Science Friday - U.S. COVID Spikes, Blockchain Chicken Farm, Book Club: Chicanafuturism. Oct 16, 2020, Part 2

Episode Date: October 16, 2020

Across The Country, A Spike In Coronavirus Cases Over 217,000 people have died of COVID-19 in the U.S., and many states are seeing an upswing in case numbers as we head into fall.  In rural Wyoming, there have been over 8,100 cases, with 57 deaths to date. More populated Wisconsin has seen over 167,000 cases—and recently crossed the grim threshold of 1,500 deaths due to the disease. Both states have reported more hospitalizations, with Wisconsin this week opening a field hospital to help deal with the increased demand for medical care and pressure on hospitals. In this State of Science segment, Ira talks with Bob Beck, news director at Wyoming Public Radio, and Will Cushman, associate editor for WisContext, about how their communities are responding to the pandemic. Blockchain And Big Tech In China’s Countryside Many of us are familiar with blockchain: the decentralized, anonymous ledger system. In the U.S., blockchain is usually talked about in terms of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. But in China, chicken farmers are using blockchain to monitor food safety.  There are hundreds of million people living in the Chinese countryside. Chinese tech companies are investing in all sorts of projects in the country’s rural areas—from villages built around e-commerce to internet gaming sites getting into the pork industry. In Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside, author Xiaowei Wang traveled through China to investigate how this technology is shaping the people and countryside.   Science Friday Book Club: Conjuring An Alternate History Of Colonization It’s week three of the SciFri Book Club’s exploration of New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color. This week’s story is ‘Burn the Ships,’ by author Alberto Yáñez. It’s set in a world that could be the Cortés-conquered Aztec Empire of 1520—but in this fictional version, the Spanish conquerors have modern guns, radios, railroads, and even scientific developments like vaccines. And as the Indigenous people are contained and slaughtered in camps, they use powerful magic to animate their dead against the invaders. SciFri producer Christie Taylor, Journal of Science Fiction managing editor Aisha Matthews and University of California Santa Cruz professor Catherine S. Ramirez talk about how a story about the past can still be science fiction, and introduce Chicanafuturism—a literary cousin of the Afrofuturism we discussed in last week’s conversation about Andrea Hairston’s story ‘Dumb House.’ Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Iroflato. Later in the hour, a look at the new tech frontier in China. But first, it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERNO. St. Louis Public Radio, KQAWAW Public Radio News. Local science stories of national importance. Around the country, the COVID-19 pandemic rages on with numbers increasing in most states. We wanted to check in on how some communities are reacting to the pandemic. Joining me now are Will Cushman, Associate Editor with Wisconsin. That's based in Madison, Wisconsin,

and Bob Beck, news director at Wyoming Public Radio in Laramie, Wyoming. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you. Thanks, Ira. You're welcome. Will, let me ask you first, some of the nation's most alarming COVID statistics this week are coming out of Wisconsin. Can you give us an idea of what's going on there? Yeah, we are hitting new daily highs on Multiple days this week and our seven-day average for new cases is also a record high. We're also seeing now a pretty staggering increase in the number of deaths that are being reported every day. That's gone up pretty steadily over the last couple of weeks and it's really spiked in the last few days. It's definitely alarming officials to the point where a field hospital is opening up this week in the Milwaukee area to help.

care for some of the recovering COVID patients from around the state. Has there been any reason, any one thing that is driving this increase? That's a really good question. And I would say that there really is no one reason. You know, cases have been kind of steadily climbing across the state for a couple months now. And there were certainly spikes associated with the start of school, particularly with the university's reopening in the beginning of September. There is kind of widespread testing of students, especially in the University of Wisconsin system. That uncovered a large number of cases. And there was some spillover into those local communities where the universities are based

that was documented by local health departments, but it's now to the point where the disease is clearly spreading across the community. It's not necessarily associated. with any one type of activity. So no one can point their fingers at social distancing or mask wearing or people just congregating and taking it very lightly. Yeah, you know, Wisconsin's been under a statewide mask mandate since August 1st. It's not clear how all people are adhering to that mask mandate in kind of throughout the state. It definitely sounds as though anecdotally that there are large parts of the state where adherence to that mandate is pretty low. Governor Tony Iver is actually out of alarm about the spike in cases last week declared a new emergency order, limiting capacity, indoor private venues like bars and restaurants to 25%.

