Nobody Remembers The Real World: Guests Talk On "The Escher Man"

Cyberpunk is back, and we're discussing "The Escher Man", with SPFBO semi-finalist Sarah K Balstrup, FanFi addict reviewer Charlie Cavendish, and the author himself, T.R. Napper.

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SOME OF THE PAPERS AND BOOKS MENTIONED:

• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38694651/
• https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22522805-the-buried-giant
• https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59808603-the-mountain-in-the-sea
• https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54120408-klara-and-the-sun
• https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/63183008-the-way-of-unity

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Isn't reality what the majority remembers?

(00:03):
Isn't reality what the collective believes it to be?
This is one of the many poignant questions around memory
presented by a masterpiece of Australian cyberpunk.
I'm talking about The Asher Man by T.R. Napper.
Let's get this book undone.
["The Asher Man"]
["The Asher Man"]

(00:23):
["The Asher Man"]
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Books Undone.
I'm your host, Livia J. Elliott,
and today we are back with a guest talk
to discuss one of my highlight reads of the year,
The Asher Man by fellow Oshi T.R. Napper.
We have several guests, so let me introduce you to them.

(00:46):
Hi, my name's Sarah K. Baustra,
and I'm an Australian ABC author,
and I have a background in religious studies,
so I'm very interested in the nature of consciousness
and all these kind of interesting sci-fi things,
so I'll leave it at that for now.
Yes, well, I'm Charlie Cavendish,
part-time reviewer, full-time reader, I suppose,

(01:06):
and more recently I've joined the four beardsmen
of the Bookpocalypse, which includes a number of other authors,
and so we're slowly icking our little sphere in this world
and just trying to have some fun, interview people,
and do a bit of role-play games as well.
We also have the author himself, T.R. Napper.
Tim, thank you so much for being here again.

(01:28):
Thank you.
Is this our third time?
No, yes.
Yeah, second.
Okay, thank you for inviting me back again.
It's good to see Charlie and Sarah.
So before we get started, let me tackle some disclaimers.
There are spoilers in this podcast.
We will not hold back,
and so I recommend that you listen with caution.
If you are keen on knowing more about the Escher Man,

(01:50):
but you want to avoid the spoilers,
I did a spoiler-like solo episode,
which you may be keen on listening.
Second, what you will hear is our subjective opinion,
and you may disagree.
It's fine.
We all have different opinions.
That said, let me begin with a question.
Tim, you mentioned plenty of times

(02:11):
that you wrote the Escher Man over the course of a decade.
Can you share a bit more about the process
and the research you did?
Well, it's an appalling process.
I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
And it's not really a process of what was foisted on me.
It was writing the book that took maybe,
I don't know, two or three years the first time around.
I think I started writing this book
when I was living in Vietnam.
I'm almost positive I was there.

(02:32):
So after, say, three years, I had a pretty good book.
Good enough to get an agent, but he couldn't sell it.
So I put it aside, actually, and then I wrote 36 Things,
because I'm obsessed with, obsessed,
or I should say, after Linh Thieu Vu stuck in my mind.
So I decided I had to write her story.
So I went five years back and wrote 36 Streets.
And then I went back to the Escher Man,

(02:53):
and then I reread the manuscript
with how many years we'll experience,
like four more years experience as a writer,
or five more years experience as a writer even,
and realized it was a good story.
I didn't think my craft was up to it.
And again, I think I talked about this in the last episode,
but from a technical perspective,
it's a difficult book to write,
because first person, unreliable narrator,
getting memory wipes,

(03:14):
and scene to scene doesn't necessarily know what's happening,
but also making that entirely explicable to a reader,
is, from a technical perspective, is really difficult.
Unreliable narrators are very difficult to write.
So I kept the story,
but I essentially did a lot of rewriting.
I added some scenes,
and given we're doing spoilers in this episode,

(03:34):
I did the whole section where he's having his memory wiped,
where he sees the birth of his child and it's wiped,
and then he sees he drops the cake on the floor,
and they're eating off the floor.
That's like 5,000 words, that was all new.
That was written nine years after I started writing it.
And it's one of the better sections, I think.
There's something about the ordinary, unusual things,
like eating cake off the floor.

(03:55):
You're not having them just do cliched things
like hugging each other and saying goodbye at school.
It's like the randomness of children
is what makes children fascinating,
and what makes them so lovable.
But that scene was also very different,
because throughout the entire book,
we'd see Endel doing like thousand stuff,

(04:18):
killing people and so on.
And in there, we see him as a human.
We see that other side,
that it doesn't matter whether he's a car man that kills
or anything else that he's on.
He's also a loving father.
Yeah, and these are the things that,
it had to be kind of unusual experiences
that would stick in memory.
So that's always thinking about
how the memory works as a function.

