay, I am going to write a book? Or did this come out of a series of short stories? Or how did you go to the, okay, I'm going to finish this whole book? So Machine Head is my first novel, but it is not my first book and i actually got started in the world of short stories and had several short stories published and then a short novel which in the industry we call novella and that's about 110 pages it's called Runtime. Yeah, Runtime came out in 2016 as a standalone book. It's very slim. But it kind of got me on the path to publishing a full length novel because of Runtime, I signed with an agent, and that emboldened me to sit down and actually finish writing a novel. It's something that was always part of my career path as a writer. I started in short stories because I was working full time and writing

short stories takes, is a lot faster, let's say, and allowed me to improve on various aspects of the craft, like characterization and plot and world building and descriptiveness. And so I worked through some of that. And then after Runtime came out, since I had an agent and I really wanted my agent to be able to shop a book around for me, a full-length novel, I decided it was time to write one. But this particular one did grow out of a short story that I had written that wasn't working for my readers. I workshopped it. It still wasn't working. And I realized the reason why was because I was trying to cram too much into 30 pages and it really needed to be a book. And as I started developing the idea for it, it changed pretty drastically from the ideas in the short story to encompass a lot of these themes around AI and labor, because in part that was heavily on my

mind around 2016, 2017. And in part because up until then, I hadn't written any short stories on that subject. And all my friends were like, you work in AI, how have you not written an AI story? And I think the answer was, I couldn't do that in a short story. Like I needed 400 pages to talk about everything that I wanted to say on the subject. Your book is pretty long. Was there any pushback to make it shorter? No, it's not super long it's not what uh we call a doorstopper which would be you know five six hundred pages it's not epic fantasy length

it um i mean it's maybe a a smidge longer than ideal for a thriller but but yeah, it was like 430 pages, something like that. So not too bad. Do you want it to be shelved in the science fiction fantasy area or in the thriller section? I mean, why not both, but if only one? Right. I'm really happy on the science fiction shelf. I have been reading science fiction since I was nine or 10 years old, and it has been my favorite genre all my life. So I am super proud to be on that shelf in bookstores and in the libraries. When did you shift between being an avid reader of science fiction and say, hey, I want to write this myself?

It started in eighth grade English class. Wow, okay. We had an assignment in class to write a short story and then swap it with a partner and critique each other's work. And I wrote a short story with a cliffhanger ending, like a super duper cliffhanger ending. And my friend read it and she gave it back to me and her feedback was, this is not an ending. You need to write the rest of the story. So since I had one reader, that's all it takes, who said, please give me more. I continued to

work on it. And I think I wrote several chapters. And then my friend moved to Texas and I actually mailed her chapters. So, I like, bless both our parents for putting up with having to mail, you know, 30-page printouts to each other. So, I kind of, you know, I dabbled in writing through high school. I wrote a couple other short stories. I wrote some poetry. I wrote a novella in college and a short story for a creative writing class at Caltech, but she loved my short story. Unfortunately, it got lost somewhere on a Caltech server. Like I have no hard copy, no digital copy of it. But then, you know, things got serious with my science career, then my engineering career, and I put aside writing as something I would do when I retired because it doesn't pay very well. And I was busy trying to do well in the tech world.

And I would occasionally go back to it. I have notebooks littered with, you know, the first five pages of different stories that I never finished. And it wasn't until 2013 that I really kind of sat down and said, life's too short to wait for retirement. I'm going to try to actually write and get published this time. How long did it take? To write or get published? From. How long did it take? To write or get published? From decision to publication. Yeah, from the decision point, I was super lucky. It took about a year.

I signed up for an online science fiction and fantasy class through Gotham University because it was completely asynchronous. So I could read the lecture notes and do my work and review the other students' work on my own time, which was often lunch hour or like when I was running some automated test or really long simulation at work. And then I think I submitted a story for the first time in September of 2013 and of course, you know, was frownfully rejected and then sold my first piece of flash fiction in February of 2014 and it came out that June. And that's pretty quick. But like I said, a lot of it was luck.

And I think a lot of it honestly was as the stories that I write today after an additional two decades of life experience. And so I think that that helped a lot in terms of both the types of stories I told and all the writing I did in between. I mean, I wasn't writing fiction, but I was journaling and blogging on LiveJournal for, you know, a good chunk of my life. Did the short story you published then, do you still, is it part of your anthology? It is.