although just this week there's a lawsuit filed by the Tavern League of Wisconsin, and that order has been temporarily blocked by a judge pending a hearing next week. Bob Beck, what is the epidemic, the pandemic, the pandemic looking like in Wyoming these days? It's really picked up since the start of the fall, the University of Wyoming, where I'm talking to you from, is certainly seen some increases in the county. A lot of that, of course, related to some social gathering that had involved alcohol in some cases. There's also been a lot of workplace clusters, long-term care facilities, which got opened up. This summer have had a few outbreaks.

So that's what we're seeing. A lot of challenges taking place right now. I was speaking to a Wyoming resident earlier this week who said that it was strange there because hospitals were filling up, but all the schools were open and no one would. was wearing masks, and the thought from this person was, well, no one's dying. So no one's taking it seriously yet. When they start dying, they'll take it seriously. And that's the common thing you hear. You know, there's a today as we speak, there's 57 deaths in the state. And so if you're in some other places, that doesn't sound like much at all. And I think that's what maybe has convinced people

that I don't know if they think it's necessarily a hoax, but it's nothing to be concerned about. It sort of depends on where you go, Ira. In our county, actually, in a lot of the stores and restaurants, people are wearing face coverings for the most part. But, you know, our bars, unlike Wisconsin, our bars are open. And there are people that, you know, I see some social media posts where it's business as usual. And so clearly people aren't that worried about it. And the governor has chosen just to more or less plead with people with the love of goodness. please wear your mask and please wash your hands and social distance, but there have been no mandates.

Earlier in the year, many people were attributing a surge in cases to college students, not following guidelines. Have you seen that as a problem in Wyoming? Yes, we certainly have seen that as an increase. The University of Wyoming actually had a meeting today, and they're trying to get more of a handle on it. And I think as they start having more cases and kids see what's happening to other students. That's going to, they hope, work and start slowing it down. But that is certainly driven a lot of numbers. We've got community colleges across the state as well, who have seen some increases

as well as a trade school or two. And in fact, our younger population, which I thought was interesting, has about a quarter of the cases, our 30 and under population is our largest number in the state. Interesting. How are the hospitals holding up? Well, we had a story this week that they're starting to fill up. And ICU is certainly a concern. Intensive care unit is certainly a concern in a lot of places, including in Laramie and in some of the bigger cities as we're starting to see more and more people stay there for long periods of time. You know, people are a little worried about what the future looks like.

our state health officer is worried about it, but there's also an argument being made that we have better treatment options. We know how to handle the cases that we're seeing. And so there's some alarm. There's worry, Ira, but not over the top just yet. Yeah. Will Cushman, let's go back to Wisconsin and you there with the hospital outlook. But you said there's a new field hospital opening. Are people getting worried about it?

Yeah, I think people have been worried about it for weeks now. Worry is really hitting a crescendo at the moment. Hospitals are really straining in the Green Bay area and the Fox Valley near Green Bay, so that would be around Appleton and the city of Oshkosh. But really, hospitalizations are on the rise across the state. There's a record number of hospitalizations in south central Wisconsin, including Madison, as well as southeast Wisconsin. center of the Milwaukee area. And statewide, we are nearing 1,000 current hospitalizations due to the

disease, which is an all-time high. We talked about the governor's mass quarter, and this week, the courts upheld the Wisconsin governor's mass quarter. Tell us about that. What kind of stress went through the community waiting for that ruling? It's unclear to me how much stress individuals maybe felt about the mandate being in limbo, I think people are getting pretty set in their views on the disease and mitigation strategies like face coverings. And people are either enthusiastically taking them up and adhering to them pretty well or not. And I think those attitudes are becoming firmer and firmer over the course of the pandemic. Bob Beck, Wyoming is obviously a lot more open in distance between people.

