Imaginary Worlds - 10th Anniversary Special Part 1

Episode Date: August 28, 2024

When I began my podcast in September 2014, I was mostly sticking with topics that I was familiar with like blockbuster movies and animation. I liked science fiction, but I was not as familiar with traditional fantasy, literature, tabletop games, and most anime. My understanding of the depth and breadth of imaginary worlds kept expanding, and when I thought I had reached the borders of the universe, I kept discovering more. This show has also become a historical archive of the development of sci-fi fantasy genres since 2014. I talk with journalist Rob Salkowitz and editor Diana M. Pho about how the film industry, comics, and publishing industry have been on their journeys in the past decade. Plus, we hear from listeners about some of the episodes that made an impact on them. This episode is sponsored by Henson Shaving. Visit hensonshaving.com/imaginary to pick the razor for you and use code IMAGINARY to get two years' worth of blades free with your razor – just make sure to add them to your cart. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show that's been chronicling how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief since September 2014. I'm Eric Malinsky. When I get interviewed on other podcasts and people ask me how I came up with the idea of doing Imaginary Worlds, I always tell them the story. Being a public radio host is a highly coveted job. I didn't know if I'd ever get to be one. But 10 years ago, podcasting felt like this new thing.

You could start your own show and just declare yourself a host. But I didn't know what my show would be about. Did a lot of brainstorming and I thought about all the stories that I would love to do for public radio, but I knew they were just too geeky. And that turned out to be the first 10 episodes of my podcast.

Also 10 years ago, when public radio would cover sci-fi and fantasy, not the people that I worked for, they were great, but other shows across the country, I noticed that they kept mentioning how much money these franchises made, as if there was no other way to justify talking about sci-fi or fantasy on public radio.

Although I ended up doing the same thing in my first episode because I was feeling insecure about doing a whole show about these genres. But I also wanted to set a different tone in my reporting. I used to think that when other public radio shows would cover sci-fi and fantasy, the tone of voice sounded condescending to me. I wanted to take these genres as seriously as the fans did.

And that was a story I would tell people. But after a while, I stopped mentioning the part about the tone of public radio because I noticed that public radio was starting to cover science fiction and fantasy seriously. And sci-fi fantasy genres have moved from the margins of popular culture into the center. In the last year, I began to notice something else. have moved from the margins of popular culture into the center.

In the last year, I began to notice something else. When I'm covering a new trend in sci-fi or fantasy, I keep referencing myself because this podcast has become something of a historical archive. But I've been covering these changes in real time. So for the next two episodes, we're going to zoom out and look at the big picture of how sci-fi and fantasy have changed in the last 10 years. And we're going to break it down into different forms of media. TV and film, comics, literature, tabletop games, and video games.

Each of these industries has a story to tell. Each one of them has been on their own journey for the last 10 years. Ten years later means that, looking in the mirror, I'm seeing a guy who is 10 years older. I know that if I grew a beard, I'd look even older. But shaving is a chore. I hate that feeling of irritation after I shave. And according to a recent study, two-thirds of men feel the same way. Hansen Shaving wants to change the shaving industry. Not through gimmicks like subscriptions, but through groundbreaking research on the impact that shaving has on your skin. When Hansen looked at other razors, they noticed a consistent lack of blade support. Basically,

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with over two billion plastic razors each year. So you can not only feel good while shaving with Henson Razors, you can feel good about using their razors. It's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that will last you a lifetime. Visit hensonshaving.com slash imaginary to pick the razor for you and use the code imaginary to get two years worth of blades free with your razor. Just make sure to add them to your cart. That's 100 free blades when you head to h-e-n-s-o-n-s-h-a-v-i-n-g.com slash imaginary and use the code imaginary. Let's begin with Hollywood. Where were we in 2014?

