Science Friday - SciFri Reads ‘The Kaiju Preservation Society’

Episode Date: January 3, 2024

What does it take to write a believable kaiju—as well as a charming group of scientists and explorers—onto the page? The SciFri Book Club invited John Scalzi, award-winning author of our August 2023 pick, The Kaiju Preservation Society, to discuss worldbuilding on an alternative Earth; combining ecology, biology and cultural touchpoints to create new giants; and how he used a lifetime of scientific curiosity to write a sci-fi romp in five weeks during a global pandemic.This event was a part of the SciFri Book Club read for August 2023.Watch the live zoom event on Youtube.Find out more about our book club on our main page. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Author John Scalzi likes a good standard sci-fi trope, but in a certain way. One of the things that I really like doing is just taking tropes that are well-established like giant monsters and kind of flipping them. It's Wednesday, January 3rd, but in another universe, it's also Science Friday. I'm SciFri producer Charles Berkwist. Earlier this year, the SciFright Book Club read John Scalzi's book, The Kaiju Preservation Society. And he joined them on a live stream to discuss his healthy obsession with kaiju movies like Godzilla, how to weave science reality into science fiction, and why it's so fun to write about alternative and parallel universes. Here's Sifra Experiences manager, Diana Plasker.

John, thank you again so much for being here. We have so enjoyed reading your book together. How does this book sort of fit in? What happens in Kaiju Preservation Society, even for maybe, for people who haven't read it yet, how do you get people excited about the book, but also has it fit in with your other writing? I don't think it necessarily fits in with the other writing at all. I mean, it was, it was an accidental novel. I was writing an entirely different novel in 2020, and it was going to be a dark and gritty political thriller in space. And as it turns out,

the 2020 was not the best year to be writing a dark and gritty political thriller about anything, much less in space. And I just couldn't manage to get that book done. I had to actually say to my editor, I failed. I can't, this book is not working. And they were, they had literally took that book off the schedule. And, and then just when I thought for the first time ever, I would have blown a deadline, my brain was like, oh, while you were panicking about that book that you would never, ever, ever write, I was thinking about a completely different book. And here it is, I do preservation society. It really just downloaded into my brain. So in many it was unplanned in almost every sense.

That said, there are some similarities to what I've done before, for example, in Agent to the Stars or in Red Shirts, where I like to call those sort of my contemporary novels where an ordinary person confronts an extremely high concept idea. So, for example, in Agent to the Stars, it's aliens come and they want to meet humanity so they get Hollywood representation. You know, for red shirts, it was the people in a, you know, on a spaceship realized that they are the doomed characters in a not-so-great TV show.

And with Kaiju, it was really just thinking about everything that we know about Kaiju, Kaiju being like Godzilla, Rodan, you know, Gamera, all of those giant creatures. that wreck Tokyo on a really standard basis. And I was thinking about just the whole thing of how we think about them and how we encounter them and what they represent. And one of the things that I really like doing is just taking tropes that are well established like giant monsters and kind of flipping them, turning them on the head.

So instead of what if the kaiju came to our world and wrecked things, it would be, well, what would happen if we went to their world where they were just hanging out and living their best lives? And that was kind of the impetus for what was going on with the Khadju Preservation Society. Yeah, I love that. It was so fun getting to the end of the book and reading the afterward, which I don't always do, but you, you know, you kind of caught me with your attention. You're like, I was writing a whole other book. Here's this other book. So talk to us a little bit about why that was important as a story to tell as part of the afterward. Was there any world in which you didn't tell us that story?

No, I thought it was really important to tell that story. I mean, for a couple of reasons. The first is I do think that fair or not, people tend to think of authors as kind of a black box that text sort of extrudes out of them. And it extrudes on a regular basis. And it's only way. that black box fails, you know, that we notice, right? And you start banging on the box going, what's going on?

Where's my extruded text? I need my extruded text. And so I needed to, I wanted to explain to people that, you know, this book was a little bit not like all the other books that I had done and how it happened. But the other thing was also, I wanted to talk to creative people. You know, it's one of those things that people who don't do a lot of creative stuff, and I don't mean that as a dismaragement. I just mean like on a day-to-day basis, that's not their gig. Often, I think, think that like challenging times will make for, you know, challenging art, right?