(04:39):
But the birth of the child,
it kind of based it on the birth of my child,
what happens in that scene.
And so there's like a, what is it?
The waters break and he gets drenched.
And that happened to me.
But then the copy editor, this is the best,
maybe one of the tippy top examples of mansplaining.
The copy editor had a really long comment in the side

(04:59):
of nearly a page at the side of the draft
saying how this was medically and physically impossible
to have this much liquid come out when the waters break.
It literally fucking happened.
I shot my wife and she thought it was hilarious.
As you know, I'm fascinated by the science of memory
and the function of memory
and the role memory has in their lives.
So I did an enormous amount of reading

(05:20):
during writing the El Levitin,
but particularly for the Eshoman.
And it spawned so many, it's more of this book,
but it spawned so many short stories as well.
I think the most recent book I've written,
a draft I just finished,
doesn't deal with memory for the first time,
but it's been a pretty constant theme of,
in terms of writing it, I think I was,
my process at the time was my son was one or two

(05:41):
and I was living in Hanoi
and I would write for two hours every day when he slept.
My partner was working and I was primary care.
So we'd hang out all the rest of the time,
but the two hours, and he always sleep for two hours.
So it was really good discipline to write then.
And sometimes late at night I'd write
when everyone was in bed.
So that were the two times I would write.
Obviously influenced by living in Hanoi,

(06:01):
influenced by, I used to spend a lot of time,
I used to go to Macau quite regularly to play poker.
Aside from memory, I'm fascinated by the gambling subculture
and the gambling world.
I find that quite fascinating as well.
So yeah.
So let me follow up with another question
and this one is for all of you,
because since you mentioned the gambling
and also the people that we have here,

(06:22):
a quote that I found very interesting is when someone says,
without memory, there is no morality, no constraints,
nothing but the perfection of the moment.
What are your thoughts on that?
In particular, in the relationship between memory
and morality as he presents it here
and how some people can just waste their lives,
sometimes gambling or committing crimes

(06:43):
without bothering about it.
I mean, the gambling part is quite interesting
because when you gamble, you are in the moment.
You're completely sort of abandoning all constraints.
You're throwing yourself into a kind of chaotic present
where you expect to win,
but it is a bit of a knife edge, that experience.

(07:04):
I mean, the protagonist in the book is definitely gambling
with his life and his family's life,
like through the entire book.
And he's afraid to invest in his memory
because then it will reveal to him the danger
that he's put them in and put himself in.
I think you're absolutely right, Sarah.
That sort of gambling is that suspending

(07:25):
the sort of usual constraints that people have
and that obviously then itself becomes addictive.
And I think you mentioned about memory and morality
is that if you're not having to,
it almost frees yourself from having to deal with that.
If I haven't got to remember it,
then there's no consequences to those actions.
And also by addressing that memory,
you're saying, well, I'm gonna take those,
I'm taking that on board,
take ownership of what I've done.

(07:47):
What you said made me think, Charlie,
because it's like Endel during the book,
he actually gambles with his identity
because at some point it's mentioned
that if he keeps being erased,
he will lose who he is and just become that memory drone.
I think it's more than just his life,
it's the identity or his own nature, his own being,

(08:07):
what he's been gambling throughout the book.
Yeah, very much.
And even early in the book,
I know that sort of almost as a second section
when it's just to being with his family,
you can see that change in personality almost immediately.
Now, the first few chapters,
we're in this hard, you know, enforcer, no real care.
It's just sort of, and then something when he starts
to get some of that memory back and realize that,

(08:28):
you know, he does have this family and you can sort of see
that sort of real softening in a way
of that hard-man exterior and you start to see
the character underneath.
I thought that was really effective, you know,
quite powerful, yeah.
Everybody, you know, it's not like you have a static self
that you show to every person in every situation.
I mean, we all have these sort of different aspects

(08:50):
that come out in different situations
that are sort of triggered by the situation.
And also I thought it was really interesting later
in the book how, you know, you really see the way
that the self is extended into others
by the way that other people and their memories
of how you are and what you do are actually sort of a part
of this collective cultural memory that most people

(09:11):
in modern society just don't really think about.
They think, oh, I'm an individual, I do what I want.
You know, I don't affect other people,
people don't affect me, but we're actually a lot more
sort of interdependent than that.
There is something very interesting
based on what you mentioned, Sara,
it's this whole scene in which he goes
after he gets the memories from his wife,
remember trying to build himself up.

(09:33):
He goes to the bar and then he gets incredibly upset
when the other women are being harassed
and he realizes that he's actually reacting
based on the memories of his wife.
I found that hilarious because on the one side,
it was a very woman-like reaction, like the one he had.
And at the same time, it was very interesting

(09:54):
how the memories of what we have been going through
in our lives will change our reactions
because he mentions it at that point
that he wouldn't have even done that before.
And then their situation ends up with them saying like,
I love your nails to the other one.
That was a good thing, yeah.
So he's in a feminist came out.

(10:14):
Yeah, but it's also, at some point,
I was wondering like how much of Fendel
is actually acting in that scene
or how much is his wife acting through him,
the memories of his wife guiding his actions,
because he had just dumped her memory into him.
Yeah, that was a tricky one to write.
And it was tricky.