It's called Strange Attractors, and you can still find it online at dailysciencefiction.com. So, yeah, and I still really like it. I mean, it's flash fiction, which is basically a four-page story. It's like the shortest of short stories. And my second publication was also a flash fiction piece and it was published in nature and i was so excited i know i'm like i started out as a physics major and i was just the irony uh but also you know amusement of getting into nature as a science fiction writer rather than a scientist was was not lost on me.

But I was still super happy to say I got published in nature. Oh, yeah. But how do you submit to nature? Nature has a futures feature in every issue. And I think it's the last page of the journal. And it's a one-page short story. So you have to fit it between 800 and 900 words, which is a really specific limit. But it's open submissions.

Anyone can send it in. You said you started in physics. Did you switch away from it? I did. Halfway through, I switched away from astrophysics to computational neuroscience. And there's a complicated set of reasons why I did that, and not all of them were good reasons. But I'm pretty happy with the choice that I made in the end. Astrophysics, it sounds good, but then when you do it, you realize there's only like a job and a half.

And it's in Antarctica. Yes. That was a big part of it. I was like, I, so my dad was in academics. He was a professor in the business school of strategic management. And so we, you know, we moved every six or seven years until he got tenure. And I just didn't want that for myself. You know, I have friends who continued on in astrophysics and I'm just like, yeah, I think I

made the right call because I really like where I am. I really like the job security and the money of the tech industry. That was all really good. And frankly, that is a lot of what enabled me to make the shift into writing because I needed that financial security to be able to kind of jump ship and do something that makes, you know, $10,000 a year if I'm lucky. Going back to the specifics of the book for a second, if that's okay, there's a lot of ideas in this book. And I was kind of, I don't want to say overwhelmed, I'm just incredibly impressed as I continue to read it that there's new ideas. And some of them

are continuations of things that we see happening now, but there's a lot of really novel things you put in there. And they're put in such a way that they feel natural. It's not like some of the stories from the 1950s where it's like, hey, I had eight ideas and the story is about the eight ideas. There's no story here. Did you start with a story and have ideas come in to kind of fill it out? And okay, this idea fits here and this makes sense here or did you have a selection of okay these are some futurist things i'm thinking about uh and build the story on top of that it's an iterative process um i like to talk about the story building triangle where the vertices are plot, character, and world building, at least for speculative fiction. And so each of them relates to the other and each of them

affects the other. So with this particular book, I started with some core ideas, a couple of core characters who came out of the short story. And then I spent several weeks on the world building. Then I went back to the plot. And as I developed the plot, I had to change the characters. And then both of those, you know, had some effect on the world building. And so you kind of end up iterating between the three till you get to a stable point where, you know, everything works and makes sense with everything else. And so some of it is me, the author, driving things in a direction that I specifically want to see or explore?

And then some of it is just natural consequences, especially when it comes to plot and character. People have to do things that make sense. You know, reactions have to and consequences have to kind of naturally derive from certain plot elements and so then sometimes you know you have to sacrifice certain aspects of the world building to fit with those things two of the big ideas that are along the side of the the main point which is the the ai stuff um are deep interconnectedness like taking social media way beyond where it is now, and also being able to modify ourselves through either temporarily through custom-designed pills or through kind of Android sort of stuff. When you put ideas like this in,

do you think of them as warnings sometimes? Or do you think of them as warnings sometimes? Or do you think of them as this is just the natural endpoint of where this is going? Do you have, or is it just this is what the story needs? I was going more for the natural endpoints. I was really thinking about where we are today and trying to extrapolate those in interesting directions as to where we could be. And whether or not it's cautionary, I think depends on the reader. I don't know if you've been privy to any of these conversations, but there's people, especially in the science fictional world, talking about some of the stuff that the tech industry is embracing as features from science fiction they read or watched when they were younger that were intended by those authors

to be cautionary. And yet now everyone's like, yay, shiny, let's do this. And so, you know, as a writer, I tend to shy away from giving people easy answers and saying, this isn't the good bucket, this isn't the bad bucket. I would much rather make things complex and nuanced. And I know that's not always popular, but, you know, rising questions rather than presenting easy answers. Yeah, I appreciate that. One of the things that I felt you did put in the kind of bad bucket was the idea of living by a tip jar and the gig economy and micropayments done by strangers who appreciate watching you... Do whatever. blow things up um do you have positive feelings about that or is that exploitive

i didn't intend to put that in the bad bucket i I intended that, again, to be an extrapolation of what I'm seeing happening. And that is, you know, the gigification of a lot of work, but also the, you know, the requirements to monetize everything, your hobbies, you know, your everyday life, everything you put on social media. And so I think a lot of people see it as being in the bad bucket and I'm fine with that. I'm not trying to extol the virtues of the gig economy. I just wanted to kind of present it as if this goes on, you know, and we end up here and that becomes an acceptable way of life. How do you feel about that? Is that the future you want?

