The Expanse (featuring James S.A. Corey)

Daniel and Kelly talk to Daniel Abrahams and Ty Franck, the authors behind The Expanse series.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
So thanks very much guys for coming on the show.
And before we dig in, I want to do my
due diligence and point out that I'm the only one
on this call to not have won a Hugo Award,
because Kelly also won a Hugo.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
If you have fewer than three, it's like you don't
have one.

Speaker 3 (00:21):
Thanks Diy. You know he did write us the night
we got our Hugo to tell us that.

Speaker 1 (00:25):
Wow, he just rounded you down to zero Hugos. All right, well,
welcome to that less than three Hugo club. Kelly, thanks me,
you and most of the planet.

Speaker 3 (00:33):
We'll drink after this.

Speaker 1 (00:49):
Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's The Extraordinary Universe. I'm Daniel Watson.
I'm a particle physicist, a huge sci fi reader, and
a big fan of the Expanse.

Speaker 3 (00:59):
I'm Kelly Smith. I study parasites and write about space,
and I love the Expanse so much because it's got
like parasites and.

Speaker 1 (01:06):
Space parasites in space space. So, do you only read
science fiction novels that contain weird, evil micro organisms?

Speaker 3 (01:20):
Unfortunately, No, there's just not that many to choose from.
But no, I love all sci fi. What's your favorite
sci fi story.

Speaker 1 (01:27):
Oh, I'm a big fan of almost anything that is
hard science fiction that you know, picks a set of
rules and really follows it. I read a lot of
science fiction, though. I'm a big fan of Ian Banks,
Alistair Reynolds, Adrian Tchaikovski, and The Expanse. Of course, I
just can't get enough.

Speaker 3 (01:42):
I love the Expanse. I also really like the Strugatsky Brothers.
They were writing during this like Soviet Union time, and
they've got this book called Roadside Picnic, which just like
guts me every time, and it's just such a interesting
world and like also kind of gets be sort of
teary eyed. Anyway, it's it's great. So I don't necessarily
love the hard stuff. I just love a world that

(02:03):
is created that is interesting, where they're consistent with the rules.
That's all I want is consistency in a world that's
been made that's interesting.

Speaker 1 (02:10):
Another subcategory of sci fi that I love is science
fiction written by professors. For example, I love verner Vinge,
and he was a professor in San Diego until very recently,
And of course I love that because it makes me
feel like maybe one day I could also write science fiction,
but also because it's good.

Speaker 3 (02:27):
Yeah, I happen to know that you are a good
writer in a variety of different genres. Yes, you got this,
we'll see.

Speaker 1 (02:33):
But today we're not talking about Daniel's science fiction preferences.
We're talking to actual, massively successful, very influential writers of
the Expanse.

Speaker 3 (02:43):
Yeah, we somehow manage to get the expans guys on
our show. We're super excited and let's just dig right
in so we can spend most of the time talking
to them exactly.

Speaker 1 (02:51):
So, for those of you who aren't familiar with the series,
it's a set of books set in the near future
where humanity has colonized the Solar System but effectively split
into a few groups folks living on Earth, folks living
on Mars, folks living in the Belt. Then they each
end up with their own different culture, and there's lots
of fun space battles where they really take care of
the physics and the gravity, and then there's some unexpected

(03:13):
stuff that happens.

Speaker 3 (03:14):
And they're just so good at character writing. All right,
let's do this. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.
Today we have the authors of the Expanse, Ty Frank
and Daniel Abraham. And instead of like telling you about
how they got like a hugo and maybe more than
one Hugo, maybe four or something like that, I'm gonna

(03:36):
tell you the story about how we all met because
it explains how Daniel and Kelly managed to land the
Expanse guys on our show, which is a pretty lucky
catch for us. So many years ago, back when it
was possible for little nerds like Zach and I to
afford booths. At San Diego Comic Con, we had a
booth for our Sketch Comedy theater, our sketch comedy show,
SMBC Theater, and Ty came to our booth not to

(04:00):
tell us that we were funny, but to tell us
that our friend James was funny. But James wasn't there,
and so he got stuck talking to us. And it
turns out that Ty has a really brilliant, amazing wife,
and so we all got along pretty well. And then
when Zach and I moved across the country, we asked
if we could stop at their place on the way,
and they said yes, and we brought our cats with us,

(04:23):
and we made a big mistake because the cats were
in the guest room and I opened up the door
real quick and they both ran out and they hid
in their fireplace, and then I went to try to
get him out of there, and they ran across their
house and put little kiddy footprints all over the place.
We haven't been back to their place yet. Probably those
two pieces of information are not related, but maybe they are.

(04:44):
But Ti mentioned during that trip that he had like
a space upper thing that was going to come out soon,
and it turned out that was the expanse. So, you know,
after hanging out with us, he became a really big deal.
Maybe correlated, who knows, But importantly, he virtually introduced me
to Daniel, who has a book called Unclean Spirits, which
has a main character who's a parasitologist who is both

(05:06):
attractive and very smart. Parasitologists are not usually portrayed in
that light. If we're portrayed at all, we're kind of
like creepy. And when I mentioned this to my husband,
he pointed out that book also has vampires and is fiction.
You know, So if anybody needs someone to rain on
their parade, I can give you my husband's phone number.
So anyway, Daniel and Tye are both wonderful, amazing people.

(05:27):
It's so much fun to have them on the show.
They write together as James sa Corey for The Expanse
and other projects. They also do amazing work separately. Welcome
to the show.

Speaker 4 (05:36):
Thank you very much, happy to be here.

Speaker 3 (05:38):
Is that about how you remember it?

Speaker 4 (05:39):
Ty?

Speaker 3 (05:39):
Did you ever get to meet James?

Speaker 2 (05:41):
Yeahs James. James is in many of your videos wearing
the Game of Thrones T shirt I gave him.

Speaker 3 (05:48):
Oh nice, Oh fantastic. He's also on a lot of
our videos not wearing a shirt at all, so lots
of options there.

Speaker 2 (05:56):
He's very brave. He's a very brave comediic actor.

Speaker 3 (05:59):
Yes he is.

Speaker 4 (06:00):
He is.

Speaker 3 (06:01):
All right, So Daniel, how about you kick it off
with the first question.