And that might be true. But on a day-to-day basis, I think writers and artists and creators do better when they, you know, they have, you know, the space, both mentally, physically and otherwise, to think about their work and do their best work. And 2020 was, 2020 and 2021 were years where we had pandemics. We had, in the United States, we had political upheaval and social upheaval, all of these things going on. And nearly every single creative person I know was distracted and torn from their usual. usual creative process by the events of the year. And one of the things that I think was important is, for better or for worse, I'm a well-known person in science fiction and fantasy and in literature.

I'm a New York Times bestseller. I've won awards, all of that sort of stuff. And if I can say, look, 2020 through me for a loop and I barely escaped it with the skin of my teeth, I think it makes it easier for everybody else to go, yeah, no, that actually happened to me as well. I mean, literally nobody I know, with the exception of Brandon Sanderson and his four ridiculous doorstopper books, thank you, Branden, handled 2020 in a way that was like, ooh, now I'm going to, you know, get all my projects done. It was just literally, we're all sitting there hitting the repeat on our social media, finding out what horrible thing was happening next. And so, um, making it clear that even though this book came out and it came out on the right schedule

and all of that sort of stuff, that it was still really hard. And it was really important to tell people that, you know, sometimes this stuff is really hard. And you just, you know, and there's nothing wrong with it being really hard. We are, we are humans. We are not the black boxes people think we are. And sometimes it gets in our way. Yeah, I love that. It was definitely like of sort of mind.

opening part. I was like so into the world that I was like, oh man, I got a step back into our world now. I finished this book and I got sort of a glimpse into like what it was like to write this book. So I really appreciated it. Yeah. So James is a really great question. That actually goes back to a question I was going to ask you as well. You're wondering, what is your favorite Kaiju movie? And I was wondering, too, did, was there like sort of a block of inspiration that inspired this book specifically? Well, the two book, the two movies that are kind of my favorites for various reasons are actually mentioned in the book. It's the original Godzilla, which is the 1954 movie, and then Guillermo

del Toro's Pacific Rim, which I believe just had a 10th anniversary. And for the, for the original Godzilla, a lot of it is just because this is the, this is basically the establishing shot for the kaiju genre of films and it's an extremely important film not just because it's like that's the first time we see someone in a big rubber suit stomping over tokyo but because of everything that it represents as as a piece of art and as a moment in time for particularly japanese cinema right um all the all the nuclear uh angst and terror and confusion of Japan is basically poured into that movie, right? I mean, there's a reason why it struck such a chord in Japan and then elsewhere when it went other places. And on one sense, it really is just a monster movie with a guy in a rubber suit stomping on cardboard versions of buildings. But on the other hand, it really is something else entirely. And then with Pacific Ram, it's just, it's the ultimate, I'm a movie nerd, and I'm paying homage to all the stuff that I love.

And that's kind of Guillermo del Toro in and of himself. He is, he is nothing, if not a fan of cinema, right? Like all his films are very clear, have very clear antecedents. and his enthusiasm was so infectious, and the film is also just so completely ridiculous, right? That I just love it. Like, there's the scene when they're, you know, the kaiju and the Yeager are fighting in Hong Kong,

and they go way up in the sky and spoiler alert, but it's 10 years so you've had your time. You know, he slices the kaiju in half with this sword that just sort of magically appears. He comes down. He's like, you know, burning on reentry, hits a soccer field. You know, stuff goes up everywhere. It's a mess. And I remember turning to my wife, Christine, I'm like, this is the best film ever. Because it just hits all those nerd buttons.