Social distancing is almost there naturally, right, as opposed to an urban area. I would imagine that this is part of the reason that it's making harder psychologically for people to follow health guidelines. Would you say there's something to that? Oh, absolutely. And you're absolutely correct. and that's the argument you hear from a lot of people is we naturally social distance. We don't have, for people that don't know, we don't even have a community above 70,000 in our state. And we're very

independent people, Ira. And so when things were shut down earlier this year, there was a lot of outcry from many citizens in our state. And so it's definitely a unique place, a lot of wide open space, but sometimes that can be to our detriment as well. Are there trends even across your state or are there parts that are clearly doing much better or much worse than other places? Absolutely. You know, we have a county that has had two cases. And I think they got their second one a month ago. And so we have places where it really hasn't shown up that much.

And they're not necessarily because of anything they're doing. I think in some instances it's been luck. But we have seen some places where it's bigger, Albany County, where the university is. As soon as the student population kind of came back, I think people were sure something might change, and in fact it did, we had some big jumps. Teton County, where Jackson, Wyoming is,

is a very touristy area, Cody, Wyoming, just outside of Yellowstone. Both of those areas have seen some increases, and a lot of that could be because of tourists. And so, you know, there are, and Casper and Cheyenne, Wyoming certainly have seen some increases too, but there's other parts of the state that had some surges, but then they went away. And, Will, in Wisconsin, you're seeing all kinds of court cases coming up.

Where do we stand with challenges to various things? Right. The challenge to Governor Evers' latest order limiting capacity in bars and restaurants, that's been temporarily blocked, and there will be a hearing next Monday to hear the Tavern League's case there. And then the challenge to the governor's mask mandate, the circuit judge did decline to overrule the mandate and in fact said that that's the job of the legislature and that the legislature can act whenever it decides to to overturn the mask mandate if it were to choose to do so. So there has been a little bit of rumbling that the Republican-controlled legislature may be waiting until after the election to try to overturn the mask mandate. But that's kind of unclear. There's definitely some political machinations going on, make the current situation a little muddied.

That's a good place to stop because we'll have to wait and see a lot of things following the election in just about three weeks. I want to thank both of you for taking time to be with us today. Thank you for happening. Thank you, Ira. Will Cushman, Associate Editor with Wisconsin, based in Madison, Wisconsin, Bob Beck, News Director at Wyoming Public Radio in Laramie, Wyoming.

We're going to take a break, but when we come back, we'll talk about how Chinese chicken farmers may be way out in the countryside, but they're using high-tech tools to raise their flocks. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Blockchain, artificial intelligence, machine learning. You know these, some of the latest big tech buzzwords.

But here's a little secret. Silicon Valley is not the only place developing these technologies. China has its own new tech frontier, and some of the biggest technology advances in China are taking place in the countryside. Producer Alexa Lim has more. You've probably heard of blockchain. It's that sometimes hard to understand decentralized,

anonymous ledger system. In the U.S., blockchain is usually talked about in terms of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. But in China, chicken farmers are using blockchain to monitor food safety. There are hundreds of millions of people living in the Chinese countryside, and Chinese big tech companies are investing in all sorts of projects in the country's rural areas. My next guest traveled through China to investigate how this technology is shaping the people and the countryside. Jiao Wei Wang is author of Blockchain Chicken Farm and other stories of Tech in China's countryside. They're also creative director for Logic Magazine based out of Oakland, California. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you so much, Alexa. Great to have you. So for this book,

you looked at Big Tech in China and how this relates to the countryside. And you've also worked in tech in the U.S. and have been researching this in China. So can you kind of step back a little bit and kind of lay out what big tech means in China? I mean, what does it mean through a Chinese lens? That's a great question. In China, the landscape of tech, especially big tech, feels very different to me. So you have a big company like Alibaba and Tencent. And Alibaba is doing all these initiatives that are going into the countryside and trying to do rural revitalization. So there's e-commerce villages that are plugging into Alibaba's. platform, Alibaba also has a sister company which spun off Ant Financial, which provides a lot of the payment mechanisms to try and get people who are unbanked into the financial credit loan system. So it's really fascinating because you'll read these policy documents where these huge tech companies are trying to play almost the roles of like a development bank as well as