(10:35):
See, this is why this bloody thing took so long
because when you've got an unreliable narrator
and then you've got to give him a portion
of someone else's memories and wonder how he'll behave.
And so he does that.
I've forgotten that bit, but yeah, he gets angry.
But then later on, there's a more,
well, that's consequential,
but later on there's a more consequential scene
where they blame people for a car bombing,

(10:56):
the Chinese military, the military police.
And usually he would just walk by,
but then his wife's offended
about how China's behaving in Vietnam.
His wife's, or she would be in her memory.
And so he does something,
that's how he ends up getting imprisoned
and that's how he ends up getting caught up with the revenge.
I think he said something like, we Chinese,
which I thought was quite interesting,
like that's not how we Chinese behave.

(11:18):
And this is an Australian guy saying that.
And like, it's almost as if it's been that memories.
As if his wife were talking, yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, yeah, so I thought it was interesting.
Good scene, yeah.
Later on, the admission, it cleans it up,
which was a relief for me as a writer,
because I had to keep thinking about that,
what she'd think in every scene.
But then the admission, it cleans up his memories.
And so he remembers certain events still,

(11:39):
but he doesn't remember things independent of him.
A dyadic memory, I think that's what it's called,
is a thing.
And so this is an experiment any of you can do
and any listener can do is,
dyadic memories when you,
with a partner or old friend or whomever it is,
you can sit down and talk about an episode in your life.
And you can say, I remember this.
And then they'll say, I remember this.

(12:00):
And sometimes they might jog your own memories
and unearth them.
Sometimes you'll have misremembered,
but you'll come out of it with a more,
with a stronger understanding of that event in your past.
But in that sense, this is kind of a version
of the way your memories can extend beyond the self,
or that the self is not just contained
in the body necessarily.
It extends to others and their experiences of you.

(12:22):
So yeah, I mean, dyadic memory is something
that I've thought about and the way,
and the way as part of our identity.
But I also, of course, I think it comes up in this,
but it also comes up in my other work,
which is the memory of the body and the memory of feeling
and the memory of smell, for example,
all these things,
because I think about uploading brains into a neural net.
But what do we lose if we lost our body?

(12:42):
There's this sense that this is meat space
and some people are quite contemptuous of the body,
but I think our humanity is bound up in it.
I just, coincidentally, this is,
I wasn't doing this as prep for this.
Someone sent me an article about memory in the heart,
and people who get heart transplants
start to get the memories of the first person
who have the heart.
So this is a peer-reviewed study.
This isn't just a speculative what if.

(13:05):
So I'll read a little bit,
because I just happen to have it on my screen.
Studies indicate that heart transplant recipients
may exhibit preferences, emotions,
and memories resembling those of the donors,
suggesting a form of memory storage
within the transplanted organ.
And then later on, the heart,
I don't know how, but the heart can store memories
in a similar way that the brain can store memories.

(13:25):
It's fascinating.
And so I'm gonna, this is something that,
I just said I'm not gonna write about memory anymore,
but someone sent me this article.
The point is that we still don't understand memory,
we don't understand consciousness,
and we don't really understand the self.
Fundamental things to being a human, all those.
And yet the scientific basis for, say,
free will of consciousness is so weak.

(13:45):
And so we're still so far away from really understanding it.
Like if you said, where does consciousness reside?
Well, where does it reside?
Because if you have dyadic memory,
is your part of your consciousness another person?
Is part of your consciousness in your heart?
You know what I mean?
But you can't even say where consciousness comes from.
This is the sort of stuff I get excited about.
I can't even remember the original thing
we were discussing.

(14:06):
We were talking about the shared memories.
Oh, and the gambling.
Sarah made a point about, a really good one,
about gambling being kind of an eternal present.
I hadn't thought of that before, but it's true.
It's true.
Everything disappears.
Like I play poker, which I don't consider gambling
because it's a school game.
But when you see people at the casino,

(14:27):
they're totally lost in that moment.
They're lost in this eternal present.
There is no future, there is no past.
It's just those guys bouncing across the felt,
or whatever it may be, or the ball and the roulette wheel.
There's a saying in gambling,
that the next best thing after gambling and winning
is gambling and losing.
The point is, it's not the winning or losing,

(14:48):
it's the gambling.
And it's that experience of being in that eternal moment.
So it was interesting from Sarah.
And yeah, and so the other point I would write down
is about the dyadic memory.
When we were mentioning that part at the end,
when he gets the memories pushed,
and he starts remembering,
he remembers and he also sees the memories

(15:10):
being deleted, but at the same time,
Endel has this denial and he starts saying,
the omissionary, don't take this away,
don't take this away,
especially the part of the child that is born.
And after he's basically cleansed
and has a new memory being,
he still has a instinct, like he still has a worry.
And when he is told that he had a wife and children,

(15:34):
or a family with a very big war,
kind of like he remembers the feelings in a very abstract way,
even though he truly doesn't remember anything
because he was cleaned out.
I found that very interesting
because it's more of what you mentioned,
the fact that memory is more just than recalling
or what we have there.
In that whole scene, there was perhaps a clue

(15:54):
that something else within Endel remembered his family.
It's like a phantom limb,
you know, where people have limb removed,
they still feel like it's there.
So it's not there,
but there's this sort of suggestion
of something that used to be.
Yeah, I mean, I read a review recently when someone,