Marvel was in a hot streak. People were marveling, pun intended, that they had taken what were considered second tier superheroes like Thor, Captain America, and Iron Man and turned them into cultural icons. But what really blew people away was that in the summer of 2014, they put out a movie of Guardians of the Galaxy. Characters that even nerds like me hadn't heard of. The movie was a huge hit. DC was trying to compete with Marvel. They had just started their own cinematic universe with Man of Steel, directed by Zack Snyder. Snyder was the grand steward of this new slate of DC movies. Snyder was the grand steward of this new slate of DC movies. In fact, in 2016, I did a whole episode just imagining what a live-action Wonder Woman

movie could look like. Disney had bought Star Wars, but the new trilogy hadn't launched yet. I was so excited when The Force Awakens came out in theaters. I recorded myself before and after I saw it. I'm in line right now to see The Force Awakens. We got here about two hours early. The second J.J. Abrams produced Star Trek movie had come out, and that was the state of Star Trek.

There were no shows on Paramount Plus because there was no Paramount Plus. Streaming had not taken over TV yet. There were some superhero shows on the major networks, but the big sci-fi fantasy shows were on cable. The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones. Some of my earliest episodes were about the popularity of zombies and the politics of Game of Thrones.

We all know what happened next. There was an explosion of content. The studios couldn't fill up their streaming services with enough shows. It turned into quantity over quality. The media bubble burst. Rob Selkowitz is an entertainment journalist. He was in my episode about the future of Comic-Con in 2020, when I didn't know if there would ever be another in-person Comic-Con.

I began by asking him, where did Marvel go wrong? Marvel in its movie strategy was recapitulating the history of the Marvel comic book universe in compressed form. And by doing that, it actually also recapitulated the audience dynamics of and fandom of Marvel. Because when Marvel first started, it was a breath of fresh air Marvel Comics that is in the 1960s. They had a new approach to superheroes, they had a new and different art style. All of the characters were in some way connected, so they were inhabiting the same universe

and they would run into each into people and so this idea became really appealing and it generated fandom that took Marvel from being a career second string publishing company into the top seller by the early 1970s by engaging fans around all of these cool ideas and then as you trace Marvel into the 70s, 80s, 90s, it kept going back to that well and kept mining the intensity of its super fans to create more intrigue and more excitement around this very deep, complicated world. But the more deep and complicated the world was getting, the harder it was for people from the outside world to penetrate it. When you get to the 1990s and Marvel almost goes bankrupt in the middle of the 1990s, part of that problem

is that it was catering so exclusively to collectors and longtime fans that was having a hard time expanding its footprint beyond that. The Marvel movie universe went through that cycle and instead of it taking 30 years, it took ten years. It took people that were curious and interested and excited about the fun of it and by twenty twenty four people are talking about the amount of homework that you need to do the fact that that would have happened in ten years that we were seen such an explosion of content that would burn out the audience to the degree that it has in that amount of time, I think it would have been a little surprising. I think we would have thought it would have had a little bit more staying power before it turned into something that required that much fan intensity. I mean, the other big question has been the idea of the director driven approach versus the in-house style. Because I mean, many directors have complained over the years that Marvel

has this in-house style. Edgar Wright, who was, you know, a director with a very distinct style, he wanted to do Ant-Man very badly. He was supposed to do Ant-Man, and then he left because he said that, you know, Marvel would not accept his vision. It had to be the Marvel in-house version. At the same time, you know, Warner Brothers basically, you know, handed the keys to the DC Universe to Zack Snyder, and he's a director with his own very specific vision of the characters that end up totally dividing the fans. And then even with the Star Wars, the new Star Wars trilogy,

it was made by two different filmmakers who disagreed with each other as to what kind of story they were telling, which is also obviously a problem. So, I mean, which do you think has worked better in the last 10 years? The in-house style idea that the directors are kind of interchangeable or like a director-driven approach? I mean, I think this goes to the differences in media types between comics and movies

or any of the source material and the film versions. Movies are a very specific thing and it takes a specific kind of artist to make a good movie. Comics are serialized which means that their commercial goal is to get fans coming back month after month. So each issue that you buy needs to give you a satisfying chunk of the story, but the story itself can never end. Every time you resolve a story arc, you're in the middle of another rising arc that's coming up underneath it. That's the business model of how comics or any periodical medium, TV shows even, succeed different from movies. And it takes a different creative sensibility to make that work. So if you're trying to

bring that kind of vision and that sort of idea into movies, you're short-circuiting a lot of the art that a movie director in particular brings to their job. And we're starting to see that that's resulting in some incoherent, unsatisfactory, just plain weird movies that are out there because you're not letting directors do what directors are supposed to do. But I mean, I mean, as I said, like Zack Sanders, DC universe was really divisive. And I mean, more importantly to Warner Brothers, that Marvel was still beating them at the box office. And they basically canceled his universe. They're starting over again with James Gunn. He is going to be his vision. All he's casting all new actors, Superman and everybody else.

