The Science Fiction Universe of "Orbital Cloud"

Daniel and Kelly talk to Tayio Fujii, author of "Orbital Cloud" 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hey, Kelly, are you a lottery ticket purchaser?

Speaker 2 (00:11):
Uh?

Speaker 3 (00:12):
No, as a person who thinks a lot about statistics
and probability, I am not a lottery ticket purchaser.

Speaker 1 (00:18):
Well, you just got to bet on the high variants events.
But let's say that you win a billion dollars someday.
What are you going to do with your windfall? Have
you thought about that?

Speaker 2 (00:27):
Oh?

Speaker 3 (00:28):
My gosh, Well, I'd like to think that I'd like
work on the world hunger problem, so maybe i'd do
something like that. But also I would make a really
awesome lab for myself, probably probably put it into science.
What would you do?

Speaker 1 (00:42):
I might start my own university where students can go
for free and faculty don't have to apply for grants.

Speaker 3 (00:49):
Whoa, And then I encourage them to hire me because
this university you're talking about sounds fantastic and I would
like to work there.

Speaker 1 (00:57):
What I definitely wouldn't do is spend any of that
money sending myself to space.

Speaker 3 (01:02):
Really, you don't want to go to space.

Speaker 1 (01:04):
I have zero interest in going to space. How much
money would you spend on a ticket to space coming?

Speaker 3 (01:09):
I wouldn't know. We're on the same page, but I
still seems way too dangerous right now for my taste.

Speaker 1 (01:16):
Let's just stay here on Earth and spend our billion
dollars on science.

Speaker 3 (01:19):
Yeah, that sounds great.

Speaker 2 (01:35):
Hi.

Speaker 1 (01:36):
I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at
UC Irvine, and I am terrified of fast moving vehicles.

Speaker 3 (01:45):
I'm Kelly Wiener Smith, and I'm a parasitologist with Rice University,
and I am also sort of petrified of fast moving vehicles,
but also maybe in particular, fast moving vehicles that have
a high probability of.

Speaker 1 (01:56):
Explodingly tested my faith in science and engineering because A
took a helicopter flight for the first time last week.

Speaker 3 (02:06):
WHOA, how did you get that opportunity?

Speaker 1 (02:08):
My daughter and I were on a road trip around
the West Coast and we took a chopper ride through
the Grand Canyon, which was pretty spectacular.

Speaker 3 (02:16):
That does sound awesome, But are you saying you were
scared or was it moving slow enough that it wasn't scary.

Speaker 1 (02:21):
I was terrified. There's so much angular momentum in that thing,
you know, some little thing goes wrong, it just pulls
itself apart. And my daughter was scared. She thought, is
this thing really safe? And I know the numbers, I
know the statistics. It's much safer to get in the
helicopter than it was to drive to the helicopter. But
still it was terrifying, and so I had to reassure her,
even though inside I was also terrified.

Speaker 3 (02:44):
Well, it's also you know, the unknown things that could
happen that maybe you're not expecting, which is sort of
what makes the book that we are going to talk
about today, you know, makes Base Treble sound even more petrifying.

Speaker 1 (02:56):
And so welcome to the podcast. Daniel Le Jorge explained
The Universe, a production of iHeartRadio, in which we explore
everything that can and does happen in our universe, how
things come apart, how things come together, how everything works.
We talk about black holes, we talk about white holes,
we talk about galaxies, we talk about particles. We talk
about everything that happens in the universe, and sometimes we

(03:18):
talk about things that happen in fictional universes. My friend
and co host Jorge can't be with us today, but
I'm very happy to have Kelly, our hosts on these
science fiction episodes, joining us today. Kelly, thanks very much,
Thank you.

Speaker 3 (03:30):
So much for having me. I love every time you
email me and you're like, hey, how about we read
a science fiction book for work? And I'm like, this
is this My life is the best.

Speaker 1 (03:39):
Science fiction is so much fun to read. You know,
as a scientist, you spend all of your days struggling
against the boundaries of the laws of physics. It's so
much fun to have creative people also contributing, you know,
thinking about other ways universes could be, what the laws
of physics might be, or setting stories in our universe
and figuring out like how to solve problems. I just
love the connection between the creativity of writing science fiction

(04:02):
and the creativity of actually exploring our universe.

Speaker 3 (04:05):
Yeah, and this book was particularly exciting because it's set
almost essentially in our time exactly, and the world is
very similar to our world, and so it's interesting to
think about, well, it's just a few things were different,
what might our world be like? And so yeah, it's
a really fun book to think about.