Yeah. So those were the two films very specifically that I was thinking of when I was thinking about the Kaiju Preservation Society. Now, it's important to note that because the Kaiju Preservation Society doesn't take place mostly, in Earth Prime, the Earth that we know, but in an ultimate Earth, again, I don't think that's really a spoiler, that the action and the concerns that people have in both of those films are the same

as the concerns that the people in the books have. But honestly, they are, they live in our culture. They understand what a kaiju is. They understand, you know, where they're at. And in fact, the fact that both of those movies are named is it's the first night of a new shift of workers at the base for the Khadry Preservation Society. And as an opening tradition, they watch those two movies. That is taken specifically from down at the South Pole Station and at Ardica. There's like the people who stay over for the winter there.

And the very first thing they do once they shove everybody off and, you know, then they're basically trapped for the next three months is they watch the thing. 1882 is the thing. Perfect. Yeah. And you're just like, one, what's wrong with you people? And two, perfect, right? Just like.

Yeah. You have to give your nightmarish new surroundings a thing to sort of project onto the. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, absolutely. Oh, no, that would never happen here. Yeah. Well, speaking of, so you talked just now a little bit so about the science fiction inspiration, but about the science inspiration that Kaiju themselves.

So you sort of, when you describe them in the book, there's sort of these ecosystems. And there's, you know, they essentially have like a whole world sort of living on them, but like this whole other mystery happening inside of them. That's like part of what happens in the book. So what? What was the process like of sort of developing their physicality and the ecosystemness of the kaiju? Because that's totally different than what we've seen in the past with those types of creatures. Right.

Well, I mean, the thing about kaiju or any creature that is 150 to 200 meters large, right, that you absolutely have to confront, right, is that they're just physically impossible. In Earth gravity, they just don't work. They're going to collapse into a pile of goo, and it's the square cube law, right? And so one of the things that I wanted to do is as much as possible, as much as possible, make the science of the world that I was creating as plausible as it could be, so that when you finally like, you know, kind of launch off, then people are like, okay, I have, I have grounding for it and we can go from there. And so one of the things that I knew that it would absolutely have to confront is that square cube law, right? Because everybody in the book, almost everybody in the book is a scientist,

right? Almost everybody there is. And they all know about the square cube law. They're not just going to be like, maybe it doesn't work over here. No, it absolutely does work. So when you have, decided that you are going to actually obey the laws of physics to a certain extent. Let's be very clear. Then you have to be like, well, now you've got to rationalize this. And the ways that I rationalize them are two ways. One, what is the power source for the kaiju? It cannot be just regular metabolism.

It can't just be regular desperation. All these sort of systems just don't work on that scale. So you have to figure out a whole new way to basically power that whole machine. And then it becomes the thing of, well, how do you make all that work besides that? And that's basically where the parasites and everything else that inhabit this ecosystem that is the kaiju come from. And honestly, that's not that part. The ecosystem of the kaiju is not that much of a stretch because even we, and this is mentioned, in the book is all. Even we are basically aggregate creatures. We have lots of species that live in

and on and near us. And some of them are parasitic. Some of them are commensual. If you don't have your gut flora, you're going to have a really bad time. But in fact, they are not, they're not you, right? So you think of this fact that basically all living creatures that are larger than paramecium are a system. And there's no reason why a kaiju wouldn't be that sort of system as well. Scaled up because they are larger. Now, so for me, that was the thing of putting in enough of reasonableness. And I want to be very clear about the reasonableness is very, very stretchy here. So that when people were thinking about it, they'd be like, okay, I can accept this for you are both observing the square cube law and now you are giving this rationale. There are people who are like,

you know, I have very many questions about how you were talking about how the power system worked here, you know, and that's perfectly fine. I mean, there's a reason why I leave so much of the specifics of the science incredibly vague. For two reasons, the first being, because I have a degree in philosophy, right? You know, I don't have a huge grounding in science, so I would just love it. But the other thing is that basically all the scientists and all the nerds and all the scientists nerds can think up something for themselves that will make that somehow vaguely function and what they will think of is going to be so much better than what I could do. And they will come to me. It's like, I figured out how you actually made that work and blah.

