Rev Left Radio - Methods Devour Themselves: Science Fiction & Political Philosphy

Episode Date: December 8, 2018

Do you like political philosophy? Do you like science fiction and fantasy? Do you like breaking down the artificial cultural and intellectual barriers between the two? Then we have a treat for you!     This episode is a totally novel collaboration between our show, PoliTreks (a podcast which combines Trekky Fandom with cultural and political analysis), Benjanun Sriduangkaew and J-Moufawad Paul (co-authors of Methods Devour Themselves).     DESCRIPTION OF THE BOOK: "Methods Devour Themselves is a dialogue between fiction and non-fiction. Inspired by Quentin Meillassoux's Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction that was paired with an Isaac Asimov short story, this book examines the ways in which stories can provoke philosophical interventions and philosophical essays can provoke stories. Alternating between Benjanun Sriduangkaew's fiction and J. Moufawad-Paul's non-fiction, Methods Devour Themselves is an interstitial project that brings fiction and essay into a unique, avant-garde whole."     Check out the book here: http://www.zero-books.net/books/methods-devour-themselves  Check out PoliTreks here: http://www.thetricordertransmissions.com/politreks.php

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your host name Comrade Bred O'Shea, and we have another really interesting, unique, collaborative episode for you today. On this episode, we'll have a discussion with Barry and Shashank from the podcast, Polytrex, on the book Methods Devour Themselves by Benjinnin Sri Dengau and J. Malfuad Paul. Their book encapsulates the dialogue between science fiction. and political philosophy, and this translates to the structure of the discussion between Polytrex and Rev Left Radio. To keep you in the loop and help decrease confusion, there are nice, recognizable, and nerdy Star Trek noises that will occur, that will tell you when the conversation transitions from

the discussion between both podcasts and the interviews we conducted with the authors. The interspersed interview questions and answers by the authors are there to provide context for the conversation we'll have with Polytrak's. Also, because both interviews were so valuable, Barry over at Polytrex will be dropping both interviews in their full form back to back on one episode. So if you want to hear both authors on their own in their respective interviews, you can go check out Polytrex, and Barry will have that for you. So, in summation, this is a pretty much three-way collaboration between Rev Left and Polytrex, as well as between the authors of methods devour themselves. and methods devour themselves itself is a book that is fiction and nonfiction. So one chapter is written by Benjin, and it's a fiction piece.

And then the next chapter will be written by JMP, and it's a nonfiction political philosophy piece. We've had JMP on our episode for continuity and rupture, so you might know him from that episode in the past. Either way, it's a great book. This is a totally unique and new attempt to do a podcast that reflects the structure of that book. It's exciting. It's different. It's totally new for us in our show. We want to thank Barry over at Polytrex for doing so much of the work here, organizing the episodes, doing a lot of the technical editing and the lifting when it comes to getting this episode out.

So thank you so much, Barry. You're awesome and we really appreciate all your hard work on this episode. So with all of that said, let's get into our episode with Polytrex and the authors of methods devour themselves. All right. So, yeah, maybe you could just tell us about yourself first. And then we'll tell you a little bit about us. Absolutely. Well, my name is Brett O'Shea.

I'm the host of Revolutionary Left Radio and The Geotene. Me and Barry met probably through that, but we've developed a friendship and a mutual respect over time. And, you know, being able to work with Barry on this project has been really fun. And having a little mixture of our two shows, I think, is going to be incredibly interesting and mirror in interesting ways the work that we're actually covering in this show. So, yeah. So you definitely do a podcast from a very specific left-wing perspective, right? Is there any specific left-wing ideal that you try to post or poll or anything like that? Well, on Revolutionary Left Radio, we kind of take a what has been termed a pan-leftist approach.

So it's not so much about pushing a certain tendency on the radical left. It's more like opening up space to have nuanced and complex dialogue between many different tendencies and many different representations of radical left politics. We want to be very welcoming and open in that way, and I think hopefully we've succeeded in that. And on the guillotine, you know, my individual tendency and my individual analysis might come out a bit more. I'm clearly on the Marxist side of things. If pressured to really name my tendency, I would say that I'm a Marxist-Leninist Maoist, but I usually just refer to myself as a Marxist or communist.

And my co-hosts on the guillotine is an anarchist. So an insurrectionary anarchist to boot. So the interactions there are kind of interesting, and where we converge and where we disagree. is part of, I think, the interesting aspect of the show. So you could say that if someone was maybe not identifying themselves at all, or they would identify on other sides of the political spectrum, I'm guessing far right might not be terribly interested, but if you were, say, in the center, part of the Democratic Party, maybe even a Republican who might be a bit dissatisfied with things over there, you could also find

at least Revolutionary Left Radio accessible for, like, learning purposes. Yeah, I mean, 100%. And we hope to reach those folks. And I even have an entire like two and a half hour episode where it's called Rev Left in Dialogue with Liberalism, where I have a liberal historian. And we don't debate. We have meaningful, respectful dialogue back and forth. So I'm very much about having an open mind and engaging critically with topics and not being dismissive or angrily sectarian if somebody disagrees with me politically. So if you're a Democrat, if you're a centrist, even if you're a conservative or a libertarian, you know, I really hope that you could still get something out of our shows.

And I certainly think that you'll be able to get something out of this one. What about you? What's your show for my listenership that might not be familiar with what you all do on Polytrix? You want to introduce yourself and say a little bit about your guys' project? Certainly. Well, my name is Barry DeFord. I am the co-host of Polytrix. And with me, as always, is my often-imitated, never-replicated co-host, Shishankovarou.

Shishank, how about you let Brett know a little bit about what we do over on the Polytrix? Namaste Homo Sapiens. I am completely out of my element today. This is going to be a lot of fun. I am Shoshankavaru. I co-host Polytrex. I write computer programming by day. I write comic books by night. And when I can, I try to get away from it all by jumping into the high stakes and exciting, entertaining world of politics. And so it's a little bit of everything really, but first and foremost, I'm a nerd. That's, that's really. the perspective I think I'm bringing in today. And that's kind of what we do on Polytrex, is we try to take everything in Star Trek that we think is interesting and we try to connect it to the real world. So we'll take an authoritative figure from Star Trek, for example, and like for a listener who might know there is a character named Gal Dukat, who's kind of a space dictator in one of the series, Deep Space Nine, and then we take him and we break him down in an episode on, you know what this is trying to tell us, about the real world is, it's trying to tell us about MoMA Gaddafi in some ways. It's trying to tell us about, it's trying to tell us about some authoritative precedents, prime ministers.

And that's the gist of what we do on Polytrex. And you take characters, we take themes, we take ideas, every now and then we'll do something exciting called Debatex, where we'll take a specific part that we think is politically or socially interesting in Star Trek. and we both or some some guests will have a certain opinion on it that neither of us do not share. So we'll see about having a respectable debate about that particular topic within Star Trek. So long story short, we discuss politics and culture within the realm of Star Trek and we try to connect it to the real world. So the vision about this whole project, dear listeners on both sides of Rev.

left in on Politrex. The whole point is a book got released recently by a political philosopher and a speculative science fiction fantasy writer named Benjinnon Shidungao. And both of them, Jay Mufaoud Paul, the philosopher, and Benjamin, what they ended up doing was creating what you could say is like a dialogue between a science fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy story, and then the deeper sort of political implications of that, the criticisms, usually coming from a left-wing or post-colonial background or concept. So I think with that, that kind of got me thinking about my two loves, which is politics, specifically political philosophy, and then, of course, science fiction, namely Star Trek,

but we will be branching a little bit out in this, and you'll notice that in the interviews as well, as they'll be spliced in and out of my conversation, or sorry, they'll be spliced in and out between Brett, Shishonk, and my conversation that we're going to be having about both the book, which is known as Methods Devour themselves, a conversation. And then our interviews, so Brett interviewed Benjinn and I interviewed Josh Mufowid Paul. You may notice we're going to call him JMP from time to time, just simply. So that's a little, if you're listening and you hear us say JMP, we just

mean, the philosophy author of that book. And we'll probably refer to her as B, just, you know, for brevity's sake. Yeah, B as well. So, and then I don't know, in that respect, we can call each other by special secret nicknames if we want. You guys got my email like special secret nicknames, right? Oh, no. Oh, damn, damn.

I do want to say, though, before we start for Rev. Left listeners, JMP, you would know him from our episode on continuity and rupture. He wrote that book on Maoist philosophy, released by Zero Books. We did an episode with them. So, you know, if you're at least familiar with that, then you'll have some orientation to what we're doing here. And if Shashank is out of his element, as he says, I, too, am out of my element in some ways. You know, I come out of the political world. And although I'm interested in and always have loved science fiction and fantasy, both in film and in literature, you know, I'm certainly in over my head when it comes to these two with regards to that.

So Barry, who has a, you know, a firm foot in both worlds will help us and act like a. a bridge. So I really think this is a pretty, pretty damn unique episode in both of our catalogs. And I'm excited to, to jump into it. Full agreement. Yeah, it's an elaborate exercise that is being jumped into from two different podcasts, all to just make Barry look good. Yeah, it's really a Barry vanity project. It is totally a vanity project. So there we go. I guess, if you're ready to jump in. Yeah, let's jump in. The first sort of question maybe is just sort of zooming out and what are your overall thoughts? So what are your overall thoughts on the book and the interviews that we're about to listen to?

And what did you find particularly interesting or valuable in any of those? First of all, I found, and the best word for it would be for B's writing in Methods Devour Themselves. And now that I'm reading Winterglass, her actual novel, I think the best word, and I've been thinking about it for a long time, is incandescent. her writing actually has sort of a glow to it almost. There's a lot of visuals that will kind of almost cause you to squint if you look directly at it in your mind, because she comes from a perspective that is completely outside of what the West would give you. So I found that very much in her writing. When she starts to talk and when we start to hear her introduce sort of the concepts and ideas that bring her to writing,

you also see very much a context that is far beyond what myself a, you know, a person living in so-called Canada in Western society, I guess, as we would call it, I don't really have much context. And that was almost the best part for me because it really felt like I was stepping outside of my own imagination, I think, is the best way to put it. So that's kind of where I would start just talking about bees work in specific. Yeah, Shasheng, did you have any thoughts? I'm going to be entirely honest. I did not get an opportunity to read the book in full. I did get to read part of it, but I got to spend some time with both your interviews. So I guess I'll start off there.