Speaker 2 (04:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (04:21):
I love when science fiction tells us about how we
could live, how we might live, and also explores like,
you know, the consequences of technology and how it can
affect and change people's lives. You know, we can lift
up one nation to make it more powerful. It can
give access to people who were excluded from the mainstream.
Technology really can completely revolutionize our society, and I love

(04:43):
seeing science fiction writers try to anticipate that and to
explore that.

Speaker 3 (04:47):
And that's absolutely what this book does. And what book
did we read for today's episode, Daniel.

Speaker 1 (04:54):
And so On today's episode, we're going to be talking
about the science fiction universe of Orbital Cloud by Tayo Fuji.
This is a really fun book that takes place in
the near future. Kelly and I both read this book
and encourage you to pick it up. It's a lot

(05:14):
of fun and it's a really impressive display of like
the technical mastery of the author. It's like very detailed,
very specific. A lot of the plot points really rely
on like understanding the science and how things actually work.

Speaker 3 (05:27):
But I feel like often when you get a book
that's really good about the science, sometimes you don't get
characters that are good. Also. There's like, you know, you
can be good at the engineering, but maybe you're not
also good at describing people. And this book, I think
does a really nice job of having like an interesting plot,
interesting characters, and solid science. I was personally very impressed
with his breath.

Speaker 1 (05:46):
I was curious what your thoughts were about it, especially
like the space international law and all the treaties and
the intrigue and all that stuff. But first let's tell
our listeners a little bit about what this book is about.
It was published originally in Japanese and then translated a
few years later, and in my mind, it's something like
a space spy techno thriller. You know, you have countries
battling against each other in space, but you know, it's

(06:08):
not like a shooting war. It's more like, you know,
information and maneuvering. I got some sort of like Hunt
for Red October vibes. You know, it's like political and
it's espionage and all sorts of stuff. How did you
see the book?

Speaker 3 (06:22):
Well, so, first of all, I should admit that I've
never seen Hunt for Red October, and I regret that
like every couple months because I feel like it gets
referenced all the time and I'm like, oh, yeah, I
got to watch that. But yeah, no, I got those
vibes too, although although I'll say that it like, yes,
there was the espionage web aspect of it, but you know,
there were also these very real weapons that were up

(06:42):
in space too, and so yeah, I had some of
that also, But I'll watch Hunt for Red October, so
the next time it gets brought up, I'm on the ball.

Speaker 1 (06:50):
I don't know how you can exist in the nerd
done without having seen that movie.

Speaker 3 (06:53):
When I've spent two years studying Russian and I'm interested
in Soviet history, and so it comes up a lot
because it's US versus the Soviets in that right, Yeah,
like every movie back then.

Speaker 1 (07:04):
So what is this book about. It takes place over
a few days in twenty twenty, and it involves a
lot of sort of amateur characters people watching the sky.
There's a guy who runs a meteor predicting website who's
following something in space and notices something strange happening in
the trajectory of an object that was launched by North Korea.

(07:26):
So if a lot of different characters all around the
world sort of seeing things happening in space and trying
to put together what's going on.

Speaker 3 (07:32):
Yeah, and they all actually for the most part, work together,
which I hope is what would happen, but I'm not
always so optimistic. There's also a rich dude who is
doing a stunt trip to his orbital hotel and he's
bringing his daughter with him, and like, you know, you
read it for the first time, or you start reading
the book and you think to yourself, oh, is this
supposed to be Elon Musk, And then it turns out

(07:53):
he made his millions from a company that is very
clearly meant to be PayPal in fiction or in this
fictional universe, and you're like, Okay, I get this is
definitely supposed to be Elon Musk. So there's an Elon
Musk character who is going to space in his orbital
hotel for the first time, and as a big stunt,
like I guess, show how safe it is, he takes
his daughter with him.

Speaker 1 (08:11):
Mm hmm exactly. But then it turns out maybe space
isn't so safe because these amateurs watching the sky notice
that this object that North Korea launched has a sort
of strange trajectory. It's not really following like your typical
gravitational trajectory. It's sort of maneuvering in space in a
way that surprises everybody. And suddenly people panic, like, hold on,

(08:32):
is this some sort of new weapon? Have the North
Koreans developed this thing called the rod from God that
can you know, drop payloads from space, or maybe they're
like targeting this orbital hotel that the Elon Musk character
has built. So all of a sudden there's this sort
of change in the power balance in space. People think, oh,
this is new technology. Maybe now we are no longer safe,

(08:55):
whereas a moment ago we thought of ourselves as safe.
I think that's really interesting seeing how the explores the
sort of power dynamics and how very quickly things can
change with new technology.