Do you think that Warner Brothers would actually be better off if they just ditched the whole idea of the interconnected movies and stopped trying to copy Marvel and they just went back to the way things were, where each director had free reign to do whatever they wanted with their superheroes and none of these movies were connected? Or was the idea sound? You know, it's not a problem to have an interconnected universe.

The problem was just the way that they did it. DC is very frustrating because DC has done this right. In the 1990s and 2000s, the DC animated universe with the Batman the animated series, Superman, Justice League, Batman Beyond, was an incredibly successful version of that, that told satisfying stories in half hour chunks that were for all audiences. Kids could enjoy it, adults could enjoy it. It could tell long stories, it could tell short stories, and it did that really well. Working together, we saved the planet.

And I believe that if we stayed together as a team, we would be a force that could truly work for the ideals of peace and justice. What? Like a bunch of super friends? More like a justice league. Then they did it again on TV. And, you know, in the timeframe that we're talking about, this was the heyday of, you know, the Flash and Arrow and the Arrowverse and all of that stuff. They really did succeed in telling engaging stories that were successful on their own terms, let's say. So I figure we could all use this to gather if anything ever happens again. It's a great idea Barry. Superman. So DC actually knows how to do

this and then when they went to the big screen, in the case of the Zack Snyder stuff, his particular take on the DC universe is the old stuff that made DC into a all-American brand in the 50s, 60s, 70s, you know, when we thought about Superman and Batman and all of that stuff, was corny and out of date. And that the only way to breathe new life and make this relevant to contemporary audiences is to make it tense and hard hitting and dark. And he drew, in my opinion, a lot of the wrong lessons from the 80s and 90s and the sort

of grim and gritty area of comics and the Dark Knight returns and all of that stuff. And assumed that this is what people wanted to see from DC and not the other sensibilities that actually gave it its original appeal. I mean, this guy's probably fought hundreds of thousands of other super beings on the other planets. He's destroyed, right? And we have to assume he's won. I don't care how many demons he's fought and how many hells. He's never fought us, not us united. I mean, one of the conversations that got so much steam, and I think probably the peak of it

was maybe Avengers Endgame, was this idea that superheroes had taken over the movies, they're destroying cinema, they're swallowing Hollywood, and you fans are to blame. You keep showing up for these things. When is superhero fatigue gonna finally kick in? And I got so sick of hearing that. Although they're not talking about anymore,

I mean, partially because maybe the superhero bubble has burst, I don't know. Time will tell. But how do you feel about that conversation and where we're at now in terms of this overdrive of superhero movies and this fear that it's somehow taken over and destroyed cinema.

Well, I think that that conversation is a proxy for other social anxieties. I mean, there is legitimate things to be feared about the huge amount of business consolidation in the entertainment industry. And the fact that three or four corporations now control the production, distribution, and revenue from, you know, 90, 95 percent of the entertainment that we consume is worrisome. And people need to be aware of that and thinking that all of these projects, like when Star Wars was first made, it was like an independent production. George Lucas is an indie filmmaker coming out of that tradition. And if you cut the ladder off and you don't allow for those kind of people to come up and make their splash, you know, as independent

directors, because those films simply can't get made, there isn't the money for them, there's the audience for them, that is something to be worried about for the future. And the other thing is that superheroes in the Trump era could be construed as sort of power fantasies for, you know, the people with the power make the rules and those sorts of things. And I think a lot of people were projecting political and social anxieties on what was happening in the movies. You know, I think that the summer of Barbie and Oppenheimer popped the bubble, like that we had two movies that represented very distinct individual takes on stuff. There's a lot more diversity and studios are seeing that there's a virtue to these 20, 30, $40 million movies again, or even big budget films that aren't tied to a franchise, finding an audience. So Hollywood goes in cycles like that stuff comes and goes. But I think the conversation that was happening at the time that you're referencing was in a sense part of a larger conversation that was going on that didn't just concern

entertainment. Well, what about Star Wars? I mean, there's been so much debate among the fans about where Disney went wrong in the last nine years. What do you think? I think Disney slightly misjudged what they had in Star Wars, and they assumed that what people were coming back for was the mythology when in fact they were coming back for the fun. They pushed a property with extremely broad appeal into a niche.