They'll tell me what it is. And I'll be like, that's awesome. That's so close to what I was thinking. Of course. Yes, exactly. That's exactly how that works. that's and so that's but that's part of the fun of science fiction don't over explain it because then you'll get in trouble but leave enough that they can speculate about it for on their own and they will come up with what works for them and then you've won because they're like okay i don't i'm not been thrown out by the bad science i can just continue on but absolutely i wanted to um take a look at a kaiju in a slightly different way where we're not just accepting that the square cube law doesn't work, right? We're like, no, it works. Yeah, you know, and so we're going to work with that.

Yeah. I think it led to some, like, incredibly creative moments in your book. And I got to say, the kaiju are scary sounding. The parasites are terrifying sounding. Oh, yeah. Every day I picture them, I was like, I do not like that. Yeah. There was a, there was a, there was actually, and I want to be very, uh, because someone will probably mention it in the comments. There was another kaiju movie that did talk about parasites in a significant way, aside from Pacific Rim, which actually did go into that. And that is Cloverfield, where they had the parasites dropping off and then attacking people and stuff like that.

So I definitely had that in mind when I was thinking about my parasites. But my parasites, I have more parasites than Cloverfield did. So there, because I have a whole ecosystem. So there. Yeah. Yeah. Jake is a question. How much research is there to do about kaiju? It seems like there must be a lot. Well, I had an advantage in terms of the kaiju of two things. One, I used to be a film critic. So I have basically 30 years of film knowledge or, you know, writing about film at my fingertips, which makes it super easy to do the research because I just pull things out of my brain. And then I also did a lot of science journalism. I mean, fun fact, I wrote an astronomy book many years ago, did a whole lot of

writing for the Uncle John's bathroom readers where I was specifically their science guy. It's like, can you do us, can you write us an 800 word piece about clouds? It's like, yes. So both of those meant that I had inherently a whole lot of just information that I could pull out of my head. But beyond that, yeah, I mean, we live in an age where so much information is at our fingertips that it makes it actually really easy to research. The irony of so much information exists, and yet we also live in an age of disinformation because not everybody is information literate is a whole other topic, which we will not go into now because we are talking about this book. But for me, it was, it was great because

they could call up, you know, some information about a particular kaiju or how they've done things or, you know, look at a YouTube clip of a movie so that I can make sure that I got it right. But a lot of my research was not about specific kaiju, but since I was building my own kaiju by their own rules, just basically finding out ways to make that work and to go into information that that would seem to be plausible. So there was a lot of research, but it wasn't necessarily the research I think everybody would think that I had there. Yeah, and you talk a little bit in other interviews as like you're able to draw on this knowledge of like this scientific knowledge. You don't have to do a lot of research about ecosystems because you have a lot of knowledge from your work as a science communicator talking about ecosystems and other science topics.

For other people who are hoping to maybe be a writer like that where they can draw on that experience, was there any sort of besides having a job where you can do that? Is there any other like advice that you have for people? I'm like, all right, I really think I want to learn about this thing, how to sort of get entrenched in it while also keeping that that goal. of being a writer about this thing in their back pocket? Sure. I mean, I think the very first thing that helps, regardless of whatever it is that you do, is just to have innate sense of curiosity and desired, basically, to have information come in at all times. I mean, I constantly read, and I constantly read not just about, like, science or just about science fiction. I astound my wife by the fact that we will

go to like a family gathering. And I will sit there and I will talk about sports with the other dudes until the cows come home. And she's like, how do you do that? Why do you, how do you know that you don't like sports? Why do you? Why? And I'm just like, I read it. It's part of the information flow that comes in because you never know when you're going to want to, you know, when you're going to need that stuff. And basically, whenever I go to family reunions, it's really helpful to know what's going on with Ohio State football. I mean, it just is. And so that's part of it. You know, just always have a huge, basically a fire hose of information. Like, pick your resources. Don't, you know, don't be going to low quality information sites. And again, this is about

information literacy. But what you're going to find out is that when, you're going to find out, is that when you have just basically that constant inflow of interesting information, even if you aren't using it at any particular time, it's going to rattle around in your brain. And also, when you do that, you start understanding the, basically the infrastructure of information online and elsewhere. Like you begin to learn how to find that information. You begin to learn which sites are reputable, which ones are not, how to, create your searches so that you are making good search queries so that you can find good and useful information, you know, absorbing it and using it in those sorts of ways. I find that this

sort of information literacy, aside from anything else, helps create a versimilitude to your writing, particularly if you're writing contemporary stuff, that you're just not going to get otherwise. And I'll give an example of this. There is a scene in Kaiju Preservation Society where a group of people leave from BWI Airport in Baltimore to go to an Air Force base,