Speaker 3 (09:05):
And absolutely if some country not only got the power
to knock out you know, the International Space Station, the
Chinese Space station that's up there any touris stuff, but
also all of our satellites that we use for GPS
or communication or something, that would be an incredible power
if they were willing to wield it for evil purposes,
and it would of course break all sorts of international law.

(09:26):
But yes, you could certainly cripple a country like the
US if you suddenly took out all of our satellites,
we'd be in trouble. And so now that we've got
you all petrified of the idea that your cell phone's
not going to work anymore, or your credit card, how
plausible is the science here? Daniel could something like this happen.

Speaker 1 (09:42):
So this is a really fun book because Wow, did
the author do their homework? Oh my gosh. It's so
clear that it was really important to him that every
element of this book be plausible. I think he wanted
the characters to be really living within the confines of science.
And you know his background is he he is an engineer,
and so I think he's trying to share sort of
that joy of solving puzzles within these rules. You know,

(10:06):
you can't just break the rules and say I'm going
to magic away this problem, and so in the book,
the characters can't magic away stuff. So there's a lot
of really interesting science in this book, includes like computer
science and space technology and physics. One of the espionage
bits in this story involves changing how automatic translation engines
will translate like Korean into English, so that it changes

(10:29):
what people hear when they're watching a speech. So you're
watching a speech by the dictator of North Korea, for example,
and you're relying on this automatic translation. You can manipulate
what people here if you manipulate also these translation engines.
And I thought that was really fascinating, a very clever
and sort of troubling idea.

Speaker 3 (10:46):
I agree it was both petrifying and clever and troubling.
And has anything like this ever happened before or did
he come up with this?

Speaker 1 (10:54):
It's a totally plausible idea because the way a lot
of these translation engines work is they just sort of
like scrape the webrin from you want to know how
to translate between English and Korean. You don't like sit
down with a bunch of experts who teach your computer
how to do it. You just get a bunch of
examples and you just learn the mapping. So you need
pages that are written in one language and in the
other language, and the computer learns between them. And so

(11:17):
just as chat GPT is learning from the web, they
just like s great text from the Internet. So they
rely on the fact that it's written by humans and
it's correct, and then they learn that mapping. And so
if you pollute that sample, if you insert a bunch
of new stuff into the web that has incorrect translations
that you want to insert into like English Korean translators,

(11:37):
then that's totally possible. You would absolutely do that because
the assumption they're making when they're doing this training, is
that all the human text out there is basically correct.
None of it's like maliciously incorrectly written. And there actually
is a sort of hilarious and tragic example of incorrect
text being pumped into you know, the sort of textosphere,

(11:57):
which is a few years ago they discover that there
was one guy writing a bunch of articles in the
Scots language. Right, you know, Scottish people part of the UK,
you know, speak English obviously, but they also have their
local dialect Scots, which is related to English but not identical.
And there was some American teenager, probably this kid watched
too many Austin Powers movies in which there's you know,

(12:20):
some Scottish characters, et cetera, and he just thought, oh,
I'm going to write a bunch of articles in Wikipedia
in the Scots language. But he didn't know Scots, and
so he just wrote them sort of as like English
written in a Scottish accent, but he wrote like gibberish
and nonsense and just like made up a bunch of stuff.

Speaker 3 (12:39):
Oh my gosh, But and so like how many how
many articles did he write? Like how committed was he
to this endeavor?

Speaker 1 (12:48):
For being something that was not malicious, It was really
impressively deep. He wrote twenty three thousand articles. About a
third of the entire Scots Wikipedia at the time was
created by this one guy who didn't speak Scotts. You
just like writing in a joking accent.

Speaker 3 (13:05):
This is why teenagers should not be allowed to have
free time. They don't do good things with it.

Speaker 1 (13:10):
There was an interview with a professor who's like an
expert in the Scots language, and he said, quote, this
is gonna sound incredibly hyperbolic and hysterical, but I think
this person has possibly done more damage to the Scot's
language than anyone else in history.

Speaker 3 (13:24):
Oh my gosh, worse than mel what was it, Mel Gibson.
And didn't he do a.

Speaker 1 (13:31):
Worse than all those English kings that's killed all those
Scottish people and suppressed Scottish culture. Anyway, the point is
that you can actually pollute what's out there. If you
now go and write a translator that goes from English
to Scotts, you're probably picking up a lot of this
bologna that this American teenager created. And so now it's
a lot harder to learn that translation. So this is

(13:51):
totally plausible. It's really happened in our world that you
can pollute the sort of ocean of information from which
AI is learning to connect languages.