And it's hard to resist, and especially in the era of social media, where the most vocal fans are online and getting clout and getting views, maybe not representing the mainstream of fandom, but definitely being more vocal and being more engaged than everybody else. And so it puts the companies in a tough position trying to find that balance. I mean, in some ways have become full circle because like, you know, the explosion of content for Star Wars is kind of over. I mean, we know there's gonna be a Mandalorian movie, but I mean, we don't know what else.

There's been so many other projects that were announced just kind of disappeared. Marvel pumped the brakes. They basically, everything they had planned, they kind of postponed or canceled, and they just had to rethink a whole new strategy. DC is in a rebuilding phase. Even Star Trek is cooled a bit, but that's partially because its parent company of Paramount is in a lot of financial trouble. So yeah, have we come full circle?

We kind of in some ways back to where we were in 2014. No, because we've had the experience in the last 10 years, and hopefully people have learned some things from how much content the market will bear. But the risk that they were responding to in the last 10 years was FOMO. They didn't know if there was gonna be an audience for these movies or for these franchises. We're not just talking about the superhero franchises,

we're talking about like Godzilla, Alien, and Terminator, and all of these things, all of these properties that they've been sitting on. And they're like, Marvel is making zillions of dollars out of this stuff, are we missing the boat? Even if there's signs that the audience may not be interested in this, if we don't invest, if we don't flood the market with this stuff, are we gonna be and our shareholders gonna be the ones on the outside looking in saying, hey you guys had assets, why didn't you exploit them?

So I think that dynamic was what was driving the market and now we've kind of seen, okay if you get too far out in front of audience demand, you will have squandered a huge amount of money over investing in content that people aren't interested in. And then there's also a generational transition in Hollywood right now that part of why the superhero movies of the 2000s and 20 teens took off is because the fans who grew up with reading X-Men in the 70s and 80s and reading Dark Knight and reading all of this stuff were suddenly in decision-making roles and could

greenlight these movies and do them right and not make the mistakes of like the Batman movies of the 90s that were like corny and you know campy and and everything. No we're gonna do superheroes the way that we like to do them. And now that generation is starting to age out and being replaced by people that were younger, that have a different generational outlook on this stuff. They like different kinds of properties. They like different, different approaches. You know, they're looking to make their markets distinct from the

people that they're replacing. These things come in cycles and we've been through a full cycle in the last 10 years. They don't usually happen that quickly. From overinflation of the balloon to different aspects of a deflating or collapsing. You know, like we're starting from ground zero again right now. And it's like the new history of the pop culture medium really is being rewritten starting. This is, this could be year zero of the next phase of the cycle. Besides covering movies and TV, Rob Selkowitz is also an expert on comics. When I began my podcast,

I thought comics were synonymous with superheroes. I knew there were indie comics and non-superhero graphic novels that would come out occasionally, but I saw them as critically acclaimed labors of love. Rob says in the last decade, comics has expanded way beyond that, especially in the US.

Changes were already happening 10 years ago, but I didn't notice them at first because I fit the stereotype of the typical comic book nerd, a white middle-aged guy. In 2015, Eventbrite, the ticketing company, hired me to do a consulting engagement because I was like the expert on Comic-Cons because I'd written a book about this. And they were saying, this is a really fast exploding type of live event. We want to know who is going to these events. We want to do a huge survey of who the audience was.

So we did this survey in 2015 and we released the results and we discovered that fully half of the people that were attending comic conventions and gaming and manga and all of those kind of event oriented events were female. And moreover, the younger in the demographic spectrum you got, the more female it got. So if you're looking at over 40, 65% male. Under 30, 65% female.