Speaker 1 (06:03):
So we're going to ask you lots of science questions
about the universe you created. But first I'm going to
calibrate where you are in the sort of science fiction
spectrum by asking you a classic science fiction philosophy science question,
which is about Star Trek transporters. In your opinion, does
a star Trek transporter actually relocate you or does it
kill you and re materialize you somewhere else?

Speaker 2 (06:25):
I mean it clearly kills you because it disintegrates you,
so your dad, and then it makes and then it
makes a perfect copy of you. But there's an argument
to be made that that happens every time you fall
asleep too.

Speaker 4 (06:36):
So this is like arguing canonicity. This is like saying,
is Luke really you know? There is a pattern, the
pattern is recreated elsewhere consciousness is an illusion. Consciousness can
be two illusions. Consciounces can be eight illusions. Consciousness can
be illusions in different places. You don't actually exist to
begin with, So what does that even mean?

Speaker 3 (07:00):
WHOA, This got philosophical fast.

Speaker 4 (07:03):
That's what I was saying.

Speaker 2 (07:04):
The best and darkest transporter story ever written is by
James Patrick Kelly, fantastic one of the best short story
writers in side fiction. He wrote a story called Think
Like a Dinosaur, which was later adapted and turned into
an episode of The Outer Limits in the nineties, and

(07:24):
it is the best darkest transporter story ever written. So
you should definitely if you're into like does the Transporter
kill you should read that one.

Speaker 3 (07:33):
Think Like a Dinosaur is on my list.

Speaker 1 (07:35):
Now, Well, what I love about this question is that
the teleporter in Star Trek was, of course invented in
the sixties or conceived of much earlier. And now that
we know something more about quantum mechanics and quantum information
and the no cloning theorem, you know, science has actually
informed the philosophy of this question. So it's a lot
of fun.

Speaker 2 (07:51):
Any process that begins with your own disintegration should be
should be questioned heavily.

Speaker 4 (07:58):
You're as if there were as if there was a
standard you.

Speaker 1 (08:03):
This is also an argument to be made from a
particle physics perspective, that all of your quantum objects are
interacting constantly and therefore transforming, and the process of being
de materialized and materialized somewhere else is equivalent to the
process of just moving forward through time as quantum fields
ripple with energy. So then I have to agree with
the other Daniel that like, maybe you don't even exist

(08:24):
in any sense.

Speaker 4 (08:25):
This is a problem of narrative framing. The actual issue
here is that what's going on doesn't fit gracefully into
our language, and that's our language's fault.

Speaker 2 (08:34):
When I first met Daniel, he was very powerfully on
the free will side. I think years of association with
beating him down to the mechanistic universe.

Speaker 4 (08:44):
No no, no, no, that is not true. I am
still firmly in the free Will universe.

Speaker 2 (08:51):
Yeah, because that's what the universe has programmed you to say.

Speaker 3 (08:56):
I'm going to pull us back a little. So when
did you two meet, speaking of meeting each other, and
how did it transform into a writing partnership at.

Speaker 4 (09:06):
That would have been two thousand and.

Speaker 3 (09:11):
Six, Bubonica, Is this like a festival ce celebrating the
bubonic plague?

Speaker 4 (09:16):
Where basically yes, it's the local science fiction convention in Albuquerque.
And because we still have the black plague in New Mexico,
we have Perry Rodent as our mascot and we just
kind of lean into the dark.

Speaker 2 (09:31):
It's also the only state in the country where you
are likely to get a hemorrhagic fever.

Speaker 4 (09:36):
Well not likely. We are, however, number two in the
world for necrotizing fasci itis.

Speaker 1 (09:41):
This also a huntavirus. Are you a New Mexican, Daniel,
I didn't realize I am.

Speaker 4 (09:45):
No, I was. I was born here. Tay actually came
through briefly and that's where we met and started the project,
and then he fled to someplace with water and greenery.

Speaker 1 (09:56):
I grew up in Los Alamo, so I'm in New
Mexican as well.

Speaker 4 (09:59):
Yeah, Los Alamos. That actually explains a lot right there.

Speaker 3 (10:05):
All right, so you met at the Bubonic Plague Festival, Yes,
And then how did that turn into a writing partnership.

Speaker 4 (10:13):
Well, there were a couple of things. We had a
friend in common who was in the critique group that
I was part of at the time, and Ty had
sold a short story and was therefore eligible to come
play in the critique group and did so we knew
each other through that. And Tie also, I don't know,

(10:33):
out of the kindness of his heart, saw the sad,
lonely Daniel, new dad working too hard guy and said
one I had the greatest productivity and invited me over
to play video games at his place on Wednesdays.

Speaker 3 (10:49):
And you said yes, yeah, no.

Speaker 4 (10:51):
I love playing video games and he hooked me on
left for dead. So then I was screwed and I
had to go get my fix.

Speaker 3 (10:57):
And then the Expanse was the Expanse, your first writing project, together.

Speaker 4 (11:00):
With some other little stuff kind of along the way,
but the Expanse was definitely the big one.

Speaker 1 (11:07):
And how does your process work writing together? Does one
of you outline the other one flesh it out. Do
you guys brainstorm together? You guys both editing the Google
doc at the same time.

Speaker 2 (11:16):
Daniel's in charge of consonants and I am in charge
of vowels.

Speaker 3 (11:20):
That's got to be a slow process.

Speaker 2 (11:22):
Not compared to some Yeah, not when you're typing on
the same keyboard.

Speaker 4 (11:28):
Generally, we outlined together than one of us to do
the first draft to a chapter and the other guy
will edit the first draft and we'll just kind of
iterate through that.

Speaker 3 (11:35):
Who's the outline guy or does it alternate?

Speaker 4 (11:37):
Oh no, there's no outlining is a group project.

Speaker 3 (11:42):
And my collaboration was Zach, I'm the outline guy, So
we don't have but anyway, all right, So your books
are so well written that when I was researching for
my book on space settlement, I was blown away by
how many times they came across citations of the expanse
as though it were a documentary, and that kind of
blew my mind. And so was it important to you

(12:02):
that you created a world that followed the rules as
we know it or not? Really? What do you think
is it important to follow rules or make up your own?