Speaker 3 (13:59):
So what you're saying is that North Korea is going
to hire this teenager and we're all going to be
in a lot of trouble. And I think after the break,
we should talk about the weapon that the North Koreans
were wielding in this book. So let's take a quick break,

(14:24):
all right, So that there's a corruption of information, and
there's also actually these weapons that are going into space.
So Daniel tell us about these weapons.

Speaker 1 (14:31):
So in the book, they have this weapon. They call
it the Rod from God, which is a really fun
name for a weapon, but it's terrifying, right. The idea
is to take a big, heavy object, launch it into space,
and then drop it on someone. And this is essentially
just taking advantage of the kinetic energy. You have something
really high up in the gravitation a well, and it

(14:53):
falls to Earth and as it falls down, it speeds up,
it gains a lot of kinetic energy, and when it
impacts it's like a meteor. The reason why the dinosaurs
were wiped out there wasn't a nuclear weapon nobody blew
up a fusion bomb. It's just a massive amount of
energy delivered to the Earth's surface, which doesn't take high
technology as long as you can get something heavy up
really far above the Earth and then drop it into

(15:15):
the gravitational Well, but as time it hits the planet,
it can be devastating.

Speaker 3 (15:19):
Yeah, So I did a little bit of research on
these rod from God proposals when we were working on
our spacebook, and there are some pretty good arguments against
not using them. Like one, you know, the fact that
it's heavy is super important, which is also going to
make it super expensive, because every pound you send into
space is still pretty pricey these days. Also, it's sort
of hard to direct this kind of weapon relative to like,

(15:42):
you know, a missile that you can in some cases
maybe turn or point, and so it needs to be
almost always over a potential target at all times. And
then finally, this weapon so as you mentioned, like asteroids
were pretty bad for the dinosaurs, you know, they were
also bad for everyone because they created this like cloud
that impacted the climate. And so this is a kind
of weapon that can cause problems for people who aren't

(16:05):
necessarily the target, but still a very scary weapon. And
I guess the final argument that usually goes against these
things is that you can do all of these things
with weapons we already have from Earth. So I spend
the money to send it up into space, and then
you have to worry about maintaining this weapon. But still, yes,
Rod from God comes up in sci fi. I actually
I think the idea came from a sci fi novel

(16:25):
first and then got explored by the US Air Force.
And to be honest, I didn't know that the Air
Force's Project Thor had gotten as much attention as it did.
I ended up doing a little research after reading your outline.

Speaker 1 (16:37):
Yeah, this is something the Air Force has actually thought about.
They like read about an end science fiction of the
is that possible? And so they explored the idea of
dropping basically a tungsten telephone pole from space. And you know,
this thing would reach like mock ten and it would
have the yield of a nuclear weapon without any fallout.
So from that perspective, it's like less dangerous. You know,
you worry about like nuking other countries and then the

(16:59):
fallau trip across the ocean or whatever. In this case,
there is no radioactive fallout, but as you say it's
super expensive. They calculated it costs like two hundred and
thirty million dollars per shot. Oh my gosh, Because you know,
tungsten is expensive. The thing that makes it powerful is
also the thing that makes it heavy, and so that's
pretty tricky. I think you'd have to like mine the

(17:20):
tungsten in space to make this thing more effective. But hey,
I'm not here giving the air Force, you know, good
ideas for futuristic weapons.

Speaker 3 (17:26):
Why, I'm not too worried. That's pretty far off in
the future, I think, being able to mine that much
tungsten and use it for weapons.

Speaker 1 (17:33):
But then they also have this other interesting technology in
the book, which are anti satellite weapons. So if you
have now things in space that can attack you, you
want to have ways to defend yourselves. And so in
the book, there's a long thread at Norad where they're
talking about, like what could we do to attack a
satellite to help defend ourselves, and it refers to this
technology this as M one forty is anti satellite missile,

(17:55):
essentially shooting a missile from Earth into space to attack
a satellite. So what do you know about anti satellite
technology in our universe? In reality chilly.