And I'm quoting these from memory. I'm not sure that these are exactly the right numbers, but it was something like that. And moreover, the people that were the most intense, the people that would go to four or five events per year, or would travel to go to destination events were again disproportionately women. Publishers were starting to realize this so a lot more stuff particularly in the manga and webtoon space was drawing an enormous female readership and a lot of those women that had started reading comics in the 90s and 2000s graduated to become creators so the creator ecosystem was becoming a lot more

gender diverse, still not all the way there, but trending in that direction a lot more than we had seen in the previous like 50 years in the industry combined. Wow. All right. So I want to talk about manga and web comics. Let's start with manga. That's been one of the biggest surprises to me is how huge manga has become for younger demographic and then how much a lot of the mainstream publishers are trying to then emulate the manga style or people who are coming out with new stuff now just draw on the manga style

because that's kind of what they're used to. When did that happen? How did that happen? Why did that happen? Do you know? Yeah, so manga started trickling into the U.S. market in the 90s and was gaining a readership. But what we started seeing at the end of the 1990s and early 2000s, you had bookstores and libraries that wanted to put comic stuff on the shelves,

not necessarily superheroes, but graphic novels and things like that. And so you had companies that were coming out that were bringing in manga and people loved it. And it made borders into a national in manga and people loved it and it made borders into a national powerhouse. And then subsequently Barnes and Noble that was building all of these super stores

became places where people would come into to read it. When you read comics and bookstores rather than comic book shops, comic book shops in the nineties were real boys clubs. And so even women that were interested in comics would find them forbidding and unpleasant. Not so with bookstores. You go into a bookstore, you pull the book off the shelf, you sit on one of their comfy couches, And so even women that were interested in comics would find them forbidding and unpleasant. Not so with bookstores.

You go into a bookstore, you pull the book off the shelf, you sit on one of their comfy couches, you read it, you've got your friends there. It's a more conducive social experience and it removed some of the barriers, let's say, to entry for new kinds of fans. The other thing is that the manga industry in Asia is big, big business. Like per capita, their sales are like 20 times what American sales are, which means there's a huge diversity of subject matter. Fantasy, adventure, romance, slice of life, like all of these different genres that have a broader

appeal than superheroes. It's meant to be more approachable, it's meant to be read faster, and then also manga is fueled by anime. So when a new season of Dragon Ball drops or a new season of One Piece or that sort of thing, instantly that drives fans to say oh I want to read this, then you go to the store and unlike at comic stores where you see the Spider-Man movie and you say where do I start and there's a million Spider-Man things, One piece, start with volume one, continue to volume 108, complete story, all done by one creator. So what about webtoons?

I know some kids are into webtoons. I remember when I did my episode on fantasy and translation, that's where I learned that web comics were really big in Korea. How did that really become huge here in the last 10 years? Digital comics solve a lot of problems in terms of distribution, accessibility, things like that. But panel and page comics that are meant for print

are a less than optimum experience on a tablet, and they're certainly not that great with you trying to read on a mobile phone. And there's been some ingenious ways to get you to navigate through panel by panel and things like that. But reading a comic that way is not the way it was meant to be done. Webtoons are created in the first instance for mobile reading. So it's a vertical scroll, the storytelling style, the art style,

the pacing, everything is optimized for people to read on their phones. So people that are just starting out, teenagers that are doing their web comics, can post them on there. They can build an audience as they're building their style. There's no gatekeepers It's a very it's a much more of an open ecosystem And then the company itself webtoon is one of the biggest Providers of this service and the company has data that can say okay This is what's working for you. You just introduced this new character. Your readership went up 25%. Every panel that this character appears in has a longer dwell time.

So they have access to metrics that publishers don't. They've paid out millions and millions of dollars in creator residuals over the years. So it's possible to make a much better living if you're on the top tier of webtoons than it is if you're on the medium tier of comics, let's say. So it's a combination of good business, good content, good creator model, and mass mass mass audience appeal to younger readers. What does possible sound like for your business? It's having the spend to powers your scale with no preset spending limit. More cash on hand to grow your business. It's having the spend to powers your scale with no preset spending limit. More cash on hand to grow your business

with up to 55 interest-free days. And the ability to reach further with access to over 1,400 airport lounges worldwide. Redefine possible with Business Platinum. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Terms and conditions apply. Visit amex.ca slash business platinum. When I first began my podcast,