and financial, they have initiatives that are actually planting trees to prevent desertification in Inner Mongolia. This struck me as very different than American big tech where companies are saying and claiming that they're doing things for the social good, but, you know, they're probably not necessarily doing kind of these more development bank NGO type initiatives. Right. And I do want to get back to that because that's kind of what you visit in your book. You visit all these different sites. But when you think of big tech, you don't really think about the countryside. So why were you interested in the rural areas in China? Why is that an important to technology development there? When I first started doing research for this book, there was definitely the layer of

the typical writing about Chinese tech, surveillance, cities, facial recognition on every corner. But as I dug in to both the actual numbers, I was also trying to think through this juncture of ecological and climate crisis and tech. And so as I dug in, I noticed 90% of the tech, maybe even more, that we're using is this invisible stuff that's being used to make sure that shipping containers filled with grain meet the port, algorithmic futures trading of commodities markets of grain, things like that. And so I became really interested in this actually large amount of tech that we use in our world that really isn't in the spotlight. And so it just made sense for me to finally just go into the countryside and see the tensions between

big tech meeting this rural way of life. Right. And in China, I mean, a large part of the population is in the countryside, right? So like the big tech companies can't ignore that population there. Absolutely. And in China, the agrarian transition hasn't really fully happened yet. So yeah, you have a lot of people in the countryside. Does the government want them migrating to the cities all of a sudden? That's a lot of people. And so the question right now, is this rural revitalization? How do we keep people in the countryside?

And also just kind of going back to definitions of what technology means in China. When we talk about new technologies and innovation in the U.S. in Silicon Valley, there's this idea of disruption, right? And trying to find a hole in the marketplace and it's largely profit motivated. But, I mean, does innovation mean something different in China? Is there a different definition or role? I talk about this in the Made in China chapter, where I touch upon the notion of Shanzai.

And Shanzai is this word from Cantonese, which means mountain stronghold, but signifies kind of a knockoff culture. It's very scrappy. It doesn't, you know, have this sense of like, oh, we have to, you know, abide by IP. It's a phenomenon that has really yielded a ton of creativity, people pushing up against very black boxed controlled technology.

You know, when you look at an Apple iPhone, if it broke all of a sudden, you would have to take it to an Apple store. But Shunjai technology is all about designing tech that, you know, if you don't have this special $1,000 machine to take apart the phone, you could really repair it. And you would be allowed to repair it at your home. So I think that disruption has happened just in a different form. And I want to talk about some of the specific initiatives and locations that you kind of visited.

Like the title of your book is called Blockchain Chicken Farm, and you visited one of these blockchain chicken farms called GoGo Chicken Farms. Can you kind of tell me what exactly is happening there? It was very surreal. As it turns out, when I showed up to the Go Go Chicken Farm, which is in this beautiful area of China and Guizhou in the mountains. The farmer there was actually super sweet, super humble, and he had actually been raising free-range chickens for a long time.

But people didn't want to pay a premium on what he was trying to sell because there was such a low level of food safety and trust due to a number of food safety scandals. So along came this tech company from Shanghai who said, oh, we actually have the solution of blockchain. And so you just attach a little QR-plated bracelet to each of your chickens. And then people can scan the QR code and just see the whole life of the chicken, you know, how much it weighed at slaughter.

And it can track the journey of the chicken's life, like from birth until the slaughterhouse. There's even a picture of the chicken. So these chickens are funny enough. they're very heavily surveilled. There's like a geofence to make sure no one's like tampering with the feed and actually feeding them things that aren't grains. So that was a very surreal experience just to be in Guijo. And then when I asked the farmer, well, how do you feel about blockchain?

He was just like, what are you talking about? What's blockchain? So then how is blockchain good for like these chicken farms? Like, why use that type of technology? Yeah, so blockchain, you know, as a ledger, it's tamper-proof. It's not easy to commit fraud on blockchain. And it's proposed as a solution to a wide variety of provenance cases. So when you want to track the supply chain of something, for Farmer Jiang, I think it also operated,

given the technology as a kind of perfect marketing. ploy as well. I mean, the technology did work, but it was this added kind of shine that gave people the sense of safety that they were getting this perfect chicken. And you have a quote in your book where you say, blockchain is just kind of shifting bureaucratic roles to a technical role. So, I mean, is this like feeling a void that the government should be doing? Or, you know, is that, are they, they're like, great? Yeah, sure. Let's use blockchain for food safety. Oh, absolutely. I think the government, much like the U.S. government is willing to let companies, especially tech companies, step in and try to address a number of social issues. So, you know, everything from blockchain chicken to net ease, which is one of the world's biggest gaming companies, they're trying to solve the quality of pork meat.