And so, yeah, so it's, you know, it's reality. And it's like, are we living in a dystopia or, you know, are we living in what we've all decided is an acceptable fashion? We should add that to lightning round. Are we living in a dystopia? Yeah. Depends on who we talk to. Do you think that your book described a dystopia or just an acceptable path from where we are now? I think it is a plausible

path from where we are now. And I think people would accept that way of life in the future, just based on what they've already accepted today. And I'm not a strong believer in realistic dystopia. I think that's kind of an oxymoron. I think dystopias really need to take things to one extreme. And they are very clearly in the bad bucket as written, otherwise they wouldn't be dystopias. And so I don't see machinehood as a dystopia. There are plenty of people living good, solid, reasonably happy lives in that novel and it's just a future yeah i think if uh you wrote about today to people 20 or 30 years ago i mean that's but that's how this novel feels to me it's like okay this is this is plausible to me some of things these things i'm

not super happy about but you know if they came to pass and some of them I am, and so that's life. And so I think that makes for a more realistic and plausible setting. The way science fiction has gone, a lot of people expect it to either be utopian or dystopian. It's either the shiny future where everything's great or the grimy dark future where everything is terrible. And one of my goals with this novel was not to hit either of those extremes and really kind of go down that middle line and say technology has its good points and it has its flaws. And, you know, we choose which of those we accept as society. Going back to writing, it sounds like you do quite a bit of plotting out what you're going to do. You're not one of the seat-of-the-pants writers. But once you have it written, how many revisions is typical? So that's not entirely true of machinehood. Okay.

Being my first complete novel, the one on the ash heap was 100% pantsed for NaNoWriMo. And for people who don't know what that is, that's National Novel Writing Month. It's like a fun thing people do in November where they try to write a novel's worth of words in one month. Did you succeed? No, you know, I was on track, but then my two-year-old got norovirus. And then I got norovirus, which took me out for like a week. And that was it. You know, that's 25% of the time. So I got 75% of the way there.

And then I was just so despondent that I abandoned it. I eventually went back and read it and I was like, it's not half bad, but it's not the thing I wanted to finish either. And with Machine Hood, I spent a lot of time on the world building and the characters and very little time on the plot. I think I had like, you know, the basic beats written out and that was it. And then I just dove in and started writing it. And it was a catastrophe of epic proportions. I had to revise it wholesale probably three times. And then there's always more revisions after that.

Versus the novel I'm currently working on, which will be out next year. I spent a lot of time outlining it up front. I spent three months just working on the outline. And so I only had to lightly revise it once and then kind of a medium revision after my publisher and editor got their hands on it. But it was a much smoother process. I am not a fan of revisions. There are writers I know who hate first drafts and get them out of the way as fast as possible. And then they just love revising and, you know, perfecting the book. I am the opposite. I would like to keep as many of the words I've

written as possible. I still throw plenty away when I have to, but I would much rather plan stuff out up front. And the problem with machinehood was I just didn't really know how to plan a novel. I'd plan my novella a little bit, but I literally it was the same thing where I just written a couple of sentences about each act and then, you know, it's good to go. But turns out a novel is not just four novellas strung together. It's a whole other kind of animal. And so I had to learn by doing with Machinehood. But thankfully, my agent was amazing and gave me copious notes and was patient as I reworked the book a couple of times and really happy with the final product. Can you tell us anything about your upcoming book?

Yeah, the upcoming book is a bit of a departure from both Runtime and Machinehood, which are these sort of very grounded, realistic, near-future stories. The upcoming book takes place a thousand-plus years into the future, involves post-humans who are vacuum-adapted descendants of humankind living in space. There are human beings as well and involves, you know, interstellar space travel, but not in the usual way. I'm just not going to spoil it. And, you know, invented physics and a lot of genetic engineering, directed evolution, themes of still centers on themes of humanity, but also really what it means to be a living conscious entity in this universe and kind of extending the themes of machinehood in terms of what's our responsibility toward the larger things in the universe and not just ourselves. In machinehood, there was an element of responsibility

regarding what ethicists should be doing. Do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah. especially in the tech industry, especially in biotech, pharmaceuticals, in addition to AI. And biotech has, I think, a near and dear spot in my heart because, you know, my first college internship was at Medtronic. My first job was at Masmo, which is a medical devices company. And so biomedical engineering and biotech have been topics that I've been really interested in. And also I think just computational neuroscience, I had to do a good amount of biology in parallel with the engineering. And so I feel like, you know, we've, we had the opioid crisis, now we have the pandemic. are actually encapsulations of tiny micromachines and nanomachines, are something that they have to do in order to prevent getting sick from bioengineered pathogens.

