Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Journalist & Author Annalee Newitz (#022)

Episode Date: April 22, 2019

Meet Annalee Newitz, nonfiction and fiction author, science-journalist, and co-host of the podcast series Our Opinions are Correct. Winner of the Lambda Literary Award and nominee for the Nebula and Locus awards, her ability to use her scientific knowledge in both her fiction and nonfiction works is something that makes Newitz unstoppable. Dr. Brian Keating begins to unravel the creative process behind her newest novel Autonomous, as well as The Future of Another Timeline, and more. Annalee Newitz's novel Autonomous Newitz’s podcast Our Opinions are Correct Newitz’s website Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic. Five, four, three, two. It is a great pleasure to be here with Annalene Newitz, recording this episode, episode number 22, I believe, of the Arthur C. Clark Center for the Human Imagination Studies we do at UCSD. It's one of the few, if only, a podcast in the UC system. And we're really delighted to have guests like Anna Leone because you really embody the living spirit of our prototype founder, who namesake of the center, Arthur C. Clark, and that you are one of the foremost science fiction authors, who's also very well versed in hard science, science fact, as well as science fiction. So welcome, Annalie. It's great to have you here.

Yeah, thanks for having me. So last week, you're on campus down here, and you were participating in an event called your dystopia has been canceled. And this podcast was really supposed to be filmed last week on the day that you were here in San Diego. But in addition to the dystopia, your flight got canceled. So just- It did, yes.

It happens a lot. For my audience, what actually happened and why we didn't get to precede the event with the podcast. But nevertheless, you can find Annali's entire lecture and presentation from the Clark Center filmed last week on our YouTube channel. Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination. I want to introduce Annalie, just for the few of you who may not know who she is, quite renowned in many different circles,

and I think that's what your kind of polymathematical nature is what really intrigues me about you. Annalie Newitz writes science fiction and nonfiction. She's the author of the novel Autonomous, nominated for the Nebula and Locus Awards. And she won the Lambda Literary Award. As a science journalist, she's written for the Walsh. Washington Post, Slate Ars Technica, the New Yorker, and the Atlantic, among others. She is also the co-host of the podcast, Our Opinions Are Correct. She was the founder of I-O-9, which is an extremely popular site online,

and she served as the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo, really phenomenal. One thing we're going to talk about today is not only her current novel, Autonomous, but her upcoming novel and even a work of science nonfiction coming after that, so there's really no stopping and late it seems. And so I wanted to start off with kind of a little deep dive, if you will, for those of us who are writers, aspiring writers, et cetera. How you actually create worlds in a book like Autonomous, that you create entire scenarios, futures, and visualizations of the future that are very crisp and realistic. And yet that's a skill that's very far removed. from there are very, very few writers who can switch between nonfiction and fiction so effortlessly.

So how do you accomplish that? How do you, you know, is there a way that you're nonfiction training as a science journalist, et cetera, that informs it, or is it completely different skill sets and you're just unique and we should just clone you? Which we can do here. We can do that. Well, feel free to clone me. That sounds interesting. But, you know, it really is the case that I'm using kind of the same skill set, I feel like, because especially in Autonomous, like a lot of the world building in that came directly out of a book that I had done previously, a nonfiction book about how humans might survive a mass extinction using technology, green technology, and a lot of other things. and also just the work that I've done over the past, you know, 15 years covering technology and especially covering hacking and covering biotechnology.

There's a lot of characters in the novel who are hackers or one of the characters is a robot who, of course, can naturally break into systems because, you know, she just uses her brain to connect up to the system and tries to figure out a way to fool it. And so, you know, I approach fiction often the same way I do nonfiction. I interview a lot of scientists, social scientists as well, and try to get, I want my science to be as accurate as possible. I think that's fun. And fiction writers will often talk about how one of the best things about fiction in some ways is having constraints on what you're doing. Of course, there's the joy of making up whatever shit you want, which is delightful.