Speaker 3 (18:05):
Well, so I guess this is one of the the
ways that the rod from God actually is a good weapon.
Like if you it's pretty hard to mess up a
giant's slug of tungsten, and so like, if you are
sending it towards Earth and someone shoots it, probably that
giant's lug of tungsten is still coming towards you. But
in terms of actually shooting at like you know, like
a GPS satellite or something, this is something that a

(18:27):
number of countries have done already from the ground. China,
the US, Russia, and India have all shot their own
satellites out of the sky just to show that they can,
so that other people know that they have that power.
I think that in all of those cases it was
from the ground shooting to space, as opposed to the
method that's used in this book, where you climb on

(18:49):
an airplane and then the airplane shoots at the weapon.
I could be wrong about that, but anyway, so anti
satellite weapons are a thing that exists right now. In
the time between when his book was published and when
it came out out, Russia shot down one of their
satellites and it got some news because the ISS folks
had to jump to their return vehicle because there was
some concern that the debris caused by the satellite getting

(19:10):
blown up was going to hit the ISS and puncture
it and expose everyone to the vacuum of space. Russia,
of course, claimed that everybody was making a big deal
over nothing and it was nowhere near the ISS. But anyway,
so these sorts of weapons are real.

Speaker 1 (19:25):
Yeah, And that's really the downside of it is that
if we have like a war, we're shooting each other's satellites,
we could fill the near space environment with garbage and
we could make it impossible for anybody to get off planet.
We have an episode about space junk and this concern
that as soon as you have enough space junk, it
becomes exponential of banging into itself and destroying all the satellites,
and then space is just filled with junk and you

(19:47):
can't launch anything safely, which would be terrible in lots
of ways.

Speaker 3 (19:51):
Yeah, Kessler syndrome. We want to avoid that for sure, exactly.

Speaker 1 (19:54):
I think there was actually a program in the Air Force,
it's called ASM one thirty Fivehere they were going to
launch a missile from an F fifteen doing this crazy
supersonic climb. I was reading about how they did test
it in nineteen eighty five and destroyed a solar observation
satellite and the junk still was floating around for twenty years.
They track each piece of junk after this explosion, and

(20:17):
the last piece deorbited in two thousand and four. So
it's not like space cleans itself up very quickly either,
like you make a mistake, It's could be decades before
we could launch something into space again.

Speaker 3 (20:26):
So that I was wrong. There has been They have
tested this from a plane shooting the satellite thing before,
so that's super interesting. And I think the country that
got the most flat for this test was China because
they shot a satellite that was still at a sort
of higher orbit and so all the junk it created
stayed up there for much longer most people when they
shoot down their satellites, it's much lower, so the junk

(20:47):
is going to deorbit sooner. And I think the international
community went after China, whereas they usually don't make a
huge fuss about this stuff because they had sort of
polluted the space environment so much. But anyway, okay, so
that's been tested.

Speaker 1 (21:00):
COO cool scary. I'm lazeria. One of the key technologies
in this book. The thing that allows the North Koreans
to sort of like steer this ode, to manipulate this
rocket in orbit without having propulsion on it, is this
idea of a space tether. The sort of central plot
device in the book is that they're watching this North
Korean satellite and they're expecting it to just to be tumbling,

(21:20):
but then it's maneuvering and they're wondering like how did
they do that? And so this space teather technology is
what allows the North Koreans in the book, having stolen
it from the Iranians, to sort of maneuver this object
in orbit and you know, maybe target areas with their
rod from God.

Speaker 3 (21:36):
So how do these tethers work?

Speaker 1 (21:37):
So these space teathers are super fascinating. Again, the author
has been like very diligent because there is real physics here,
like you can't actually use these things to manipulate the
path of things in orbit. Especially space teather is just
a long wire. You have an object in space and
you have a very very long wire attached to it.
If you're moving through a magnetic field, then you can

(21:57):
take advantage of the Lorentz force, and you can either
turn your motion into electrical energy. You can like become
a generator by turning the motion of your wire through
a magnetic field into current in the wire, so you
can generate power, or if you can dump power into
the wire. If you can create current on the wire,
then you get a force between the wire and the

(22:19):
magnetic field, and you can use that essentially to steer.
So you get something like an electronic rudder where you
can control your motion through the magnetic field and basically
position your satellite anywhere you want it at least steer
it somewhat.

Speaker 3 (22:32):
So could we actually have this and why don't we
or should we? Let the author explain that later in
the interview.

Speaker 1 (22:37):
This is totally plausible. The physics is solid. You know,
it's all just the Lorentz force. You're either turning kinetic
energy into electrical energy or electrical energy into kinetic energy.
Both of those actually work, and people have explored this.
NASA had a mission in two thousand and two called
the pro Seds mission, which was going to have a
fifteen kilometer tether attached to an object that was going
to explore like electrodynamic propulsion The advantage again here is

(23:00):
that you don't need propellant. You know, most of the
time when you're maneuvering in space, you have to throw
some mass off your ship. You want to change direction,
you got to push away by throwing something in the
other direction to conserve momentum. And so this would allow
you essentially to swim through the magnetic field indefinitely because
you will never run out of propellant. So this is
a very cool idea, totally plausible. My one question when