So they actually started a whole agricultural products branch where they're raising. There's also like a really funny game that they briefly had. I don't know if it's still up, but you can play, play games on it and earn tokens and then buy their agricultural products. So that they're using, you know, tech to try and monitor pig health during the hog farming process. A lot of tech companies are getting in on this food safety question. Right. Sounds like they're gamifying pork. And they are a gaming company. They're like an internet gaming company, right?

And is it a huge profit-making venture for them, too? So right now they have partnerships. So Nettys is the one that's like directly spinning off their own arm of agricultural products. I think actually the past year wasn't great for them given the African swine fever, ASF, in China. For Alibaba, they've actually done something really smart where all these. smart agriculture initiatives. They're partnering with other agricultural companies. So they don't need to put as much investment into the actual physical infrastructure of farming. And as, you know, great benefit to Alibaba, they're getting a lot of data out of this. So you just have tons of

data being collected across these farms and improvement upon Alibaba's own AI models. Right. So, I mean, it's not necessarily that different than what's going on here in terms of like what they're going after. It's kind of like data collection. And then talking about Alibaba, I mean, you have to talk about this. There's these e-commerce villages that are springing up. It's just like completely sponsored by Alibaba. How do those villages work? So they were a strangely organic phenomenon at first.

The specific village that I visited, it was actually the result of this pretty common larger pattern that happened, which is people from the countryside going into the city to work in factories, sending money home, and at some point maybe moving back home. This one person, the first entrepreneur in the village, he had gone to the city and had to come back due to some family illness that he had to take care of. And he was like, oh, I heard about this thing. You know, you can sell stuff on Taubo. And he just got all. the resources together, you know, borrowing money from a cousin to buy a computer. And he was telling me that he actually had to figure out how to type Chinese onto the computer and he had to borrow

his daughter's pin-yin textbook to figure out how to do this. And his business, once it started becoming pretty successful, and he was making stage play and performance costumes that would sell all across China. Alibaba started taking notice of like, oh, this Taubo village thing is pretty much, you know, a really great economic development model for rural areas. And actually, Alibaba has like a rural research institute now. And a lot of their focus is on encouraging these initiatives in other towns and also partnering with development thanks to spread this throughout the world. I'm Alexa Lim, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

So then the farmers are like making the products and also selling it on Alibaba's kind of e-commerce site. Is that how it happens? Exactly. Most of the time in this village that I visited, it was just a garage workshop. I have images where it's people just cutting cloth using jigsaws on the workshop. that's the first floor of their house and sewing these things, putting them together. So they're manufacturing this when they're not farming, and then when it's time to tend to the land,

take care of the fields, they'll do that. Other villages, they're actually selling some agricultural products directly. So they're selling, I visited one place where they decided they would plant kiwis, and they're selling that, also tofu, local products that they had made. I mean, is it completely changing those villages, though? Are they just going to become like these e-commerce places where, you know, you have to like make sure your ads are squared away and things like that? There's an eerie sense.

It's not a cheerful place. It wasn't a cheerful place for me to be because there's this influx of wealth in a huge way. a lot of half-hazard shoddy construction of these new village buildings. And yeah, it's also people are giving up a lot of the younger folks, too. I was told they're giving up their land entirely and leasing it out to bigger industrial agriculture companies so that they can focus on e-commerce full-time and take advantage of how cheap things are in the countryside as a competitive advantage over maybe a factory in the city.

