August 10, 2026 • 33 mins
Margaret interviews the author and activist Cory Doctorow about the role of fiction in making a better world
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to cool people who
did cool stuff, which is sometimes cool people who are
actively doing cool stuff, because sometimes the people that I'm
talking about are still alive. I am your host, Margaret Kiljoy,
and this week I am actually talking to someone that,
from my point of view, is a living person who
does cool stuff. Coridoctro. Hi, how are you Hi.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
I'm glad to be classed among these still alive. That's
one of my bucket list items I can scratch off now.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
Yeah, still being alive. Yeah. This is usually a history show,
as I think that people who are listening now, but
I also have been more recently interested in talking about
things that are currently happening, and you're one of the
people who talks about the things currently happening in a
way that I really appreciated. So I wanted to have
(00:53):
you on for people who don't know your work. You
do a lot of things, and I think you know
that I originally know you as a fiction writer, and
I know you for writing and just an incredible number
of novels that I've read, including ones that are probably
very relevant to our listeners, like walk Away and more
recently The Lost Cause. But also you do nonfiction. And
(01:17):
I learned this word a while ago. Would you consider
yourself a public intellectual?
Speaker 2 (01:21):
No, I hate that so much, like I strongly prefer activist.
I think public intellectual is like how you launder the
fact that you don't want people to think of you
as an advocate. Okay, for a specific perspective, if you
want to maintain the pretext of the you from nowhere,
I think you call yourself a public intellectual.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
I'd rather be a public demagogue than a public intellectual.
I want to be on top of a fucking barricade
with a megaphone. I don't want to be like scratching
away in a you know, study with a glass of whiskey.
I mean, I'll take a flask of whiskey up to
the top of the barricade, don't get right.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Yeah, that's a good thing. It goes with the megaphone
very well, because if we're moving in as is sometimes necessary,
to climb barricades.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Hard on your throats, screaming through the megaphone, you want
something to cut the dust afterwards, a little anesthesia.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
That's true. Okay. When you think of yourself, do you
think of yourself as a fiction or nonfiction writer first,
or like what do you what? What was your dream
as a kid?
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Like, oh, definitely to be a fiction writer.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
I came up through the first and last approximation of
formal apprenticeship for science fiction writers in the history of
the world. And it was all due to this one woman,
Judith Merril, who was great science fiction writer, editor, and critic.
And Judy had been married to Frederick Pohle and their
marriage broke up in sixty eight, which was also they
(02:43):
were in Chicago. It's when the Chicago police riots happened,
and she decided she just couldn't raise her kids in America,
so she went into self imposed exile in torontok where
I grew up. Like all the best Americans, I'm Canadian,
and she just had this variety of gigs that she
used to create this thing that was really like, as
I say, a formal apprenticeship for science fiction writers. So
(03:04):
first of all, you should know she got the books
in the divorce and she gave them to the Toronto
Public Library System. They formed the nucleus of what's now
the largest science fiction reference collection in the world. It's
called the Meryl Collection. Oh amazing, Okay, she eventually let
us change the name to that. It was originally called
the spaced Out Library. She didn't want it named after her.
And when I was like nine years old, I went
and took a trip with the school to the spaced
(03:25):
Out where she was the writer in residence. And I
knew who she was because my dad was in radical
politics and so was she, and I knew her from
that because her other gig was introducing Doctor Who on
public television.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
Oh wow.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
OK. And when my mom was at Teachers College and
out in the evenings, my dad would cook dinner and
we'd eat it on the sofa with my baby brother
and watch Judy introduce Doctor Who. And she basically talked
about like where the tropes came from. And she was
like this tough old broad who chainsmoked and had iron
gray hair and a gravelly voice. And she would come
out and she'd say, like, tonight's episode is about time loops.
(04:02):
I remember we invented the time loop at a Futurian
house spaghetti podlock dinner in nineteen forty seven. I'll never
forget because Isaac Asimov was there and he would not
stop squeezing Cmcornblue's girlfriend's ass. He wrote thirteen stories about
time loops that night. I took them on the A
train to Rockefeller Center in the morning and threw them
(04:22):
over John W. Campbell's transom. He published them in the
ensuing year, and this is where the time loop comes from.
So I knew she was because I'd seen her do
the shtick every week. And she was like, kids, if
you write stories, you can bring them to me at
my library, okay, and I'll make them better for you,
like scenes to ten year olds. Right, And she's this
(04:43):
like towering figure in the field. This is to be
Canadian about it. It's like Retzki offering to help you
with your stick handling.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
Right, It's okay, this is actually one of the only
sports figures I know.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
Yeah, me too. And he's turned into a maga guy,
which sucks, but no, yeah, and he started making the
shittiest rye anyway. So I had a subway pass I
used to go down and bring her my stories and
then she would put the writers who she thought were
kind of compatible into writing groups. So, you know, seven
or eight years later, she put me in a writing
group with Carl Schrader, and then eventually that group included
(05:14):
people like Peter Watts and Alan Weiss and a bunch
of other you know, science fiction writers from the city,
from the region, and it was just one of many
different groups that she'd started. We were all kind of
Judy's kids. I went to work at the science fiction
bookstore at Baca Books, which is the oldest science fiction
bookstore in the world, when I was about eighteen. That
store was started when she bullied a local fan into
(05:35):
opening a science fiction store. I sold my first story
to a Canada's science fiction magazine on Spec when I
was seventeen. That's a magazine that was starting.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
I seld it on Spec.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
No, this magazine was called on Spec. I did also
sell it on Spec. Like. They didn't commission it from me.
I sent it to them over the transom. Yeah, this
was how sharp fiction works. Yeah yeah, so or worked
changes from your to ear.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
But that magazine on Spec was founded by two fans
out west who she bullied into starting a science fiction magazine.
I edited a volume of the Testrax Canadian science fiction anthology,
a series she began. I worked on a Canadian science
fiction TV show as a consultant called Prisoners of Gravity
that was started by the people Who basically, like she
mentored when she was doing The Doctor Who Gig, It
(06:18):
was on the same public television network on TV Ontario.
She found this thing called Toronto Hydra that was modeled
on this New York thing that had happened during the
Golden Age where groups of writer would gather every like
six weeks for a potluck and you know, movable feast.
And so all the writers and editors and critics and
illustrators and filmmakers and TV people and everyone in Ontario
would get together, you know, like ten times a year
(06:40):
at this event that Judy started. So she was just
like a fucking machine. And she was you know, she
was an incredible writer and critic and editor. But like
her great contribution was this right that she created this system.
Even the weird alternative high school I went to had
this incredible writing workshop that I found out years later
Judy founded ten years before I got there through a
(07:00):
writers in the School grant, and it was modeled on Clarion. OK.
So when I got to Clarion, I knew how to
workshop because I had been doing Clarion workshopping at high
school through this world, and I spent seven years in
high school mostly because I just wanted to stay in
the workshop, like it was just she was just a
force of nature. So I always wanted to be a
fiction writer. Okay, as to like, do I think of
(07:21):
myself as a fiction writer or a nonfiction writer. I
am living in the very strange end stage of a
lifetime of removing all the Jenga blocks that weren't low
bearing from my life, such that every activity I engage
in now is something that cuts into multiple parts of
my life and work. So everything is doing double and
(07:43):
triple duty as an activist, as a writer, as a journalist,
as a novelist, and so it's very hard to like
kind of take one thing and say, oh, well, today
I'm doing fiction writing. You know. People say, like, how
do you know when it's time to write something up
as fiction or nonfiction? And I'm like, I usually do
both right, and usually what each one makes the other
(08:04):
one better. And sometimes they do them at the same time,
sometimes they do them in succession. They don't always come
in the same order. And so I'm both and not
only am I both, but they are inseparable now because
all the things that I used to do that would
have just been in service to fiction I've stopped doing
because I wanted to do more of the other stuff
in my life, and so I double down on the
(08:25):
things that serve more than one pillar, and at the
expense of the things that were uniquely about one thing.