(23:23):
I was reading about this was whether the magnetic field
of the Earth really was strong enough to give the
effects in the book. But we asked the author about it,
and he gave us a very fun answer about it
when we talked to him. All right, and so enough
of me and Kelly talking about this book that we
didn't write. We were very excited to talk to the
author about how he wrote such a fun book with
so many interesting characters and so much cool space technology

(23:46):
and space dynamics and space law and space politics. And
we're very happy that the author was willing to join us.
So here's our interview with Taio Fuji. So it's my
great pleasure to welcome to the podcast. Mister Taio Fuji,

(24:07):
author of Orbital Cloud Tyo, thank you very much for
joining us on the podcast.

Speaker 2 (24:12):
Thank you very much for inviting me to their podcast.
I'm grat to the talking about the op the cloud.

Speaker 3 (24:18):
We're glad to have you here. We loved it and.

Speaker 1 (24:19):
We'd love to hear about how you got into writing
science fiction. What was your path to becoming a successful
science fiction author.

Speaker 2 (24:27):
I was a computer software engineer and especially the developing
their computer graphics software for the commercial usage. Then in
the nineteen eleven May nineteen eleven March elevens we called
the huge eest quack in Japan. On that time, then

(24:51):
ten thousand people has gone away at batsnami. We know that.
But the two days after the Kushima nuclear pakpround got
the boomed exploded. All the news source and the media
it changes to their mentioning about the tsunami disaster, but

(25:12):
also they turned to the reporting the radioactive dangerousness honest,
timing safely, safely, but the news media kept framing that's
dangerous and other radioactive is dangerous and then we cannot
live there. I go anger and I was thinking about

(25:34):
how to show that we can stand in front of
their technology or disaster or the natural natural disaster or
the climate change or another many things. Then, but I
was only once engineer. I'm not scientists. I was not
famous for talking about their disaster nuclear dister. Then I

(25:56):
started to write science fiction. Fiction is the most low
cost way to their sending the message to somebody. Then
I wrote the first science fiction story about demagogue killing people.
I sold ten thousand copies of a book on the

(26:22):
two months was sold. I became the every many writer
editor and my publisher editor know my work. Then I
and then the higher clup of the published a higher colup,
the Japanese science fiction dedicated publisher, that offered me to
the publishing the gym, but to becommercial publisher. Then I

(26:46):
agreed and rewriting it and changing my job to the
engineer employee to their independent writer.

Speaker 3 (26:54):
That is such an interesting path. And so I'm wondering
you were inspired by an event that happened in modern times?
Is that what motivated you to write a book that
could be happening in the very near future as opposed
to like thousands of years in the future. Were you
a science fiction fan before that?

Speaker 2 (27:12):
Yes, I was science fiction big science fiction fan. I
already have eight hundred books on my books on my shelf,
andunder I kept the games p Hogan and the Asimo Founder,
and I was like, right, especially I love the woke Up,
the power patiology, the wind up goal.

Speaker 1 (27:35):
Well, tell us about how you came up with this story.
There's so many fascinating interconnected pieces to it. Did you
come up with sort of the story first and then
figure out how the technology worked? Or were you more
fascinated by the technological elements and then figured out a
story you could tell with them.

Speaker 2 (27:52):
I start the story from there. I start to write
a science fiction from the story who do? What is there?
My either my story is starting point and about the
cloud and speaking about golf. Then the Weber Engineer saves
the world is a story storiist call corp. Then how

(28:16):
I think and when I think? The uh then when
the food.

Speaker 3 (28:24):
I was impressed by how much different knowledge you had
of things, so like international law, different space agencies in
different countries and how they work. And the knowledge was
expansive and beyond just what you would expect from your
experience as an engineer. So how long did it take
you to get all of that additional information, and how
did you go about learning all of those those additional pieces.

Speaker 2 (28:46):
I researched to the sleieve or four months about that's
the internet. The mess up is joining onto thek there
Marazon NASA study. It's the hockzon of the space up
datas discloaded all the data by the Obama governance. Then

(29:08):
NASA started to let the engineers to the make something
developed something from with using the NASA data space data.
Then I joining it. Then there I spent two days
at the Tokyo University and making a friend and I
UH under my I joined uh and with my friend,

(29:32):
then my friend is more the protagonist model of their crowd.
I met many people, some people is appearing in this book.

Speaker 3 (29:47):
Do you have a friend like Kazumi who could like
i'm'm sorry to re pronounce the name, but who could
like imagine orbital trajectories in his head?