It's also really changing the ecology of these villages to one place that I visited. They started growing chili peppers because it takes up less land. It's easier. It's more profitable. And that was in addition to their e-commerce businesses. And yet it was also an area where it maybe wasn't the most well-suited for, chili growing. And so I definitely felt a lot of concern about that. And, you know, there's the label Made in China. It kind of has this association now of cheap products. But I mean, what do you think

made in China will mean in the next 10 years? I would like to see, and this is a complete, maybe too hopeful aversion. I would hope that made in China is a, this sense that we can build technology from a decolonize standpoint that really gives openness and opportunity to different ways of being in the world. What I mean by that is I think a lot about the Shanzai technology, where it is really about answering the needs of the user from the grassroots level. It's about making tech accessible. It's about ensuring that tech doesn't become this profit-driven intellectual property constant battle and instead is really oriented towards people. Whether this will happen or not, I'm actually not that optimistic because I do think

China is becoming more like the U.S. in that sense, but I still hold some hope. Thanks for joining us. Zhao Wei Wang is author of Blockchain Chicken Farm and other stories of tech in China's countryside. They're also creative director for Logic Magazine based out of Oakland, California. Thanks so much, Alexa. For Science Friday, I'm Alexa Lim. After the break, the book club tackles what it means to rewrite a history of colonization and conquest in Mexico. As our exploration of speculative fiction continues, stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Iraflato. If you've been following faithfully along with our book club, you know we've been stuck firmly in the future with short stories from their collection New Sun's original speculative fiction by people of color. But this week's story, time travels to a different place, a reimagining of events from the past.

For example, what if the Azteg people had used magic to fight back against Cortez's conquist doors in the 1500s. Hmm. SciFri Book Club captain Christy Taylor has more. Last week in our ongoing discussion of the short story collection New Sons, we talked about Afrofuturism and how Afrofuturist stories place cultures stereotyped as primitive into multicultural futures. This week, we're taking on Alberto Yaniesz's Burn the Ships. It's a story about an alternative history of the conquest of the Aztec Empire in Mexico. The Indian Indigenous people are still being exterminated, but this time in prison camps by invaders called the dawncomers. And a woman named Sitlal is plotting to use magic to turn the tables back in favor of her people.

This time, by reanimating the dead. In the process, though, she and many other women will sacrifice both their lives and some of the future spiritual gifts of their people. You might be surprised to hear that this, too, is part of a futurist tradition. This one, Chicana Futurism, which centers people of people of people. Mexican origin. Joining me again to talk about this story is Aisha Matthews, managing editor of the journal of science fiction and director of literary programming for the museum of science fiction's Escape Velocity Conference. Hey there, Aisha, welcome back. Hi, Christy. Always a pleasure. Always a pleasure. I want to start with genre, actually, for a second. It really seems like pure historical

fiction. Burn the ships as a phrase seems like a really clear reference to Hernan Cortez's conquest of Mexico, which was in 1519. He ordered his men to scuttle their boats. They had no option to retreat from battle. But then there are all these references to the invaders having technology that I wouldn't expect at all from that century. We've got radios, railroads, and guns that seem a lot more advanced than the muskets that Cortez's men had. What's going on there? A lot of people ask about the difference between speculative and science fiction. And I, in my scholarship, see science fiction as kind of a type of speculative fictions where, you know, speculative fiction, the point is speculating about how different

variables would change the past, present, or future. So alternate history is definitely a form of speculative fiction. And I think it gives us that ability, as you're saying, to bring in technology that wouldn't have otherwise historically been there and see how that may change things. Yeah. And we're also bringing back kind of another trope that we've covered in past conversations, which is this relationship between technology and magic. The magic is definitely working. We see a lot of zombies ripping apart conquerors. And it's positioned as this kind of opposite of technology. But it still also has this kind of order and logic and a systemic nature to it. In a lot of ways, I guess it feels like the indigenous characters are wielding it as a

technology. So I would definitely say that they're wielding it as a sort of technology. One of the things I'd love to return to later is the characterization of the Don Commer technology as cold technology, this cold mechanical versus living magic. And I think technologies like language, for instance, which are also a big part of the Afrofuturist canon, are also really prevalent here highlighting the ways that technology is not always digital. Yeah, I would really like to return to that too. First, I'm going to bring another researcher whose work has looked at futuristic storytelling, but in a different tradition, Dr. Catherine S. Ramirez, Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California in Santa Cruz. Welcome, Catherine. Hi. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, welcome. So a while ago now, you coined this word Chicana Futurism, which may sound like something related to the Afrofuturism that Aisha and I have just been sort of touching on. How would you define this term Chicana Futurism? So Chicana Futurism is indebted to Afro Futurism. And Chicano Futurism refers to Chicanax cultural production such as literature, visual art, music, performance that engenders cultural transformations by articulating, by linking and enunciating new and everyday technologies. And like Afrofuturism, Chicana Futurism is concerned with histories of colonialism and displacement. and it explores the nexus of race, gender, science, technology, the environment, and the future. So if we can unpack that a little bit more in the context of this story, Burn the Ships, which feels like a story that takes place in the past in a lot of ways, how is that Chicana futurism? So as Iesha noted, one of the tropes of speculative fiction is anachronism, alternative,