I felt pretty confident about my knowledge of comics, movies, and TV, but I knew that I was not familiar enough with sci-fi fantasy literature. I gave myself a crash course, although this crash course ended up lasting about seven years. I began reading the classics by Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov. I moved up the timeline to Philip K. Dick, Octavia Butler, Neil Stephenson, and eventually I caught up to the present

and then I was checking to see what was coming out in the near future. Becoming fluent in the language of sci-fi fantasy literature has been one of the greatest gifts that this podcast has given me. During that process, one of my favorite authors I discovered was Becky Chambers. Her first novel, A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, came out in 2014, was part of the Wayfarer series. She's written another series called Monk and Robot

about a monk and a robot on a distant planet. Her writing has a light touch and you feel like her characters are your friends. My interview with Becky Chambers had a big impact on one of my listeners, Emily Groom. Before she had heard my episode, she had actually made up her mind that she was not going to read A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet.

The book title never really appealed to me for the first book. Like the word angry just sort of put me off it. And I'd sort of been kind of looking for new sci-fi and fantasy for a while, but I'd kind of been stuck in a everything's a dystopia, everything's miserable kind of vibe. So I didn't even bother trying. I was like, Oh, this angry in the title, I'm not going to bother. But yeah, it wasn't until I heard the podcast episode that I was kind of like, Oh, yeah, I'm going to get definitely give it a try. Well, actually, though, I did like in the email, I think you mentioned that even when it downloaded, you tried to avoid listening to it. Tell me about that.

Yes. I think it's just because for so long, I'd sort of gone like, I don't think it'll be interesting or something. And I was always just picking other, like other ones that came in. I was like, oh, that one sounds interesting. That one sounds interesting. It just stayed on my to be listened list. But yeah, my app had just downloaded it and it just sort of started playing one day. And I was like, oh, actually, I should have listened to this ages ago because it was actually

really cool. So once you started reading the book, what did you like about it? Or which one did you start with? I started with the first one. So the long way to a small angry planet. Yeah. I think it was just the character straight away that spoke to me. The whole found family thing was really nice and it was just a small character driven piece.

I liked it. The characters were great and the story went to the good place and it wasn't, I mean, the stakes were high enough, you know, to keep going, but it wasn't end-of-the-world kind of high. It was... And it was also, there's a possible future, even though Earth has kind of died and isn't doing great, but life goes on, and, yeah, it was really nice. Well, you said also in the email that you were feeling burnt out.

You said totally lost, had no idea what to do with yourself. Are you comfortable talking about why or what was going on? I kind of, yeah, I just I hit burnout last year from both a work and a personal point of view. Some small things have just changed and I hadn't really processed what had changed so I was just completely lost with like directionless and everything. Yeah, I was just in a really rough place for quite a while. But it was really her, her Monk and Robot books that I found really when I was at one of my deepest moments in the misery. I think because the character in that, he's kind of figuring things out and taking his time and also doesn't really know what he wants to do. But it's sort of just taking things slowly bit by bit and just everything was just calm and cozy.

And it was nice to find a sci-fi story that was like that. Yeah, those two books just sit on my shelf in a very nice place. I'm like, yeah, next time I feel like I'm going to spiral, I might just pick one of those up again because it was nice and cozy. So, yeah. So tell me a bit more about Monk and Robot. You were talking about how the choices, Monk was the one that was figuring things out.

Tell me a little bit more about the characters, because I didn't talk about the Monk and Robot. In fact, I don't think the first book had come out when I talked to Becky Chambers. So tell me about that. Yeah, they just sort of decide, it's like, yeah, I don't know what I'm going to do, so I'm just going to open a tea shop and figure things out.

And the way the community is built, they can just do that. Like, there's no capitalism strains, there's no financial strains, they're just like, I'm going to just, you know, go open my tea shop up and talk to people. It was nice to be in a world where you could just take the time to figure yourself out without having to worry about how you're going to get by in that world. And that was just really, really nice. And that's kind of what I was needing last year.

Cozy sci-fi and cozy fantasy are some of the many new subgenres that have emerged in the last 10 years. Another big one is solar punk. I did an episode on solar punk in 2020. That episode resonated with a lot of listeners, including Morag McDonald. She's Australian, living in Germany. She likes living there, but at the time she was feeling pretty hopeless about climate change and our

ability to do anything about it. It hit me at a time when I was feeling quite down about things. It was a time when I know I was feeling particularly hopeless and disconnected. Having a show about a movement or a concept that was about a future where it was both hopeful and possible and also something that I could see real humans trying to build to be really part of as a human as opposed to a superhero or a space opera hero, which you know I love escape as literature still, absolutely, but I was feeling a bit like, do we need aliens to save us or, you know, magic powers? Because I just don't see that happening.