There is something really unique as someone who is and guys do not find me and like, moor me down. I have a dog that I need to take care of. I am a Democrat. I identify as a Democrat. sure and and why when i put that part aside and i objectively listen to both the interviews when she's saying things like you know she's she's she's very honest about uh something like you know westerners cannot follow fiction that's about mexicans when she when she goes into that part of the interview uh that felt very very uh connective to me that was something that i

could instantly relate to because all my life i have been i have been exposed to both movies that are full of brown people, books that are full of brown people, people that look like me. And also, I've gone out of my way to expose myself to Western media. And it's, there is certainly a disconnect that kind of in a few, in a few aspects goes both ways. Like, there are some things I cannot connect you. When it's like a white guy and a white girl falling in love in the book 3D, like I can't, I do not get that. And it's, not, it's not like a critique on what they're trying to do. It's, it's pretty much what she's talking about where she says, you know, when somebody doesn't look like you, their names

don't sound like the names, you know, and they're, they're telling you the story of an environment that you do not understand. Of course, you're not going to get it. But that is kind of where the challenges that she talks about and what she was trying to tackle with, with the book. So that was a great interview for me to listen to Brett, and full kudos to you on that interview. Going to the, to the, to the JMP and Barry interview, there was a little more Star Trek discussed in there, so I kind of had some more authority personally in there, and when he says something, and this is something that only a non-trekkie could come up with. He pretty much puts Barry in his place when he says, you know, you don't

think about it, but Starfleet is kind of an imperial organization. And I never thought about that until he said it. And I could almost hear Barry trying to scramble for words. It's like, What do I say now? Because the trekkies are going to listen to this. So it was a very, they're definitely full of a lot of good thoughts, facts, insights, and opinions that somebody who comes to one entirely, no pun intended, left field can look at and understand and relate to. So like, I guess my big thoughts said, good job, you guys. Well, thank you. Yeah.

Yeah, and I really found the part where B was talking about how difficult it is for, you know, certain, even like Western publishers and stuff to relate to, you know, Asian characters, for example. And I think at one point she says, you know, a lot of people in the West have an easier time relating to Hannibal Lecter than they do just to a regular protagonist with a weird name from a different country. And, you know, I think that speaks volumes. Do you just kind of a side question, but I think this is kind of interesting. Do you find it difficult with publishers in the West or centers of capitalism to get your ideas out and publish? And what have some of your experience has been with that? Yeah. For one issue, I have a personal respect is that, okay, people think the names of my characters are difficult to pronounce or even unpronounceable.

But there are just Thai names or Chinese names that are actually always quite normal in my part of the world. My friends, Suea Moreno Garcier, has mentioned before that editors have no trouble. relating to Hannibal Leicester. They find Mexican king-edge characters so hard to connect with because their names are weird, or they live in Mexico and a lot of Western writers

just by that's so unrelated. And that is pretty funny, given that a lot of readers and editors have no problems relating to a literal serial killer. Right. That does speak volume. So there's that cultural difference as well.

You know, what I enjoyed about this the books and the interviews over i mean the book we have two great writers right each in different fields each coming from fiction and nonfiction respectively but two people that are really masterful with the pen and that not only makes it engaging and it not only makes it accessible but it really makes it like an aesthetic sort of experience when you're going back and forth between you know b's fiction and jmps nonfiction and how they interrelate and weave together when you have two high-caliber writers like that, it really makes this experiment even better and more valuable and fulfilling as a reader and a thinker. So I don't want to say too much because,

again, we're going to have the interview so people can make up their own minds as we go, but that's what I would sort of say up front. It's really worth the read. It's a short, it's a short text. It's challenging, but it's also accessible, and it's really well-written. So if people are interested, it doesn't take that much time to get through, and it's definitely worth your time. So I guess I want to move on to, you know, a couple more introductory questions. And one way to think frame this conversation would be to talk about how politics and social realities sort of shape art and vice versa. So how does politics and social reality shape science fiction and fantasy? And how does science fiction and fantasy specifically influence or

interact with our political and social realities? I think, I think, yeah, I'll take, I'll take the first crack at this one. When you think about Star Trek coming out in 1966, the vision was a united earth. And if you look at the context within Star Trek, of course, it is coming from the center of capitalism. It is coming from a country that is at that point in 1966 ramping up a illegal war in Vietnam. It is throwing its weight around and in a direct competition with another gigantic superpower who later on is going to earn the ire in criticism of its, say, like its invasion of Hungary and the different revolutions that are taking place around the world. This was a tumultuous time.

And Star Trek doesn't even bat an eye at the idea of the entire world is unified together. It's a planet that supports, that every individual supports each other. And we are now moving forward into the galaxy, looking around meeting new groups, trying to create relationships, obviously coming into conflict from time to time, but always in the spirit of exploration and discovery. So I think right then and there, you can almost see and feel the aspirations of even just regular people within the United States. And then when you look at the people who are actually under oppression, right, when you think about, say, Uhura, who is played by Nicholz, who actually wanted to leave Star Trek at some point. And Martin Luther King Jr. specifically told her to stay on the show to keep the black voice alive within this science fiction. And since then, we have had African American actors grace the screen, direct, right. I mean, I'm looking at my gigantic Star Trek board, and I've got Michael Dorn who played Wharf, the guy with the wrinkly head in the next generation, and I have an autograph from Nicholz, as well.

These are people who inspire me, and as a Euro-Canadian, I am inspired, I look up to, I see the talent in these other people. And then, of course, with George Decay, he was actually interned during the Second World War in the United States because he's Japanese. he still shares this vision that Gene Roddenberry had of a unified world. And, you know, he's written extensively on the fact that he's angry at his country for what has happened, but he still believes in his country regardless. And I could never imagine the amount of pain and anguish and sorrow he went through to get to that point. So I think right there, there's just using the Trek example, specifically, there's an

interplay and an interconnection there. Shishang? That was a very interesting question to me. And since Barry covered the trek of it all, I have always thought of science fiction as an astute student of politics and reality in that if you look at any science fiction story, be it from Isaac Asimov, be it from Ray Bradbury, who are like, you could say in some stories out at the opposite ends of the spectrum, and then you go into something like Star Trek, which presents a very hopeful future, a future in which. humanity has actually resolved its issues and it has gone on to better things and it has gone on to the greatest adventure as the show likes to call it or you could look at something like Blade Runner which I imagine we'll talk about here in a little bit which is which is the worst or not the worst which is a very realistic depiction of sci-fi dystopia so I've always thought

of science fiction, and this is an eye that I guess you develop when you're really trying to look for it. So this might just be my perspective. But all science fiction is either really, really trying to mirror our reality and politics, or it is trying aggressively to be the opposite of our reality and politics. So if we are today in a world where everybody is disagreeing with each other, you look at Star Trek and then you see a place where people have a set of fundamentals that they've agreed on, and that is where the power comes from, is that everybody has come to an agreement. And then you go to a time where everybody is agreeing with each other, then you see something like Star Wars, where the fundamental belief that there is this thing that holds all of us together itself is a divisive topic, even between the heroes. Like when you see Han Solo interact with Luke Skywalker, he says, that four stuff is mumbo-jumbo.

Like even people who are trying to go for a cause cannot still agree on this fundamental thing that connects the universe according to that particular fiction's lore. So all of science fiction to me is either, hey, this is the reality that I'm trying to teach you about or, hey, this is the reality that I'm trying to aspire you to. And that's really a lot of what Star Trek is too. And they've tried to do that.

Star Trek has the unique benefit of having the ability to show at one point of time how great things are in one place and then just how a complete disaster in other places. If you look at this show that we talk about on the show often called Deep Space Nine, it's about a structurally run well-placed organization called Starfleet that is trying to help a nation that has just come out of genocide and imperial rule which is one opposite trying to confront another opposite

and that's one of the fundamental conflicts of the show. So that's what is politics and reality within science fiction. It is just that. That is all that science fiction is. The veneer of numbers and science, if you will, is just in there

to give you a gateway into the mirror of, it's either the mirror darkly where you see it and you go, oh, this is horrible, I can't imagine this is the future that we're going to, or it's the beautiful, clear water mirror where you look at it and go, oh, this is really hopeful and this is where we actually can go. So that is all that science fiction is to me in a way. Yeah, super interesting. I would say, you know, kind of building on both of what you've said, you know, science fiction

by putting the human condition into the future into, you know, an alien environment, whether literally or metaphorically, is an attempt to sort of get some space from our current socio-cultural, you know, realities. But that space allows you to more easily maybe criticize or analyze or push the envelope on some things that you wouldn't necessarily always be able to do on a straight retelling in the present time. But moreover, you know, I'm coming from the Marxist, a political philosopher perspective of things. And you also have to understand that all art, you know, art is generated in a material context, meaning science fiction, fantasy, whatever art, literature, anything, is ultimately a manifestation of the underlying, you know,

socio-historical, cultural milieu that that writer or those teams of filmmakers are operating in. And so in a lot of ways, it's going to always reflect and, you know, point towards its material roots. And part of the, you know, critical theory coming out of the Frankfurt School or Marxists who want to talk about ideology and analyze film and culture is that by analyzing these cultural products, you can actually have a pretty interesting and insightful door through which to analyze the broader culture and society that one is living in. So in that way, you know, this interplay between art and the political and social realities are always sort of in this back and forth with one another, informing each other, rooted in one another. And that's why I think we're able to analyze things like Star Trek and draw, you know, parallels or zoom out and talk about, you know, our own social realities using that as a doorway. And for people who sometimes might think that political theory is too dense or not at all their interests, art and social. science fiction and fantasy and literature offer a door in to some of this stuff. And that's why we do do shows where we analyze an entire film. Because for some people, that is a far more

accessible way to start understanding some of these deeper critiques of society and culture. So in all those ways, including everything that both of you said, it's important and it certainly interacts. I also very much appreciate considering, coming from the Marxist sci-fi fan perspective, I like the amount of times you use the word space in your conversation. For sure. Brett, let me ask you. So from your unique Marxist perspective, I guess Barry can win on this too. What is your objective view of Star Trek?