Tully Air Force Base that's in Greenland, right? As it turns out, there is a specific flight in the real world that goes from BWI to Tully Base. It happens every week, and it happens at the time that I had it leave BWI, and it arrived, and it arrived on a very specific day, because I actually blocked because the book happens between March 2020 and March 2021. They travel on a specific day.

That specific day, I looked up for Tully Base in Greenland, the weather conditions at the time that they would have been landing, right? And so that when they stepped off the plane, they were experiencing the world of Tully Base the way that someone had Tully Base did. Now, is anybody going to care about that? On one sense, no. On the other hand, there might be like three people in the world

who are in Tully Base who are reading my book, being like, oh, my God, was he here? How did he find that information out? And this is what I mean by knowing that what you're looking for, knowing how to find it, knowing to evaluate whether that information is good so that you can incorporate it into your interest, no matter what it was. I mean, I have absolutely no reason to, on a day-to-day basis, know how to find information about the weather at Tully base in Greenland.

But because of all the sort of just natural curiosity of that as a human, that information was easy for me to find and to put in the book and just make it that much more. interesting and realistic. And I'm sure just having spoken to you now for about 30 minutes, the fact that you put that, it probably just made your brain happy. Oh, it's absolutely good. It's very much like, it's very much an Easter. There are so many little things where you put them in and you're like, there may be nobody but me will know, but I do know and I'm super happy that I got that right. I had that happen actually in the new book where Sartreville and it takes place, part of it takes place in this town called Barrington. Illinois. And basically everything that I call out on every street corner in Barrington,

it exists, right? So if you are, anybody here from Barrington, Illinois, when Starterville comes out next month, you're going to be astounded. You're like, I know where that place is. Oh my God. So it's a delight. I mean, that's the thing. It's like those little Easter eggs, a few people in our community space also mentioned the lampshading moment in like halfway through the book, who were like, hilarious, love it. Several people mentioned it. So you've got a few fans. I really loved that. Sweet. We've got, this is why I love doing audience Q&As, by the way, because I spend, you know, an hour sort of like figuring out what questions I want to ask and doing research on passenger views. And then Dan comes in and they say, if you were to be taken out by a kaiju,

what circumstances would lead to your demise? And I'm very curious. I, you know, what would happen is I would just be like looking at the kaiju going, that's a big. animal is and I would basically be eating. I'd be sitting there just like looking at it and being like, wow, I guess, okay, I guess this is how the physics of it works. And I think that would be, it is that thing of curiosity kills the cat sort of thing. They would basically, everybody would be telling me to run and I'd be like, but then I can't look at it. Yeah. I need to see what the bottom of its foot looks like. Right. Exactly. And so that would, that would be the thing that would get me. nobody actually believes that they're going to die until they die.

And so I would be right until I would be like, oh, nope, that's a foot. No way to run from that. Oh, oh. It was a good life. I saw it once. Yeah. Yeah, it's funny because you're, so in the book, you know, these people, they go, they are hired, they go through a process of getting higher.

They go to the base. They travel to an alternate dimension and land on this alternate world. Sure. But there are tourists who come, who could be in this very situation. Yeah. Yeah. And one of the things I wanted to ask you about, too, was this idea of preservation and conservation. And they're just like, they're very different.