Speaker 2 (12:10):
We get a lot of credit for being hard sci
fi that isn't actually accurate. There's kind of there's only
two rules that Daniel and I never broke in the Expanse,
and because every other science fiction project breaks those tool
rules constantly, we seemed like weird and exotic. In the Expanse,
gravity works the way gravity really works. So spaceships in

(12:33):
the Expanse are not like ocean liners, where the deck
runs the length of the ship. Spaceships in the expans
are built like office towers, so that the deck is
below you in the direction that the thrust is coming from.
So when the engine fires, you are pushed into the
deck rather than being slid backwards the whole length of
the ship and into a wall. So that was one
way that one thing that we never broke, And the

(12:54):
other one we never broke is that light speed is
a rule, and so there's no faster than light communications.
So if you send a message to your buddy you're
on Earth and you send a message your buddy out
by Jupiter, it takes three hours to get there, and
by the time you get a reply, it's been six
hours of past. And because every other sci fi thing
just hand waves those two things away, there's gravity plating

(13:17):
or there's hyperwave communication. We seemed very exotic and hard
because of that, But the rest of it we just
kind of were you.

Speaker 4 (13:25):
Know, a lot of the science in there came from
the stuff we were already kind of excited by too.
So I mean Ty got Ganymede right because he'd been
playing with astronomy and knew that Ganymede was the place
that had the magnetosphere and kind of knew what magnetosphere

(13:46):
were and did so we had that level of kind
of introductory knowledge, and that level of introductory knowledge has
a bunch of cool stuff in it, So we stole
all the cool stuff, and I think that also kind
of work toward benefit in plausibility.

Speaker 2 (14:03):
I mean, we do sort of ignore the fact that
anybody living on Ketymiede would be massively irradiated by Jupiter's
enormous radiation belt. Yep, you know. So, I mean there's
plenty of stuff you just sort of ignore. And in
your book on Mars, you know, there's a ton of
reasons why you wouldn't want to live on Mars, but

(14:24):
it's cool if people live on Mars. So in the book,
people live on Mars, even though there's like no reason
to go there and it would be a.

Speaker 3 (14:29):
Terrible I'm going to push back a little though, because
you know, Ty was like, oh, we only followed these
two rules. But I think it wasn't just that you
got all the physics right, is that you also thought
through people so well and governing so well, and how
the environment would impact the way that people interact with
each other and how they can be governed and stuff

(14:49):
like that, And so it wasn't just the physics. It
was you thought through all the different science fields, the biology,
the psychology, the sociology.

Speaker 4 (14:57):
A lot of that's just you know, Ty had read
a lot of history, and a lot of the issues
that you see in the Expanse are things that are
science fiction reskinnings of how humans have been working since
we stopped being monkeys. We're a very consistent species. The
stupid shit we do we have been doing forever, and

(15:17):
we just projected that into the future.

Speaker 2 (15:19):
Yeah. No, I mean that people ask like, what is
the theme of the expanse, And you know, the serious
one is that tribalism is bad, But the joking one
is people do the same stupid shit over and over
and over and have done for the last two hundred
and fifty thousand years that we've been in this shape, So.

Speaker 1 (15:34):
You guys pick these two bits of physics to be
sort of strict about, and that really changed, like the
experience of the characters on the ship and what it's
like to live in low g and Hygi and the
societies that form there. But why did you decide, unlike
many science fiction writers to be hardcore about this is it?
Because you felt like these it changes the stories, and
those stories hadn't been told yet.

Speaker 4 (15:53):
Because we had an alien weird that comes through pathway
through book one, and if you don't have things grounded
before that comes in, then it comes in without any impact.
The fact that we had something miraculous and strange happen

(16:14):
halfway through the book meant up until then you couldn't.
It's a necessity of the narrative that we approach it
that way.

Speaker 2 (16:23):
The best example of that, I think in modern fiction
is Game of Thrones, Georgia R. Martin's first novel. Because
it's a fantasy book, but it's not like every other
fantasy book. There are no wizards, nobody's casting spells, there's
no elves or trolls. It's just people and he seduces
you into believing you are reading a medieval history. It's

(16:45):
kings and it's princes, and it's fighting families, and everybody
just uses medieval weapons and they live in castles and
they ride horses, and by about the midway point of
the book, you could be reading a history of medieval England,
and I mean, it would feel exactly the same. And
then just about the end, Danny Targerion walks into a

(17:11):
fire holding three rocks, and when the fire goes away,
she comes out and she's holding three baby dragons, and
it feels amazing. It feels like this miraculous moment. But
the only reason it feels like that is because everything
up till then has felt like medieval England, and so
it feels super weird. If you're writing a story in
which you know half the people are wizards and they

(17:31):
cast fireball spells and the people fly around on flying
carpets and three dragons show up at the end, it
just feels like a of course, that's what happens. That's
that's just like everything else that happens in the world.
To have that dragon moment matter, it has to be
weird compared to everything else, and so for us to
have the arrival of this weird alien technology feel strange,

(17:54):
nothing should feel strange up until that point, so that
that actually matters, because if everybody's zipping around with supporters
and teleporters and magic technologies, then another magic technology doesn't
feel strange, So.

Speaker 3 (18:06):
Then why does Lost fail so badly? So like that,
I feel like that's another This is a series. I've
only watched the TV show. I don't even know if
it's a book, but like it's meant to be real
until the magic comes in. But instead of you feeling
like you bought it and now you're in this awesome,
magical world, it's just like, no, this isn't right. So
it seems like it's a hard thing to pull off.

Speaker 2 (18:25):
And I'm not a fan of Loss, but I don't
want to just sit and bash on Loss. But but
the reality is it was not a well thought out universe.
It wasn't They wrote an amazing pilot and jj Abrams
is a fantastic director, shot an amazing pilot, and they
kind of had an idea what the first season was about,
and they kind of had an idea what the show

(18:45):
is about. But when it got picked up, they had
to write a bunch of scripts. They had put a
first season together. They were coming up with mysteries to
keep people interested, and then they got a second season
and they had no idea what that was going to be.
So now they're just making stuff up, and so you're
just at that point, they're just sort of throwing things
at the wall to see what sticks. And because there's

(19:06):
no consistency to it, it doesn't feel I mean, once
in our books, when the protomolecule shows up, which is
the weird alien technology, it always kind of behaves the
same way all the way through, and so each thing
it does, you go, yeah, that's what it would do.
That's you know, it feels very consistent. In The Lost
It's like there's polar bears, and then there's a black
smoke monster, and then there's this other thing, and then

(19:28):
there's the Hatch. But the hatch doesn't do what we
thought it did. And this need to relentlessly create mystery
but never solve any of them. It's like juggling a
thousand balls, but all you do is throw all a
thousand up in the air at one time. You don't
catch any Absolutely.