Do you think Star Trek, like the way it exists, without the hope of it all? What do you think? Just what are your thoughts on it? Like if you were to sum it up. Yeah. So certainly talking about the original Star Trek, it is simultaneously of its time. and incredibly impressively progressive, right? So when I look at the original Star Trek,

I see a team of people behind that show really, really trying to push the envelope on social issues. I mean, I know that it was the first time you had an interracial kiss, you know, displayed on television, for example. And in that way, it is incredibly progressive. But in other ways, and you almost can't blame it for this because we're all sort of lost in the fog of our own time. But it does replicate some of some interesting social hierarchies, even though it talks about, you know, being in a post-class society.

There is a hierarchy aboard the ship, and we can maybe talk about, you know, what hierarchy is demanded of a situation like that, or are hierarchies absolutely necessary in the context of, you know, more militaristic outfits, for example. But there was at the end of the day still a white man at the helm leading, you know, a journey into space. to, if not, it's not explicitly to colonize, but there is that imperial instinct. There is that American frontier aspect to going out and seeing what else we can do in the universe. And although it's, at least in my understanding, and again, I'm no expert on Star Trek, so don't, don't hammer me too hard for this stuff. But there is that element of things that I see. And I'm not sure what fully to make out of it, but I simultaneously love the show, and I also see it as a, as a show very much of its time but striving to be ahead of itself yeah white man leads the show

while the black lady enters the space phone yeah and i i would just say you know and that and that that uh hardworking uh uh lady in the back there is also wearing a very high skirt right there was you know levels of misogyny that that that was still pervasive within that like i was surprised that the captain's tear didn't have an ashtray uh when i when i think about it now you know and 60s and stuff. How did this unique collaboration with JMP come to be, and what was your goal in doing it?

He has been reading my fiction for a while, and he approached me about this project, and I jump at the chance, because usually you don't really, unless you are a very famous author or dad or boss, you don't really get to engage with. You don't really get people, doing a very critical engagement with your work.

And it was a very original way to do it. My goal of doing it was to build a really unique work where the non-fiction and fiction components interact with each author in a way that you don't usually see done so much because usually literary criticism is very separate from the fiction. It's done very separately rather than as a collaboration. This almost sort of brings up the idea that using artifact philosophers, folks who have died or who aren't with us anymore or who, say, refuse to engage or something like that, you see that as not as useful as engaging with people who are actually here who can actually respond. I would wonder if you'd be able to kind of elaborate on that point. I wouldn't say not as useful. I think they have different uses, and I use analogies from people that are dead all the time.

in literature and art that I think is useful for explaining things as a rubric to explain ideas. I just felt, and I think this could just refer back to what I was saying in the last chapter, I felt, and I know B felt as well, that this project would be something different. It would produce a different way of thinking about things, not better, but just kind of, I kind of said that at the end of the introduction, but like what would it be like if, you know, the author could respond back? So it wasn't just like artifact, as you said. What would it be like?

It's not suddenly saying one is better than the other. It's just saying that this way of doing things might produce a different way of reading for readers. Yeah, I think maybe we can go on to the next bit here and talk a bit about our thoughts on this is an engagement that we're having with. two authors. And until the early 1990s, we were also able to engage with, say, you know, the guy who started Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry. And today we can engage a lot with different science fiction authors for better or for worse, such as like J.K. Rowling or George R. Martin or Gene Roddenberry in the past or currently George Lucas. So what are your guys' thoughts on engaging with living authors versus dead ones? Brad, would you like to go ahead? I can try. This is a challenging question. I guess I've never really thought about it.

I've never had the question explicitly formulated like this and had to respond to it. I guess some of my initial thoughts are when you're looking at an author of the past, a creator of any sort, they're sort of, they're stuck, you know, I'm using sort of JMP's, you know, terminology here, but in the amber of their time, right? Their work is done. The author is dead. you can look back on it, understand it in its historical time, and draw lessons from it. But it's almost like it's the work of art that any person creates after their dead is sort of stuck in time. And as time goes on, you know, people comment on it, et cetera.

And it just piles up a whole secondary empire of people talking about the original work, you know, and all of that. But with a living author, that person is still, just by virtue of being alive, still developing and they're operating in the same time that you are operating in. So I can go back and I can read, you know, Karl Marx, for example, 150, 170 years ago and get a lot out of it. But it's also very interesting to read somebody like JMP, who's coming out of that same principled Marxist tradition, but is operating in this very unique time. And politically, you know, we're facing, you know, the insurgent fascist movements around the globe.

We're facing climate catastrophe. We're facing a sort of crisis of litigation. legitimacy of capitalist democracies around the world, and people are struggling with that. So to hear somebody come out of the Marxist tradition living in this time today, discussing it is always going to be a different experience than trying to go back 150, 200 years and extract what meaning you can out of a previous author and try to apply it to totally new conditions. That's our job, and it's fascinating. It can be done, but engaging with contemporary authors and creators versus dead ones has those sorts of differences in dynamics.

There is also the question of development for living authors, at least particularly to me, or lack thereof. I'm a huge fan of Jake Erowling. I grew up reading the Harry Potter series. I was bought the VHS and the DVDs or what, I don't know if anybody remembers this. There were between DVDs and VHSs, there was this thing called the VCD, which used to be two discs having broken down a movie into half. or maybe that was just an Indian thing, I don't know. That's funny. Yeah, not familiar.

Yeah, and so I watch them over and over, and they're kind of still moral fables to me in a way. But if you just take the Harry Potter series, this is a person who has become the world's first billionaire by writing books. She's the first person in recorded history to her make a billion dollars by writing a series of books. And yet it took her publishing her. her entire series and making that billions to then come out and say, oh, hey, Dumbledore was gay all

along. And even though there is no specific mention of that made in the books or there is not even a line printed where it's, it, it, there are places where it is alluded to, but there isn't a specific remark that says something to the life, to the effect of he kissed a man or, you know, he made love to a man. That was, that was never made clear. And now 11 years down the road, she is back in doing stuff within that realm again. And now she's authoring screenplays.

For those of you unfamiliar, she's doing the new series called Fantastic Beasts, which goes back in time and shows these characters when they're young. Particularly, there is a young Dumbleder who's famously being portrayed by Jude Law. And the two movies in, again, while specifically telling the entire world, this is a gay character. who's interacting with men and who in one of the movies has a very troubled relationship with a man. He's clearly, there is a connection there. And yet she does not have, or she's constrained by the fact that she represents so many people and so many financial interests that she cannot make that statement, even though she clearly very explicitly has stated that this is happening. So there is even the lack of development that is one of the things that's concerning to me.

But I also recognize that engagement with any author is first and foremost a privilege. That person never has agreed to engage with the person who has bought that person's intellectual property. The agreement begins and ends with, at least to me, hey, you give me your five bucks, I'll give you my comic book. or hey, you give me your $10,000, I'll give you my novel. And that is where the engagement begins and ends. So anything out of that is a privilege. So in a way, what I said so far seems like if I was to go down and press JK Rowling, she could very well tell me to F off, and that is completely in her right.

So it is a complex issue for sure. Yeah, you've mentioned Harry Potter, and sort of the interesting thing about what J.K. Rowling tries to do is we'll go back, like post hoc, right, and look at her old work and then put in meaning for, you know, progressive social issues that weren't actually there in the original creation of the work itself. So as like society progresses and like trans issues comes to the four, she'll go back and, you know, deem one of her past characters trans in a sort of post hoc way. That sort of reflects the criticism that you're talking about there. How do you think about that sort of action? Do you think it's the sort of that's well in?

intentioned, but ultimately sort of harmful? So we're rolling in particular, I can't, it's hard to think of it as well-meaning because it's for, I mean, there is no textual evidence to support any of it. She literally just comes on Twitter and then goes off. And it's almost random at this point. Like, now Nagini is an Asian woman, which has a lot of unfortunate implications. I would say that the way she goes about it is particularly. I think if there is nowhere for the text itself to support it, it's a really bad idea.

And most writers should not try for it. Absolutely. Barry? Yeah, that was all very good. I don't know if there's much else I can add to that. But no, that really got it. And yeah, I think Benjinen really does kind of bring that up in the sense of like, if you're going to make a gay character, make them gay, don't.

Don't recon them years later. But then again, also, you know, imagine if Star Trek came out today or if Lord of the Rings came out today, where they would be aligning themselves a lot more, you know, would Gene Roddenberry make the exact same choices? I would argue no, and there would be more progression there and more things taking place. But I think the biggest piece of this is it really underscores, especially in Western science fiction, also in Western consumption of media and books. everything, that we also are dealing with a society that has a long ways to go still.

Yeah, and that leads to, you know, another question, and it's sort of based on something that Benjamin said. But Benjamin talks about, you know, the realities of being a contemporary artist. I mean, she is, you know, a living author in that way. And she said that, you know, unless you're famous dead or both, you don't really get people critically engaging with your work in the way that J&P has clearly engaged with hers. I feel that's like sort of a good jumping off point to discuss the idea. is behind our collaboration here in some ways.

We are mirroring what B and JMP did and methods devour themselves in that as we've talked about, I'm coming from the world of political philosophy and you both come from the world of science fiction and fantasy. But here we are engaging across spheres in the same way that they did. So what is important in your opinion about this critical engagement across fields that both their book and our interview are attempting to do? And why is it so novel in the modern time? I would say just basically the point here is I feel like I kind of.

kind of embody that in a lot of cases. And this is, maybe we joked about this being sort of my vanity project earlier, and I'm not going to deny that, that this is sort of a dream come true having one of my absolute best friends, Shashonk on here, and a new friend who is also very inspiring to me, Brett, having you both on is a wonderful sort of idea. But what it truly represents to me is when we critically engage with the content that's being produced for us, I think we can better understand, better understand our own society, better understand ourselves. You know, if you see, if you're really happy with how Loki has gone from being a villain to a hero in the Marvel universe, then maybe there's something you need to critically engage with there as to why you find that interesting, right?

Is there something deeper philosophically to that? And I mean, sometimes it's nice just to go to a movie and eat popcorn or sit in your basement and watch a movie and eat popcorn with friends and all that. of stuff. But it always comes down to that, that the critical engagement with the stuff you're consuming don't think for a second that the person who wrote it wasn't intending for you to critically engage with it, with the exception of Michael Bay. But outside of that, I think what we really see. How did you? That guy's a loser. Anyways, just the freaking loser. Anyways, moving on. I think, and I think that's, that's again, just bringing it back to Star Trek. you know, we do engage quite a bit.