Speaker 2 (29:56):
There during the Hockazon, I tried to to make it
the positioning of their is s. Then we we we
agree that if we track the two weeks, there is
s s orpital elements a weekend, the prejudice of their
positioning in the one hour, the accuracy with in their

(30:22):
brain calculations. That's the real research under the story about
Isana is very interesting. He is my friend from friends
from the university and the very long friend and he
is he made a unique program and he displayed the

(30:42):
ISS position of the ISS on the Google map. Then
everybody can see there where is the I, S S
on the on the square. Then I love that program,
very small program and on that years Google Maps API
was really into very important thing. Then we love that.

(31:02):
So we love that program. Then many the amateuria uses
program and the Yeah. And one day there is an
phone that NASA use it on the Space Sattle mission.
That he watched the NASA TV and the Space Attle
mission there on the bigger largest console. The NASA displayed

(31:26):
his app on the biggest screen and sharing the position. Wow,
and the iPhone, I know that the under After that
thing there he was invited to the Space Shuttle launching
mission to NASA. Then he was he watched the launching

(31:50):
from the fast price. Then this story is the basis
of the one with the big base of the object.

Speaker 1 (32:00):
All right, we have lots more questions for Tayo, but
first we have to take a quick break. Okay, we're
back and we're talking to Tayo Fuji, the author of

(32:21):
Orbital Cloud, about how he wrote such a fascinating and
complicated but compelling novel. I really liked how in your
story a lot of the contributions to solving the puzzle
come from people who are amateurs, and I don't work
for NASA or the Space Agency. You know, maybe they're
amateurs but wealthy, or they're professionals but they're underfunded. Is

(32:42):
it important to you in our real world that everybody
can contribute to cutting edge science and space exploration with
whatever skills they have.

Speaker 2 (32:51):
Writing the year about twelve thirteen, that tools a year
the SpaceX had not succeeded yet, then I think the
amateur can helped or work better.

Speaker 3 (33:06):
So you mentioned that you were researching and writing in
twenty twelve. So in the decades since you wrote the book,
what about the trajectory of the space industry has surprised
you or disappointed you? Are we about where you expected
we would be by now? Or are we falling short.

Speaker 2 (33:24):
There with limiting on the space development their commercial under
non government or the space development it gett succeed rather
than I imagine writing of the optail Cloud. Of course,
the Ronnie Smack the space developound. The story models evil

(33:51):
masks under the mask that followed very closely to image
mention his specifics and the starting system is a very
similar for my story. My imagination was touted by the
el Mask and another challenge is keeping. Then their space
development is better than my expect And but thing was

(34:15):
the world tension of the geopolitical situation. It's hard as
I thought that I pree real.

Speaker 1 (34:25):
And if given the opportunity, would you like to travel
to space personally? If Elon Musk after your SI on
one of these points.

Speaker 2 (34:33):
Yeah, I think the masks showed that it is possible.
Then there are many forwer works and better I think.

Speaker 3 (34:43):
Yeah, I'm excited by companies like rocket Lab too. I
know they're not bringing people to space, but they're doing
a good job of lower and the costs and stuff.
So your book was translated into English. Did you work
with the translator or have you read the translated version?
What was that process like?

Speaker 2 (35:01):
The translation was a very standard process. The publisher, the
publisher High Castle Route, the San Francis publisher, the selected
the translator, the translator is the payer translation and then
this is a Chemo Silver is the group name of
the two transferrectors, then they are living in Japan. Then,

(35:24):
after the translation was almost refinished, the two and then
asked me to the accuracy question about accuracy with the
but it the connect communication was were the publisher high
Castle not direction to me? Then there I only review
the translation in English there, but I was so excited

(35:51):
when right and during the writing the opital cloud in
Japanese edition, there I imagine that of course the many
characters speaks English in Japanese edition, or of course then
but I write in Japanese. But I imagine that how
they say it in real in English. Then I was

(36:15):
so excited to read in their English edition and with
the real English ones, I was so excited. Under that
translation is very accurate, very similar to the Japanese one.

Speaker 4 (36:32):
Every paragraph is not removed that no one is add
it wonderful. Well, I'm glad that it's so accurate. Kelly
and I have both written books that have been translated
into languages we can't read. And I wonder sometimes if
my bad jokes work in Turkish, you.

Speaker 1 (36:48):
Know, or in Hungarian. But I'll never know. Speaking of accuracy,
something about the book really impressed me to say, you
have all these characters sort of fighting against the rules
of science, sort of string against nature. You know, how
do we solve this problem? And every time they find
a solution, it falls within science. You're never inventing new
kinds of science. Is it important to you that the

(37:10):
science in your book be plausible, essentially that your story
take place in our universe? You never like make up
new laws of physics?