And I came up with this after reading some concerns from, you know, climatologists and epidemiologists that with global warming, we're going to see more pandemics in this coming century. And it happened a bit faster than I thought, because in my book, I predicted like the 30s and 40s for that too, just like the singularity. But here we are. And, you know, and I figured pandemics would be a really good driver for the decentralization of biotechnology because distribution chains are a big problem when you need to quickly access vaccines and antibiotics and antiviral agents. And lo and behold, that's starting to happen. And so there's a lot of ethical quagmires when it comes to medicine and biotech. And so I really did want the book to be part of that conversation.

Do you ever feel like you wrote stuff and you're like, oh, no, not yet. I didn't mean that. It's happened with both books with runtime. Um, one of the core ideas in there was a strong anti-immigration sentiment and some, uh, anti-immigration laws. And, uh, I wrote that in 2014, November, when President Obama had just signed the DACA, the Dreamers Act. And then it got published in May of 2016. And I was just kind of watching it like, I did not expect this to happen so fast either. But, you know, I think it's an occupational hazard of writing near future science fiction. Like William Gibson has talked about that and how hard it is because, you know, the future keeps coming faster and faster and trying to stay ahead of it is a challenge. It's interesting you mentioned Gibson because that's the feeling I have when I read your book.

It's okay. Not that it's necessarily inspired by Gibson or, you know, following on or anything, but it's the same kind of environment. Like, okay, this is a near future that's plausible and a little bit scary. And some of it doesn't make sense yet, but it probably will. That whole thing kind of resonates with me as I read the book. Well, thank you. That's a compliment. You are getting compliments from other authors as well. It's the Science Fiction Writers Association that does the Nebula Award? That's correct. And where were you when you heard that you were nominated for Nebula? I was doing a very mundane thing. I had just dropped my daughter off for ballet, and I was pulling into a parking spot and I got the phone call and the the only

reason I answered it because I these days generally make a policy of not answering unless I have caller id I'm like if it's important it'll go to voicemail I got a phone call from someone I knew from the SFWA and um but I wasn't expecting her to call me so i had a sneaking suspicion once the phone rang and i saw who it was because this has happened to me once before runtime was also nominated for a nebula and um and that time i really couldn't answer the phone because i was teaching science lab um at my daughter's charter school and i was like in the middle of lab the phone rang and I was like oh my gosh who actually I that time I didn't even know who it was I was like random number middle of class off to voicemail you go and then um and then the same number called me

back or she might have left a voicemail man Man, I can't remember now. It was six years ago. But this time I was like, okay, if it's nominated, I'm going to get a call from a random number. And so when I saw it was from someone who works with the SFWA, I was like, ooh, this is probably it. And it was. So I was sitting in my car in a parking lot, you know, not the most glamorous location to find out, but it's still exciting. It doesn't really matter when, where, or how. When are the awards announced? The awards ceremony is at the end of May. It's traditionally held during the Nebula conference, which I love attending because it's very small and tends to be mostly professionals. Um, but this year they have decided to go virtual. So I'm probably going to have, uh, some kind of little party or event pandemic willing, cause there's two other finalists, both in the young

adult category who are in the Southern California area. So we're thinking we might get together and get dressed up and celebrate or commiserate as necessary. When did you realize this book could maybe be in that category? So the SFWA site, which is sfwa.org, has a recommended reading list every year that is accessible to the public. And anyone who's a member can put items on that list. And so I saw that my book was on that list and, you know, had a respectable number of upvotes. So I figured it was in consideration.