And unfortunately, it's sometimes that engagement's negative, and sometimes that engagement gets quite heated, much like it does in the political spheres. But if we really take a step back and look at what we're supporting, what we're following, what we're listening to, what we're consuming, I think we can better understand ourselves, our society, and maybe start imagining alternatives to things that we may not like. So that's where I see this, is in science fiction, speculative fiction,

and all of those sorts of things, you have that opportunity basically every episode or every book that you consume. Those are great points. When reading this question brings to mine, for me, this fascinating concept in Star Trek called the Mirror Universe, in which characters happen upon a universe

that has their exact versions of characters, except they're distorted in some ways. For example, if you take someone like Captain Kirk, who's for all intents and purposes, a good guy, a clean-cut hero, a very Captain America-like figure, you then take him and put him in this Middard Universe, and he's almost king Kirk. He's dirty, manipulative, he's imperialistic, he's tyrannical.

And to me, that's a really good metaphor for our interviews here. And the book itself and what you guys are trying, trying to do with this. It's that there is that imperial side within all of us. There is this fiction-loving side in all of us. And it's a way to put them one up against another and look at them and go, what about this is so perfectly harmonic that I am still able to exist and continue living and having a balance of ideas where I can understand that there is a really horrible side of me that somehow relates to this imperial Kirk while also being completely connected to this this real good guy, Kirk that we know. And the same can be said of fiction

and reality. Reality owes nothing to fiction. Reality will just keep going on whether fiction is being written or not. But fiction owes everything to reality. It is precisely your understanding of reality that fiction relies on. If you don't understand reality, you would never understand fiction. So to me, this series, this project that is being done and what the book and the authors have tried to do to a certain extent is to show that, is that, you know, this is how much we rely on stories to help us get through a reality that is unforgivable. We try to look for forgiveness. We try to look for joy. We try to look for emotion in a set of fabrications that we've created so we can keep balancing ourselves while going through an unforgiving world.

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I would, I kind of jumping off some of that is like, you know, we are as human beings a storytelling animal, right? We're an animal that is sort of obsessed with narrative. And, you know, we have a narrative going on in our heads pretty much all day long. And we, you know, we engage in narratives when we're when we're doing literature or film for sure. But also very much to equal measure in politics, right? It's not so like when you're trying to convince somebody to come over to your political ideas or engage in some sort of political discussion with somebody who might not necessarily already be in your sphere of things, to tell a story, to tell a narrative is essential.

And, you know, I think politicians or even just political actors who try to discard with that or don't take that seriously, end up sort of creating for themselves a sort of curmudgeonly or an inaccessible or just a sort of flat persona. What people respond to is not so much, you know, facts and, you know, stats on things. I mean, just look at any political discussion on Facebook or social media broadly. People aren't really debating the facts of things, right? People aren't really interested in, like, getting the objective evidence and compiling that into a worldview. you, people are interested in telling one another stories about how the world is.

Sometimes those stories are way off. Sometimes those stories are ultimately rooted in more factual evidence. But either way, when you're doing a political program, especially when it comes to getting people to come over and help you with it, telling people a story is an absolutely essential way to win people over. And I think that's important. I think people who are trying to organize, people who are trying to build a better world, definitely need to keep that in mind.

You're not going to go out to a regular working class person and necessarily talk to them about Marx's capital, volume one in the words that Marx uses. That's just going to be off-putting and alienating for them. And they're like, okay, whatever. But if you can tell them a story about, you know, why they're struggling and why certain things in our political system are so screwed up and why it seems like we're not getting anywhere and why we have Nazis marching down our street these days. And that story does not need to be fictional, right? It doesn't need to be made up. It can very much be rooted in the evidence and good analysis, but it's also the way that you're going to connect with that person and explain to them their situation and give them a vision for a better world. So this interaction is absolutely essential and it makes political actors better if they take it seriously.

And then the last thing I'd say sort of zooming out and talking about academia and talking about sort of the intellectual sphere of our societies and why we don't often see this sort of interesting cross-field engagement. I think part of that is the division of labor in our society and in academia, the hyper-specialization. You know, you're rewarded in academia not for having the broadest understanding of a bunch of different fields and creatively linking them together in ways that push progress forward. But in academia, it's about getting published. It's about ultimately profits for the administration and the university itself. And what this sort of leads to is hyper-specialization, where people just narrowly, narrowly focus on one little sliver of one little field.

And what we lose in that is we lose this cross talk. We lose this cross-pollinization. And in a moment in history and civilization, that seems so crucial, right? I mean, no matter what political arena you're coming out of, you can certainly agree that the 21st century is a crossroads for our species. We either have to fundamentally change the way that we interact with each other in our natural world, or we very well go extinct or at least devolve into some dystopian barbarism. So at this crucial moment, having people who are really good at one of their fields

openly talking to another person who does something different with a whole new skill set and finding where we can learn from one another is incredibly important. And what this work shows to me is a real earnest attempt to do just that. And I love it for that reason. And I would just to build on that even further, and this can tie into further discussion is what it really does and what it can do for those people who are, say, just stuck in the, well, I just like my, I just like my sci-fi and that's that, or I just want to talk politics all the time. And I encounter people on both of those ends and I hold nothing against them in that sense. But what this can do by bridging this gap, especially in academia, but then also by reaching ordinary working people with these kinds of conversations. you can expand imagination, I think, is the best way to look at that. And if you expand that concept, not just by limiting it to academia,

but even fiction and nonfiction, or even on a broader scale, cultures, because of what are cultures but sets of beliefs that happen to have scattered across the planet, if you stick yourself to trying your best to specialize in only one school of belief or sticking to only one idea you're losing out by not exposing yourself to a variety of ideas because there is the question of your intellectual growth being just limited

to accepting that one idea and then rejecting everything else because this idea inherently tells you hey I am the right idea like if you take Christianity or even Hinduism the religion I come from it's supposed to just tell you Hinduism is the one true religion

and when you listen to something like that you limit yourself by specializing yourself in it and stick into it you limit yourself and your intellectual capability of understanding what the political motivations of the Old Testament are for example because you're you're so stuck in the world of trying to fix it on your own narrative

it's like going to a buffet and saying that hey I really like your cheeseburg at this buffet, what kind of a buffet has cheeseburgers? But it's like going to a buffet. I want to go to your buffet. It's like going to a buffet and saying, hey, you have 25 items, but I like your cheeseburger so much. That is the only thing I'm going to eat for the rest of my life.

That is a depressing life. Right. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, and not only does it limit your own development, but at some point, you know, it limits your ability to connect with other people. If you're so navel-gazy, if you're so. infatuated with your own narrow view of things and your own narrow interests, like, it's just bad overall for every aspect of life. And I think most people intuitively understand that even

if maybe politics aren't your thing and you're coming from a science fiction background, there's certainly other interests that you have. And you see that if you're really into like two different things, for example, you have two things that are seemingly totally unrelated, but you're really into both, your brain, your mind can start making associations between those two fields of thought. And that, that gives you. rise to creativity and intellectual novelty. And that's important on just an individual development level and also on a broader geopolitical level where, as Shasheng was talking about, you know, we need to broaden our

imagination. And those associations between different realms of thought and different realms of behavior and different worldviews, I think it's going to become increasingly important. Just one thing I'll say before we move on to other topics is to connect it to the Star Trek of it all, imagine. ship you if the ship that you're imagining just as humans in it that is an incredibly monotone ship and that is not a narrative that you will ever enjoy or be entertained by for the for a longer period of time and that's kind of why uh if you look at certain cultures within star trek like

there is a there is this culture called the klingon culture which very much relies on trying to be within itself and trying to celebrate their own uh their own heritage in phase of and rejecting other cultures mainly something like Starfleet which is trying to promote a melting pot kind of culture there's the reason why those guys

end up being the antagonist or end up being anti to the narrative that we're trying to tell so the best ships are those that celebrate diversity where you have an Andorian sitting next to a Vulcan sitting next to a human

and all learning from each other and all filling in the gaps of this universe's vast infinite knowledge and this infinite creativity that is available to you by availing yourselves and opening yourselves to that kind of a narrative you're getting so much more out of life and out of existence than you are by sticking to a very human-based cling on culture like ship barry am i am i even close to the point of trying to make oh yeah you're hitting it you're good man Yeah, and I think, you know, taking that analogy to the sort of, you know, global political stage, as I'm wont to do, you know, you see countries doing that, right? You see, you see an impulse in something like the Brexit vote or an impulse in the anti-immigration rhetoric that's all over Europe and America at the moment as this attempt to turn away from diversity, turn away from different perspectives, different ways of life. And when you turn away and you just, you just want to.

to have a sort of incestuous, narrow world of just people that look and think like you. You know, it's really, it's, it never leads. It never, ever leads historically and it never can lead to anything productive or creative or interesting because it's just, it's just an inward spiral, you know, infinitely. Brett, beautiful use of the word incestuous, by the way. Thank you. I like to slip those in there once in a while. What do you think are the responsibilities of science fiction and science fiction

and fantasy creators, whether in literature or film, if any at all? Part of the current climate change discussion, I think is that before now, let's say 10, 20 years ago, a lot of science fiction was very positive about technology. As a way forward, nothing no detriment, and there was not a lot of concern about climate change and all that. So I think that has done a lot to affect the way we view technology today, and we have spend a long time not really thinking about the environmental impact. That in many ways, I think that was pretty irresponsible of all the writers, because they

didn't really think about this. They're just thinking, or we can go to space, or we can come up with basically magical technology that will make all this go away. And our current approach to technology is flexed a lot of that kind of narrative. do you think as things intensify and agis climate change becomes more and more apparent in the everyday lives of people that that sort of reflections will happen in science fiction going forward either pessimistically or optimistically do you think it'll become more of a thing as we sort of struggle with our present and future conditions yes i think now that is a lot more post-apocalyptic fiction for obvious reasons and i think uh fiction now more a lot of writers put a lot more thought into this kind of thing. And there are some movements toward both ends. Some of them espouse a kind of completely pessimistic.