But it's also fun to have some boundaries so that you can, that helps you get more creative. And so for me, the boundary is often, can I make this feel plausible? Is this based on technology that's happening, that's being developed now and that might plausibly go in this direction? Of course, you can't predict what's going to happen in 150 years. There's a million black swans that could happen. There's the three body problem. We just don't know what's going to really happen. But we can make educated guesses.

And oftentimes those educated guesses come from looking at history and looking at how technology has developed over time and kind of saying, all right, we see certain ways that it goes. Governments will intervene in this way. People will take up the technology and do things they're not supposed to with it, which is my favorite part to when people do that. And so I definitely, I find that what happens is I'll do a certain amount of nonfiction and then I get a hankering to kind of take it into the fictional arena. and then vice versa.

Like I'll get sick of doing fiction and I'm like, God, I just want to interview a million scientists and present what they've learned. So it's good for me because I can kind of switch back and forth. Can you have elements of both, you know, writing nonfiction? You know, I often felt like I could manipulate past history for people, especially that are dead by kind of putting my mind in the mind of these historical figures and trying to, you know, analyze them psychoanalytically. But do you feel like when you're doing a fictional sequence that you're training as journalists, for example,

I mean, are you visualizing it as a narrator, you know, in that perspective? Like, what would it be like to be a journalist in an alternative future, you know, happening as you do an autonomous or maybe in the deep past as you're doing for your upcoming novel? Can you switch into the kind of journalistic mode in a fictional setting? Or are they basically not overlapping? I think you can for sure. And I actually have written, I did write a short story that was just a fake nonfiction science piece of work of science journalism, which was about how scientists discover how to communicate with ants. And I just wrote it as like a future journalist covering this discovery and talking to the different scientists who'd worked on it and stuff like that. And that was really fun because I got to just pretend that I was writing journalism. And so there's some things that you don't have to do when you're writing journalism that you do when you're writing fiction. So it's like, oh, I don't really have to develop this

character. That's easy. So that's delightful. So I think you can. And I definitely, in my fiction, even when I'm not pretending to be a journalist, I like to get, I like my visuals to help readers understand how science is being done. And so oftentimes, like when I was doing autonomous, I talked to some neuroscientists about just if you were looking at neurons changing, what does that look like? Is it fast? Can you see them doing it? What is that, you know, what do you see when you look through the microscope?

And they told me, and I put that in the book. I mean, the characters are looking at a hologram instead of looking through a microscope. But it's the same thing. It's just projected what the microscope is seeing. And indeed, you can see neurons changing in real time, growing and forming connections, So, which is pretty creepy and awesome. And so, yeah, I like to have journalistic detail. Like, I like to have, you know, readers kind of come away with a sense that things are more complicated than you might expect.

And that's, of course, the job of science journalism a lot of the time is to say, like, well, you thought the black holes work like this. But actually, no one really agrees. But we do have a picture. That's right. So that was today's news. Everybody's excited. That's right. The first black hole selfie.

If only it were selfie, that would be amazing. That would cost the NSF a lot more money than this money. Looking forward to that. So I've heard it said, you know, that science fiction writers often will contend that, you know, science, deep science fiction in the future is really just kind of a manifestation of what either they wish would happen today or maybe what's even happening today. I mean, Jack and your, and autonomous is kind of, you know, part past, part. future in that, you know, kind of like Robin Hood in some ways, anti-hero, but also looking deep forward in the future. But these are all events that are happening now with, you know,

medication costs rising and sort of the need, the urgency is sort of happening now, and yet you're kind of fantasizing about the future. So what do you see in that continuum? Do you feel like, you know, science fiction in the deep future is really an expression of, you know, either the author or the audience's desires for what's happening today? Or is it something, you know, that you're really trying to speculate on because if it's so speculative, I feel like the audience couldn't recognize it. And yet they relate so viscerally. I mean, I read some of your thousand plus reviews and people really relate, you know, as if these are real people. And, you know, maybe they will be something. Yes, exactly. That's it. We'll get into. Yeah, I mean, I think of my work,

and I think of most science fiction work as being reflections of the present. And so either it's a way of grappling with issues in the present at a distance. Or sometimes it's really, I mean, like a lot of science fiction authors like William Gibson, their work is set essentially at the very edge of the present. You know, it's something that is actually happening, but kind of just maybe 10 minutes out. And although not in his newer novels, of course, he's also time traveling in those.