Speaker 1 (19:44):
I feel like the contract between the science fiction writer
and the reader, is I'm going to present to you
a mystery for which there is a solution that eventually
this can all make sense in your mind. If you
get to the end of the book and you're like, oh,
you were just throwing dragons out every other page and
you have no idea what's going on, then I feel betrayed.

(20:18):
So that leads me to ask you, guys about your process.
How much of the whole series and the whole concept
had you mapped out before you started writing, you know,
word one of chapter one, did you outline the entire thing?

Speaker 4 (20:29):
We didn't know that we were going to have a
whole series when we wrote the first book. I mean
we with the first book, we had I think a
pretty rigorous outline of what the first book would be,
and you know, we knew what the end of that
book was going to be. We knew what the uh,
the last scene of that book was going to be
before we went into the at the front. And then

(20:52):
for the whole series, actually that got mapped out during
the writing of book two, when it became clear that
the publisher was interested in doing a bunch more of
these and at that point we kind of broad stroke
the whole series to the point that we did know.

(21:12):
You know, Tie pitched the last scene of the last book,
the lasting of book nine, while we were about halfway
through book two, and that didn't change. So a lot
of a lot of the pathway along the way was
not cooked yet, was not identified, but where we were
going we knew early.

Speaker 3 (21:34):
Did you have any moments where you were like, oh, crap,
how do we get there? Like we've we've we've built
and maybe now it's not a clear path back anymore,
or just knowing where you're ending up keeps you from
having moments like that.

Speaker 2 (21:47):
That really, I mean, you you you talk through how
you're going to get there. But I don't think we
ever painted ourselves in a corner, which can happen in
fiction writing. You can you can create plot points that
as you get to the end of the book, you realize, oh,
I've screwed myself. The plot points that I have created
do not allow me to have the ending that I wanted.

(22:08):
I mean, I know people who do that. But because
we always kind of firmly had an endpoint in mind,
and we and we, you know, the two of us
plot pretty rigorously and talk through everything ever really wound
up getting lost in the weeds. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (22:26):
I mean it's kind of like, you know, the metaphor
we keep using is a road trip. You know you're
going from New York to Los Angeles, you know where
you're going to end up, you know where you're starting from.
You don't know exactly what restaurant you're going to stop at,
where you're going to get gas, what little side detours
you're going to do, but you know, generally speaking, you
should probably head west.

Speaker 1 (22:47):
And what's your process? Scientifically? It sounds like you guys
do a lot of reading. You're smart guys. Do you
also talk to scientists, you have consultants? Do you do
all your own reading and research?

Speaker 2 (22:57):
We had two people. No, there were three times in
the writing of nine books that we asked for outside expertise.
Daniel had somebody help him figure.

Speaker 4 (23:07):
Out a complex physics problem.

Speaker 2 (23:09):
Yeah, yeah, an acceleration issue with a ship doing something
strange and what that was the experience of being inside
the ship would you like? And then I had to
I had a guy who you're talking about, you were
from Los Alamos. Had a guy from Los Alamos. I
asked him the question if the entire asteroid Aros went
up by two degrees? How much energy would that he

(23:32):
and he figured that out and he gave me the
answer in jewels and hand grenades. Apparently hand grenade is
a unit of measure in physics. And then the other one,
weirdly that you asked that is Kelly's husband. Zach helped
me with something I had to question, a math question,

(23:53):
which was, if you have a sphere a million kilometers across,
and on the inner face of this sphere you have
rings that are ten thousand kilometers across, and you have
eleven hundred and seventy three of those rings, how far
apart are they from each other? Zach is smart, and
Zach that was funny because you know, I mean, Zach

(24:14):
and I were friendly, but we weren't like good. I mean,
we had never stated each other's house at that point.
It was just, you know, we were sort of friendly.
We had met a couple of times, and we'd emailed
back and forth periodically, and so I sent him this
question and his reply after like a day, I thought
he was kind of ignoring the email, but a day
later he just wrote back and said, this is not
a trivial problem.

Speaker 1 (24:35):
Why did you say this to Zach? He's definitely a
smart guy.

Speaker 2 (24:39):
But why because we had talked about some math stuff
and I knew he was really into math and figuring
out math problems was a thing that he was into.

Speaker 3 (24:49):
And so I don't remember. Did he get you an answer? Yeah,
nice way to go.

Speaker 4 (24:55):
We didn't check it. I mean, it might have been wrong.
We have no idea.

Speaker 1 (25:00):
Pranking you absolutely, yeah, could be. What was the acceleration
problem you were wrestling with?

Speaker 4 (25:05):
If you are in a ship that is accelerating at
two g's and you have an unbalanced firing of a
maneuvering thruster at the nose that puts it into a spin,
what does it feel like on the inside if you
are if you're on that ship it is spinning while

(25:26):
also accelerating at uh two g's. Are you thrown against
a wall? Are you what? What's? What does it feel like?
What is what is the lived experience of being in
that system?

Speaker 1 (25:40):
Sounds like a great problem to put on my physics final.

Speaker 4 (25:42):
There there was a wide variety of opinion.

Speaker 1 (25:45):
It sounds similar to the scenario of like a fighter
pilot doing a loop de loop where they feel very
different forces at the top of the loop and the
bottom of the loop, because at one point in the loop,
gravity is adding to their effective acceleration and the other
part of the loop it's.

Speaker 4 (25:58):
Contrasting, except the you don't actually have that underlying gravity
to confuse things because you're not on a planet.

Speaker 2 (26:07):
No, but that gravity is being replaced by the thrust
of this hip.

Speaker 4 (26:11):
No that, yes, the gravity exists, but there's not like
that the thing to make one part of the loop
feel different from the other part of the loop. Yeah,
there's no directional nothing from a planet.