So then after you heard the episode, you thought like, wow, this is, you know, dealing with climate change at a very human scale. Did it inspire you to do stuff afterwards, you know, do things in your life? I looked up solarpunk, you know, I googled it, came across Reddit forums and image galleries and I'm very lucky. I live in Berlin, which is quite green by modern city standards, but there'd been quite

a bit about how the city trees are quite stressed. I mean, I could see that in my area. Lots of them died from heat. I signed up for a local street association to water the street trees and plants, supportive plants around it and keep an eye on them and report if there's any diseases. And from there, I met some people who were starting up

in an urban garden in the allotments just around the corner. I met some people who are in something called the Action Spons jury where we help give grants to local events happening. I hadn't really felt very connected to the community. I think I partly because I moved here just before COVID, partly because when you have a young kid, it can be really isolating. I kind of almost resigned myself to never really feeling part of the local community and just being an expat and knowing expats, but that changed. Now I know people often down my street because everyone who is in the street planning thing

like lives on the street or very close to. I meet people who I've been gardening with. Wow. That's amazing. This helped you connect with your community. Yeah. In terms of literature, I'm curious, like, you know, were you then inspired to go find more solar punk books? Or, you know, one thing I always think is interesting whenever like a new

genre is named or coined, people then go back and look at books in the past that, you know, they'll then retroactively say, oh, yeah, this was also part of the genre, even though, which may be true, but of course that author at the time had no idea that they were writing a book in that genre. Did this inspire you to look for works of solar punk either currently or in the past? Well, a friend of mine had recommended years ago

this book by Marge Piercy called A Woman at the Edge of Time and it is absolutely solar punk. The entire book is just pure, distilled solar punk. It's about these people in the future who try and contact a woman from the past because there's something happening and they don't want to be the alternate future, they want to be the real future. So, you know, it's a bit magical in that sense. They live in this future utopia, but it's not an easy utopia or a perfect utopia. You know, they're trying to reconstruct this really

environmentally degraded world. It feels very modern. They have petty squabbles and jealousy, and there's people who grandstand in meetings. But they're really trying to work it out. And it sounds like it's a book about lots of boring discussions, but it's not. It's this book set in a world where I just thought, wow, I'd really, really like to live there. Even though she's not trying to sell it as a utopia, even though people are just absolutely recognizable real humans, the society around them has changed. The society that supports them being human, supports them being creative, supports them trying to be environmentally friendly in a very modern way. They just live in a world that seems potentially ours, you know, it's environmentally degraded, they're trying to restore it.

Just ordinary humans, no special heroes. I often discuss fantasy and science fiction as two separate broad categories. To put it simply, sci-fi is more science-based, fantasy often involves magic. And fantasy has gone through a huge transformation. Ten years ago, a lot of the best-selling fantasy novels were full of medieval-style kingdoms with knights and sorcerers. And then in 2015, N.K. Jemisin's book The Fifth Season came out.

It was the beginning of her Broken Earth series, which featured non-white characters and new mythologies that were not Eurocentric. That series is considered science fantasy, a blending of science fiction and fantasy. But I noticed that her books were having a particularly big impact on fantasy. For instance, when I did my episode on Hindu fantasy worlds, or when I interviewed Nhi Vo

about her Asian-themed fantasy worlds, I kept thinking, for publishing houses to commit to books like these, they must have been encouraged by the success of N.K. Jemisin. Diana Foe is an editor who's worked with Tor and other sci-fi publishing houses. She won a Hugo Award for Best Editor, and she's now Executive Editor at Error One Books, which specializes in speculative fiction. She said N.K. Jemisin's work did bring attention to a lot of other non-white authors.