They're similar. But preservation tends to be like, all right, we're going to leave that alone. And conservation is like, are going to help it so it can be closer to what it used to be. Right. Was there a choice that you made there about the word preservation? Did it feel right when you were. saying it, it came to you in this moment and you just kind of stuck with it. Did you have like a moment where you were thinking a little bit about those words? Well, anybody who knows the band,

the Kinks, knows that there is the Village Green Preservation Society. Right. So that was just sort of a natural thing for me, right? But as it turns out, it works out very well for what the mission of the KPS is. Now, they do some sort of conservation effort stuff in the sense of They are, for example, at one point, helping one kaiju breed with another kaiju and all of that sort of stuff. There is the understanding that, you know, we have a role in helping them do what they would normally do if they weren't just big, massive physics-breaking pandas. But part of it as well is you're on an alternate version of Earth. Not only are you on an alternate version of Earth, but there is no. no scenario on this version of Earth where you are not an alien. The evolution of this planet did not

include mammals, you know, among other branches of the tree of life. So the job there is to observe, and it is to do science. And it was very important to me that we actually have the scientists do science and all that sort of stuff. But also in a way that doesn't intrude as much. You want to preserve the world as it exists as much as you can and not be a vector of infection and not be a vector of invasion, of intrusion, or any of that sort of stuff. And one of the reasons that I had the KPSB scientists is that of all groups of people, scientists will understand their place in the ecology of this world or in this universe better than other folks will. They will not necessarily be looking at it going, do you know, this probably means that there are completely undeveloped oil fields here that we could absolutely explain.

That's not what they're there for. They are like, look, there's so much science to do. and the science we can do here is going to be amazing. And we don't have to screw any of it up. We don't have to become billionaires to get the value of this world because the value of this world is the knowledge of it. And so that was actually, like I said, really important for me to make that sort of statement,

that the scientists would understand what they were, doing there and why they were doing it. And part of it was also, you know, there is the other mission of let's make sure that we keep these creatures on that side of the fence, you know, the transdimensional fence so they don't come in and cause problems over here. But again, that just leads into the mission of, you know, preserving not only the monsters over here, but the barrier that keeps them from coming over and wrecking havoc on the other side, which is where we are. Yeah. Well, you depict this group of scientists in such a fun way. They've got such great dynamic between them,

the sort of core group that we meet, but also just kind of everyone working out this base. Was that different or similar to writing other sort of character groups like soldiers or investigators or politicians? What was it like writing a group of different varying scientists? I mean, I think that personalities or personalities across the board, regardless of what you do and you are going to have some people who are, some are going to be smart asses, some of them are to be very earnest. Some of them are going to be accommodating. Some of them are going to be spiky. So you will always have the great, you know, hopefully panaply of personality types. What I liked about the scientists is that I could let the scientists be scientists and just

really nerd out about science things, right? Where, you know, they're super excited, you know, like there are so many actonites all over this place. Do you know what that means? You know, and all that. And just you really get in it, you know, I made sure that our, you know, point of view character only has a master's. So could be sort of the, the one that everything gets explained to. But having, just letting really smart people be really smart about the things that they're really smart about.

And also do their, you know, their jobs and have their personalities. So in one sense, no, I mean, you always want to have the range of personalities. But it was an actual joy of just showing people who are like, isn't this cool we get to be here and do this science and learn these things and, you know, share them with the other people who are there. It's very frustrating for a lot of them that they don't get to do like actual peer review and that they can't actually announce what they're. what it is that they've learned because everybody is there is like, you know, back home, I would be picking up my Nobel Prize and I can't tell anyone. Yeah. But, you know, but in this, but the adventure of learning all this stuff and exploring this world

and doing things that literally they wouldn't have a chance to do otherwise, I think for most scientists or the people that I know who are scientists, that's catnip. Yeah. And like, you know, it's like you could have a Nobel Prize or you could actually do the biology on these weird creatures that look like they're breaking the laws of physics but aren't, which would you rather do? And they'd be like, yes, exactly. Good for the science. Yeah. Well, Mary's got a great follow-up question to that. Do you really think that the secret of a parallel world concept could be kept, especially with so many bad actors who knew about it? Do you think that's possible? Oh, yeah. No, and this is something that, again, because one of the things that I am very aware of both as a huge consumer of popular culture and being a nitpicking nerd myself, our question's just like that, right? It's like, oh, come on, you can't really expect everybody to do it. And it actually gets addressed in the book, which is just like, literally like, you know, we take their phones, you know, so they're not going to be like doing selfies and just me with the, me with the kaiju, live in our best. lives, you know, that sort of thing. They're not going to do that. But even if somebody did,