So he's looking further in the future. So that is my approach to it. Certainly other science fiction writers will say that that's not what they're doing. And of course, any book that you write is going to partly be a reflection of your fears and hopes. So, I mean, that's why I have an honorable pirate who is trying to do good and hackers who are trying to do good because that's kind of my, always been my perspective on it. And so, yeah, I mean, it was funny because the whole Martin Schrelli scandal hit after I was done with the book. And it was actually like right when the book was coming out that he was kind of coming up on charges and stuff. And people kept saying like, oh, it's about Martin Schrelly.

And I was like, well, it is. But it's really just about corruption in the pharmaceutical industry. And that's what drives our scientist character Jack to go rogue and to try to bring medicines to people who can't afford it because the system is so out of control. Yeah, I heard it said recently in relation to Martin Screlly, I think that's how you pronounce. That's his name. Yeah, let's go with that. I think he's in solitary confinement now, so I don't know if it makes a big difference, but he's not going to be seeing this most likely unless he's got a real... This is his favorite podcast.

I know. Well, it's Into the Impossible, so now Into the Impossible is his escape route also. So, yeah, I heard it said once, maybe it was by him or somebody affiliate, his legal team, you know, Michael Avanotti or somebody, but it said something like, you know, like, they shouldn't charge so much money. You know, these pills cost $0.25. and someone responded, no, the first pill cost $2 billion. The next one cost $0.25.

But it'd be sort of disheartening of some of these, you know, kind of manipulations, monopolies, et cetera, continue into, you know, the year 244. 2144 is the novel presents. But so, you know, I want to talk now a little bit more about what your next book, your next novel, really is a dive into the past. And then the nonfiction work you're working on that you briefly mentioned last week and before we came on the podcast today,

as dealing with their much far distant past. So I wonder if we can get into those for a little bit and talk about the difference in writing kind of historical, you know, almost fan fiction and fan fiction in a certain sense. For the audience, maybe you can discuss a little bit of the theme of your upcoming book, which is going to be out in September called The Future of Another Timeline. and we'll want to get you back on the podcast and at UCSD for that. But can you give a brief description of that as you did for the audience last week?

And then we can get into the differences between writing about past fiction and then future fiction. And we can kind of explore the differences between the two. This episode is brought to you by Netflix. Most valuable promotions in Netflix are hosting a blockbuster triple headliner Saturday, May 16th. Rhonda Rousey returns to face fellow woman's MMA pioneer Gina Carrano in the main event. Plus Comane's Nate Diaz versus Mike Perry And the best have you wait in the world Francis Ngano versus Felipe Lins

Watch Rhonda Rousey versus Gina Carano Live only on Netflix Saturday, May 16th at 9 p.m. Eastern Center Time, 6 p.m. Pacific Time. Sounds good. So future of another timeline is a time travel novel And we can talk about that too. How do you write a hard science time travel novel? Turns out no. And actually, you know, being a good journalist, I interviewed a couple of physicists before I started and was like, okay, so what's the most scientific way I could do this?

And they both very gently said, this is a literary device. This is not science. But I talked a lot to Sean Carroll, who's down there near you guys at Caltech. And he gave me some good ideas for how I could do it that wouldn't be just egregiously terrible. So there are wormholes. Obligatory wormholes. Yeah, and it's, and we, I came up with some stuff with Sean that, you know, could, could be true in sort of physical sciences, but is obviously, but is not something that we know about today. So, so it's about a group of activists who are also professors at UCLA because the UC system rules.