I mean, right now, maybe the one thing I'm doing
that's very fictionee is there's a writer who I quite love,
who's incredibly problematic, who I'm convinced we can write stories
in his mode and rehabilitate his mode without the He's
(08:48):
a pulp writer from the fifties, and it's just like
super homophobic and super sexist and often very racist and whatever.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
Oh okay, it's not who I was guessing. I thought
that we were building up to Hinland. No.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
No, it's John D. MacDonald, the guy wrote Cape.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
Okay, I don't know it, who.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
Wrote seventy plus novels, including a couple of science fiction novels,
mostly hard boiled detective fiction. Travis McGee series is the
one he's best known for. I went on eBay at
the start of the summer and I bought everything from
someone selling like their dad's pulp collection, like seventy books
for seventy dollars, And I'm working my way through them
at the expense of books by people who I really
(09:25):
want to blurb and review, and I'm reading this instead,
and there's nothing in there that's in service to activism,
and in fact, the thing that really reminds me of
I once ran into a Werner VINGI at an event
in like August one year, and I was like, how's
your summer, and he said, oh, my god, I discovered
Terry Pratchett at the start of the summer, and not
(09:46):
since I was ten have I discovered a new writer
at the start of a summer where I could read
a new book by them every.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
Day, Right, Terry Pratchett would be that.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
And that's what I'm doing. I'm reading a new Pratchett
novel every day this summer.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
That's amazing.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Forty one Discworld novels, plus twenty plus and stillary other books.
And so yeah, Verner was just like working his way
through the cannon. And that's sort of what I'm doing
with John Dy McDonald, because the lesser books are really lesser,
but each one has like one or two just like
fabulous moves. He's got so many great moves. He was
Stephen King's favorite writer when he died. Stephen King tried
(10:21):
to convince the son to let him out this race,
like he's so many writers, favorite writer, but oh my god,
Like I'm reading a book now where he's like trying
to figure out who's murdering a bunch of people, and
one of them is a woman who's been killed, who
it turns out has been the lover of a woman
who we learned as a lesbian. And he goes out
to see this woman. It turns out she has been
the lover of this lesbian who was killed in an
(10:43):
earlier scene, and she is in with the butches, and
like the description of the butches, because I'm listening to
it on audio. I was like in the pool and
I'm just like doing my laps and listening to this
just fucking surreally, like just like it's like he had
a catastrophic brain injury between the previous chapter and this one.
(11:05):
It's so stupid, so bad, and it's sandwiched between two
amazing chapters, like beautifully constructed, beautifully written chapters, and it's
just like what the fuck, John? And so I'm working
my way through and making so many notes about like
I'm just gonna steal all the good moves right and
leave the shitty ones on the side of the road.
(11:26):
And I'm gonna I'm writing a pulp novel right now
called Once His Enemy Action, which is like a Bond
reference because three times his Enemy Action and Bond.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
Oh yeah, okay.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
And I'm just like, I'm finding so many little grace
notes I just want to fucking steal, and I'm just
stealing them like crazy. Is this gonna be so good?
So I'm just loving it.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
So this brings up a thousand things for me. But
the idea of taking a pulp mode and applying it
to the activist fiction or you know, there's a lot
of words that all sound bad. Activist fiction sounds bad,
Didactic fiction sounds bad. There's no way of saying like
fiction that gets across ideas that doesn't sound bad, except
science fiction. But like when I cite when I talk
(12:14):
about didactic fiction, like fiction that is meant to teach
a lesson. The people I reference are you, Lagwin Butler
and Heindline.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
Holy shit, that's good company to be in.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
And I think you do it the most like Heinland. Okay,
just to inside Baseball. But I don't mean this badly.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
No he's good at it. He's got such shitty ideas
and he makes them sound so reasonable.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
Right, right, totally, And so for anyone who doesn't have
any fucking clue what we're talking about. When writers try
to write about ideas, there's a lot of ways you
can do it. You can drape it in metaphor that
Laguin I think is a master of. Sometimes Lagoin's very literal,
but like you know, sometimes the entire book is a
specific metaphor things like that. You can also be really
(12:57):
fucking direct and hindline and you and I actually might
be pronouncing Highlight's name wrong, but I've read more books
by him than any other author because my dad was
really into him.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
No, it's timely.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
Like I remember you wrote a book called was it Pirates? No,
it was the one about for the Win.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
For the Wind. I thought you wrote a book for
the Wind. I'm like, this is going to be for
the Win.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
And that's your most didactic But possibly so if you
ever want to read a book that just explains capitalism
and how it works by way of people who play
World of Warcraft, who gold farm, which is a thing
that people used to do for a living, especially not
in America. If you want to hear about gold farmers
unionizing and how capitalism works, read for the Win by
(13:40):
Cory Doctro, And you do it. It's not seamless. That's
the thing that's interesting to me about it. Right, You're like,
here's an aside about how capitalism works, about how like
money works, how different exchanges work. But it never bores
the reader. Sure right. You don't switch to an essay mode.
You switch to a dactic fiction mode. And I think
(14:02):
that you do this better than almost any other author.
Is one of the reasons I wanted to talk to
you about it. I wanted to talk to you about
you know, kind of it's the big meta question. It's
the giant question like how do you use fiction to
unfuck the world? Or how do you use fiction to
ask the question how do you unfuck the world? And
what leads you to different methods of talking about this
(14:23):
stuff in your fiction.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
We have these these alleged rules in fiction writing like
show don't tell. Yeah, And I think show don't tell
is actually advice, not a rule, and it's advice for
a thing that's not working. So we never really know
why fiction works. Like there's something foundationally irrational in the
process of enjoying fiction. Right, you're reading about someone who
(14:46):
you know doesn't exist, but you're experiencing empathy for them,
which is like not a it's not a reasonable thing.
It's like, facially, it's it's kind of stupid right to
experience empathy for things that don't exist. Like, it's one
thing to experience empathy for even like an a animal
or an ecosystem or whatever, but for an imaginary thing weird, right,
And so we don't always know, like we don't understand
(15:07):
exactly what's going on, and so when we encounter something
that doesn't work, we make guesses about why it's not
working or how to make it better, which are often
two sides of the same coin. So one thing we
know about fiction is that it is much easier to
get a reader in the mode where they experience empathy
(15:28):
for imaginary things that they know don't exist when you're
using drama. Yeah, and there's something about that that kind
of triggers the kind of empathy response that then makes
the esthetic work of the fiction start to happen. But
notice I said it's easier to do it that way,
not that doing it in other ways. Not that being
(15:48):
discursive or expository is bad. It's just hard, right, right,
So like if you were, like, if you're trying to
do like a dance routine, say my kid is a
com headitive dancer. She's on a hip hop dance team.
So there are aspects of the choreography as they're getting
closer to the competition where they'll go, this trick would
(16:09):
be amazing if we could pull it off, and we can't,
and better to do a less impressive trick better than
this impressive trick. Badly, the judges will like it better.
And I think that if you're critiquing someone's fiction, right,
if you're an editor, or you're in a writing circle
or critiquing circle, or if you're instructing someone. I was
your clarion instructor at one point. Ye, then you encounter
(16:30):
something that's not working, you go through it and you're like, well,
there's this like giant chunk of exposition here. And it's
not that this giant chunk of exposition could not be
made to work. I just don't know if this writer
can make it work, or you know, like I don't
know how to tell them how to make it work.