But that was the tipping point of a movement about race and speculative fiction, which began in 2009. It was a huge online discussion called Race Fail. You know it sprung up because of this one, you know, pretty like innocuous question from a newer writer asking like for advice about representation. And the answer that particular author gave, you know, on her website kind of like unleashed this whole wave of like, well, this is what you say, but this is what you do. Or like I've seen so many other examples of like publishers

who've done this or that, or why are we even talking about race? I just want to talk about my fantasy and sci-fi. Also just working in sales and seeing, I sold like N.K. Jemisin's like first book, A Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. But she's also talked about like since then, after she's like earned three Hugo's in a, you know, in a row for her

broken earth trilogy and all that stuff about how she initially wrote 100,000 kingdoms because she initially had a book that would not sell anywhere because she was it was about is an African fantasy kingdom book. People got telling her like these books don't sell. Or like people of color don't sell or black people don't read all these like terrible things And she got so mad. She's like well I'm gonna write this one book or like the whole cast is just gonna be like people of color. They're gods

I'm gonna do this and you know, and she so she sold that book it launched her career No, and that's just like one example. I think, of kind of like what the culture was like. But I also think too, because of the conversation of race fail, I09 started their first book club and their book pick was 100,000 Kingdoms. And that kicked off further recognition of the book across like the sci-fi blogosphere. We are now fully in this renewal of what it means to work in speculative fiction and have that flourish because we're able to address and include and consider so many different types of communities and voices that had been historically pushed out.

Now, as I've been covering science fiction literature over the past 10 years, it's been interesting to see new sub-genres emerging, like solar punk. I asked Diana, if there are any sub-genres that are less popular than they were 10 years ago. She said, steampunk.

I think people are still publishing historical fantasy, you know, in that vein, but it's just marketed differently. They wouldn't call it steampunk, but they would call it alternate history with a dose of magic. But people still write those types of stories. And that's how it is really with genre fiction. You tend to see everything comes in cycles. You can say the same thing with post-apoc scenarios. People are always wondering, like, do you get tired about reading about the end of the world?

But there's always new permutations coming up. Wait, wait, wait. So in the industry, post-apocalyptic is called post-apoc? It's just a shorthand. That's cool. Well, speaking of acronyms, or not acronyms, but shorthands, CLIFI, something I've followed on my show

is how CLIF-fi has changed, how it was also kind of post-apoc for a while. And there was a sense almost of, this is almost kind of productive, you know, we're just depressing the hell out of people. And so there's been this real strive for more optimistic cli-fi. Where do you see cli-fi right now?

I do think people are looking for optimistic answers, but not necessarily finding it in current climate fiction. And to be honest, I think the most effective climate fiction stories aren't about actual climate change or solving climate change, but it's kind of like the backdrop that poses greater human character-driven questions. Like I think about Station Eleven,

which in some sense, it's post-apoc, but it also addresses so many feelings that come with like the end of the world. And even like Jeff Anamir's Southern Reach trilogy, his books really talk about what it means to de-center the human experience more than actually solving anything or posing any scientifically oriented questions. That is what really attracts people to climate fiction. Has the publishing world or as the world of sci-fi fantasy publishing also just gotten bigger? Like, I mean, it sounds like really reductive,

but are there more books like sci-fi fantasy books simply being published and bought and read now than there were 10 years ago? There's definitely been a growth in genre books across the board. I've seen a lot of like houses that have traditionally been published more literary fiction are now dabbling in sci-fi fantasy

and they're just like, oh, it's just speculative fiction. Or are people forming whole new houses and imprints? Like, horror is having huge resurgence right now. Every major publisher, they already didn't have a horror arm, are trying to set up house to like acquire more horror. Seeing that is always just really exciting. That's been the most encouraging thing to me. I was recently in The Strand, which is a great independent bookstore in New York, and I was surprised to discover that they had moved the sci-fi fantasy section to a prominent space

on the first floor, and the crowds of people perusing the books were younger and more diverse than I would have expected 10 years ago. I noticed the same thing at other bookstores and even among the crowds at Comic-Con. I certainly can't predict the future of our world, but I think the next decade of fantasy worlds is looking pretty good. The enthusiasm is there.

The content will follow. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Rob Selkowitz, Diana Faux, Emily Groom, and Morag McDonald. There's a lot more coming up in the next episode. Special thanks to Rob Selkowitz, Diana Faux, Emily Groom, and Morag McDonald. There's a lot more coming up in the next episode. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. If you like the show, please give us a shout out

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