And they are trying to change events in history to, to basically make. to basically help vulnerable groups, people who they think need, who, you know, have been neglected historically or who are suffering in the present. So in the case of the main character, she's going back to the 19th century, trying to change the culture at that time so that abortion is legal because she lives in a timeline where abortion is not legal in the United States. And so for her, this is a very important political issue. And so she's trying to, she's decided that there's some events that occurred in the 19th century. that kind of set us on this course. And we're only in one timeline. So if she changes the timeline,

everybody in the United States would gain access to the benefit or the not the benefit. You know, if she screws things up, they'll also be screwed over. So it was really fun to do the world building, although I had promised myself at some point that I would never do a time travel novel

because they are so tough. And so there was a lot of world building at the outset where I was trying to, to figure out all the timeline shenanigans because they do change the timeline she and her colleagues. And so, yeah, and I had to do a lot of historical research too. The characters do go to multiple different times, but they spend most of their time either in the 21st century or in the 19th century. And so I had to look up everything from like how much money a woman who was working as a seamstress

might make in 1893 Chicago, which luckily there actually are records online showing standard pay for actually hundreds of jobs at that time. I think maybe partly because unions were being organized quite effectively, especially in Chicago at that time. So I think there were a lot of efforts to kind of gather that data and so that they could have a sense of who was working and what they were making. So that was really fun and frustrating, trying to do all that research. And, you know, it's funny because I think when people are reading the book, they're not going to be like, oh, wow, what an accurate amount of money that this character is making. But it's fun for me. Like, again, it's that constraint. I want the real world to have constraints. And or I want my fictional world

to have the constraints of the real world. So, but creating a past world is a lot like creating a future world. You know, you have some guidelines, but there's a lot of missing information. information. Even stuff from the late 19th century, there's tons of missing information, especially the characters I was writing about, which were like feminists and belly dancers and sex activists and like people who don't often make it into the annals of history. And and historians have tried to unbury the histories of some of these women, but, you know, we're not, we don't have a lot to go on. And so, so it's, it's, there's a lot of making shit up, you know, just the way you do with the future, where you have some information about where you think things might go based on the way the world is now, but then you kind of have to fill in the gaps. And so with fiction, I feel no guilt at all. I'm just like, hey, this is fiction. I'm just making stuff up. Maybe they did this.

Like, I don't know. But when I'm doing nonfiction, I actually have a lot of guilt when I'm trying to recreate life 9,000 years ago during the Neolithic. I'm like, okay, how do I base? you know, I have to do some speculation, but I want every step of the way, every piece of speculation to be based on something someone's founded a dig, something that, you know, at least two or three different scientists kind of agree on, or at least kind of, you know, semi-agree on. And that's, yeah, I mean, I just, I don't feel like I can stray from the path as much when I'm doing nonfiction.

Yeah, the constraints, I'm sure, are much, much greater. But then also you do have, so Andy Weir is a, I can't. can't call him an alum of UC San Diego because he never graduated. But despite that he might go on to a good career. I'm not sure. Time will tell. But, you know, when he was here, you know, he's really talking about how shocking in some ways it was to do a hard science fiction work and then be mercilessly attacked in some ways,

but also aided by readers in another sense that they could provide, you know, much more information on, you know, smelting of aluminum or for Artemis or, you know, the kind of communications codes that Watley uses in the Martian. And, you know, so there is also, it seems like, a constraint for fiction authors as well, especially those of you who are trained in the hard sciences or science journalism and sort of held to a maybe unfairly high standard, but it must not be completely liberating to work in fiction because you know that you're going to have people that, I mean, like you, if you didn't go to someone like Sean or somebody like, oh, that's completely ridiculous, but then actually doing the work as you've done, I think that gives a greater,

imprimatur to the realism, if it will be, you know, for, for readers to grab onto. I want to talk about a theme that comes up, you know, somewhat in autonomous, obviously, and maybe in the upcoming work as well. And that's, you know, graduate students and kind of the positions that the students, you know, We're talking about, you know, almost slave-like labor back in the 1800s for women. And, you know, a lot of people feel like, well, graduate students are kind of modern-day indentured servants in a certain way. And as I was telling you earlier, our building is called the Surf Building that we're in now, science and engineering research facility.