So I'm going to say, stop trying to do this
fucking hard thing and do an easier one. Right, But
(16:51):
exposition that works, Holy shit, it's great. Right. We still
read fucking Moby Dick, a book that's just about like
exposition about whale hunting, right, it's a techno thriller about
whale hunting.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
Yeah, Kim Stanley Robinson will make me read about landscapes
in it Arctica.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
And Mars totally.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
Now I look at geography different because I have read
hundreds of pages of that man.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
One hundred percent. So yeah, So, like there's so much
of this right in genre, and genre is not afraid
to do it, you know, like if genre has a
thing that a move that doesn't want to make because
it doesn't want to bore you, right, right, which like
there's boring fiction that's really good, right, Like there's lots
of plotless kind of character study fiction. It's very subtle
(17:33):
and whatever that you know, science fiction, fantasy, pulps, thrillers.
We just don't want to try doing it right. That
is fucking hard to do well, to be boring and interesting,
Like it's it sounds like a contradiction until you find
someone who does it well, and they're like, oh, I
just like, boy, I just like I read this whole
thing and when I was done, I just felt like
I've been knifed in the guts. And I no, I
(17:55):
didn't never saw the blade, and I just don't know
where it came from. And like, yeah, with genre, you
always know where the blade is, right, there's a great
will and give some bit. Where he's interview in the
Paris Review about writing science fiction, He's like, I'm in
a lineage with dash ol Hammett. I'm a pulp writer.
I can plot. My tractor has wheels on it when
I you know, like I sit down to write a
(18:18):
story and I get that thing in gear and it
just starts to fucking move. And that's who I am,
and that's how I write. I might be florid, I
might be poetic, I might do all this other stuff,
but I am a plotting writer, and I'm a genre writer.
I'm a plotting writer too. There's always a lot of
stuff happening, but it might have exposition, and you know,
you want to rate a plot. He writer read Neil Stevenson, Right,
(18:40):
this is a guy who's got so much stuff, but
also a guy who's never afraid to do exposition. Right,
there's a bit in cryptonomcons sixty three hundred words about
eating cereal that is so interesting and cool, and I'm like,
I just want that expanded to full novel length, right,
like write his thesis about eating Captain Crunch, which like,
it's so good and unless a writer could never pull
(19:02):
it off. And Stevenson, especially as early books, they've got
problems right there. Every book is flawed in some way
or another, right, right, he got a lot of shit
for his endings.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
I think writing a novel is the hardest thing I've
ever done, huh. And then I keep doing it and
it's like, but why do I keep doing this thing
that's impossible?
Speaker 2 (19:17):
Right?
Speaker 1 (19:18):
Which actually I don't mean to completely derailue, but that's
actually how activism feels. Is this thing where you like,
you can't do it right. I've always suspected parenting is
like this, you can't get it right, but you have
to do it. And novel writing always feels that way
to me, because it's like there's just actually too many
things happening in order to get it perfect.
Speaker 2 (19:40):
Aspiring to make no mistakes as stupid, aspiring to learn
from your mistakes is great. Yeah, you know, like there's
that line in Bird on a Wire that Leonard Cohen line,
I swear by this song and by all that I
have done wrong, you know, like, yeah, yeah, you know,
it's just it's such. It's like in love and parenthood,
in art, in activism, you'll never you'll never get everything right,
(20:02):
but like you can aspire to make new mistakes rather
than the same ones over and over again. And you know,
I think that's what makes groundhog Days such a great movie.
Is like watching someone like systematically approach making better mistakes,
although he does eventually get perfect, which I think is silly. Yeah,
but it makes the story. It gives it a nice
happy ending, puts it.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
It's stuck in the plot, you know, you like, you
have to get perfect in order to get out of
it or whatever. So any given problem you're trying to
cover and for people aren't used to your work you
cover like surveillance and technology and climate change and more
recently I've seen you talking a lot about AI and stuff.
(20:42):
But like, what works better? What do you communicate better
through fiction versus nonfiction? Like what are some of the
advantages of fiction?
Speaker 2 (20:51):
I mean, fiction is like it's the fly through the
architects rendering of the emotional state of what things will
be like if we let them get worse or if
we make them better. So, you know, the architect designs
your new house, they make the architects rendering, then you
fly through it and you get a sense of what
it would be like to inhabit that house. Yeah, And
(21:13):
the dystopia is like if we let this go on,
And the utopia is what if we do something different?
And you know, it's so hard to feel what things
might be like if they're better. You know, there's a
famous Marx quote about like not writing recipes for kitchens
that haven't been made yet, right, And I think that,
like science fiction is often about writing recipes for kitchens.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
That haven't been made yet.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
You know, like, what would it be like to live
in this if we were different? And you know, I
think that, like I can say as a matter of
policy advocacy that so I should say. I've worked for
the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is the most important and
most established digital rights group in the world. I've been
there for nearly twenty five years as an activist, and
(21:58):
I am cursed with object permanence which means that I
can remember the policy fights we had twenty five years
ago where we said, if you do X, why is
going to happen?
Speaker 1 (22:08):
And then they happen.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
So now that we're living in why I can go
like this is because we did X, right, because these policymakers,
these advocates whatever, they did it and like we shouldn't
do that again. It's very frustrating having object permanence among
people who don't even the people who lived through it,
but also the people who didn't now get why it
sucks to be old because you're surrounded by people who
(22:31):
didn't see the mistake the last time and want to
make it again. But like all my friends who are
like AI sucks, so we need more copyright, I'm like, dude,
like crawling the internet is theft. Fuck off, Crawling the
internet is not theft. That is how we killed Aaron
Swartz is calling crawling the internet theft? Yeah, shut out
about this stuff, right, ye, Like we have a labor issue,
(22:52):
we don't have a copyright issue. We've expanded copyright for
forty five years, and we are poorer and our bosses
are richer than they've ever been. And it's because like
we have more to bargain with, but because we have
no bargaining leverage, it's just more to bargain away, Like
giving us more copyright is like giving a bullied kid
extra lunch money. There isn't an amount of lunch money
that advises us to lunch. Right. We need labor rights,
(23:13):
we need solidarity. We don't need another alienable right. Like
an alienable right only makes sense if you really think
that you're an LLC with an MFA, right, like if
you think you're a small business bargaining with another business.
But we're not. We're workers, right, and so we need
to think in terms of labor rights, not in terms
of copyrights. So it's very frustrating right to I've lived
through this. And sometimes with fiction you can say the
(23:36):
world we're in now did not have to be this way.
We could have a different world. You can say the
stinging rebuke that vulgar Thatcherism deserves, and you can say
there is no alternative is a thought stopping cliche intended
to extinguish the imagination. It's really a way of saying,
stop thinking of alternatives. And when you write the alternative,
(24:00):
like when you write the recipe for the kitchen that
hasn't been built. You create like the imaginative space to say,
lots of recipes could be cooked in this kitchen. Yeah, right,
Like I always say this, the most important thing about
the technology is not what it does, it's who it
does it for and who it does it too. This
is Bill Gibson's version of the street finds its own
use for things, right. And you know, I know this
(24:23):
is not what Audrey Lord meant. But you know so
many people say, oh, you can't dismantle the master's house
with the master's tools. Why are you talking about using
the internet for anything good? Obviously that's not what Audrey
Lord meant. She was talking about patriarch blah blah blah
blah blah. But right, this idea that, like the tools
we have are steeped in so much sin we shouldn't
try to use them, it's so anti Promethean, it's so
(24:44):
anti leftist, right, Like, you know, this idea that like
every peasant should live like a lord is like the
idea that excites me about Leftism, not the idea that
it'll all live like peasants. Like fuck that noise, right, right,
And so like I'm really interested in the Promethean project
of stealing the nonsense from Elon Musk because he didn't
(25:04):
invent it, right, he did like built it. Yeah, workers
built it. The fact that he like capitalized it or
jack you know, uh, directed it, that doesn't change the
fact that it came from workers and that workers made it,
and that it's it is the people's technology to use
and choose. And the fact that it's the master's house
(25:25):
doesn't mean that it wasn't built by the.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
Right the people's house. He's just the master's squatting it basically,
and like yeah, yeah, Like I think, like there's one
thing to hit over and over is that lunites didn't
hate technology.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
Yeah. Sure, they loved machines. That was their thing. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
They were like, no, I prefer working in a cottage
to a factory.