Speaker 1 (26:22):
Well, I love the realism of your spece scenes because
it gets me thinking about the physics and actually reminds
me of another book. I don't know if you've read
Alistair Reynolds's book, Revenger. He has all these scenes that
feel sort of like British naval battles because he's thinking
about the kinetics and his ships actually have like huge sales.
And I asked him the same question I asked you,
which is like, why did you go so hardcore about

(26:43):
the physics? His answer was totally different. His answer was like,
I actually wanted to write a British naval battle, but
my agent said it had to be science fiction, so
put it in this space.

Speaker 4 (26:57):
We all get there through different paths.

Speaker 3 (27:00):
What was the hardest part of writing and what was
the hardest part of writing together.

Speaker 4 (27:04):
The hardest part.

Speaker 2 (27:05):
Of writing, I think hardest part of writing is writing, Yeah,
parking your ass in a chair and typing.

Speaker 4 (27:13):
The hardest part of writing together. I mean, I think
this is this is an an emotionally unsatisfying answer to
your questions because it's all about logistics. It's all about,
you know, finding the time. You know, the hardest part
of writing is sitting your ass in the chair and
actually writing. The hardest part of writing together is working

(27:35):
out your schedules so that you're in the same place
to have the conversation at the same time when you
both have full lives with distractions and event it's it
would be great if you know. The hardest part was,
you know, the having to fine tune your brains in
such a way that you can think as one. That's
not how it worked. It was much more.

Speaker 2 (27:59):
Uh.

Speaker 4 (28:00):
The process is much more like running a small landscape
and company than it is like something high sci fi
and brilliant.

Speaker 1 (28:09):
I think Shakespeare famously said that also, didn't you know
it was marked. It's always marked twenty marked Twain.

Speaker 2 (28:17):
Now, I mean, I think that the probably the only
frustration that we have is that I am very, very
very lazy, and I really want to procrastinate everything, and
Daniel actually wants to get things done, so periodically he
has to go, hey, so you're gonna get that thing
done that you said you were going to get done,
Maybe we should get something done. So you know, that's

(28:39):
I am the burden that Daniel's forced to carry.

Speaker 3 (28:41):
But you all picked up a new set of books together, right,
so like you couldn't have been that bad of a burden.
What is the new series you're working on?

Speaker 4 (28:50):
We also very much enjoy getting paid.

Speaker 3 (28:54):
Some burdens are worth carrying.

Speaker 4 (28:56):
And I'm just saying now the new series is it's
a very different part of this kind of space opera spectrum.
And it was Ty had this. You know, Ty had
the idea for the Expanse. He did all the world
building for the Expanse, he did all of the kind
of groundwork setting that up, and then he had this
other idea that he thought might also be a cool

(29:16):
idea for space opera. So now we're doing that one
and it's pretty fun, it's pretty good stuff. It's not
the same relationship to history that the expans had. The Expanse,
you could really see where it grew out of our
world and how we might plausibly have gotten there. This
is more like Dune or left handed Darkness or something
that's just like gazillions of years out and light years away,

(29:41):
and it lets you approach some very different things.

Speaker 2 (29:44):
But because I'm me, the relationship as to history as
it's all based on ancient Babel.

Speaker 3 (29:48):
Yeah, why did you pick that time period.

Speaker 2 (29:51):
I'm a big fan of pre classical history. And when
I was a kid, my parents drug me to church
a lot. My parents are very religious, and I am
the least religious person on the planet, so when I
was there, you know, the only thing you were allowed
to have is a Bible. And most of that book
is very I don't know if you've read it, but
most of it is very boring, very dry. But there's

(30:12):
a few books that have some interesting stuff, and one
of those is the Book of Daniel, which has like
empires conquering and people being drug off as slaves to
serve in the palace of kings, and I always found
that story interesting. Of like, what if you're just this
little agrarian society and the much more technologically advanced Babylonians
show up and go, oh, you guys all belong to

(30:34):
us now, and we're going to take a bunch of
you slaves back to Babylon, and some of those slaves
will wind up working for the king in port of
the king as bureaucrats. That just seemed interesting to me,
So I wanted to write the sci fi version.

Speaker 4 (30:45):
And so now we're in the midst of having this
human in a very alien framework of very alien society
and figuring, you know, trying to understand and his own
context and keep himself human while on the one hand serving,

(31:06):
on the other hand, undermining the great nation that has
destroyed him and his friends.

Speaker 1 (31:13):
I love that you guys go into history to find
these stories, and they say, effectively extrapolate them forward and
think about, you know, the economics of a solar system
wide society and this kind of stuff. But does doing
that change your opinion about it? You know, like, after
running the expanse, are you more or less bullish on
asteroid mining or colonies on Ganymede? Are you less likely
to invest in a startup that's actually going to do

(31:34):
this kind of stuff.

Speaker 2 (31:35):
There's no economic reason to go out into space. There's
just there isn't any I mean, there's other reasons to
go there. There's a you know, exploration, learning more about
the universe and our place in. All of those are
very good reasons to explore space, and I'm glad that
we have a space program where we do that stuff.
But there is no reason for people to live on
any of those other bodies other than the all your

(31:56):
eggs and one basket argument, which is a valid argument
of you know what, if an esteroid hits Erith, then
there's no humans left. I would say though, that if
your answer to that is we'll build a city on
Mars and there'll be humans on Mars shortly after the
esteru redistriy is Earth, all the humans on Mars are
just gonna die. So so it's yeah, you have eggs
in another basket, but those eggs are going to expire

(32:17):
very quickly. So unless we get much much much more
advanced at like turning unlivable hunks of rock into livable
hunks of rock, which we are nowhere near right now,
there's just no reason to do that at that point
you might as well just be building really really advanced
space stations and putting people in those, because you're much

(32:37):
more likely to survive in one of those.

Speaker 4 (32:39):
A generationship in orbit would be a better basket.

Speaker 2 (32:42):
Yeah, it's a better answer than Mars.

Speaker 4 (32:44):
And I think generally, the experience of having fictionalized these
things and talked about them in ways that are compelling
and plausible, but not actually ground that in anything has
I feel I could help me understand. Like Elon Musk,

(33:05):
I think, you know, he's got a lot of great
stories on how things are going to work, and I
recognize that they're not grounded in anything. And and there's
a there's a level of bullshit detection. I think that
comes with having spun up a bunch of your own bullshit.