It's just like post-apocalyptic games like fall out. And the other end is thinking of positive change and a future where we can reduce our environmental impact, have sustainable energy, that sort of thing. To pull it back to your question about the utopia and dystopia, I think there's a place for both of those, right, in the way that we tell stories. Like, I don't, I think they can be gritty, they can be not gritty. I worry of this kind of very simplistic social realism way of telling stories or, oh, it should all just be how, you know, everything is unified under socialism. I mean, that's what we want, but we're not there.

So I think there's, like, literature and a lot of the great literature by leftists has always taken different positions. They've done their own versions of dystopia, their own versions of utopia, and, you know, things that aren't either dystopia or utopia as well. I mean, I think about the mixture of it's like E&M Banks, like the culture novels. Have you read the culture novels? I have not. Okay. Well, I mean, if you're aware of them, like the whole, and he died a few years ago, but his culture novels are kind of like, they're like, they're communist, there's like space communism. And so he imagines this, this far-flung, distant civilization.

called, you know, the culture, which has reached its position through, you know, class struggle, but a long time ago and has no state formation and as kind of, it's, you know, the forces of production are unleashed because those social relations are, you know, have been completely changed. So it's, like, exactly that you can see communism. But the problem is, is that what he makes interesting about it is how it runs into, you know, people that are, like other, other galactic civilizations. that don't have those values. And so what do you do when you're, you know,

your communism and you're running into these people? And so eventually they have like an organization called special circumstances that arises that are just these like AI minds, like that are, that hire people and they try to prevent, they basically try to spread communism, like in a way that like that, like almost in this Cold War way. But it's, it's interesting because the books also deal with times they get it wrong where they make these mistakes and that it causes deep splits.

but they're still very clear that that way is like it's communism it's like this way where there's no there's no more classes people get to do what they want and because of that their technology is also better than anybody else's right so it's those are in those those those are an interesting way right because it his those books would look at like how utopian the actual thing is but then how all these dystopian other competing galactic powers are and what happens when they clash and can can something that has reached communism can it make mistakes? I mean there's an, it's, Banks isn't the first to do

that. The Strogotsky brothers who were writing in the Soviet Union, they wrote a number of books about that, about like space communism, trying to figure out how to intervene. Like they have this one book called Hard to Be a God which is made into a very long and onerous avant-garde movie recently that's like four hours long.

But the original story is just about these people that are like they're from all of Earth as communist their way they're out in you know some distant place exploring space they encounter a society that's like the worst form of like european feudalism and they're supposed to watch and so there's a debate between them about are are they bound to intervene or should they just watch because communism can't be imperialism but here's all this so it's an interesting they have these debates right about that so

yeah so i feel there's a there's this whole opening that this kind of left-wing literature can do And I think that kind of storytelling is very, very important to any kind of political movement. I mean, obviously, I think that when it comes down to what action is and can only ever be the way forward, right? I mean, I'm a Marxist, Leninist Maoist, I believe in, like, a vanguard party that has to organize the masses through the mass line and, you know, in order to, like, make revolution. But, you know, part of that making revolution is kind of creating, like, taking control of the cultural sphere. like producing your own revolutionary culture with its own values that stand as alternate values to like the bourgeois values and the very reactionary values that come through in a lot of literature and for the purpose of propaganda but in that larger sense of the world because you know all literature is propagand it's all going to tell you something and i think bees afterward in methods devour themselves talks about that the intentionality it's always in literature but i think this idea of this large sense of creating our storytelling and control that not just like in the science fiction and fantasy. And all cultural sphere, I think a revolution needs to do that. That's what the bourgeois revolution did when it took power, like when it took power over these

centuries, right? It took control of the cultural sphere as well and produced a whole bunch of different kind of novels and things like that that were way better than the empty ideas of the European aristocracy at that time. Right now that bourgeois culture is empty, right? So we should be producing something better. And I think absolutely the storytelling and production of artists has to be part of that. But moving on to the next question. Both of our guests talked about science fiction as an art form through which we create and imagine new futures while mired in and wrestling with the present. What is the relationship in both of your opinions between past, present, and future, and in what ways has or does science fiction change in response to socioeconomic and political events or epochs?

I'm going to do an interesting jump here. So I know we're talking about the future speculative fiction, but I'm actually going to use an anecdotal story I heard from my archaeology prof back in my bachelor's degree. They were all at a conference talking about arrowheads, and they were talking about the arrowheads of the Mandan and the Hadatsa people who are very close to the Sioux Confederacy, just sort of on the 49th parallel kind of North Dakota, South Dakota area. And what they'd noticed was there was an incredibly sophisticated group of people who are capable of making arrowheads of like surgical precision. Like these things looked great. And weirdly, there was another group of people who lived right alongside. Like we're talking like carbon dating. They would have had to have interacted.

And they were awful at making arrowheads. They were terrible. And yet they seemed to persist just as long as this other group. So you got this like huge conference of professors all. talking about it and they're all jibber jabbering along and being like, oh, how could these two societies live together and blah, blah, blah? And as the story went from my archaeology prof, she said that a undergrad student put her hand up and said, what if those poorly made arrowheads weren't actually from another

people, but were actually from like just kids who are learning from their parents to become surgically good arrowhead makers? And I was thinking about this in the sense that, like we talked about, if you can expand your imagination, and if you can wrestle with the realities of that expansion happens, I mean, sometimes you're not going to like what you see. Sometimes you're going to come off as seeming like an idiot, like an entire conference full of, you know, thousands of years of educational prowess and experience. And it was an emperor's new clothes moment of like, well, no, kids made those and adults made those. And they're kind of like, well, I guess we need to call the conference off now. So I would say in that respect, when we're looking at this, it gives us this ability to imagine beyond what we currently see. And I think that's what SFF does in the best part of it.

Like you can look at Star Wars and maybe get a better understanding of your own religion, watching people wrestle with their belief system. You can watch Star Trek and look at a post-resource society where everything is available. and yet seemingly we seem to want to kind of fall into our usual roles. So we can look at these things as mirrors on ourselves, and as Shoshan could mention, it is. There is a mirror that we look at ourselves when we look at science fiction and fantasy. But also, like I were saying earlier, is it helps us to think outside of our own, the fog of our, the fog of now. And I think Brett, you'd mentioned that earlier. And this brings me to a point that JMP brings up in his.

conversation after they talked about one of the stories was that Mark Fisher, a author said that it's easier to envision the end of the world than it is to envision the end of capitalism. And I really do think that. And when you look at Star Trek, when you look at Star Wars, when you look at Babylon 5, when you look at all of these different science fiction stories, you are looking at a time that is either technically pre, but it's all, these are mostly post-capitalistic societies, right, where our current paradigm is no longer in motion, it's moving, it's changed to something different.

And so even just giving us the opportunity to envision that will help us find solutions in our here and our now. And if we really want to see change, we can use that almost like a target, right? I don't think necessarily everything's going to be exactly as it is in, say, Star Trek. But darn, there are some things that I really like to see, like the idea that everyone, if they're hungry, can literally just go and put food in their mouth, or that medical help is free for everyone, no questions asked, even enemies. These are all wonderful things, that women can be leaders. And now recently in Discovery, we also see that LGBTQ people exist and they are

flourishing and they're doing fantastically well in the future and they're commanding spaceships and blowing stuff up and being awesome, just like they're awesome now. And so with that, I guess, yeah, this just, it's another way to expand our, our imagination. So I'll try to break this question down to two main ideas. And interestingly, the first one, which is what is the relationship between past, present, and future, can actually be answered using a piece of fiction called Battlestar Galactica. And one of the greatest lessons in that show, the BSD reboot, is that, characters often say from their scriptures, all of this has happened before and all of it will

happen again. And there is something both comforting and terrifying about that. The past, present and future are really almost at once both very, very similar and uniquely different learning experiences for human beings. If you look at something like the interaction between genders. The agendas have always been the same. From when we started speaking to now when we can communicate literally between a space station and something floating in space and something on Earth, the agendas for the interaction have always been the same. It's companionship, sex, finding security, those have always been there. And the things that have changed about these three things is that the socio-economic relations have changed.

Technology has bought about a different way to communicate between us that we did not envision having in the past. So in that way, the present gives us more access to get to our agenda is easier. If you even take something as simple as cleaning the house that you're living in, The early man did it probably with their hands in caves. The medieval people did probably did it with a straw broom in their wooden huts. And now we're doing it using Roombas in our matchbox apartments. But the agendas have always been the same.

And that is, again, very, very comforting, very inspiring, but also terrifying. Because we have not figured out how to go post-cleaning. we have not figured out on a broader scale. We have not figured out how to go post these fundamental interactions that keep bringing us back to, in some ways, this circle of the human condition that we seem to have become slaves to while giving ourselves the illusions that we have mastered it.

So science fiction uniquely, again, has the opportunity to, going back to my earlier point, either give us inspiration to get past it or give us comfort in knowing that this is good. So if we take something like Star Trek, it gave us a hopeful future at a time when, as Barry mentioned earlier, things were dark. And if you take, this is not really science fiction or fantasy, but if you take something like Rocky 4, it gave us a hopeful time during a dark time. And then if you remember all through all through the 80s, the dystopian fiction, especially dystopian science fiction like Blade Runner and Terminator really flourished because people were finding comfort in the idea that there will be, this sounds horrible because the world was so close to the brink of nuclear war that they were just happy that there was the idea of a realistic future in which humanity survived.

And that's why dystopian fiction itself had had a resurrection of sorts. So the best things that fiction has done in the way of changing as time has gone by is it has either found a way to tell stories that comfort people or it has found a way to tell stories that horrify people while giving them the tools or at least a tool to combat that fear that they've been dealing with. Yeah, that dovetails really nicely with sort of what I have to say on this topic, which is, you know, just thinking from my perspective, when the present gets particularly bad, as perhaps it was, you know, in the 80s when you saw the rise of some of those dystopian films, but certainly as it is today, you have two directions, right? You have two ways to go. One is to look to the past, right? And I think neoliberalism, I think reactionary politics, fascism, they've very much like to draw your eyes to the past. Neoliberalism does this in like a cultural way in that you see this rise of nostalgia in culture. You see a bunch of reboots of old films from the 80s and 90s when we were kids trying to push us back into that joy, the joy of being a child, for example. And then, so it does it in that more subtle cultural way neoliberalism does, but the way that reactionaries do it all over the globe is to, you know, the present is scary.