Speaker 2 (25:45):
Yeah. Well, and also like I want machines that produce
good outputs and not bad ones. But we're going to
adopt this new technology. Let's have the people who are
the technologically skilled workers, which is, you know, to be
his textile worker. In pre industrial Revolution England, you need
a seven year apprenticeship r right. It was like doing
a master's in mechanical engineering at mit. They were the
most skilled machine workers in the world at the time,
(26:06):
and the law at the time said that new machines
had to be built and deployed with their co determination,
and they were insisting on enforcement of these laws, which
were instead jettisoned, and the machines that existed at the
time made extremely bad cloth among all the other problems
they had, right right, the fabric of the industrial revolution
that the Industrial Revolution produced was bad. Oh so a certification,
(26:29):
it was a sertification, yeah, yeah, yeah, And it was
a certification in lots of ways. So like one of
the reasons that the mill owners loved the new generation
machines is they were quote so easy a child could
use them. And there just happened to be these war orphanages,
Napoleonic warorphanages in London filled with children who were kidnapped
and indentured to work in the dark satanic mills of Manchester.
(26:50):
You know, this was like we actually, like one of
the great forgettings we've had is like how central the
Luddite cause became to the conception of labor and science fiction.
So Mary Shelley was a Luddite sympathizer. Frankenstein was a
lutdite allegory about what happens when you let capitalists decide
or entrepreneurs decide which technology we're going to use and
(27:12):
how it's going to be used without any say from
the wider society. Yeah, her husband, his maiden speech in
the Lords was a pro ludite speech. Right. Science fiction
was invented to advance the cause of Luddites, right, Yeah,
but not just that. There was one of the children
who was kidnapped to work in the factories after his
tenure of indenturies survived, and he wrote a memoir. His
name was Robert Blinkoh, it's called The Memoir of Robert
(27:33):
Blinko's a giant English bestseller. One of the people that
influenced was Charles Dickens, who used it as the basis
for Alliver Twist, which is Luddite fanfic.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
I love the strings across the board. I love the
fact that everything we try to teach history as these
like concise separate things. Sure, and this is so completely
untrue and it separates us, yeah, from where we come from.
That like, yeah, like no science fiction being invented to
advance the ltte, Cause this is not a thing that
gets discussed, you know, or even you're talking about coming
(28:04):
up in a science fiction where like you're talking about
this woman who built so much of the infrastructure that
underlies modern science fiction, and that y'all were sort of
family friends because both your parents are radicals.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
Like I remember she was radical and my parents were radicals.
She was my parents' generation.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
Yeah right, right, sorry, yeah, like family friends. Yeah, And
but that's not People have this like stodgy idea that
science fiction was this, you know, fundamentally conservative thing, because
often conservative stuff tends to linger longer. I don't entirely know.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
And John W. Campbell was a fucking fascist who's the
most important editor in the field.
Speaker 1 (28:41):
Right, So it's like it's not like all science fiction
was inherently liberatory and good and you know whatever. But
like I remember getting introduced around a convention and you know,
being introduced like, oh, you have to meet Margaret. She's
an anarchist and like writers whose works I've read, like
one of them was like, oh, me too, and I
(29:01):
was like I had no idea, huh. But so there's
this whole legacy. Okay, I remember when I first started,
Actually you were the one of the people who told
me this. When I went to Clarion West was just
six weeks writer's boot camp in twenty fifteen, and Corey
was one of my instructors there, and I remember I
was coming in and being like I had actually even
published some stuff, but always with radical presses. And I
was like, I don't know, my stuff might be too
(29:23):
radical for mainstream presses, and you were like, no one cares, Like,
that's not going to stop you. The quality of your
pros might stop you, right, And it's not because science
fiction is inherently leftist either, although I would say that
the editors at modern science fiction magazines is probably skewed progressive.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
Certainly what the right would tell you, well, they're.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
Like they're underpaid people who love books, and they're really
well educated and really poor. You're probably a progressive or
left right. But science fiction like has fascists and radicals
going all throughout it, like it's.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
Yeah, no total I mean the Futurians, which was this
like polyamorous leftist science fiction group house that Judy Merrill
and Fred Pohle lived in along with Sam Kornbluth and
a bunch of those other people. They were banned from
attending the first Hugo banquet for being two left very famously.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
Okay, so that is actually huh okay.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
Yeah, so this fight is as old as the as
the modern genre as we understand it.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
There are two great books about this. One is Damon
Knight's The Futureians. Damon lived in the Futurian House.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
Two.
Speaker 2 (30:27):
Damon was my clarion instructors. The guy wrote many many
things found in science fiction writers of America, but if
you're a Twilight Zone watcher you'll know him for two
Serve Man that was his Yes and Mary to Kate Wilhelm,
another great figure in the field. The other is Judy
Merrill's autobiography, which won the Hugo Award, which she co
wrote with her granddaughter Julia Paul Weary, which is called
(30:47):
Better to Have Loved. And they are really two very
different accounts of the same events, and they're great to
be read one against the other. They're terrific, terrific books.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
Okay, well, I think this is probably where we should
end episode one. But when we come back, I really
want to talk to you about how to unfuck the world.
Some of your ideas about unfucking the world. The book
The lost cause, changing our conceptions of what it means
to protect the environment from don't build anything, to build
high rises and all kinds of really challenging but really
(31:21):
important ideas. But do anything you want to plug? What
have you been working on? What's your latest stuff?
Speaker 2 (31:26):
I mean, the latest book is The Reverse Centaur's Guide
to Life After AI. It's a nonfiction book about being
a good AI critic. It's doing super well. If I
can toot my horn here, I just got an email
saying it's the for the sixth consecutive week the best
selling paperback nonfiction book in Canada.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
Oh wow.
Speaker 2 (31:44):
It was a debut on the New York Times List.
It's selling well everywhere, so it's doing great. The book
before that was called in Shitifications, book about how tech
platforms go bad. Paperback's about to come out. I had
a call with the publicist marketing people. They've had massive
orders for the paperback, so it's looking like it's going
to do really well. It's going to be a Hudson bookseller.
So the Hudson has originally said, oh, we won't take
(32:06):
a book that has the worst shit on the cover.
They're the ones in the airport. We won't take a
book that has the word shit in the cover, and
now they've taken a giant order. They keep calling every
couple of weeks increasing the order, and the word in
shitification just made it into the Oxford English Dictionary, which
is definitely a bucket list item.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
Yeah. That I also love that. Like, that's the thing
about capitalism is that, like they'll be like, oh, we
don't do that, and you're like, look, this sells, and
they're like, you know what, Yeah, you could publish your
book about hanging us. It sells. I'll want to hear it.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
Yeah. Yeah, And then you know, as I said, I
work for the Electronic Printier Foundation e FF. Dot orger
is where we find out more about our work where
a member supported nonprofit. Beyond writing us a check and
joining you, there's lots of ways you can get involved,
and if you join our email list, we will tell
you about them all the time, things that are local
to you, things that are national and international. And then
my newsletter is pluralistic dot net Open Access Creative Commons attribution.
(32:57):
I write five or successays a week there and they
are a CC attribution, which means that you can take them,
share them, sell them, dapt them all without my permission.
Just cite the license, cite the original, and note if
you've modified it.