(16:15):
the reviewer said that it's about
a man's search for his own soul.
And I kind of like that because it goes to
what Livy is talking about,
which is, do we have an essence
that extends beyond our memory function?
Do we have an essence as a human being?
Is there some spirit within us?
And so a bit of that is like the scientific explanations
of shared memory and memory that resides in the body,

(16:36):
but something beyond that as well,
that science can't explain.
So this is a difficult thing to write about.
Now, science fiction is great
because science fiction has these great metaphors
for discussing the ineffable.
We can discuss contemporary issues and the do,
and we discuss philosophical issues,
but science fiction can talk about

(16:56):
what it means to be human and what is the soul,
these unanswerable questions, but it can approach them.
And memory wipes and so forth are kind of
one of the great metaphors that we have.
We can use for discussing that in sci-fi.
Well, and speculative fiction in general has great metaphors,
but this is one of the things that fascinate me.
It's kind of almost a spiritual question in a way,
because in a sense, Hendra dies, yeah?

(17:18):
In one sense, he dies when the memories are wiped
from him in the end of the second act,
but is he really dead?
You know, and that's a question that,
even though we're having a spoiler discussion,
that's for readers to think about rather than for me to say,
but yeah.
Also, his other life continues to live in his partner.
You know, what's her name?
This is Gia.

(17:39):
So she remembers all this stuff about their life together,
and it's like when he's wife,
she's just supplying all of this.
It's like, this is who you are.
You know, it starts to rebuild this part of his life
that he did actually live.
It's not false, but it's sort of like a parallel life.
And you know, depending on what is sort of

(17:59):
interacting with him brings up different versions of himself.
That's interesting because perhaps what she remembers,
it's, as you mentioned, just a fraction of Endel,
like what she saw of him.
And there is probably a lot she was missing
because when we see another person,
we don't see their internal thoughts, you know, all of us.

(18:20):
We shall see, as you mentioned,
that the starts are like just a fraction
that they present to a specific person.
And also we never really find out about his background,
which I thought was a nice choice.
It keeps it completely mysterious.
It's like, how did he, you know,
how did this Aussie get over there and become a gangster?
Like it's, there's these little bits, a few crumbs, but-

(18:43):
It's like another bit lost into the wipes of memories
that he had.
I found it very interesting that poor guy,
he's being told about himself throughout the entire book.
Like all the people seem to know him better
than he knows himself.
And as the plot goes,
like he keeps finding pieces of himself in other people,

(19:06):
you know, like they all knew him or a version of him
or his actions, and he doesn't.
It must be so stressing.
Well, I have to, you feel that there's a piece of you
slipping away and then you're getting it sort of represented
back to yourself.
It's a little bit like, oh, I don't know,
it's quite like that,
so when you hear yourself back on a recording or, you know,
I'd measure I'm a little bit new to doing these sorts of things.

(19:28):
And it took me a long time to actually listen to my first one.
I thought, oh, that's fucking bad.
Listen to myself.
And yeah, that's not me.
As you said, there's that thing of everybody, you know,
that you're in tracks with other people and how they view you.
And, you know, it's very rare that you'll,
unless they sort of tell you, but even if they tell you,
you're not experiencing it in the way that Endel does
with actually take, you know,

(19:48):
getting someone else's memory of yourself.
So that's sort of very extensive looking.
In a way, from a craft perspective,
the reader is discovering as well.
So it's kind of, if you do three know the movie Memento?
Yes, I noticed, I thought that was a nice easter egg,
the name of the bar quite early on, I think.
It was a memory business at the resort.

(20:09):
And he went into it when he went to Fairly Old
when he first arrived and the name of it was Memento.
I thought, oh yeah, I know what he's done there.
Oh, was it?
OK, well, that movie is great
because one of the things it does,
it goes and Nolan puts the story in reverse.
He does that so you experience the story as the protagonist
and suffering from the same amnesia.

(20:31):
And so I kind of tried to do a version that so,
and ultimately at some point in Diversion,
you know what's happening with Endel and he still doesn't.
But I did want to have scenes where people are saying,
well, you did this and you do that.
And he's like, what?
All right, I'm this person.
And it's sometimes, sometimes the reader knows,
but sometimes it's a surprise to the reader as well.
That's the tricky in the first person perspective.

(20:51):
You do want to some extent want to, if Endel's confused
and Endel doesn't quite know what's happening in a situation,
sometimes it's good to have that happen to the reader as well.
So you experience what they are.
So you have an empathy for them in any context when you're writing.
And feelings are easy to not easy to evoke,
but it's straightforward to evoke a sense of smell
or sense of taste or an emotion.

(21:13):
But the sense of confusion and the sense of thinking
that everyone else knows more than you do.
I try to put a little bit of that in for the reader.
So they're experiencing what he's going through as well.
And in terms of backstory, I think, about hinting at the backstory,
I had a, I won't tell you what the backstory actually is,
but at one point my editor said, I don't, what did he say?
The book's dark enough as it is.