Speaker 2 (37:18):
Yeah? Only why on one thing that I had told
a lie about this book physics, And one thing is
the strongness of the magnetic field of the US. Then
I calculated it is a thousand times the stronger than

(37:38):
the actually one in order to the moving the things
quickly because their electrodynamics power is very small. The one
thing of the physics lie is a magnetic strength strongness
of the magnetic fields, and the second one is the

(37:59):
clock computer clock. I set the atomic clock on the
cellphone based circuit, but the atomic clock is not there.
One of my friends science fiction writer say that you
should set the solar cell on the tser. Then then

(38:20):
they're even if the abling it cannot be there, the
making the enough power, but also that the fictional accuracy
was held. Everybody cannot stand there claim you that you're
making you you're talking and you you're writing there an almosty.

Speaker 3 (38:40):
This you can correct in the second edition. There you go.

Speaker 2 (38:43):
Sure And when the when the movie.

Speaker 3 (38:47):
That's right, that's right, they'll have solar sales in the movie.

Speaker 2 (38:50):
Yeah, when somebody said the movie.

Speaker 3 (38:53):
Yeah. So one of the themes in the book is how
space technology and you know, the satellites that we have
in orbit are really helpful for the developed countries that
have them, and that this contributes to power imbalances. What
do you see as the current state of things and
do you see any hope that the developing countries will
be able to catch up and benefit from space technologies

(39:15):
as much as we do in develop countries without like
something catastrophic happening.

Speaker 2 (39:19):
Yeah, the catastrophic might not be happened because they're too
much prayers. Is there launching them things to the orbit,
then there are many the thousand eyes is watching their
spaces every time, every second under already the whole thousand

(39:41):
satirized by one company, studying system is covering us and
they studying system guys are watching their orbit every second.
Of course under the China, already the launched the two
space the two space stations and under and they are

(40:04):
often to launching the projects to their their can go
second and the North Korea already the launching the menacing
to the there and another country is starting to launching
the manzing. Then the increasing of the player makes to
the watching by each watching each other us then and

(40:29):
that makes the club thing or the big projects for
the big tyrant country may not be appear because there
are too many players is working on the space basically
and the challenge of the space six that will let

(40:50):
our past see to the sky at least, then that
makes the interesting is kept on the orbit. Then I
think the the club things think may not occur from
the space, but also from the ground.

Speaker 1 (41:10):
I think wonderful. Thank you again very much for doing
us on the podcast today and talking to us about
your book and congratulations on it.

Speaker 2 (41:17):
So I forgot to tell you that the when there
about o the clouds, then the cloud said the date
of the twenty twenty. Then why I said to this
year is because the moon is not shown in Christmas.
It's a new moon date. Then I was very love

(41:42):
about the wind the people looking about the sky. If
there was a moon, I should describe the position of
the moon every time. Then I've suched when the new
moon I searched, I should set there the date of

(42:03):
the story. This is a seven days story. They're during
the new moon. Terms. Then I found that twenty twenty.
It's the best just after the president was changed. It great.
Then I said a year to the optocra.

Speaker 3 (42:23):
I love that you use the moon phase to figure
out when the book was going to be set. That's awesome.

Speaker 2 (42:29):
So the many scientifics the science fiction found phone that's
were is the moon or other on the time the
moon is under the in front of you? You then
everybody cannot see the meteo or other another things. Then
then I once remove the moon. Then I found the

(42:51):
new moon terms. Many retailer gelators can remove the moon easily,
but science fiction.

Speaker 3 (42:58):
Cannot do it.

Speaker 1 (43:02):
When you read science fiction, do you check the science yourself?
Do you think is that accurate? Would the moon be
in the sky? Are you that detailed in your reading
as well?

Speaker 2 (43:11):
Yes? Exactly read we cannot escape from the science.

Speaker 1 (43:18):
Awesome. Awesome, all right, well again, thank you very much
for joining us on the podcast. All right, so that
was super fun interview. Thanks everybody for joining us, and
thank you Kelly for reading this book with me and
chatting with us about it today.

Speaker 3 (43:30):
Thanks for having me, and thanks again for doing another
one of these sci fi episodes where I have an
excuse to read a super fun book.

Speaker 1 (43:36):
I had a blast, all right, Thanks very much, and
we encourage everybody to check out this book. It's a
lot of fun. Thanks for listening. Thanks for listening, and
remember that Daniel and Jorge explain the Universe is a
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the

(43:59):
iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.