They couldn't come up with a better acronym, right? They couldn't make it S-U-R-F or, you know, something unique to San Diego. But it made me think about, you know, how you view the process of, of, of the student, you know, kind of teacher relationship. And that dynamic is very important to us here in a research university like UCSD in that, you know, there's kind of this almost oral tradition of passing on knowledge and collaboration between teacher and student. And yet there's a very different role between teacher and students.

So I wonder, you know, can you say something about your, you know, your education? I believe you were at the night school at MIT, is that correct? Yeah. So what was that like? How did that impact your writing? And ultimately, what I want to get to from you is you're not a faculty educator in the sense that I am on a daily basis. But can you teach the skills that you've acquired? Are they teachable skills in the same way we can teach electromagnetism or general relativity?

Are they skills in the creative sense, in the same creative sense as what you do for a living? Yeah, that's a really great question. My background is I have a PhD from Berkeley. in American Studies, which is an interdisciplinary field. So I did some social science and some humanities work. And I originally thought that I was going to be a professor that was like basically what I'd wanted to be like almost my whole life, which is kind of a weird thing for the high school student to want, but that is what I wanted.

Better than I really want to be an administrator. Yeah, did not want to do that. But and so when I was graduating and going out on the market, it was at a time like now where very few jobs were available, particularly for someone doing interdisciplinary work. And so I basically went out on the market simultaneously for academic positions and for positions in journalism.

And it was easier to get a job in journalism and easier to support myself. And so basically as soon as I had my PhD, I did work for a little while as an adjunct while I was kind of ramping my career up as a writer, but I've been to do. supporting myself on writing for my whole adult life, basically. So, and that was because I failed to become a professor.

I did do, as you mentioned, the Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT, which is kind of like a postdoc for journalists. And that was tremendously helpful in kind of sharpening my knowledge of science, because I was sort of transitioning from writing about tech to writing about more scientific topics. And I feel like, as someone who was teaching a lot, especially when I was at Berkeley, I worked my way through school basically by getting loans and teaching. I loved teaching. Teaching was my favorite part of being in the university other than the luxury of getting to just study stuff that I liked. And I really

missed it a lot. That was the thing when I transitioned into journalism that I was most sad about, was not having students around to talk to and their enthusiasm and their knowledge is so incredible. And so I try as much as I can to incorporate pedagogy into my journalism for sure. And when I was running I-09 for many years, it was very similar to a classroom because there's so many comments. So you'd wade into the comment forum and it was like, oh, it's like a bunch of people asking questions or having debates and it really felt like that kind of community where I could sort of say, well, here's my opinion and here's what I've learned. And people would say, well, here's what I've learned and here's what I've learned and here's

what I see. And that's the best experience in a classroom is when that's happening and people are, students are empowered to talk about their own discoveries. But, you know, I was very aware as a grad student and as a postdoc of how abused most most of my colleagues were particularly in the sciences. I mean, we were abused in the humanities and social sciences just because there was no money. So it was like, well, here's the job. And you were at Berkeley.

Let's be honest. Just kidding. I'm sorry. And because you were at Berkeley. Just kidding. Is Berkeley like especially abusive? I'm just teasing. There are one of our nemesies.

There are arch rivals. Yeah, you're not even on their radar. Oh, thanks a lot. Berkeley is like, Berkeley sees Stanford as its nemesis, which is also kind of a sad. Anyway, whatever, it's all sad. UC is our, is like the best. So I think we can all agree that together we're strong. But yeah, I mean, it was super abusive.

And like I said, especially in the sciences where people really had to like, they were dependent on their professors for everything. Whereas we, like I said, there was nothing at stake. There was no money. Like we weren't going to get any fancy ass like lab position. So there were a few people who did have relationships like that with professors like at a very high level, you know, we're dependent on them for fellowships and stuff. And there was just rampant abuse. There was sexual harassment. There was just regular harassment of just, you know, go get my

dry cleaning kind of stuff. I had a professor who was trying to get me to do data entry at his house. And so I would just go over to his house and like he would wander around in his robe. And it was like, dude. What is the professors and row? Male professors in robes. This is a very common. It's like a weird. And it wasn't, and I don't mean to say that it was like a harassment thing. It was just like creepy and inappropriate. Like, don't have your student come to your house. Like, it just feels like you're a servant. Anything like a robe is creepy.