or alternate history, parallel universe. That's what Burn the Ships is about. It's a kind of parallel universe to the history of settler colonialism in the new world. Speaking of science fiction as a genre, Catherine, you've been a sci-fi geek for a lot of your life. Is it a genre or has it been a genre that produced a lot of Chicana futurism

or works that you would, categorize as Chicana Futurism so far? So increasingly, yes, there is a work that I used to try to teach. And it's called Lunar Braceros. It's about these workers who are sent off to the moon to dispose of Earth's waste. And there's an uprising as well. But around the same time, this film by Alex Rivetta came out called Sleep Dealer. That's what it's called. And in Sleep Dealer, the wall between Mexico

and the United States has been built. And so these workers in Mexico work in the United States, but remotely. They basically operate robots on construction sites or in restaurant kitchens. And so the Mexican workers are doing the work that so many Mexican immigrants do. do do in this country in our time, but they're doing it from Mexico on their side of the wall and sleep dealer. And this is, you know, the sort of fantasy of xenophobes, but also capitalism. You know, it's a convergence of these fantasies. So that actually kind of reminds me of the way that the dawn comers are portrayed as there's a lot of language of, uh, um, unwanted visitors, unwelcome refugees effectively.

And it seems like they were an intellectual curiosity when they first showed up. You know, I think they call them blonde-haired jetsam. But now they've become this invading force. And so one of the things I found most interesting right out of the gate was that portrayal. We often hear it from the colonial side of things of, you know, civilizing savages. But to see from the more indigenous perspective saying, in many ways, you seem like refugees in the way we are. now, and it really makes you consider how we treat refugees. There are many narratives of indigenous uprisings from Tupac Amaru in southern Peru in the 1780s,

and then also the murder, the assassination of Captain James Cook in Hawaii in the 1700s. And when Cook and his men arrived in Hawaii, they were welcomed by the Hawaiians. This is not an uncommon story. These newcomers are different. They spark curiosity. But then things went south, and the indigenous Hawaiians ended up driving Cook and his men out. There were some actual uprisings, and this seems to tell a story of what could have happened. It's not one where we see the indigenous people fully victorious.

They don't actually kick the invaders out. they do enough damage instead to sort of change the terms of bit or to give them a bit more of a fair footing. But it's not a complete, like, what if they had never succeeded sort of story. So it's interesting that you read this as, I guess, an incomplete victory because I read it as a wiping out of the invaders. But this victory comes at a cost. The women who lead it, they die, and they've also, for lack of a better word, made a deal with the devil. You know, they have aligned themselves with the Sitsi Mehmet, the goddesses of death. See, Loll has also had a sort of falling out with the putatively good god, though.

And she realizes that the god that was worshipped as the god of life is actually just a voracious. as these goddesses of death. It struck me the juxtaposition of that feminine magic, which is forbidden, and the masculine magic, which is orthodox. The history of the African diaspora is slightly different because, especially in the context of America, Africans were brought from various countries and kind of lost their history and religion. So in a world where both are accessible and both are clearly real,

it's very interesting to me, and it feels like a way that is much different from the Western way of thinking of both the kind of balance of the masculine and feminine. I did want to ask, actually, so going back to Aisha's really good point about cold technology versus living magic. This also makes me think of conversations we've had sort of behind the scenes at Cyfry and also on the air about recognizing knowledge systems outside of what Western science. And that all feels very connected here in sort of the cold versus the living and these dichotomies of understanding. There's definitely a dichotomy there between Cartesian thought, you know, Western, you know, rationality, and then these other ways of knowing, seeing, understanding, being in the world. I do want to talk about the cold technology, though, just in relation to the science fiction. genre. What makes burn the ship's science fiction? And so science fiction, you know, historically, it was defined as this genre that focused on, on science, on tech. And in terms of race,