Speaker 2 (33:21):
Yeah, I think anybody has spent any time really thinking
about what it would take to colonize Mars Caesar right
through Elon Musk. I can't see you and Zach signing
up for the first rocket to Mars.

Speaker 3 (33:33):
Kelly, No, No, But I also can't see us signing
up for the like one thousandth rocket to Mars. We're
just not very adventurous people.

Speaker 2 (33:39):
Hey, when Mars has like strip malls and movie theaters
and all of that, then yeah, sure I'll got there
for a vacation.

Speaker 4 (33:48):
I will not. I barely want to go to New York. Yeah,
it's a it's a very long commute.

Speaker 2 (33:55):
Daniel is a medieval peasant in that he will be born,
live his entire life, and die with than of one
mile radius and be happy.

Speaker 4 (34:02):
It's not I'm sure I'm a mile and a half.

Speaker 3 (34:07):
Well, I wouldn't want to leave my bugs, So I
get it.

Speaker 1 (34:27):
So you make a compelling argument that there's no economic reason.
But what's your prediction for the future. Do you think
a thousand years from now, five thousand years from now,
humanity has colonized the Solar system, or we're all effectively
Daniel and still just living in our own backyard.

Speaker 2 (34:40):
I think it's very optimistic that we're all still around
in one thousand or five thousand years. But if we
are the one thing and Daniel, I'm sure we'll have
his own answer for this. But from my perspective, the
one thing that science fiction does really, really badly is
predict the future. That's true, we're good at inspiring, but
we're terrible at predicting, and I think anybody who thinks

(35:02):
they know what the world's going to look like a
thousand years from now is laughably wrong and probably a
little to do.

Speaker 3 (35:09):
You think fiction is usually trying to predict the future, though.

Speaker 2 (35:12):
Yeah, some people actually call themselves futurists who are science
fiction writers, and they believe that what they are doing,
or what they are attempting to do, is accurately predict
these changes in the near future. You can do some
stuff some even then, look how wrong cyberpunk was. You know,
we were all reading William Gibson and going, oh, this
is an amazing accurate prediction of the future, and then

(35:33):
twenty years later it's laughably silly. And that is often
the case with sci fi, where we try to predict
what the future is going to look like and then
and just silly.

Speaker 4 (35:42):
The actual world has a much more kind of florid
imagination than any one of us.

Speaker 1 (35:48):
But individually, well, that brings me to a question I
wanted to ask about how you build your universe. You
guys are really careful about the gravity and you know,
the kinetic energy and what it's like to fight these battles,
But something that would really change those battles are things
like you know, AI controlled drones. We don't have you know,
delicate meat sacks in every ship in these battles, but
you don't see a lot of that in your universe.

(36:09):
Was that a conscious choice because it would really change
the story or was there some of the reason for
not including that.

Speaker 4 (36:16):
We like writing stories about humans because humans are going
to be reading and buying them. So yeah, No, One
of the choices that we made early on was not
to include the kind of automated space stuff because once
you include that, there is literally no reason to have

(36:36):
any people out there.

Speaker 2 (36:37):
And we do and we do have smart drones for
fighting words, they're called torpedoes because there's no reason to
build an automated little spaceship and mounted gun on it.
Just put a big bomb on the end of it
and run into the other guy, and then you just
have a torpedo. The idea that there will be like
little fighter planes driven by robots shooting at the other ships,
why just have it fly into the other ship, explode

(37:00):
really big, and then you win. And if you know,
if it's if it's a little robot driving a cheap ship,
why put a gun on it? Just have it blow up.

Speaker 4 (37:09):
The thing is we do have kind of unmentioned expert
systems and AI. We do have that kind of you know,
you flick on the light switch and the light comes
on level of normalized technology. The only weird that we
have is we also kept the meat sex.

Speaker 3 (37:23):
So is it difficult when you start working on a
TV version of your work which you know maybe one
day will happen with me who knows, but like to
go in from like you're completely in control of the
narrative to now you're in a writer's room and it
might go into direction that you hadn't anticipated. What is
that experience?

Speaker 4 (37:42):
Like it's like having a partner that you're writing with,
only there's more people. I mean, we were, in a
sense kind of building a government lab to move into
a writer's room because we were already in an artistic
project where none of us totally owned it. Now we
just included Narraine and Dan Noak and Georgia Lee and

(38:06):
all of those other voices became other voices that were
also contributing or in you know, for Narraine in charge.
But that kind of divesting your ego from the the
project had happened for us on day one that's great.

Speaker 3 (38:28):
I feel like when I work with professors, the more
professors that are in the room, the less we get done.
And it's great that I know. I'm sorry, but it's
great that you all have managed to be so amazing.
With so many people working on a project together, sometimes
it makes it harder.

Speaker 2 (38:43):
The thing that is true of a TV show is
that it has a showrunner and they have the final say.
If you have a room full of professors and one
of them is the boss and gets to tell all
the other ones what to do after the conversation is over,
that they make a decision, things will get done. It's
when nobody's the bass and everybody thinks that their version
should be the one that happens, that's when things done.

Speaker 4 (39:04):
And we got really lucky with our show runner. We've
got a guy who was really smart, really invested in
the project, and probably the best manager that I've worked
for in any industry. So you know, go us.

Speaker 2 (39:17):
He only says that because he never worked for it
was awesome.

Speaker 1 (39:21):
What's something that you see in the TV show that's
visualized differently than how you imagined it as you were
writing it, but that you know you're happy about. I
don't want you to throw anybody under the bus. But
what's something new that came into the visual element of.

Speaker 2 (39:34):
The show that you liked everything Daniel and I are
not We are not prop designers, we are not costumers,
we are not set builders. So you know our plan
in writing books, and this was how Daniel basically educated
me to do this is you describe enough that you
get the reader to do all the heavy lifting. You

(39:56):
get them to imagine the rest of it. You don't
give them detail instructions. You just kind of say, give
them a little hint and then they go imagine the rest.
You can't do that in the TV show. You actually
have to build things, and so you hire very smart
people to do that. You hire prop designers, and you
hire costumers, and you hire set builders and production designers

(40:16):
and all those people. So everything they brought was something
I hadn't thought of before, but in almost every case
it was better than the version I would have done,
because I'm not a professional at that. So there was
every day there was a new thing I hadn't thought of,
but I was like, oh, yeah, that's great, that's totally
what I would have put in the book if I
had thought of it.