(21:34):
If I hear his full backstory, it'll just, I'll just be too depressed.
So please don't tell me.
No, I think it's better unknown.
There's better unknown.
Actually, no, you're right.
Sometimes it's nice to imagine those sort of off-on-the-road,
you know, in a similar vein, in some book where you,
as you said, Tim, you're leading up to the reader
to interpret this song live, or what happened next, or, you know,
I read a couple of series where it doesn't end up with,

(21:55):
and then this happened, as like sort of they go off
and other adventures or other things could be happening.
And, you know, that's up to you.
So imagine where that might lead.
So I think doing it in reverse of how did you get here is part of that,
sort of, you know, the whole tapestry of the book
and the sort of spiralling of, you know, obviously, you know,
it wasn't a happy sort of coincidence that he's right there doing what he's doing.

(22:16):
You know, he probably wasn't a Boy Scout to start with.
Yeah, and I think it's interesting how generally,
I'm not talking about people who see themselves as gangsters,
but generally people don't think of themselves as being wrong or fundamentally bad.
Like most people can explain their own actions to themselves.
And I think it's interesting how, you know, a part of Ebbinghaus's job

(22:40):
requires him to kind of delete all of the kind of dark side of his personality.
Just for practical purposes, but for his purposes,
he just will not look at that side of himself.
If you're trying to figure out, like, what is a true picture of this character?
I thought it was really interesting that it is a sci-fi book and not just a book,
you know, set in a non-technological society,

(23:02):
because there's this idea that, you know, you can record with absolute fidelity,
like the truth with, you know, some kind of computer aided recording
and even things like nerve responses and, you know, like going beyond audiovisual.
Like you can kind of get beneath the skin and find out quite a lot about a person.

(23:24):
But even with all of that fidelity, it's like it seems more real,
the parts of him that are shared with other human beings
and just his kind of imperfect impression of himself.
In that note, something I found interesting is how everybody reacts different to that process.
We have people or characters within the book that they get the memory erased or replaced

(23:46):
and they seem not to care.
Like the reaction is like, yeah, probably I did the stuff.
They don't seem to have any depth to it.
But there is this whole scene at the start of the book in which Endel realizes,
like, the extent of everything that has been erased.
And he goes into a rabbit hole of what have I done?
What if I did this and that and that?

(24:07):
And that made me think that, again, perhaps there is something,
it's that it was a case of nature versus nurture, you know,
like his morality was so imbedding him that it couldn't be erased.
It was that part of him that couldn't be deleted.
And he kept worrying, you know, he still had that quote unquote, consciousness.
I think it's Lin particularly doesn't care.

(24:28):
And I think we started with your quote, I think the quote you used at the start,
that's Lin talking, I think, at the very start of this part.
So of course, that's explained, but that takes me a whole bloody book to explain
how she got to that point.
That's what 36 Streets is kind of about.
And when it's about, it's about, that's not quite true.
It's about a lot of different things, including collective memory and collective trauma.
But how she became that seemingly sociopathic,

(24:50):
so cold-blooded killer is even with Lin is quite complex.
Someone said that they read the books back to back 36 Streets,
so they're the Escher man.
And they said to me that Lin and Endel had reverse arcs.
Like she's going, she sort of arcs into this darker and darker place
where there's fewer and fewer memories.

(25:10):
And her morality, ultimately, we see where her morality ends up,
where she's kind of this living for the moment type thing,
or she's a revenge machine, if you will.
But Endel has the opposite arc or tries to go on the opposite arc.
He starts in this very dark place where he's just almost an Escher man
or a recall drone, but trying to get out.
Often you write something and then when you stand back and read it,

(25:33):
like after a nice long break, perhaps when you're editing,
you see all these patterns that you're thinking,
wow, how did they all get in here?
Because I didn't really plan them.
And you have all these sort of subconscious layers
that are product of all those books you read at the time
and all the different things that you were thinking.
And actually, I didn't know when we could talk about this,
but I wanted to understand a bit more about the influence of Ishiguro

(25:56):
on your thinking in this book or just generally,
because I know you dedicated the book to him.
He's an amazing author, my favourites, but I still haven't read,
I think I've only read five of his books so far.
But yeah, The Buried Giant, of course, is about memory
and there's always a lot of themes in there
that I think you could link back to your books.
Yeah, no, I love Ishiguro.

(26:17):
He'd be my favourite living author, I think.
But on the surface, we're completely different writers.
On the surface, I mean, like he's doing this very literary, slow-paced.
He does, he's a science fiction writer now, though.
You know, he wrote Clara and the Sun and then before that,
The Buried Giant and before that, Never Let Me Go.
So for 20 years, he's been a specfic writer.
So he's one of us, even though I don't...

(26:37):
But the establishment doesn't like that so much, they think.
Well, he's good, so it's not science fiction,
which is kind of an unfair moving of the goalpost anyway.
So in a way, the opposite writers, because he's very slow and not violent.
I'm very fast-paced and ultra-violent, for starters.
He's fascinating for me thematically,

(26:58):
but also from a craft perspective,
because thematically, he does unreliable narratives all the time.
And you slowly figure it out.
Even his first book, which I think is called A Pale View of Hills,
his first novel is an unreliable narrative.
And by the end of it, you're like, what the fuck is this person thinking?
It's such a... It's quite extraordinary.
And then you realise the whole time you've been in this deluded person's head.