African-Americans, Latin X, were usually not, you know, associated with science technology, and images of these, you know, clean, bright futures. This is very, very important. This is very much a science fiction story, like, because it is about that cold technology. Burn the Ships, it's also science fiction, though. If we think about science fiction as a genre that prompts us to look at our world or our history from a new perspective by alienating us, you know, by showing us our world, our history from a new vantage. I prefer that second definition of science fiction. I think it's much more capacious and flexible. And what Janiez is doing with Burn the Ships is he is alienating us from our history and our present of settler colonialism and casting it in a new light.

And that, to me, that's the essence of science fiction. Just a quick reminder that this is Science Friday, and I'm Christy Taylor. Talking to Aisha Matthews and Dr. Catherine S. Ramirez about the short story, Burn the Ships by Alberto Yenyes. My last question is actually from one of our listeners. Samantha Davis suggested that rather than being a story about an alternative reality or history, this might just be storytelling from a cultural perspective that defers from the Western understanding of what actually happened. Is this a useful frame for reading this story? I think that it is a useful way of framing the story.

Indigenous languages endure. Indigenous people survive. There are ways in which we continue to resist. I think we also have to acknowledge the gory history of conquest. That ties into the similarities between this story and a lot of tropes in Afrofuturist stories. In particular, there was, you know, the idea that they're still celebrating or still trying to observe their holy days in captivity in these camps. But I think, you know, the difference there is obviously the ways in which colonialism and the middle passage kind of changed the enslaved relationship with their history. But between that point where C. Mistlin has been chosen as a subcommander's bed warmer,

effectively, and it gives her access to supplies and information, which is definitely a historical strategy for slave women who were, you know, taken by their masters using that to their advantage. And as I mentioned in the beginning, the significance of writing as a means to freedoms. And so in a very real way for, you know, Afrofuturism and for African American history, literacy was a means of attaining freedom, both the ability to forge passes that you've been freed. and the ability to free your mind from enslavement. We still have that fundamental respect for writing as a technology of liberation, but in this iteration it is magical, whereas in many it is more literal.

How should people reading these stories take their understandings to the world as we live in it now? Should they? The radical feminist movement, I think, would say yes, that burning it all down is the only way to kind of start over. But in the same vein, I think bringing to this the memory that the racial violence we see is not new. But I think it's also equally important to tell the stories of the marginalized who fought back even at the cost of their very lives. And in the way that we try to oftentimes whitewash history or try to focus on a more diverse future, we often lose that fact that people were willing to die for their beliefs and their culture. And I think if people bring that to the real world, it might help them understand why often

people are so unwilling to let go of the past. This is the culture of our people that has endured. I just want to paraphrase from the title of a story by NK. Jemison. The title of that story is too many yesterdays, not enough to morrows. And I think that we need new ways to narrate our yesterday's just as much as we need new visions of our tomorrows we need both um in order to build the world that we want and we need well that feels like a really good place to leave it i want to thank both my guests dr katherine s ramirez professor of latin american and latino studies at the university of california santa cruz and ayesha matthews managing editor of the journal science fiction and director of literary programming for the museum of science fiction

Escape Velocity Conference. Thank you so much for being with me today. Thanks, Christy. Thank you. When last thing, we've got two more weeks left of our new son's speculative fiction book club left for you. Join us in our online discussion group, subscribe to our newsletter, read an excerpt of this week's story,

and sign up for a live Zoom event with editor Nisi Shawl, all on our website, ScienceFriiday.com slash book club. And stay tuned for next week when we read The Shadow We Cast Through Time by Andropramit Das. For Science Friday, I'm Christy Taylor. For more information on participating in the SciFribe Book Club, check out our website, sciencefriady.com slash book club. Plus, on the Science Friday Voxpop app, book club readers, what are you thinking about as you read Burn the Ships

and other stories in New Suns? Do you have a favorite story? That's on the Science Friday Voxpop app, wherever you get your apps. Have a great weekend. I'm Ira Flato in New York.