The future is uncertain. So what we're going to do is recoil violently into a mythologized past. And the mythologized part is important here because these pasts don't really exist. So, for example, when Donald Trump says make America great again, what is he talking about? What part of America was great? For whom and at what time? You know, for the vast majority of people, whether the victims of imperialism abroad or the victims of racism and sexism, heteronormativity at home, America was never great.

And it's just been, you know, especially for indigenous people or black folks in this country, America has been a horror show of world historical proportions. So, you know, you see this with fascist movements all the time. You know, the Nazis trying to reclaim some noble Aryan pastime. And Bolsonaro, the fascist in Brazil, looks back fondly on the military dictatorship that went from the 60s to the 80s, sort of muddying the waters of memory, you know, about what it really was in the past. and preferring to go there, even if it's a false past, than to live meaningfully and engage critically with the present

or to think about ways to move forward in the future. Because, you know, the reactionary has no solutions, has no future to offer except, you know, bloodshed and domination and exploitation. Neoliberalism really has nothing to offer except the same-well-same, corrupt politics, economic crashes, ecological collapse on a monumental scale. And so, you know, all of these things I think are really important. And sci-fi is one way that we try to look to the future. And when you see sci-fi get particularly dark at a certain period, you can see that

the sort of the subconscious of that society is getting particularly dark. And I think right now, I don't know, and correct me if I'm wrong, you both know more about this than me, but I can't think of any recent sci-fi that's been very optimistic and hopeful. I mean, from Black, from Black Mere to Children of Men to Elysium, they're all sort of vomiting up this, this dystopian future in various ways. They all have different ways of how we got to that dystopia or what the conditions of that dystopia are. But I really feel like we're at this moment in time where we can't envision, we can't imagine, we can't articulate a future that's not horrible, you know, and I think that's scary and it's also indicative of our times. And it's also a challenge to people who want a better future.

How do we, how do we present that vision, that realistic vision of a future that can be in a way that's rooted meaningfully in what actually is at this moment? And so I don't have the answer to that necessarily, but it's important to think about those things. Absolutely. I just want to say, since you brought up dystopia and the discomfort of people, I would argue that the beginning of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, road of dystopia is already here, given that, you know, this horrifying UN climate report that came out recently that said we pretty much only have 10 years before Earth turns into a boiling pot. And the massive socioeconomic change, the massive starvation, the massive class differences, I would argue that because there wasn't, or maybe there is that we don't

off because there isn't a writer or a fictional narrative that is popular enough to mirror exactly how the world is going. We are unable to recognize. But I would argue that that dystopia is already here. It's just in a form that was not presented to us before. So we don't have a narrative to draw off of. Yeah, fascinating. I completely agree that dystopia is already here. Yeah, we are living in it. And it's only going, I mean, it's going to get work. for the foreseeable future, that's for sure. Might I say also, Brett, sorry to also chime in, but I think perhaps the dystopia has finally reached folks like myself.

I can really only speak about myself being a person living in a pretty have country from a pretty have family. And, you know, I did, I mean, I've had hardship in my life, but, you know, if you compare this to a kid growing up in, in a developing country or in a country that has seen constant chaos and destruction say like Iraq if they were born in in 2002 I mean their entire lucid life has been at war right yeah it's certainly inflected and emphasized at certain points in certain parts of the world Syria Libya Iraq you know a lot of these places the apocalypse is already there and now it's starting to creep into you know the quote unquote first

world and it's it's horrifying but it's also if we if we don't fight this fight who will But before we move on, I do want to read a little bit from JMP's opening thoughts and just sort of thinking about time and thinking about history and thinking about the imagination being limited. I think he puts it really well. So JMP says, we are nearly two decades into the 21st century and occupy a world cluttered with objects and phenomena that would have been scarcely imaginable even in the middle of the 20th century. All of the dreams of the fantasies of the 1950s are clipsed by the reality of technological development. the science fictions of the 1960s are largely outdated, and yet we have also failed to transcend the limits of even 19th century imagination. Despite all these new technologies, many of which must appear like magic to our long-dead counterparts, the world is still determined by the logic

of capital. Whereas a 19th century utopian imagined a future that transcended exploitative and oppressive social relations, we are losing our ability to think outside the capitalist box. Following the so-called end of history, our imagination has atrophied. Is it any wonder, then, that much of the world still resembles the hell on earth reviled by past socialist thinkers? As dystopia becomes normative everywhere, endless wars, increased exploitation in the global peripheries, a resurgence of fascist movements in the imperialist metropoles, environmental devastation, it is much more difficult to imagine a time beyond these centuries of capitalist logic. Our imagination is becoming thoroughly capitalist.

And if you think about when, you know, Star Trek comes forward, there's all these amazing technological advances, and there were, I would say, some relatively progressive things. You know, they had a diverse crew. They had different groups of people being encountered. I mean, it still has its contradictions and its problems. But I would say nowadays, most of those changes that, you know, Trek, for instance, predicted kind of came to past. Though it feels as though that attaining or even surpassing what was expected has turned out to be kind of matter. a fact or even boring, kind of like a non-event, would you say that like the commodification of these new and amazing achievements or the disposability and transactional nature of our advancements has sort of rendered them non-issues and kind of non-events, which might also kind of hamper our ability to use SFF in a much more radical way? Well, I mean, definitely the commodification has rendered them as what you call non-issues in the way that they would have been seen in a science fiction. show in the 60s, just because the velocity of commodification is such that, you know, all these

things just build upon each other, the people are just inundated with these new technologies and they just get slowly merging into this kind of new way of seeing the world, like, really quickly through this commodity form. I think, I think really what's going on is that, you know, and this goes back to my complaint about a lot of this kind of shows having this productive forces analysis, is that the domination of bourgeois social relations is just recapturing or delimiting technological advancement all the time. So they're all being controlled by the class limit that exists under capitalism. And so it's really strange, right, because we're now, and this is what, like, our world actually is a dystopia. It literally is one of the worst dystopias. And I've, I talked about

this. I did talk about this in that one chapter in there, too, about how, like, the reality of the world and what the vast majority of people experience in this world is more weird and dystopic and horrendous than like the hunger games, right? And so it's like, so we're living in this world where you have this situation where people can communicate globally and instantaneously, right? And this is my entire, like our entire project methods devour themselves comes out of that, right? It comes out of the fact that, you know, Benjinnon is someone that I met on, Like, I mean, I liked her books and everything, but that I met, I was able to interact with over Twitter years ago and became friends with over Twitter. And this whole project, you know, was constructed online.

Like, you know, if technology was like it was when, you know, I was in early high school, or even early, beginning of my undergrad, this project wouldn't have been possible. So there's that, right? So we have this kind of, so we're living in a world where people can communicate global. believe instantaneously, but at the same time, we have this gap that is increasing between the wealthiest and poorest, and it's never been more stark and violent as it is now. So that kind of, and it's like technology hasn't really, we have the means with technology if we had different social relations to deal with that gap, to make the world a more humane and social place, but we don't, right? We don't do that. And that is why maybe it doesn't

seem like so much of an event. Like, yeah, there's, you know, there'll be people living in poor countries with cell phones because they need them to communicate to family that might be at refugees in diaspora. But at the same time, they're working these, like, terrible, like, jobs under different, like, kind of conditions in the proletariat in the first world, or they're fleeing from, like, you know, war zones or anything like that. So, yeah, there's a lot of, I mean, there's a lot to say about kind of, even the nightmare that underlies the technology we take for granted.

So, I mean, we're communicating over computers or I have a tablet and whatever. And this entire information technology requires silicon, right? I mean, silicon is, it's, like, without silicon, this stuff wouldn't be functioning as it is. But silicon, people forget, it's one of the worst mining industries in the world where, like, thousands upon thousands of people work in these mines with one of the most brutal extraction processes. and then the factory process of making silicon useful is even more extractive and productive. And people just think, oh, we're now living in this liquidated information economy. No, no, it's very material and productive underneath it.

And it's a brutal, brutal mining industry, the silicon industry. So there's that as well, not to make us feel guilty or anything. No, no, it's true. And, I mean, I bring this up with my students of Silicon but also Coltan, too. I mean, whole civil wars in the DRC have been funded by different companies who extract that mineral and then use it. And, yeah, like silicon, Coltan is needed for the connective tissue, I guess you could say, between the electrodes and diodes and all of the things we're using right now to communicate with one another. So, yeah, this is still very much a almost a neo-colonial kind of look at things. We think about the colonial spheres in the past where all of these nations,

I like to call them the big four originally, but, you know, like England, you know, if we took the United Kingdom, for instance, way back in the day, I mean, it was it was producing iron ore at an alarming rate, but it was because it was extracting it from India, and nobody in India was gaining any profit or any kind of capital off of that. They were just basically slaves, and then people wonder why England did so well with it. So, no, I fully agree with that. And, you know, when we look at environments that are, quote, unquote, post-scarcity, like, say, the one. that Star Trek brings forward, I almost wonder sometimes if there is sort of like a darker history that we could talk about. You know, they use a mineral they call dilithium to move people around. And they've touched on, you know, oh, we have dilithium mines here there. You know, we can't go past certain warp speeds because it's a problem. But they never really like delve deeply

into it. It's always kind of packaged into this, you know, 30 minute episode or 40 minute episode. And then it kind of gets forgotten about or it's sort of like our point has been made and that's it. So in JMP's interview, he said that, contrary to some socialists' perspective of Star Trek, the show actually represents a sort of, quote-unquote, utopian capitalism where the invisible hand is ironed out all differences because there's no trace of class struggle, etc., he goes on. And that Star Trek replicates, as we talked about earlier, the colonial or imperial instinct. So two-part question, what are your thoughts on this criticism of Star Trek, and how would a truly communist Star Trek differ from its current iterations? Do you want to take this one first, Shashok? Sure. It's a fascinating question, and the point was great, especially because it followed this line of thought where he said, you know, you don't think about it, but Starfleet is actually an imperial organization in a lot of ways.