(27:22):
For a long time, he was interested in memory, but unreliable memory,
but just in a very human way that we all have.
He's also very interested in the questions of service
and the sublimation of the self.
And that's what Remains of the Day is about,
but it's also what Clare of the Sun is about too,
which I don't necessarily talk about that, but that's one of his things.
The Buried Giant, Sarah, which you mentioned, is interesting for him,

(27:44):
because what he does differently there is,
for the longest time, he talked about individual memory.
But The Buried Giant is about collective memory.
What should we remember collectively as a civilisation?
Do we have a collective memory that is too dangerous to remember?
The idea in that book is that there was, I think there was a war,
and they lost a war, and it was a borderline genocide,

(28:04):
and this mist settled on the land and they forgot.
Should they remember that?
Because if they remember, war will start again,
because I need to get revenge.
So that was a really interesting idea, I think.
And he needed a fantasy novel because he needed a fantasy idea.
He needed magic for that to work.
And I kind of do that in 36 Streets, where it's...
Can we use the technology to collectively change a memory?

(28:27):
And this is Vietnamese memory about a war,
because if we can change a collective memory,
we can change the culture and change behaviour.
And then in the Eshaman, there's that village
where they're giving everyone the same memory,
all the Vietnamese people, again, to make them more pliable,
make them more accepting, and a kind of denial of the self
and denial of the collective community that's there.
As Sarah says, you write and then you look at what you've written,

(28:50):
and you go, oh, shit, I was really thinking about that at the time,
and I didn't realise.
But I think...
So Ishiguro's probably influenced me in that way,
thinking about memory.
But the other way, he's such a subtle writer.
Like, he doesn't...
He's not interested in obfuscating anything
with long words or impenetrable paragraphs.

(29:11):
He's deceptively simple in his writing.
But I love that every sentence is kind of layered,
and every piece of dialogue between characters is layered.
So there's always subtext,
and they're always saying more than one thing.
And that he conveys emotion in a way,
like he never says, Bill was sad,
or Bill was regretting a lifetime of serving an evil cause,

(29:33):
or whatever it might be.
It comes out in action, and it comes out in such subtle ways,
which is, for me, more compelling and more moving.
And that's the more general technical skill that I like.
I like the idea of having paragraphs and sentences
where there is subtext.
You're trusting the intelligence of the reader,
and you're kind of trusting yourself as a writer as well
to be able to pull that off.

(29:54):
So I love his work.
I loved his last book, Clara and the Sun.
I wish he'd bring out another one straight away,
but he's probably doing them every five to 10 years now.
I hope he writes another science fiction book, though.
I think in Clara and the Sun,
like, that's the one I've read.
Like, I read that quite a few years ago.
But, you know, most of the book
is focused in on these two characters.
And then just on the very periphery,

(30:16):
you have this hint of, like, what's happened to the world,
like this post-apocalyptic vibe.
It's so subtle, but it's so clear as well.
Like, I am, yeah, I really enjoy his work as well.
It's, you think, oh, you know, he's talking about this,
he's talking about that.
And then by the time you've finished,
it's just, the spell comes together,

(30:38):
and it has this kind of resounding impact
of all these things suddenly slotting into place.
I think we all wish we could write more like him.
Yeah.
In fact, I usually do a reread
of one of his books every year.
I haven't done it this year, so I might have to soon.
I feel like it's been a busy year.
I've barely read anything.

(30:58):
Something that you mentioned there,
I think it's quite common across the world that you created,
which is the addiction to technology
and how people are so addicted
to everything that's happening.
I found it funny in the Escher man
that everybody who gets asked a question about,
did that happen?
And they just go, I can't remember.
And they have to check on their memory implant.

(31:18):
At some point, it became funny in a sad way
because they were all so reliant on that.
Like, as you mentioned, Tim,
they were always hooked into the freeway
they have directly implanted.
You didn't touch it on this book,
but I was thinking like,
higher education in there has to be a myth.
Well, look at higher education now.
I work in universities,

(31:41):
but only as a casual doing mentoring and creative writing.
But I have some friends who are,
that's their profession, their academics.
It's dying.
Higher education is dying
because a friend was telling me the other day
when I had these couple of days off in Melbourne,
she's an academic.
She was talking about serious,
and this is so science fictional and so cyberpunk,

(32:02):
serious discussions about,
A, letting students use AI to write essays,
and B, letting AI mark the essays.
Think about that fucking cycle.
Where is the education anywhere?
It's like they can leave the money pot underneath.
That's all they care about at the moment.
Exactly, it's the money pot underneath.
It's also about the stress.