That doesn't necessarily mean you're going to get on the ballot. But that was enough to give me an inkling that at least it was on people's radar. So many science fiction books, especially from authors who haven't published a ton, just sink into the ocean of fiction. How much did you think this was going to work? And how much were you like, well, I'll do it. It doesn't work. I still have engineering. I have not ever approached my writing that way. I think because I have the luxury of it being a second career, I did not have the pressure of this has to work as a source, as a primary source of income for me. And I continued my engineering work up until the beginning of last year. The only reason I haven't gone back to it is because I developed long COVID after getting

sick at the beginning of last year. And I'm just not able to juggle multiple jobs at this point, though people keep asking me to come do data science for them. And I really, really wish I could because I do enjoy the work. And it's lovely to be able to part-time both because it just engages different aspects of my brain. But I think because I have that luxury, I can keep writing and I will go through traditional publishers as long as I can, just because I am not fond of the marketing side of it all. And so I'd much rather somebody else deal with all that than me. But if I had to, and I really wanted to publish something that no one else did, I think I have, you know have enough knowledge and tools now to go the indie publishing or self-publishing route as well. So the size of

the success is not the metric by which I base my desire to keep writing. That makes sense. I mean, because it is so hard to break into the science fiction market, it's good to be able to write just because I feel like writing and not as, you know, as my primary source of income and to pay the bills. That's much, much harder. Yes. You have a lot of creative work these days, especially while that feeds back into the gig economy and the tip jar and all that kind of stuff. You do feel like to go the traditional route is really, well, I don't know where I'm headed with that. People are kickstarting their novels.

Yeah. How is that a thing? I couldn't have predicted that. Well, let's make Sanderson a huge exception. That's true. And he wasn't just kickstarting a novel. He's kickstarting a company. He has 25 employees he's paying out of that money to do a fulfillment service for him as well. And I do actually have a friend from Caltech who wrote a fantasy trilogy, and the small publisher folded before the third book could come out,

and she kickstarted the self-publication for the third book. So, you know, kickstarting works really well if you have an established audience and fan base who's willing to throw money at you. If you're Brandon Sanderson, that's a whole lot of money that they're willing to throw. Most of us are not that famous, let's say. But, yeah, it is, you know, I really don't want to see it becoming an expectation that authors should be kickstarting their own books because much like with self-publishing, it's a huge time burden during which I'd much rather be writing. But some people love it. And if that's what they want to do more power to them, I just don't want to see it becoming like a, an industry standard thing. Well, how much can you kickstart

for this book? Well, it's like what you said about marketing. I mean, it's a ton of work. And if you don't have people to help you with it, it takes away from what you really want to be doing, which is writing more stories. And if you only have time to, 10% of your time is spent writing stories and 90% is spent marketing, that's probably not something that's enjoyable to a lot of people. Yeah. I think most writers prefer the writing, but you know, I know writers who, who enjoy that gear shift to coming up with their cover design and hiring editors and, you know, looking at their advertising plan. Like they like having that control because when you work with a traditional publisher, you don't have a lot of transparency or control with a lot of those items. You just kind of

take what they can give you. So, you know, there's definitely two sides to that coin. Definitely. And I mean, publishers do take quite a bit of the revenue from a book. So there's a good reason to go independent if you're willing to live with that independence, both the good and bad sides of it. Right. Let's see. John Shook asked, how you got your first novel published? I feel like we've kind of covered that, but do you have any advice? Because I think what he's asking is how does he get his first novel published? Right. Since he's asking how does he get it published, I'm presuming he wants to go the, quote,

traditional publisher route where he does not want to publish it himself. And I would say, you know, step one is write the book. You have to have a finished manuscript to shop around. That's too much work. Right? That's the big thing. And don't just write the first draft and expect that the agent and editor are going to help you polish it up. They're going to help you, but it needs to be as polished as you can get it up front. That doesn't mean you have friends who are willing to read and who can give you a reasonably constructive criticism, do that. Have that manuscript in hand, then you have to go

shop for an agent first. So you're going to be submitting your manuscript, not in full, usually the first few chapters and a synopsis, and you have to write a bang-up query letter. These are all skills you're going to have to learn. Query a bunch of agents, hope you sign with an agent. Then the agent may or may not have you revise that manuscript, after which they will take it out to editors at publishing houses. And then you get to start collecting novel rejections and and so that's really that's the process i was lucky that i signed with an agent because of the novella and so i didn't have the novel ready and i was very upfront about that with the agents that i queried with the novella but. But you do kind of have to follow that path.