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and their balsamic chicken salad. Available at the prepared foods counter. Get Summer Splash Savings Now at Whole Foods Market. Yeah. And it was like even the huge. Perfectly nice guy, but it was, it was just, you know, that kind of behavior, assuming that the student is just kind of at your beck and call. And so that was, I poured a lot of angst about those experiences into Autonomous

where one of the characters is a grad student who's a robot whose professor ports him, to a printer. So like puts his brain into a printer and is like, oh, well, one of these days, I'll hook him up with an antenna so he can access the network that way. But for now, he just has speakers and you can talk to him. And it's pretty, you know, it's obviously a metaphor. Yeah. It's commoditizing, you know, humanity, right? Yes. Very troubling. So, but on that theme, you know, just so academia is imperfect. Most systems are imperfect. For sure. And yet we do, have, you know, I always say, you know, teaching is an act of love, you know, hopefully purely platonic love, you know, not in robes. And, and, but it is, you know, it's this expression

of vulnerability and, and also, you know, asymmetry in some sense. You know, you hope the teacher knows more than the student, right, in some sense, and that's natural. And then in science, I I always point out the word scientist, in Russian, at least, as far as I'm told, means a person who was taught. And that really conveys, you know, kind of this, this tradition that we're in, that the ultimate expression of science is to teach. And then the obligation, you know, corollary to that is that you have to become a teacher. And so we exhibit a lot of that in the lab. I have nine graduate students. And, and this is something that's very important to them. The grad students or the postdocs teach the grad students, teach the undergrads. They're all kind of like force multipliers while I'm at the

faculty club with my brandy sniffter. No, no, I don't know. Yeah, exactly. Well, one of the students brings you pillows. That's right. And it enters data for me. But the, but the ultimate, you know, kind of expression of love is that you do the person leaves right you know if you have children I'm children now and you know kind of looking nostologically at back when they needed me more in some sense but also helpful that they'll need me less in the future right yeah so when you when you've been in that and I don't know if this is something featured at night but you know kind of the creative process and you talk a lot obviously there's a lot about human equivalent artificial intelligence do you think that artificial intelligence is a threat to the traditional academic

I mean, what I do has not changed substantively in a thousand years, you know, basically a sage on the stage, you know, talking to rapt audiences, you know, that really hasn't changed, but I think with the advent of AI, I mean, why should students listen to me and say, I mean, you don't know me very well, but, but why should they listen to me instead of, you know, taking a class with, you know, here's Galileo's dialogue on two world systems, right? Why should they listen to me when an AI will soon replace me and be much more authentic, visceral and maybe authentic. Do you see that happening and maybe taking away along so concomitantly this oppression of students, you know, because an AI hopefully won't have this ability to oppress

in the way that you've unfortunately had to encounter? Well, I think if future AIs, if we ever evolve a human equivalent AI, if they're anything like the kind of machine learning algorithms we have now, they're going to have all the same problems that we have, right? So they'll be a press, They'll be oppressing their students and making their postdocs, you know, do their research for them for no credit and stuff like that. So I think, you know, it's interesting because I think what's happening with machine learning in higher education right now, it seems like where it would be going would be toward just kind of aiding professors. Like it might be something where you would be replacing graders. Like so you might have some kind of algorithm that can grade a paper, which is kind of terrifying because what you really want when somebody writes a paper or a thesis or some kind of, you know,

analysis is you actually want a human to kind of interact with it. But I could easily see it being, I mean, at a lot of universities, and I'm sure San Diego as well, you know, there's these weeder courses that are enormous and students are pretty, you know, essay questions during, you know, answers to essay questions and things. And you have grad students grading them. And, you know, it would be great if you could just replace them with a machine, right? And just, you know, scantron it kind of, except now you're doing scantron type stuff for actually, you know, written work. So I could see that happening.