(32:23):
It's so much easier to get AI to write your essay
and not the stress why you have to put up in there,
and far less stress to market as well.
And I think that's also what we look for on social networks.
It's easy, less stressful, let's watch cut videos.
A society has to value memory and heritage

(32:45):
and all these sorts of things for it to have currency.
And I think this is the thing that the more corporatized,
the more media streaming our culture becomes.
Those things are not valued.
It's just your ability to kind of participate
in this fast streaming flow of information
and just keep up with it.
In that tone, I loved what you wrote in this book,

(33:07):
Memory Civilization.
I suppose it comes to you don't know history,
you're deemed to repeat itself.
And that's things that are cliched sometimes
for a reason, good or bad.
And I think that's true, whether it's memory
and sort of knowing of your culture
and what has gone before, I think is important.
When you look back, jump into history,
maybe look back across different cultures and millennia
and think there's, it's in general,

(33:27):
what was those people, what was driving them,
what was important to them?
And a lot of those things are still from 5, 3000 years ago
to now are still, well, then that,
because maybe that's part of that collective memory
that we've mentioned and touched on,
is that that innate humanity that sometimes gets hidden
in the modern world, the streaming or other things,
that how that connects us.

(33:49):
And I think we're in these times of,
we're very traumatic times, it seems,
although every year seems to get more and more so,
but it's like, there's that connectivity
that makes us human and that,
reaching out to somebody.
And I found that even just connecting
to the book community, you think with people
that you wouldn't have normally met,
otherwise we've got a lot of shared experiences
and a lot of commonality there.

(34:09):
And I think that, yeah, that memory does play a part
of that as well, perhaps in more sort of cultural memory, but.
It also affects history in some way,
because history, I see it as how people record the events
and perhaps events recorded like 3000 years ago,
we get one or two accounts.
And nowadays we can get people live streaming

(34:31):
what's happening and their reactions and their opinions
and the information that we get and how we build
that collective memory about the events is changing a lot.
So.
Yes, I think that's really good.
It's history told by the victors,
but yeah, if you could get the other side of things,
or yeah, it would be fascinating.
Or what if, I suppose, what else might have happened?
A kind of a post-war view of this sense

(34:53):
of having multiple histories that are true, yeah.
And I think that overall is a good thing.
So this is 36 Streets, but The Sorrow of War
is a novel that I referred to several times in 36 Streets,
which is a real novel written by a Vietnamese author.
But the point is that he, memory had been suppressed

(35:14):
in Vietnam of the Vietnam War,
and had been suppressed in one sense by Hollywood,
because the view of the Vietnam War was the American view,
and which was very dehumanizing to Vietnamese people
and treated them as these mindless fanatics
wearing black pajamas, charging at them
and getting gunned down.
But the Vietnamese government did the same thing,

(35:35):
but they did it from a different perspective.
They did it from the perfect socialist citizen
who's willing to die for the motherland
and prioritizes the state and the nation
and that ideal over their own lives.
What they never had was a human story
about the Vietnam War from the Vietnamese perspective.
What they didn't have was a true cultural memory.
The Sorrow of War came out and it was the biggest,

(35:57):
and still is the biggest selling novel of all time.
This is in the Vietnamese language in Vietnam.
Why?
Because it spoke of a truth, cultural and historical truth
about that conflict.
And it was that they are human beings
and they were deeply traumatized and it was a horrific war.
And so that sense going to what Charlie was saying
about multiple histories and multiple memories.

(36:18):
So this is a good thing, I think.
We can have a truth about the American perspective
and we can have a truth about the Vietnamese perspective
and a truth about the Vietnamese government.
And these are different truths.
What worries me, and this is what the S.M.N. gets at
in a way is memory that's a lie and histories that are lie
and the fragmentation of truth.
And we're living in that era.

(36:39):
It's not that now a postmodern perspective would be,
oh, we have multiple views of whatever war it may be
or of American history or Australian history.
That's fine.
But it's when we have these conspiracy theories
about ourselves or these wholly fabricated histories
and memories about ourselves, this is the dangerous thing.
And this where memory fragments

(37:00):
and our collective memories no longer
have any currency anymore.
Not that we have, we remember things in different ways
but people are believing things that are simply not true.
For example, I don't wanna talk
about American politics too much,
but that 30% of Americans that genuinely believe
the 2020 election was stolen, but was a fraud against Trump.
That's not reality and that's not a true memory,

(37:23):
but they all believe that.
And that's scary times.
These are scary times when there is no truth.
It doesn't take much to convince people,
I think is the scariest thing,
because often I see a ridiculous piece of information
and I think, oh, don't worry about it.
No one's gonna believe that.
And then five minutes later,
I hear those words coming out of a family member's mouth

(37:46):
and I'm like, you've been brainwashed.
Like why is this happening to the people I love?
And it's happened so much over the past few years
that I've become accustomed to it.
It is almost like a virus kind of flowing through people.
And when it's lost its purpose in society at the time,
people will just forget about it.

(38:07):
But while it's being pumped,
through the media on every level,
it animates people like they're little puppets.
And most people still believe they can think critically,
but how can you think critically
when you have no inputs of reliable information?
It is actually very difficult.
And it's also perhaps because social media

(38:27):
enhances some biases.
If a lie or a miscontrued truth gets popular,
it's in everybody's mouth.
And a lot of people will say like,
okay, if so many people are believing it,
it must be true.
Before we had the internet, before we had social media,
it was far more difficult for any lie
to achieve that stage.