they'd be like, okay, so you did that in Adobe After Effects? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's not like, we live in an era where photography and video and all that sort of stuff is so easily faked and people can be duped that at this point, even if you had, you were there and you did the thing where you did the thing where you. you had the, you know, the parasites or the actual kaiju right there, people would be like, no, I can see the pixels. I can see where they're wearing. And so, you know, this age of potential, you know, disinformation that we live in is also the thing that keeps it, you know, kind of underwraps. We're having that moment right now anyway with the, with the UFOs, right? You know,

it's like, we had hearings on the UFOs and they're like, I don't see them. I've seen the alien bodies. Like, did you? Did you really? It's like, like, well, I heard someone talking about the alien bodies, you know. And everybody's reaction is like, yeah, of course they're aliens, whatever, you know. I got to pay rent. So, you know, so my feeling about this is just in the real world when we're like, you know, here's this evidence of UAPs, right, which is what we call UFOs now, apparently. And people are like, yeah, I mean, that's probably just the Air Force like doing goofy things.

and I've got other things that I actually are worried about. So I think that, in fact, you could keep the secret, not by, you know, silencing, you know, everybody who, you know, would talk about it, but just be like, yeah, I can see the pixels. I mean, which did you, did you use, did you use After Effects or did you use, did you use Unreal Engine 5? Because that looks great, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, it's, we're full on just, we live in a world of misinformation. And so we would be like, yeah. No, no, the way you would deny it is not to deny it, but just to be like, those are some really good special effects. I'm going to, I'm going to hire you for my next movie because that's amazing. Yeah, it wouldn't be a surprise to me if they ended up hiring someone who works in special and visual effects and just to keep up the ruse. Right, exactly. Steve has a great comment.

Love the scientist, but wanted Sanders and the general to be eaten, which I think is fantastic. But I wonder, in relation to this, is it fun to write characters that you know the readers are probably just going to like see that the entire time they're reading? Oh, yeah, no. I mean, you absolutely want to have the people that, you know, the character that readers love to hate, right? You can't have every character be a character that everybody loves, just loves and wants to hang out. with and have a beer or a cookie with. You actually have to have some bad actors to move the plot along. Now, one of the things that I think that often is a legitimate criticism of me would be like, it's like, there's no doubt who your bad guys ever are, right? Because they're just plain bad.

And I'm like, I understand that. And also, in the real world, there's no doubt who the bad guys are. Right. There's not like there's not really, we live in an arrow right now where folks with really bad intentions are like, yeah, this is what I do. I'm just a bad person and you just got to live with it because I'm, because I got a lot of money. And in that being the case, I don't feel that the way that I'm portraying these particular characters is especially out of the realm. of fiction. One of the things that we do say often with the number of bad actors who are out there right now, and I'm not going to name names simply because, you know, let's not get distracted. But one of the things that people like to say about all the things that are happening right now with a number of bad actors are, it's like, I couldn't write that because if I wrote that, my editor would be like, that's too over the top. You can't do that. No one would believe it. And I'm just like, no, now, you know, given just how baldly bad actory so many people are,

I'm not going to pretend to give them like sneaky noble motives and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm just going to make them evil, you know. So, and once again, I understand this. People would be like you could just make them less black and white. I'm just like, do I have to? You know, the book is how many pages. It is just over $250. You don't have time to give people all of these deep motivations.

I mean, I don't know. I mean, it's like I do have the new book is, the next one is called Start a Villain, right? Where it's like it's literally about villains. And what are they want to do? They want to be bad guys. So I'm not going to, you know. They got to start somewhere.

Yeah, they got to start somewhere. Are they going to have rich complex in their lives? Yeah, sure. Why not? But they're going to have them inside. So if you want great motivations of them being evil, go ahead and write the fanfic. I'm just going to have them go blah. I love that.