Will you be replaced with a robot? I don't know. You know, maybe you'll have robot teaching assistants, like I said. But like, I think, I mean, one of the things that I think is really interesting about, you know, writing from people like Brad DeLong, who's an economist, who's thought a lot about automation, is that he and a lot of other economists feel that as we automate a lot of things, we're also going to start hypervaluing human labor around things like teaching and caretaking and emotional labor that we aren't really sure that robots can do. And so I could see teachers, I mean, imagine that teachers becoming actually more valued, like, and maybe paid what they deserve to be paid. That would be kind of amazing. So, yeah, I'm not too worried about it right now, but I could see automation creeping in for sure. Great.

So we just have a couple minutes left. I always like to get people's opinions and maybe get to know them a little bit better by asking a not so personal question. But in your case, I think I want to tie it to the mix of genre subgroups that you work in, which is past fiction and future fiction, science fiction. And that is, you know, if somebody comes up to you and tells you, Annalie, I've got some good news and some bad news. Which do you want to hear first and why? I guess I want to hear the bad news first because that way the good news will feel more hopeful.

afterword. As long as I don't have to just like only hear one kind of news, which would be like reading Facebook, I guess. Right. So I think that makes you an optimist, but I'm not sure. We can send it over to our colleagues in psychiatry. Let me know. And that's right. So I just want to ask that, you know, kind of a final question in relation to these two works of fiction. And then as I said, when you, when your book about ancient cities is out, I definitely want to have you connect you to of our wonderful archaeologists here that work on a lot of advanced imaging of archaeological sites and that will be do you have a publication date or a notion of when that will be out so it's coming out from Norton and it will probably be out in 2020 that's our plan and my

editor would really like that if that were to happen so that's what we're aiming for is 2020 who's your editor at Norton I'm working with Do we, I mean, No, we don't have to. Who are we, why are we getting into this? No, because I was, Nora is,

are we going to call up my editor? I'm actually, I'm really like, I know when she's going to, she wants to see what you're doing. Oh, he is. I don't want you to know who my editor is. All right,

fine. So if you could travel to either the future of one of your novels or to the past, which would that, which would you prefer to do? And, and then I'll have a follow up to that.

But would you prefer to go back or to, in the future. You can only do one. I guess, I, well, because I write a lot about archaeology, I think I would want to go to the past. And I would want to visit some of the places that I'm writing about and find out what the hell actually was going on.

Because there's so many mysteries like that we just don't know and it's super annoying. So yeah, I'd really like to visit Cahokia, which was like, was like a really big city about a thousand years ago in southern Illinois. It's right near East St. Louis. And that would be like, especially if I could actually speak the language, I would love to go find out what they were up to. Very cool. Oh, that's excellent.

Well, that basically subsumes my next question, which was, you know, if you could go somewhere in a non-fictional setting, would you go in your works? And it sounds like you'd like to go to Kohokia, if I'm pronoun. I want to go to Kogia. If I were to go to a place in a fictional work, I guess, I mean, in my upcoming novel, the characters, they go to all real locations, but they go to Petra, which is called Rockmoo in this version of history because they're not colonized by the Greeks. So, yeah, that would be pretty fun. That was in the Nabatian Empire in case you need to get some time machine action.

Yeah. I like the Nabatian Giants. They're my favorite baseball team. speaking they were great right like 2,000 years ago they were on top of it winning streak they had that global series champions and Lee it's been a real pleasure speaking with you from up north I'm glad you made the time and thank you so much for coming down last week I hope we'll have you down here again I'd love to yeah thanks for having me on and sorry I

didn't want to out my editor I just was like are people going to email him and be like when is her book coming they don't even know who it is we'll keep it just be between us. Our audience is growing, but it's not that thing. All right. Thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure speaking with you. Take care. Bye. Bye. The only thing we can be short of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic. Five, four, three, two.