So there was a new perspective that blew my mind and when he bought this up, this is again probably because I am a card carrying one of those crazy, hyper-liberal Democrats, but I kind of think that when he talks about utopian capitalism, the hopeful side of me wants to argue that, you know, this invisible hand is actually visible. And if you zoom in on the hand, it's actually the entire populist working together to resolve that class target. But, of course, I cannot not acknowledge that the point he is making makes sense and that that is really what happened. And so, in a way, I can see that perspective and it's a valid criticism to me. I'm certainly not going to take away from it. There are definitely places within Star Trek where something like that is acknowledged. There are characters that openly criticize Star Trek all the time, especially people that do not belong to Starfleet. They talk about things like, oh, you say Starfleet is great, but then you have a secret spy agency that goes around killing people.

Oh, you say Starfleet is great, but you only interfere when you find an economic motive for yourself. Or you find a way to, you find a way to, you find a way to. benefit Starfleet first, even though you say that is not the goal. So the criticism definitely has a lot of validity for me. As far as the second part goes, I would really hate myself if I said anything untoward while I have two communists here. I'm just going to respectfully let Barry take that one. Fair enough.

I think the one piece there that is kind of interesting for me. And when JMP said this, it did sort of make me go. oh, wow, and maybe that was my aforementioned arrowhead moment where I'd never heard it so succinctly put that Star Trek does not represent socialism winning. It represents, in a lot of cases, that idea that the invisible hand has actually been successful. Everything's been evened out. We live in a post-scarcity world, and therefore we can move forward with it. And so, again, if you think about imagination, I think that that is ideologically what capitalism wants. is it wants to go past and become this perfect society.

When you actually read Adam Smith, he is relatively hopeful, but you can see the corruptions and what kind of what is created from the relationships through capitalism. And I think that's an interesting sort of piece of it. When you think about the characters in Star Trek living in this world where class struggle is non-existent, and that's an interesting point to make, you watch them say in like the Star Trek the motion picture that came out

in the late 70s they they were intentionally made to be that kind of post scarcity everything is fine now sort of group of people and you'll notice that most actors don't know what to do with their hands Voyager is like that as well the Star Trek Voyager where their personalities were actually

directed to be not as sort of flamboyant as ours and they're a lot more sort of conversational and analytic and stuff and some people criticize Voyager Star Trek Voyager for being that incredibly boring because there isn't any class struggle. There isn't any conflict between the crew. And you see that in the original series as well.

So I think JMP has a point. And I don't think that when we do finally meet some kind of better society, and obviously my hope is that we take the left wing approach. We take the goal, ending goal being communism, where people work according to their, work according to their need, according to their ability, right? That no one is put off in that respect. But there's going to be a lot that's going to need to happen in the interim between that. We're going to have to see that kind of struggle taking place, even after, say, some kind

of revolution takes place or something large changes. That isn't an ending. It's a beginning. And I think maybe that gets brought up better in future iterations of Star Trek. You'll see it a lot in Deep Space Nine. You see it incredibly in Star Trek discovery. So I would say my criticisms of Star Trek are very similar to that of JMPs or any other one, any other person who comes from a principled leftist perspective that, no, Star Trek doesn't solve problems in the way that we see problems getting solved, right? They get saved by a skyhook, basically.

The Vulcans come and save us. But I don't think that it's outside of leftist talk to see the world that gets created and draw from the things that work for us and be critical of the things. things that don't. And I think that's one of the reasons why I love Star Trek so much is sometimes I'm looking at it very kind of cock-eyed, and then other times I'm looking at it super wide-eyed, and it flips between those two things. For the second question, how would I truly see a communist Star Trek differ from its current iterations? Again, JMP brings up, I think it was Philip K. Dick has actually a story where basically communists may get to space and start interacting with other people. So I would see Star Trek and Starfleet being completely

different. I would see hierarchy differ for the different things that need to happen. So, like, there wouldn't necessarily be, like, a captain of a ship. There would be people who would control the ship in times of crisis, in times of exploration, in times of discovery. I think that there would be a lot more sort of modular functioning parts that interact with one another. And actually, I mean, how I understand Cree culture, the people who live, who are indigenous to where I'm from, their name is the Cree people, they actually would work in a very sort of modular sort of way where they would have a peace chief and a war chief and a council of elders. And women would have the final say on certain things. And they were a completely functioning society that were able

to manage the movement of Bison. They were able to predict weather phenomena. They were able to interact with other groups of people. So I honestly think that a future space-faring human race would have to draw from a bit of their hunter-gatherer roots and draw from, I would say, draw from the Marxist tradition to fully realize a functioning, space-faring group of people. Otherwise, I don't think we're going to get even past the moon. And there's an inherent problem here. And when JMP talks about Star Trek as fundamentally

or at least partially imperialistic, I started asking myself to question, like how exactly is an imperial and one of the answers to that might not be what he had in mind but what I think of and it also kind of poses a problem to to any possible communist future of going out into the stars and trying to understand you know the cosmos at a deeper level is this connection between colonialism and science and the sort of assumptions that a certain species would have going out into the rest of the cosmos and engage. with other peoples. So like once you do that, once you make contact with another species or civilization, once you, even if you do it in a sincere attempt to go out and learn about the world and increase overall knowledge, that interaction fundamentally changes the thing you've interacted with, right? And like when in a colonial project, you know, you have the rise of racial science and eugenics and you have Western scientists going into, you know, native territories or previously unexplored land and either engaging in like brutal domination in conflict with them or even in the more softer just we're investigating what the life for these people is like um there's a real question in science about how much does is that valid and maybe if we had um an anthropologist on they could give us a better answer of how to and how not

to go about um but that i think is at least something that we should worry about regardless of of what sort of Star Trek we could possibly imagine. But I do think ultimately that Barry had a good point in that interview where Barry says maybe it would help us understand the Star Trek world better if we could go and have the perspective of like whatever the lowest strata of that class of that society is. So if we can go back to Earth or wherever the home planet is for whatever series we're talking about here, like taking the perspective of the least well off, right, the least favored. That is the perspective that I think a radical must take, and it would be incredibly illuminating for this entire discussion.

And maybe there are in some series, and you guys could tell me, maybe there are attempts to do that. But I think it would flesh out a lot of these questions and really give us a better understanding of what sort of, you know, political or social economic structures are in place and are undergirding this entire, you know, this entire universe. I think to a capitalistic mindset, that's why they never imagined that. And I think that's where a leftist mindset could say that and could bring that up pretty well. So, no, that's a really good point. How is the most downtrodden inside of the United Federation of Planets being treated? And if we find their way of life unacceptable, even to our own standards, then I would say that the project of the United Federation planets would have been an abject failure. As well as that, as well as the peoples or the aliens that they encounter, right?

Does that encounter, even if we could say that that was a completely communist society, you know, we went back, we looked at the home and this civilization is actually truly communist, how does that encounter with a new alien life form that might not be in ways similar to us? How does that just that encounter create hierarchies? How does that encounter create a system, even if it's brief of domination and bloodshed? And certainly there's, there's, you know, fighting and conflict in the Star Trek universe. So even if everything's good back at home, once you go out and bump heads with another civilization, does that give rise to new hierarchies and new forms of domination and exploitation? And that could just be a perpetual problem. I don't even know how to think about that. It sort of escapes the purview of my understanding.

But those are the questions that I was asking myself. Is your writing influenced by a political will to expand horizons and provide a voice to those. quote-unquote, dreamers in the margins, or is your inspiration to write from a more personal desire to tell stories where the characters represent personalities and concepts that you wish to express through experience? I don't think of myself of providing anyone with our voice, because I believe everybody can speak for themselves perfectly fine. So I will write things as an act of ego, more than of empathy, which I'm sure a lot

of people with this actually, but mostly writers will write for ourselves first. So what I want to do is to represent what I want to see. So in this, in my case, it's focused on decolonizing, imagining a future without the current dominant narrative, without hegemony, and, okay, a more positive future that's by my claim to be a, I claim for being a person. Shishank, any thoughts? like I said I genuinely do not want I do not want people throwing sickles at me

or leaving communist flags at my doorstep so I just those were great points I cannot even I shudder to even imagine what that would look like because my ignorant shows there I've never

not thought of Star Trek as something so liberal and so Democrat based so progressive that I took a step back and thought, hey, what would a commie version of this look like? So that is definitely a whole in my life that I need to fill up. Well, we won't throw any sickles your way. And as commies and as long as as a Democrat, you don't fire any drone strikes aren't. If I do, I'll absolutely plead the fifth and deny it. Exactly, right? So there you.

I think if you don't have anything to say, it's pretty difficult to write a story that has meaning that is going to resonate with people. So having something to say is really important to me. And obviously, it doesn't have to be super blunt, like what people think of as message fiction. But it does have to have a call of what you want to do. what you want to see, and that will inform everything in your writing, from the characters, even the post. How did you get into literature? Growing up, was it something that you were fascinated with as a child, or was it something

that you sort of cultivated as you grew into an adult? Like, what was some of your early experiences with literature that pushed you in the direction to become a writer? I suspect like most writers, I read a lot as a child. And I think it's, for me, it's the most intuitive way of absorbing information more than through visual or auditory media. So it was the natural progression for me to write rather than to make music or to get into filmmaking. And when did you become politically engaged? When did your political consciousness sort of blossom?

That is actually kind of difficult. I think it's hard to put a finger on that. But I think some of my formative influence. well, okay, the original goes in the show. It was what made me very curious about the interaction of body and technology,

the interaction of consciousness and memory. And eventually when I was a bit more grown up, which because I watched this, the original movie when I was a very young child, so a lot of that went over my head. So when I was older and started watching

more of this and came back to it, I started to understand the or political aspect of this show. And because in the show, it's really political. It gets into how the Japanese regard America and the political map of the world. So that was very influential for me. And then do you have, because I know JMP, who we've had on the show before is, you know, self-identifies as a Marxist-Leninist Maoist.