Speaker 1 (33:11):
Hell yeah, all right, Well that'll do us for today,
But when we come back Wednesday, we're going to talk
about more of all of this stuff. Cool People Who
Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit our website
Foalzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the Fiord
(33:33):
Radio app, app a Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Cool Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to cool people who
did cool stuff, which is sometimes cool people who are
actively doing cool stuff, because sometimes the people that I'm
talking about are still alive. I am your host, Margaret Kiljoy,
and this week I am actually talking to someone that,
from my point of view, is a living person who
does cool stuff. Coridoctro. Hi, how are you Hi.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
I'm glad to be classed among these still alive. That's
one of my bucket list items I can scratch off now.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
Yeah, still being alive. Yeah. This is usually a history show,
as I think that people who are listening now, but
I also have been more recently interested in talking about
things that are currently happening, and you're one of the
people who talks about the things currently happening in a
way that I really appreciated. So I wanted to have
(00:53):
you on for people who don't know your work. You
do a lot of things, and I think you know
that I originally know you as a fiction writer, and
I know you for writing and just an incredible number
of novels that I've read, including ones that are probably
very relevant to our listeners, like walk Away and more
recently The Lost Cause. But also you do nonfiction. And
(01:17):
I learned this word a while ago. Would you consider
yourself a public intellectual?
Speaker 2 (01:21):
No, I hate that so much, like I strongly prefer activist.
I think public intellectual is like how you launder the
fact that you don't want people to think of you
as an advocate. Okay, for a specific perspective, if you
want to maintain the pretext of the you from nowhere,
I think you call yourself a public intellectual.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
I'd rather be a public demagogue than a public intellectual.
I want to be on top of a fucking barricade
with a megaphone. I don't want to be like scratching
away in a you know, study with a glass of whiskey.
I mean, I'll take a flask of whiskey up to
the top of the barricade, don't get right.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Yeah, that's a good thing. It goes with the megaphone
very well, because if we're moving in as is sometimes necessary,
to climb barricades.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Hard on your throats, screaming through the megaphone, you want
something to cut the dust afterwards, a little anesthesia.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
That's true. Okay. When you think of yourself, do you
think of yourself as a fiction or nonfiction writer first,
or like what do you what? What was your dream
as a kid?
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Like, oh, definitely to be a fiction writer.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
I came up through the first and last approximation of
formal apprenticeship for science fiction writers in the history of
the world. And it was all due to this one woman,
Judith Merril, who was great science fiction writer, editor, and critic.
And Judy had been married to Frederick Pohle and their
marriage broke up in sixty eight, which was also they
(02:43):
were in Chicago. It's when the Chicago police riots happened,
and she decided she just couldn't raise her kids in America,
so she went into self imposed exile in torontok where
I grew up. Like all the best Americans, I'm Canadian,
and she just had this variety of gigs that she
used to create this thing that was really like, as
I say, a formal apprenticeship for science fiction writers. So
(03:04):
first of all, you should know she got the books
in the divorce and she gave them to the Toronto
Public Library System. They formed the nucleus of what's now
the largest science fiction reference collection in the world. It's
called the Meryl Collection. Oh amazing, Okay, she eventually let
us change the name to that. It was originally called
the spaced Out Library. She didn't want it named after her.
And when I was like nine years old, I went
and took a trip with the school to the spaced
(03:25):
Out where she was the writer in residence. And I
knew who she was because my dad was in radical
politics and so was she, and I knew her from
that because her other gig was introducing Doctor Who on
public television.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
Oh wow.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
OK. And when my mom was at Teachers College and
out in the evenings, my dad would cook dinner and
we'd eat it on the sofa with my baby brother
and watch Judy introduce Doctor Who. And she basically talked
about like where the tropes came from. And she was
like this tough old broad who chainsmoked and had iron
gray hair and a gravelly voice. And she would come
out and she'd say, like, tonight's episode is about time loops.
(04:02):
I remember we invented the time loop at a Futurian
house spaghetti podlock dinner in nineteen forty seven. I'll never
forget because Isaac Asimov was there and he would not
stop squeezing Cmcornblue's girlfriend's ass. He wrote thirteen stories about
time loops that night. I took them on the A
train to Rockefeller Center in the morning and threw them
(04:22):
over John W. Campbell's transom. He published them in the
ensuing year, and this is where the time loop comes from.
So I knew she was because I'd seen her do
the shtick every week. And she was like, kids, if
you write stories, you can bring them to me at
my library, okay, and I'll make them better for you,
like scenes to ten year olds. Right, And she's this
(04:43):
like towering figure in the field. This is to be
Canadian about it. It's like Retzki offering to help you
with your stick handling.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
Right, It's okay, this is actually one of the only
sports figures I know.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
Yeah, me too. And he's turned into a maga guy,
which sucks, but no, yeah, and he started making the
shittiest rye anyway. So I had a subway pass I
used to go down and bring her my stories and
then she would put the writers who she thought were
kind of compatible into writing groups. So, you know, seven
or eight years later, she put me in a writing
group with Carl Schrader, and then eventually that group included
(05:14):
people like Peter Watts and Alan Weiss and a bunch
of other you know, science fiction writers from the city,
from the region, and it was just one of many
different groups that she'd started. We were all kind of
Judy's kids. I went to work at the science fiction
bookstore at Baca Books, which is the oldest science fiction
bookstore in the world, when I was about eighteen. That
store was started when she bullied a local fan into
(05:35):
opening a science fiction store. I sold my first story
to a Canada's science fiction magazine on Spec when I
was seventeen. That's a magazine that was starting.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
I seld it on Spec.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
No, this magazine was called on Spec. I did also
sell it on Spec. Like. They didn't commission it from me.
I sent it to them over the transom. Yeah, this
was how sharp fiction works. Yeah yeah, so or worked
changes from your to ear.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
But that magazine on Spec was founded by two fans
out west who she bullied into starting a science fiction magazine.
I edited a volume of the Testrax Canadian science fiction anthology,
a series she began. I worked on a Canadian science
fiction TV show as a consultant called Prisoners of Gravity
that was started by the people Who basically, like she
mentored when she was doing The Doctor Who Gig, It
(06:18):
was on the same public television network on TV Ontario.
She found this thing called Toronto Hydra that was modeled
on this New York thing that had happened during the
Golden Age where groups of writer would gather every like
six weeks for a potluck and you know, movable feast.
And so all the writers and editors and critics and
illustrators and filmmakers and TV people and everyone in Ontario
would get together, you know, like ten times a year
(06:40):
at this event that Judy started. So she was just
like a fucking machine. And she was you know, she
was an incredible writer and critic and editor. But like
her great contribution was this right that she created this system.
Even the weird alternative high school I went to had
this incredible writing workshop that I found out years later
Judy founded ten years before I got there through a
(07:00):
writers in the School grant, and it was modeled on Clarion. OK.
So when I got to Clarion, I knew how to
workshop because I had been doing Clarion workshopping at high
school through this world, and I spent seven years in
high school mostly because I just wanted to stay in
the workshop, like it was just she was just a
force of nature. So I always wanted to be a
fiction writer. Okay, as to like, do I think of
(07:21):
myself as a fiction writer or a nonfiction writer. I
am living in the very strange end stage of a
lifetime of removing all the Jenga blocks that weren't low
bearing from my life, such that every activity I engage
in now is something that cuts into multiple parts of
my life and work. So everything is doing double and
(07:43):
triple duty as an activist, as a writer, as a journalist,
as a novelist, and so it's very hard to like
kind of take one thing and say, oh, well, today
I'm doing fiction writing. You know. People say, like, how
do you know when it's time to write something up
as fiction or nonfiction? And I'm like, I usually do
both right, and usually what each one makes the other
(08:04):
one better. And sometimes they do them at the same time,
sometimes they do them in succession. They don't always come
in the same order. And so I'm both and not
only am I both, but they are inseparable now because
all the things that I used to do that would
have just been in service to fiction I've stopped doing
because I wanted to do more of the other stuff
in my life, and so I double down on the
(08:25):
things that serve more than one pillar, and at the
expense of the things that were uniquely about one thing.