There are a few smaller publishing houses that allow unagented submissions, meaning you just chuck the entire manuscript over the transom at them. But if you want to try for the majors, you kind of have to go through this route of the gatekeepers. There are some sites where you can enter contests. Often you have to pay a small fee to enter the contest. Is that legit? Did you do any of that? I did not ever do any of that. Some of them are legit, but I would look very carefully at what rights they are taking because some contests will pay you the prize money and that's all you're ever going to see. And then they're going to take whatever back-end profits they get from your book and you're not going to be able to sell it to another publisher. So I would be wary, especially for novels of contests and what they're asking and taking from you. With short stories, less fraught, you may still be signing away all the rights to the short story, but you might not care so much at that point. Did your involvement with the Escape Pod science fiction podcast affect your writing or

your ability to get an agent? It had no impact on me getting an agent. I think it helped improve my short story craft, especially the first year. I started at Escape Pod as a slush reader, a colloquial term for low-level associate or assistant editor who reads submissions as they come in and filters out the ones that are obviously a no before passing them up to higher level editorial staff. And that process of reading lots and lots of short stories and, you know, very quickly having to gauge what works and what doesn't helped me learn how to improve my own short story writing. And so I think that's where Escape Pod really helped in terms of my writing craft and publishing history. Escape Pod was a big, big, big podcast.

It is a big, big- It is, right. It is a big, big podcast. It's multiple people. It's a whole organization, right? It is now. It was started by one person yeah back in 2005 it was started by sarah ely and she at that time strictly bought reprint short stories so meaning they had been published in magazines elsewhere usually print magazines and then she re-ran them as audio on the podcast um kind of like what LeVar Burton does now with LeVar Burton Reads and his podcast. But then it grew over time. It grew in audience. It grew in terms of what we publish. For a while, it was like reprint short fiction, book and movie reviews,

that kind of thing. Now we focus 100% on short stories, but we also publish original short fiction. And we do reprints of longer pieces sometimes, so multiple episodes, so novelette and novella length. And we dropped all the non-fictional stuff will really just focus on one cool short story every week, typically speaking. And it's grown in size because the number of submissions we get has grown. So we've had to have more and more first readers as our, I guess, as our reputation has broadened within the industry of writers. So if you're thinking about writing a book, John, maybe what you need to do is sign up to be a slush reader. No, I would say sign up to be a slush reader if you're going to write short stories. It is not going to help you so much with writing novels. Like I said,

novels, entirely different beast. And if that's what you want to do, go ahead and do that. Even if you're working full-time, you know, when I started on this whole writing journey, I had a toddler and a full-time job, and I would just sit down for an hour each night and let myself do something related to writing. Sometimes that was actually writing, sometimes it was reading, which is a really important part of being a writer, and sometimes it was research or revision. And so even at, you know, an hour a day, if you put down 500 words in an hour each day, you're going to end up with a book in a year or two. And there is NaNoWriMo, which I've done. It was really fun.

It was hard. I did it with a full-time job, and I only took one vacation day. Yeah, that's because you came home from your job and then just wrote continuously. Well, sometimes I wrote while at the job. Oh, did you? Yes. Well, yes. Well, I mean, like an interesting conversation would be happening and I'd be like, okay, I could work that into this chapter.

Totally. Always steal from real life. It's like the best inspiration for fiction. And then don't let anybody you know actually read your books because you don't want them to know. File off the serial numbers, make enough changes that they don't recognize themselves. I like to do character pastiches, you know, take this piece from this person and this other piece from this other person and mash it all up into a whole new character. And that way, I figure, you know, I'm good because there's no actual person who has all of those things in them that I personally know. I did that. And the two people I mashed up were electrical engineers I had worked closely with.

And they both read the book and they both knew. Yeah, you need more than two. You got to do more than two. Yeah. Yeah, you need more than two. You got to do more than two. Divya, it's been wonderful to talk to you. be horribly abused. But I'd like people to remember that there's lots of good that have come out of these things too, especially when it comes to quality of life, clean water, clean energy, medicine, connectedness, you know, for all the downsides of the internet, there's also a huge amount of connectedness and love that comes out of it. And so take the good with the bad and hopefully try to steer your work toward the good side, whatever that might be for you personally.

Our guest has been S.B. Divya. She wrote the book Machinehood, the novella, Runtime, and a number of interesting short stories. Links will be in the show notes. Thanks, Divya. Thank you so much. Thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting. Thank you to John Shook for pointing me in the direction of machinehood, which I quite enjoyed. And thank you for listening.

You can always contact us at show at embedded.fm or at the contact link on embedded.fm. And now a quote to leave you with. Seems fair that it's from the author we spoke with. From S.P. Divya in Machinehood, Technology was as habit-forming as every escapist feel-good drug.