Do you have a political tendency that you adhere to? Are you just sort of broadly on the left? How do you think about and identify yourself, I don't really identify myself as fast, but I talk a lot about post-colonialism. They colonize things. But I don't think we have any kind of lab there for that we don't call ourselves they colonialists. But I suppose I would call myself at least a post-colonialist. Well, I guess we should wrap up the conversation now. This is probably already going to be somewhat of a long conversation between everybody talking. here. So I guess maybe the best way to end this entire discussion is what do you hope people take out of this book, out of this interview, as well as our collaboration here tonight? As someone who did not get to read the book in full, but did get to enjoy the interviews,

I really hope the first thing that people look at is this is a great exercise in normalization of ideas and ideals and beliefs. It was a very good. It was a very good. constructive, creative, and a very positive way to expose each other, or at least to me, expose myself to the idea of communism. When people say communists or when I read communists, or when I go back home, the communists I know, only the narratives that have been fed have been, you know, these are people that live in jungles and then they try to kill people. and they're very much anti-society.

So when I go out of that and then I jump into something like this, I immediately, I find someone at a Star Trek convention who happens to enjoy and love everything that I do, that person just happens to identify with something that my narrative has been different about. So I hope people take that when I could sit down and not only normalize it, but celebrate it and accept it and believe that this is a viable means and a viable school of belief for millions of people around the world

and there is a reason why it's working. It only happened because there was a constructive, creative individual at the other end who sat down and let me walk through that journey. So I hope people don't just close themselves off. They accept that there are different ideas and much like within methods devoured themselves where, you know, fiction is trying to stand up against nonfiction, which is its parent, and nonfiction is trying to stand up against its subservient, a subset. And they're both trying to coexist.

When that can happen, I think the possibilities are endless. And I really hope that's what they take away from it. Barry? If you're going to get anything from this book, I just hope it broadens your horizons because, like I said, the incandescence of, of, from B's writing, and her taking you, like, you're going to go to a different place. Nothing will be familiar. And that, for me, was the most educational, the most, the most enlightening sort of moment where I was able to look outside of any kind of paradigm I could.

It was interesting because Benjamin mentions that the Ghost in the Shell, the animated movie from 1995, I believe, was very influential for her. And it was for me, too. And it was great to share that moment when she and I were chatting over email about it. But when I think about the buildings that I saw and the faces of the anime characters, they were all very familiar to me because, let's face it, anime does have, it does sort of Europeanize some of its characters and their characteristics to some degree, which is why I think they were able to make the abomination that was the movie just recently

and whitewash it almost completely so with that I think that when she when she has that connection that's something that I can connect with her as an author but when she writes she takes you to a world that unless you are from say you know areas

areas of the world where she has lived or where she is from specifically you're not going to have that frame of reference and yeah you might have to jump on the internet a few times and read and look and learn and see some of the deeper pieces to that. So I think in that respect, that in itself is reason to read it, but then also no matter where you come on the political spectrum and know that I am engaged in a debate

with myself right now, in self-discovery. And JMP has done a lot to help me articulate a lot of my viewpoints. Brett, you've helped me with your show, see all the different types of left-wing politics and philosophies that exist. And Shishonk, you have been not only my companion through talking about Star Trek through the show we do, but you've also, you know, you've been there for me and have listened to me talk and just bounce ideas off of your head

in terms of what you think. And you've always provided those sort of sober second thoughts. So I think life itself is about seeking out new groups of people, seeking out new ideas, exploring that sort of thing. And in the spirit of the show that Shishonk and I base our podcast, cast off of, that's the true exploration. And we don't have spaceships. We don't have warp technology.

We don't have the ability to cast magical spells or anything like that. So where are we going to expand our imagination? It's through discourse. It's through dialogue. It's through learning. And this book will force you to learn. And I think that's a beautiful, a beautiful thing because it really does take you outside of what is normal to maybe you.

And it might answer some deeper questions that you might. not have even known you were you were totally asking. Yeah, absolutely. And I would just echo, you know, both of those answers and just add that, you know, developing new interest, challenging yourself, stepping outside of your intellectual or artistic comfort zone, it can be, it can be scary. It can make you feel, you know, like you don't know as much as you thought you knew. But that is how we develop and that is how we become better, more well-rounded human

beings that can go on and love and teach other people. And that is an important part of being a human being. If you stop learning, if you say, hey, all the ideas I have in my head right now are sufficient. I do not need to really engage that hard with any other new challenging ideas. You know, that is when like the sort of the intellectual life dies. And so no matter what part of the political world or the artistic world, the science fiction world that you come out of, even if you completely disagree with, you know, everything I've said tonight, you know, I hope we can at least engage in a meaningful way that you often don't find, for example, on social media, right? There's no nuance. There's no real good faith dialogue between spheres of interest. And that's sort of a tragedy of discourse and a tragedy of development. So I'd encourage that. And the last thing I would say is, as I've said a few times throughout this episode, creativity sort of blossoms out of associations between seemingly disparate fields of research and understanding and interest. So the more stuff that you can engage with, the more things you can pull from, the more

associations you can make in your mind, the more creative of a thinker and of a human being that you can possibly be. And I think this is one example of this book and this interview and even our collaboration here is one example of trying to reach across Spears and do so in a way that is respectful and engaging and humility, being humble about it, right? being, having humility about it is an important part of growth and development. So I love this conversation. I love this collaboration. I love this book. And if there's artists out there, if there's writers, if there's political thinkers, starting to think about how you can take what

you already are good at and mix it with somebody else who's good at something else like this book does, I think is an interesting challenge for all of us. And if we can do that, I think we'd all be better for it. You're here. This is a question we ask everyone who comes on the show. So you can pick which enterprise, but if the enterprise actually existed and you were suddenly plopped in it, where would we find you? Where would you find me in the Enterprise? The holodeck. What would you be doing on the holodeck?

I don't know. Finding a way to interact with all these historical figures I never met in real life. Who would be a number one historical figure? Oh, man. I mean, there's no number one. But I mean, obviously, you know, if I don't say marks or angles, I lose my credentials. right now as a Marxist philosopher, Lenin, Mao, those people. Yeah, definitely.

So with one quick last little question that we would ask you, Brett, is first of all, where can people find you? And then if you found yourself on any enterprise, I'm sure you can visualize sort of the rudiments of the enterprise, where would we find you? Well, you can find me in the real world at a revolutionary left radio. At Rev Left Radio on Twitter at GeotenePod. My personal Twitter account is at Dead Irish Rebel. You Google Revolutionary Left Radio. You Google any of that. You'll certainly find me.

As far as who I would be on the Starfleet, is that the question? Where would you be on the Enterprise? What would you be doing? That is interesting. I love JN. Totally on the spot question. That's all right. I love JMP's answer of the holodeck that he would spend a lot of his time on.

And I can't beat that. but I don't know I guess it's a really challenging question I guess I'd want to be educating and helping people maybe taking you know complex ideas that we're discovering in the cosmos and putting them into terms

that people can understand and be inspired by so whatever part of the ship that puts me on I'll take it some kind of liaison officer maybe even the ship counselor that would be awesome I'll do it absolutely how about you so I guess the same question back at you Where can people find your show, and where would you be on the Starfleet? Okay. I think this is a question that I was asked even before I got to record the first episode,

and the answer I gave kind of led to everything that followed. But people can't find me on social media on at Gutter underscore Hero, that's G-U-T-T-E-R-H-O. On Twitter, that's pretty much the only social media I do. my DMs are open, feel free to DMA, tag me and stuff. Anything nerdy, pop-cultory, sci-fi-related, I can talk about. Anything that actually requires intelligence, I will direct you to Barry's Twitter account. You can find me at, you can find me at B-J-O-R-N-D-F-J-O-R-D, Bjorn-D, Bjorn-D-F-J-O-F-R-D,

on Twitter, and yes, you will find a glut of either Star Trek-related or political, socio-political-related stuff happening there. I tend to not get into many flame wars, and if you want to just shippost at me, then I'll block you. But if you want to have reasoned and principled debate with me on stuff, I love talking. It's fun. So you can find me there. And to answer your question, Brad,

Barry asked me this before. Our first episode was recorded, and I told him, in Star Trek, there is a character called The Traveler, whose entire job is his his his pursuits are so far beyond space and time like the first time you meet him in Star Trek it's because the ship

accidentally travels to the very end of space where they go to the point where time and thought originate and that's where this character lives so when Barry asked me this question I said I would like to be the traveler and be in pursuit of that of the endless, most ambitious,

most cosmically mysterious goal and find out what is there and beneath the unknown and understand what there is to be understood and get to the pinnacle of knowledge. So I would be the traveler, I would be the character who would use ships like that to get to that point.

Okay, I'm stealing that answer, Barry. I would be, to be perfectly honest, I would love to take the captains, mainly because, as we had mentioned, there we... You're a white man. If there's class struggle, we're coming for you, Barry. That's the point, though, is, you know, as a person in a leadership position, the best way to lead is through following, right? And maybe I'm taking a bit of a Zapatista sort of style tract here, is, you know, you lead by following.

You lead by putting the interests of those at the bottom first, right? You can even think of it as sort of like a mass line thing. I'd be a mass line captain. Hell yeah. So that would be my tact is in that leadership position, the interests of the people on my ship would be at paramount importance. And the fundamentals that we cling to, that we hold to, that we study and we wrestle with and all that sort of stuff, would be at the forefront of that leadership. And that would be far more interesting. And I mean, that that is ultimately what I'm trying to do in my job as an educator and in my exploration.

is how can I, when I find myself in leadership roles, be as serving of the people as possible, as being with them, right? Everything for everyone, nothing for ourselves, to sort of finish the quote with the Zepatistas. But, I mean, you see that in Mao's writing, you see that in Lenin, you see that in anarchist writers like Krapotkin, bookchin, right? When you're looking at society, you're looking at the least of us. And you brought that up in the Federation too. So I would be captain of the USS. I don't know. I guess mine would be like, I don't know even what I'd call it.

So I've dug myself a hole, but I would be a mass line captain. USS Mass Line. I like it. There you go. Well, thank you both for coming on. Thanks for doing this collaboration. It's a truly unique, pretty much novel creation we've done here in the podcast world, at least as far as I'm aware.

And it's really been an honor to talk to both of you. The humility, the empathy, the kindness, the open-mindedness, that both of you have shown and our guests have shown is really wonderful, and I'm just honored to be a part of it. Well, from my end, I'd just like to say, thank you so much for exposing me to all this, Brett, and let me be a part of this. And, Barry, I hope your ego has been satiated. It's sufficiently fair.