I mean, right now, maybe the one thing I'm doing
that's very fictionee is there's a writer who I quite love,
who's incredibly problematic, who I'm convinced we can write stories
in his mode and rehabilitate his mode without the He's
(08:48):
a pulp writer from the fifties, and it's just like
super homophobic and super sexist and often very racist and whatever.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
Oh okay, it's not who I was guessing. I thought
that we were building up to Hinland. No.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
No, it's John D. MacDonald, the guy wrote Cape.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
Okay, I don't know it, who.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
Wrote seventy plus novels, including a couple of science fiction novels,
mostly hard boiled detective fiction. Travis McGee series is the
one he's best known for. I went on eBay at
the start of the summer and I bought everything from
someone selling like their dad's pulp collection, like seventy books
for seventy dollars, And I'm working my way through them
at the expense of books by people who I really
(09:25):
want to blurb and review, and I'm reading this instead,
and there's nothing in there that's in service to activism,
and in fact, the thing that really reminds me of
I once ran into a Werner VINGI at an event
in like August one year, and I was like, how's
your summer, and he said, oh, my god, I discovered
Terry Pratchett at the start of the summer, and not
(09:46):
since I was ten have I discovered a new writer
at the start of a summer where I could read
a new book by them every.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
Day, Right, Terry Pratchett would be that.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
And that's what I'm doing. I'm reading a new Pratchett
novel every day this summer.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
That's amazing.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Forty one Discworld novels, plus twenty plus and stillary other books.
And so yeah, Verner was just like working his way
through the cannon. And that's sort of what I'm doing
with John Dy McDonald, because the lesser books are really lesser,
but each one has like one or two just like
fabulous moves. He's got so many great moves. He was
Stephen King's favorite writer when he died. Stephen King tried
(10:21):
to convince the son to let him out this race,
like he's so many writers, favorite writer, but oh my god,
Like I'm reading a book now where he's like trying
to figure out who's murdering a bunch of people, and
one of them is a woman who's been killed, who
it turns out has been the lover of a woman
who we learned as a lesbian. And he goes out
to see this woman. It turns out she has been
the lover of this lesbian who was killed in an
(10:43):
earlier scene, and she is in with the butches, and
like the description of the butches, because I'm listening to
it on audio. I was like in the pool and
I'm just like doing my laps and listening to this
just fucking surreally, like just like it's like he had
a catastrophic brain injury between the previous chapter and this one.
(11:05):
It's so stupid, so bad, and it's sandwiched between two
amazing chapters, like beautifully constructed, beautifully written chapters, and it's
just like what the fuck, John? And so I'm working
my way through and making so many notes about like
I'm just gonna steal all the good moves right and
leave the shitty ones on the side of the road.
(11:26):
And I'm gonna I'm writing a pulp novel right now
called Once His Enemy Action, which is like a Bond
reference because three times his Enemy Action and Bond.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
Oh yeah, okay.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
And I'm just like, I'm finding so many little grace
notes I just want to fucking steal, and I'm just
stealing them like crazy. Is this gonna be so good?
So I'm just loving it.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
So this brings up a thousand things for me. But
the idea of taking a pulp mode and applying it
to the activist fiction or you know, there's a lot
of words that all sound bad. Activist fiction sounds bad,
Didactic fiction sounds bad. There's no way of saying like
fiction that gets across ideas that doesn't sound bad, except
science fiction. But like when I cite when I talk
(12:14):
about didactic fiction, like fiction that is meant to teach
a lesson. The people I reference are you, Lagwin Butler
and Heindline.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
Holy shit, that's good company to be in.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
And I think you do it the most like Heinland. Okay,
just to inside Baseball. But I don't mean this badly.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
No he's good at it. He's got such shitty ideas
and he makes them sound so reasonable.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
Right, right, totally, And so for anyone who doesn't have
any fucking clue what we're talking about. When writers try
to write about ideas, there's a lot of ways you
can do it. You can drape it in metaphor that
Laguin I think is a master of. Sometimes Lagoin's very literal,
but like you know, sometimes the entire book is a
specific metaphor things like that. You can also be really
(12:57):
fucking direct and hindline and you and I actually might
be pronouncing Highlight's name wrong, but I've read more books
by him than any other author because my dad was
really into him.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
No, it's timely.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
Like I remember you wrote a book called was it Pirates? No,
it was the one about for the Win.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
For the Wind. I thought you wrote a book for
the Wind. I'm like, this is going to be for
the Win.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
And that's your most didactic But possibly so if you
ever want to read a book that just explains capitalism
and how it works by way of people who play
World of Warcraft, who gold farm, which is a thing
that people used to do for a living, especially not
in America. If you want to hear about gold farmers
unionizing and how capitalism works, read for the Win by
(13:40):
Cory Doctro, And you do it. It's not seamless. That's
the thing that's interesting to me about it. Right, You're like,
here's an aside about how capitalism works, about how like
money works, how different exchanges work. But it never bores
the reader. Sure right. You don't switch to an essay mode.
You switch to a dactic fiction mode. And I think
(14:02):
that you do this better than almost any other author.
Is one of the reasons I wanted to talk to
you about it. I wanted to talk to you about
you know, kind of it's the big meta question. It's
the giant question like how do you use fiction to
unfuck the world? Or how do you use fiction to
ask the question how do you unfuck the world? And
what leads you to different methods of talking about this
(14:23):
stuff in your fiction.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
We have these these alleged rules in fiction writing like
show don't tell. Yeah, And I think show don't tell
is actually advice, not a rule, and it's advice for
a thing that's not working. So we never really know
why fiction works. Like there's something foundationally irrational in the
process of enjoying fiction. Right, you're reading about someone who
(14:46):
you know doesn't exist, but you're experiencing empathy for them,
which is like not a it's not a reasonable thing.
It's like, facially, it's it's kind of stupid right to
experience empathy for things that don't exist. Like, it's one
thing to experience empathy for even like an a animal
or an ecosystem or whatever, but for an imaginary thing weird, right,
And so we don't always know, like we don't understand
(15:07):
exactly what's going on, and so when we encounter something
that doesn't work, we make guesses about why it's not
working or how to make it better, which are often
two sides of the same coin. So one thing we
know about fiction is that it is much easier to
get a reader in the mode where they experience empathy
(15:28):
for imaginary things that they know don't exist when you're
using drama. Yeah, and there's something about that that kind
of triggers the kind of empathy response that then makes
the esthetic work of the fiction start to happen. But
notice I said it's easier to do it that way,
not that doing it in other ways. Not that being
(15:48):
discursive or expository is bad. It's just hard, right, right,
So like if you were, like, if you're trying to
do like a dance routine, say my kid is a
com headitive dancer. She's on a hip hop dance team.
So there are aspects of the choreography as they're getting
closer to the competition where they'll go, this trick would
(16:09):
be amazing if we could pull it off, and we can't,
and better to do a less impressive trick better than
this impressive trick. Badly, the judges will like it better.
And I think that if you're critiquing someone's fiction, right,
if you're an editor, or you're in a writing circle
or critiquing circle, or if you're instructing someone. I was
your clarion instructor at one point. Ye, then you encounter
(16:30):
something that's not working, you go through it and you're like, well,
there's this like giant chunk of exposition here. And it's
not that this giant chunk of exposition could not be
made to work. I just don't know if this writer
can make it work, or you know, like I don't
know how to tell them how to make it work.