So you talked about the movies that inspired this book, but a few people, including Audrey, are wondering, are there any movie prospects for Kaiju preservation? Might we see a representation of these animals on the big screen? It's currently under option for television. And unfortunately, at this point, along with all the other things that I have, under development. There are two strikes that are going on in Hollywood, one for the writers and one for the actors. And, you know, part of my brain is like, uh, strikes, you're getting in the way of my art. And then the more realistic, actually, I'm a human, not a jerk reaction is both the writers and

actors are absolutely in the right and should be striking because they're not only trying to like live their lives on a day-to-day basis and get paid fair wages for fair work. But they're also setting the tone for how their relationships with studios and movie production houses and stuff go for the next several years. And as much as it's annoying for me and for everybody else wants to see my stuff get made, I would rather have my stuff done by people who are compensated fairly and are, you know, happy to do the work that they do with the knowledge that they are getting paid, that they have health insurance, that one day they'll be able to retire, then to basically

have slave labor. So as far as it goes, 100% support for the actors and the writers, and all the stuff that's in development can wait. Yeah, I think that's great. And I think you're right that it means that you know that the project that is going to be up on the screen is a project that you also are really proud of for all of the behind-the-scenes reasons as well. Absolutely, absolutely. And I think that that's really important for me, at least, as a creator. I mean, I was the president of the Science Fiction Fantasy Writers of America. Now it's the Science Fiction Fannie Writers' Association. And honestly, if I was not sitting there saying pay your writers fairly and make it so that they can earn a decent

living, I believe with justification that I would just be dragged into hell. And it would be right for me to do so. Well, Ashley has a question about sort of your next project. So you just showed us a little bit about your next book, Starter Villan, which I'm very excited to read when it comes out next month. In September, we're looking forward to it? September 19th, yes. Amazing. But they're wondering, you stated that KPS is quite different from your other books. Do you intend to write more like? it? I mean, you didn't quite intend to write this one, right? Right. So the answer to that is both yes and no. At the moment, I don't have any KPS sequels planned. Although with Tor, my publisher came to me and said, let's make KPS2.

Here's a big pile of money. I would seriously consider it because I like big piles of money. That said, like you're laughing. You're like, oh, if you really have freaked me out. I thought you were going to go with big giant aliens with nuclear bodies, but sure, yeah. But no, but the thing about it is, is actually, so Star-Villain, which is, you know, right here, is not like that in that there are no monsters in it or anything like that, but it is like it, because like I mentioned with Rick Red shirts or Agent to the Stars, it has a similar theme of average person thrown into extraordinary high-concept circumstances with, you know, kind of an interesting cast of characters.

And in the case of starter villain, the concept is average Joe down on his luck, inherits mysterious uncle's business, and that business just happens to be like James Bond level supervility, right? And again, just like in kajou, where you're sitting there thinking, how do I make these square cube law violating creatures reasonable by the same thinking, I take all the tropes that are of supervillains and try to have a reason for them as well.

Like, for example, the volcano lair. Because, of course, he has a volcano layer in start- Where else would you have a layer? Where else would you have a layer? But the question is not, is there a volcano there? Because, of course, there is. But why is there a volcano layer? And anybody who's probably in this audience, the SciFri audience, knows the answer, which is,

ooh, oh, oh, geothermal energy. And that's like 100% correct. So once again, you have the reasoning for all the tropes and you get to play with the tropes and you get to have fun with all of that sort of stuff. And so it's great, it's great, great fun. So Kaiju and Starter Villan, and there will be one more book that I'm currently. writing now, which I can't give any details about yet, are all basically that same idea. Ordinary people dealing with an extraordinary circumstance, more or less in contemporary time.

And then in 2025, I'll write another Old Man's War book because it's the 20th anniversary of Old Man's War. But so we have this weird, loose trilogy of contemporary, high concept, ordinary people sort of books. And I'm actually really, it was completely accidental that it turned out that way, but I'm actually really happy that it is because I think they're a whole lot of fun. And that's it for today. Tomorrow, a conversation with author Anisa Ramirez about telling our story through materials. We'll see you soon.