Speaker 3 (40:34):
I had that experience as a reader too, you know,
I read the books, I had everything in my head
about how it should look, and then when I watched
the TV show, you know, like so often you see
it and you're like, oh, that's not really how I
imagined it. I'm sort of disappointed. But almost every time
I was like, Oh, that's even cooler than I had
imagined it. That was awesome. Like it just the team
was so so incredible.

Speaker 1 (40:52):
I love how they really centered the physics. I really felt.
Of course, when you read the book you see that
it's in there, but when you watch the show, you
like con that there's you know, parabolic motion and they're
really considering gravity and it really it feels almost like
you're in a British naval battle, you know.

Speaker 3 (41:07):
I like how they really centered an alien being that
could sort of mind control. That's that's what I thought
was the cool thing. But I guess we come from
different fields.

Speaker 1 (41:15):
Bring it back to parasites. Everybody sees a part of
themselves in.

Speaker 2 (41:18):
It, right, what. Daniel and I are big, big fans
of parasites.

Speaker 3 (41:23):
So what's your favorite parasite toxin?

Speaker 4 (41:25):
Plasma GANDHII. Yeah, yeah, I'd go for the classics.

Speaker 2 (41:29):
Yeah, that's the best one for sure. I mean, I'm sure,
I'm sure that the reason that I'm a very aggressive
person is because I'm filled with cat poop.

Speaker 4 (41:39):
It's at this point, it's not cat poop. It's just
a lot of little cysts in your brain.

Speaker 3 (41:43):
I'm actually working on so one of our next episodes,
maybe the one after this one, is going to be
about that parasite and mind control and how actually the
evidence is really thin for a lot of this stuff,
and it's like really hard to pull apart. Like is
Tie infected because he's aggressive or did the parasite make
him aggressive? You don't know. Maybe his aggressive behavior has

(42:06):
caused him to encounter the parasite and there's like a correlation, Like.

Speaker 2 (42:09):
I was aggressively owning cats, yeah sure.

Speaker 3 (42:13):
Or you were aggressive about not washing your hands after
changing the little box.

Speaker 4 (42:17):
If you're just too manly to wash your hands, that's
that's how you get it, all right.

Speaker 2 (42:22):
No, I'm actually Daniel will attest to this. I'm actually
freaked out by people who don't watch them.

Speaker 4 (42:26):
That's true.

Speaker 2 (42:27):
The hell's wrong with you? Wash your damn hands? I know.

Speaker 3 (42:30):
I am the kind of person who in a restroom.
If somebody walks out without washing, I'll be like, oh gosh,
this happens to everyone. Sometimes you forgot to wash your hands,
and they'll be like.

Speaker 4 (42:39):
Turn around, turn around, turn around. Yeah, I'm a parasitologist,
Go wash your hands.

Speaker 2 (42:44):
Now Do you ever do that? Do you ever say, like, look,
I'm a parasitologist. Don't make me catalog all the things
that are on your hands right now, you should wash those.

Speaker 3 (42:54):
I don't say about washing your hands because that's like
more bacteria, which is not quite what I do. But
I will say, like when we're, you know, eating sushi,
I'll be like, I'm a parasitologist, don't make me catalog
all the stuff that's in the raw food that you're eating.
Is good to see you.

Speaker 2 (43:09):
You didn't know I was going to be talking to you.

Speaker 3 (43:12):
Yeah. Oh, I hope I get to see you against
soon Jenney for Yeah, for the for the folks who
aren't watching the.

Speaker 2 (43:18):
Video, I hope she gets to see you against Oh good.

Speaker 3 (43:21):
All right, Tie's amazing wife just came by who I
talked about at the beginning of the show.

Speaker 2 (43:26):
That's doctor wife to you, Mabe, I'm sorry, put a
little respect in that.

Speaker 3 (43:31):
Right from from Oxford, right, doctor from Oxford Cambridge.

Speaker 2 (43:34):
I'm wearing my Cambridge sweater ring out which I did
not go to Cambridge, but my wife nice.

Speaker 3 (43:38):
That's close enough. It's all in the family. It's all good.

Speaker 2 (43:42):
So back to parisit, Yeah, I feel like I'm I
don't have a PhD, but I am PhD adjacent, So yeah,
I feel like I should get the same respect as
if I doesn't work that way.

Speaker 4 (43:51):
All but dissertation and classwork.

Speaker 2 (43:53):
Yeah, yeah, all but doing any of the world back.

Speaker 1 (43:57):
To parasites and the experience parasites in our actual world
inspire the protomolecule behavior at all in your story, like
the mind control aspects of it.

Speaker 2 (44:07):
Yeah, absolutely, Yeah.

Speaker 4 (44:09):
It's anytime you start dealing with stuff that's messing with
consciousness and repurposing somebody else's body to their own ends,
you're kind of in that in that playground.

Speaker 2 (44:20):
Yeah, and the proto molecule does, it goes through sort
of phases. In the early phase, it is very much
a parasite. It is very much a In my sort
of original creation of it, back before even Daniel showed up,
it was sort of this weird mix of like ebola
and what's the what's the mold that grows out of

(44:43):
ants heads?

Speaker 4 (44:44):
Card recept Yeah, cordyceps.

Speaker 2 (44:47):
Yeah, yeah, so it's it was sort of a mix
of the two. I had written a short story many
many years ago. One of the scenes takes place in
a health camp where they're treating people who have a bola,
And so I did a bunch of reading about a bola.
And there's a phase of a bullet that they call
the zombie phase, where it has basically melted your brain

(45:10):
and you're still ambulatory. So you're sort of wandering around
with a melted brain, but you can still walk, and
your and your stomach you're vomiting up, your stomach lining
because your internal organs are melting, and the stuff that
you vomit up, the black bile that you vomit up,
is the single most infectious substance on earth. If you

(45:31):
get that shit on you, you have a bola. So
that always fastened. The horror of that fascinated me. I'm
a horror writer at hard And then the idea of
if if there was something that infected you and took
you through that zombie phase like a bulla does, but
it had a purpose. It had it had to design,
there was an in It was a goal that it
was trying to get to in the way that cordyce

(45:52):
Ep says with the ants, it infects them, makes them
climb up the tree, makes them explode so that they
infect other ants. Right, But it has a design, and
it has a thing that is trying to achieve by
taking over the end, so that combination of it's taking
over humans, it's making them very infectious so that other
humans get infected, and ultimately, when it has enough infected humans,
it's trying to achieve something. I just found that sort

(46:15):
of cool and horrifying at the same time. So that
was really ultimately where it sort of came from.