So I'm going to say, stop trying to do this
fucking hard thing and do an easier one. Right, But
(16:51):
exposition that works, Holy shit, it's great. Right. We still
read fucking Moby Dick, a book that's just about like
exposition about whale hunting, right, it's a techno thriller about
whale hunting.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
Yeah, Kim Stanley Robinson will make me read about landscapes
in it Arctica.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
And Mars totally.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
Now I look at geography different because I have read
hundreds of pages of that man.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
One hundred percent. So yeah, So, like there's so much
of this right in genre, and genre is not afraid
to do it, you know, like if genre has a
thing that a move that doesn't want to make because
it doesn't want to bore you, right, right, which like
there's boring fiction that's really good, right, Like there's lots
of plotless kind of character study fiction. It's very subtle
(17:33):
and whatever that you know, science fiction, fantasy, pulps, thrillers.
We just don't want to try doing it right. That
is fucking hard to do well, to be boring and interesting,
Like it's it sounds like a contradiction until you find
someone who does it well, and they're like, oh, I
just like, boy, I just like I read this whole
thing and when I was done, I just felt like
I've been knifed in the guts. And I no, I
(17:55):
didn't never saw the blade, and I just don't know
where it came from. And like, yeah, with genre, you
always know where the blade is, right, there's a great
will and give some bit. Where he's interview in the
Paris Review about writing science fiction, He's like, I'm in
a lineage with dash ol Hammett. I'm a pulp writer.
I can plot. My tractor has wheels on it when
I you know, like I sit down to write a
(18:18):
story and I get that thing in gear and it
just starts to fucking move. And that's who I am,
and that's how I write. I might be florid, I
might be poetic, I might do all this other stuff,
but I am a plotting writer, and I'm a genre writer.
I'm a plotting writer too. There's always a lot of
stuff happening, but it might have exposition, and you know,
you want to rate a plot. He writer read Neil Stevenson, Right,
(18:40):
this is a guy who's got so much stuff, but
also a guy who's never afraid to do exposition. Right,
there's a bit in cryptonomcons sixty three hundred words about
eating cereal that is so interesting and cool, and I'm like,
I just want that expanded to full novel length, right,
like write his thesis about eating Captain Crunch, which like,
it's so good and unless a writer could never pull
(19:02):
it off. And Stevenson, especially as early books, they've got
problems right there. Every book is flawed in some way
or another, right, right, he got a lot of shit
for his endings.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
I think writing a novel is the hardest thing I've
ever done, huh. And then I keep doing it and
it's like, but why do I keep doing this thing
that's impossible?
Speaker 2 (19:17):
Right?
Speaker 1 (19:18):
Which actually I don't mean to completely derailue, but that's
actually how activism feels. Is this thing where you like,
you can't do it right. I've always suspected parenting is
like this, you can't get it right, but you have
to do it. And novel writing always feels that way
to me, because it's like there's just actually too many
things happening in order to get it perfect.
Speaker 2 (19:40):
Aspiring to make no mistakes as stupid, aspiring to learn
from your mistakes is great. Yeah, you know, like there's
that line in Bird on a Wire that Leonard Cohen line,
I swear by this song and by all that I
have done wrong, you know, like, yeah, yeah, you know,
it's just it's such. It's like in love and parenthood,
in art, in activism, you'll never you'll never get everything right,
(20:02):
but like you can aspire to make new mistakes rather
than the same ones over and over again. And you know,
I think that's what makes groundhog Days such a great movie.
Is like watching someone like systematically approach making better mistakes,
although he does eventually get perfect, which I think is silly. Yeah,
but it makes the story. It gives it a nice
happy ending, puts it.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
It's stuck in the plot, you know, you like, you
have to get perfect in order to get out of
it or whatever. So any given problem you're trying to
cover and for people aren't used to your work you
cover like surveillance and technology and climate change and more
recently I've seen you talking a lot about AI and stuff.
(20:42):
But like, what works better? What do you communicate better
through fiction versus nonfiction? Like what are some of the
advantages of fiction?
Speaker 2 (20:51):
I mean, fiction is like it's the fly through the
architects rendering of the emotional state of what things will
be like if we let them get worse or if
we make them better. So, you know, the architect designs
your new house, they make the architects rendering, then you
fly through it and you get a sense of what
it would be like to inhabit that house. Yeah, And
(21:13):
the dystopia is like if we let this go on,
And the utopia is what if we do something different?
And you know, it's so hard to feel what things
might be like if they're better. You know, there's a
famous Marx quote about like not writing recipes for kitchens
that haven't been made yet, right, And I think that,
like science fiction is often about writing recipes for kitchens.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
That haven't been made yet.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
You know, like, what would it be like to live
in this if we were different? And you know, I
think that, like I can say as a matter of
policy advocacy that so I should say. I've worked for
the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is the most important and
most established digital rights group in the world. I've been
there for nearly twenty five years as an activist, and
(21:58):
I am cursed with object permanence which means that I
can remember the policy fights we had twenty five years
ago where we said, if you do X, why is
going to happen?
Speaker 1 (22:08):
And then they happen.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
So now that we're living in why I can go
like this is because we did X, right, because these policymakers,
these advocates whatever, they did it and like we shouldn't
do that again. It's very frustrating having object permanence among
people who don't even the people who lived through it,
but also the people who didn't now get why it
sucks to be old because you're surrounded by people who
(22:31):
didn't see the mistake the last time and want to
make it again. But like all my friends who are
like AI sucks, so we need more copyright, I'm like, dude,
like crawling the internet is theft. Fuck off, Crawling the
internet is not theft. That is how we killed Aaron
Swartz is calling crawling the internet theft? Yeah, shut out
about this stuff, right, ye, Like we have a labor issue,
(22:52):
we don't have a copyright issue. We've expanded copyright for
forty five years, and we are poorer and our bosses
are richer than they've ever been. And it's because like
we have more to bargain with, but because we have
no bargaining leverage, it's just more to bargain away, Like
giving us more copyright is like giving a bullied kid
extra lunch money. There isn't an amount of lunch money
that advises us to lunch. Right. We need labor rights,
(23:13):
we need solidarity. We don't need another alienable right. Like
an alienable right only makes sense if you really think
that you're an LLC with an MFA, right, like if
you think you're a small business bargaining with another business.
But we're not. We're workers, right, and so we need
to think in terms of labor rights, not in terms
of copyrights. So it's very frustrating right to I've lived
through this. And sometimes with fiction you can say the
(23:36):
world we're in now did not have to be this way.
We could have a different world. You can say the
stinging rebuke that vulgar Thatcherism deserves, and you can say
there is no alternative is a thought stopping cliche intended
to extinguish the imagination. It's really a way of saying,
stop thinking of alternatives. And when you write the alternative,
(24:00):
like when you write the recipe for the kitchen that
hasn't been built. You create like the imaginative space to say,
lots of recipes could be cooked in this kitchen. Yeah, right,
Like I always say this, the most important thing about
the technology is not what it does, it's who it
does it for and who it does it too. This
is Bill Gibson's version of the street finds its own
use for things, right. And you know, I know this
(24:23):
is not what Audrey Lord meant. But you know so
many people say, oh, you can't dismantle the master's house
with the master's tools. Why are you talking about using
the internet for anything good? Obviously that's not what Audrey
Lord meant. She was talking about patriarch blah blah blah
blah blah. But right, this idea that, like the tools
we have are steeped in so much sin we shouldn't
try to use them, it's so anti Promethean, it's so
(24:44):
anti leftist, right, Like, you know, this idea that like
every peasant should live like a lord is like the
idea that excites me about Leftism, not the idea that
it'll all live like peasants. Like fuck that noise, right, right,
And so like I'm really interested in the Promethean project
of stealing the nonsense from Elon Musk because he didn't
(25:04):
invent it, right, he did like built it. Yeah, workers
built it. The fact that he like capitalized it or
jack you know, uh, directed it, that doesn't change the
fact that it came from workers and that workers made it,
and that it's it is the people's technology to use
and choose. And the fact that it's the master's house
(25:25):
doesn't mean that it wasn't built by the.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
Right the people's house. He's just the master's squatting it basically,
and like yeah, yeah, Like I think, like there's one
thing to hit over and over is that lunites didn't
hate technology.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
Yeah. Sure, they loved machines. That was their thing. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
They were like, no, I prefer working in a cottage
to a factory.
Speaker 2 (25:45):
Yeah. Well, and also like I want machines that produce
good outputs and not bad ones. But we're going to
adopt this new technology. Let's have the people who are
the technologically skilled workers, which is, you know, to be
his textile worker. In pre industrial Revolution England, you need
a seven year apprenticeship r right. It was like doing
a master's in mechanical engineering at mit. They were the
most skilled machine workers in the world at the time,
(26:06):
and the law at the time said that new machines
had to be built and deployed with their co determination,
and they were insisting on enforcement of these laws, which
were instead jettisoned, and the machines that existed at the
time made extremely bad cloth among all the other problems
they had, right right, the fabric of the industrial revolution
that the Industrial Revolution produced was bad. Oh so a certification,
(26:29):
it was a sertification, yeah, yeah, yeah, And it was
a certification in lots of ways. So like one of
the reasons that the mill owners loved the new generation
machines is they were quote so easy a child could
use them. And there just happened to be these war orphanages,
Napoleonic warorphanages in London filled with children who were kidnapped
and indentured to work in the dark satanic mills of Manchester.
(26:50):
You know, this was like we actually, like one of
the great forgettings we've had is like how central the
Luddite cause became to the conception of labor and science fiction.
So Mary Shelley was a Luddite sympathizer. Frankenstein was a
lutdite allegory about what happens when you let capitalists decide
or entrepreneurs decide which technology we're going to use and
(27:12):
how it's going to be used without any say from
the wider society. Yeah, her husband, his maiden speech in
the Lords was a pro ludite speech. Right. Science fiction
was invented to advance the cause of Luddites, right, Yeah,
but not just that. There was one of the children
who was kidnapped to work in the factories after his
tenure of indenturies survived, and he wrote a memoir. His
name was Robert Blinkoh, it's called The Memoir of Robert
(27:33):
Blinko's a giant English bestseller. One of the people that
influenced was Charles Dickens, who used it as the basis
for Alliver Twist, which is Luddite fanfic.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
I love the strings across the board. I love the
fact that everything we try to teach history as these
like concise separate things. Sure, and this is so completely
untrue and it separates us, yeah, from where we come from.
That like, yeah, like no science fiction being invented to
advance the ltte, Cause this is not a thing that
gets discussed, you know, or even you're talking about coming
(28:04):
up in a science fiction where like you're talking about
this woman who built so much of the infrastructure that
underlies modern science fiction, and that y'all were sort of
family friends because both your parents are radicals.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
Like I remember she was radical and my parents were radicals.
She was my parents' generation.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
Yeah right, right, sorry, yeah, like family friends. Yeah, And
but that's not People have this like stodgy idea that
science fiction was this, you know, fundamentally conservative thing, because
often conservative stuff tends to linger longer. I don't entirely know.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
And John W. Campbell was a fucking fascist who's the
most important editor in the field.
Speaker 1 (28:41):
Right, So it's like it's not like all science fiction
was inherently liberatory and good and you know whatever. But
like I remember getting introduced around a convention and you know,
being introduced like, oh, you have to meet Margaret. She's
an anarchist and like writers whose works I've read, like
one of them was like, oh, me too, and I
(29:01):
was like I had no idea, huh. But so there's
this whole legacy. Okay, I remember when I first started,
Actually you were the one of the people who told
me this. When I went to Clarion West was just
six weeks writer's boot camp in twenty fifteen, and Corey
was one of my instructors there, and I remember I
was coming in and being like I had actually even
published some stuff, but always with radical presses. And I
was like, I don't know, my stuff might be too
(29:23):
radical for mainstream presses, and you were like, no one cares, Like,
that's not going to stop you. The quality of your
pros might stop you, right, And it's not because science
fiction is inherently leftist either, although I would say that
the editors at modern science fiction magazines is probably skewed progressive.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
Certainly what the right would tell you, well, they're.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
Like they're underpaid people who love books, and they're really
well educated and really poor. You're probably a progressive or
left right. But science fiction like has fascists and radicals
going all throughout it, like it's.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
Yeah, no total I mean the Futurians, which was this
like polyamorous leftist science fiction group house that Judy Merrill
and Fred Pohle lived in along with Sam Kornbluth and
a bunch of those other people. They were banned from
attending the first Hugo banquet for being two left very famously.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
Okay, so that is actually huh okay.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
Yeah, so this fight is as old as the as
the modern genre as we understand it.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
There are two great books about this. One is Damon
Knight's The Futureians. Damon lived in the Futurian House.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
Two.
Speaker 2 (30:27):
Damon was my clarion instructors. The guy wrote many many
things found in science fiction writers of America, but if
you're a Twilight Zone watcher you'll know him for two
Serve Man that was his Yes and Mary to Kate Wilhelm,
another great figure in the field. The other is Judy
Merrill's autobiography, which won the Hugo Award, which she co
wrote with her granddaughter Julia Paul Weary, which is called
(30:47):
Better to Have Loved. And they are really two very
different accounts of the same events, and they're great to
be read one against the other. They're terrific, terrific books.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
Okay, well, I think this is probably where we should
end episode one. But when we come back, I really
want to talk to you about how to unfuck the world.
Some of your ideas about unfucking the world. The book
The lost cause, changing our conceptions of what it means
to protect the environment from don't build anything, to build
high rises and all kinds of really challenging but really
(31:21):
important ideas. But do anything you want to plug? What
have you been working on? What's your latest stuff?
Speaker 2 (31:26):
I mean, the latest book is The Reverse Centaur's Guide
to Life After AI. It's a nonfiction book about being
a good AI critic. It's doing super well. If I
can toot my horn here, I just got an email
saying it's the for the sixth consecutive week the best
selling paperback nonfiction book in Canada.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
Oh wow.
Speaker 2 (31:44):
It was a debut on the New York Times List.
It's selling well everywhere, so it's doing great. The book
before that was called in Shitifications, book about how tech
platforms go bad. Paperback's about to come out. I had
a call with the publicist marketing people. They've had massive
orders for the paperback, so it's looking like it's going
to do really well. It's going to be a Hudson bookseller.
So the Hudson has originally said, oh, we won't take
(32:06):
a book that has the worst shit on the cover.
They're the ones in the airport. We won't take a
book that has the word shit in the cover, and
now they've taken a giant order. They keep calling every
couple of weeks increasing the order, and the word in
shitification just made it into the Oxford English Dictionary, which
is definitely a bucket list item.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
Yeah. That I also love that. Like, that's the thing
about capitalism is that, like they'll be like, oh, we
don't do that, and you're like, look, this sells, and
they're like, you know what, Yeah, you could publish your
book about hanging us. It sells. I'll want to hear it.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
Yeah. Yeah, And then you know, as I said, I
work for the Electronic Printier Foundation e FF. Dot orger
is where we find out more about our work where
a member supported nonprofit. Beyond writing us a check and
joining you, there's lots of ways you can get involved,
and if you join our email list, we will tell
you about them all the time, things that are local
to you, things that are national and international. And then
my newsletter is pluralistic dot net Open Access Creative Commons attribution.
(32:57):
I write five or successays a week there and they
are a CC attribution, which means that you can take them,
share them, sell them, dapt them all without my permission.
Just cite the license, cite the original, and note if
you've modified it.
Speaker 1 (33:11):
Hell yeah, all right, Well that'll do us for today,
But when we come back Wednesday, we're going to talk
about more of all of this stuff. Cool People Who
Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit our website
Foalzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the Fiord
(33:33):
Radio app, app a Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Margaret Killjoy
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