Speaker 3 (46:21):
So you said this was from a short story.

Speaker 2 (46:23):
The research I did on a bola, Yeah, what's the
name of the story? Scene? And I don't think that
one ever got published.

Speaker 3 (46:30):
There's an opportunity there. But your stories about parasite should
always be published.

Speaker 4 (46:35):
Have you read peeps, Scott Westerveld.

Speaker 1 (46:39):
I've eaten peeps. I don't think that counts them.

Speaker 4 (46:42):
Scott Westervelt, who is a lovely writer, I've never met
him as a human being. I can't speak to that,
but he knows his way around a book. Wrote a
teenage romance vampire book that is also introductory parasitology. What
it is called peeps peeps eat, yeah, peaks just like
just like the thing stands. Actually, I think in the

(47:04):
book for parasite positive.

Speaker 3 (47:06):
All right, awesome, I can't wait to check that out.

Speaker 4 (47:08):
It's like if Twilight was being secretly used to teach
people science, if only seriously great, it's a great little book.
I read it to my kid when she was of
the age, and it stuck.

Speaker 3 (47:25):
Peeps are Twilight?

Speaker 4 (47:27):
Peeps peeps? Twilight was not a thing for us.

Speaker 3 (47:30):
Oh yeah, my kids aren't old enough for that yet.

Speaker 4 (47:33):
I'm not sure I am all right, So I'll.

Speaker 3 (47:35):
Give you this idea, and you know, do you just
cut me in a little bit when you write the
book about it. Parasites that manipulate host behavior. Very underrepresented
in the literature are the trophically transmitted parasites sort of
like Taxoplasma gandhiy. But like this fish that I study
that has the brain infecting parasites like I found a
bunch of like viruses where it it's transmitted from one

(47:56):
person another where you bite each other, but not a
lot of these trophically transmitted things. And I you know,
there's a real opportunity there. There's some of the best
zombie makers out there.

Speaker 2 (48:04):
I don't know what trophic transfer, oh I should have.

Speaker 3 (48:07):
Yes, sorry, that's good. So trophically transmitted means it goes
from like when one when a predator eats something else.
So for example, when those rodents that are attracted to
the smell of cat urine. I'm a science communicator, but
I'm awful at identifying my own ecology jargon. But so
like when a mouse is attracted to the smell of
cat urine and the cat eats it and then gets infected,
that's trophic transmission. And I studied a fish with a

(48:30):
brain infecting parasite, and when a bird eats the fish,
that's how it gets transmitted up the trophic levels.

Speaker 4 (48:36):
And this is when you stopped eating sushi. This is
I'm guessing.

Speaker 3 (48:39):
That was when I stopped eating sushi. That or when
I had this job where over the summer I had
to jump into dump trucks full of dead fish. That
put me off of fish. All I can see that
it was my worst job.

Speaker 4 (48:49):
That seems legit.

Speaker 1 (48:50):
Can I ask one more physics question since we've been
talking about cat piss and rats for a minute, Boop,
I was really interested in this Epstein drive. I love
that you guys invented a scientist who came up with
this new drive. How much did you think through the
physics of the Epstein drive, this fusion powered drive that
moves so many of your ships through the Solar System.

Speaker 2 (49:09):
It is based on a paper I read many years
ago about a way to maximize I mean, because you
can't get around the Irocket equation. You have to throw
something out the back of the ship. You have to,
and that is the problem. And I had read a
paper many I might have been an Omni or similar
magazine way back in the day, of a way to
take the exhaust and throw it almost at light speed,

(49:34):
like throw it so hard at the back of the
ship that even tiny amounts of matter are imparting a
lot of thrust. And I just sort of stole that idea. Physically,
it doesn't actually work. It doesn't make any sense. Your
ship would just melt from the heat. If you're generating
that much energy and a fusion reactor in the middle
of your ship. You have to have a way to
get rid of that heat, and you know, we just

(49:56):
sort of go the heat is fixed. There's a heat solution.
They invented it. Thank god we invented the heat machine.
But other than that, I mean, the physics behind throwing
stuff out the back of the ship really really hard.

Speaker 4 (50:12):
Those make sense, and we're not ever gonna like say
what paper that was, so that when it was discredited,
we're not we're not taking we're not taking down with it.

Speaker 2 (50:22):
But plus I probably misunderstood everything the guy's side, so
it would probably be our heat or she would probably
be very offended that I had used their paper to
create my terrible fictional ship engine.

Speaker 1 (50:35):
Well before I was a particle physicist, I was actually
a budding on plasma physicist, and I worked in a
plasma physics group in your backyard, Daniel, in Los Alamos.
And there's a guy there, Glenn Worden, who's a plasma
physicist who's been writing a series of papers about how
plasma powered engines are the only way we could ever
like intercept an asteroid or get around the Solar System.
So I think you guys were ahead of your time.

(50:56):
The science is now catching up to you.

Speaker 4 (50:58):
Well, this is this is one of those things where
when you're vague enough, you get to take credit for everything.

Speaker 3 (51:07):
All right, writing advice. On that note, we're going to
wrap things up. You told us a little bit about
the history behind your new book, but I don't think
you ever said the name of your new book.

Speaker 4 (51:18):
The new book is The Mercy of Gods. It's the
first in a trilogy called The Captive's War.

Speaker 3 (51:24):
And are they going to come out one year at
a time or something like that.

Speaker 4 (51:27):
If I can get tied to sit in the goddamn chair.

Speaker 3 (51:30):
Yes, podcasts, well, we hope you're successful with that, Daniel,
and good luck to both of you, and thank you
so much for being on the show. I had a
lot of fun. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced

(51:52):
by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you, We
really would.

Speaker 1 (51:56):
We want to know what questions you have about this
extraordinary We.

Speaker 3 (52:01):
Want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for
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Speaker 3 (52:13):
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Speaker 1 (52:23):
Don't be shy, write to us,