(38:48):
Now everybody can quote unquote support a lie
by simply liking a post or retweeting it.
And then people start believing it
because it is everywhere.
And then it gets perpetuated by algorithms,
say, right, okay, you want to send me more of that.
And that's all you see.
That's all you see in your feed.
And you think, you know, I found one on Twitter,
I'm not gonna call X,
but when I first come,

(39:08):
there's a lot of posts through UK elections.
So there's all that sort of terrible, you know,
Boris Johnson and what happened in that country.
And having lived there,
obviously I keep passing interest in it.
And it was, I had to stop,
because all I was getting was
try to cleanse that timeline a little bit.
But yeah, you've got to be very critical about that.
And it's hard to be, because it's like,
what can you trust, you know,
compared to that memory, you know,
what's real and what isn't.
Well, exactly.

(39:29):
And this is again, is the kind of a cyberpunk idea
of a fracturing reality.
Garry Kasparov, who's a chess,
former world chess champion
and a fierce face critic of Putin said,
and he's not the first to say it,
I've heard it elsewhere, but he said recently
that the point of misinformation and disinformation
is not necessarily that you'll believe it,
although some people do.

(39:49):
Purpose is that you won't believe in anything anymore.
You won't believe in reality or truth anymore.
And if we get to a stage where
you don't believe anything a politician says
or a scientist says, or a news reporter says,
that's bad, because what you have then
is a situation where if there is no truth,
it becomes the loudest voice

(40:09):
and it becomes the most powerful.
Who's got the biggest megaphone?
And that kind of will matter the most
in a post-truth world.
So the kind of person, individuals we see
are like Elon Musk, who has now the biggest megaphone.
He retweets obvious nonsense all the fucking time.
And this guy's fallen for it,
but he's the perfect post-truth person

(40:30):
because he's the richest man in the world.
He's also a fucking moron
who just keeps putting this stuff out there
and it sticks.
In a post-truth world, what matters?
Money and megaphone.
And he's got both.
The problem is we've used words like oligarchy before
and we use words like genocide or oligarchy
or totalitarianism or dictatorship

(40:52):
and they're used so fucking easily.
And now we're in one, it doesn't have the same sting.
That word like America is an oligarchy.
But who fucking cares?
We've used that word so much.
Words have no meaning, reality has no meaning.
And so that is a very scary situation
where we're vulnerable to demagogue.
We're vulnerable.
Now the great demagogue is the algorithm.

(41:13):
Something that I found quite interesting
in this discussion is that even when we are bombarded,
we still have the choice not to believe or to believe,
depending on what we see.
In the book, they don't have.
And that's terrifying because they just get
the quote unquote truth implanted into their memory pins.
And that's far worse.
The loss of the choice, I mean,

(41:34):
on whether we believe or not.
Yeah, and they have this diamond heart.
Because our memories, us four in this conversation,
people listening, will, you think back on things
and memories are hazy and some things you're sure about.
And as I said, if you have someone else
to talk about with it,
that'll alter your memories of the experience.
And memory is a fascinating,
scientifically is fascinating because no memory is old.

(41:56):
Every memory is brand new.
So every time we remember something,
if you try and recall something now,
you are drawing through all of your life experiences since,
and it's gonna be layered and tinged with that.
You'll be writing it and it goes through a new neural pathway.
So memory is alive.
It's a vivid thing.
It's a living thing.
But in the book, you just have a playback.

(42:18):
You can go, boop, you can ask the AI and say,
what happened on this day?
Who won that argument?
Who was meant to put the bins out or whatever it is?
And it's there.
Oh my God, that would be horrible in a marriage.
It would be awful.
You just said this.
No, I didn't.
Yes, you did.
You'd be screencasting from your memory chip

(42:39):
onto the screen.
Look, there's you saying it.
There's that look on your face, the tone of voice.
Listen to it yourself.
Oh God.
But also as I say, and this goes back to,
I can't remember who was saying it,
but I wrote a note to myself.
This goes back to the idea of cognitive offloading.
With the Eshemen and with my fiction,

(42:59):
I do try and always grounded in some reality,
a scientific reality.
Cognitive offloading is this idea
where the more and more you become dependent on devices
for a memory function,
the weaker and weaker your own memory,
do your organic memory function become.
I've shown studies where you have a group of people
who can look everything up on a device
and a group of people who are not allowed
and they test them over time.

(43:21):
The people who aren't allowed to look it up
tend to remember things better
because the other people aren't.
If you think of memory as like a muscle that needs exercise
it starts to atrophy.
And so that goes back to what happens in the book.
Like if we all have technological memories,
digital memories implanted, our natural function declines.
That's based on a real scientific phenomena,
which is one of the reasons I try and have screen free days,

(43:42):
which is one of the reasons I try.
If I wanna look something up
and don't look at my phone for like five minutes
because I wanna exercise my brain to remember it
and I know it'll get there.
So I can do it, have it now
or I can have it in five minutes,
but I want my brain to do the work
because otherwise I'm kind of contributing
to a form of brain damage on myself.
In the book, one of the terms for the people

(44:04):
that manipulate the memories.
Alessia, the omissioner.
Yeah, that's it.
And so even the more basic known life,
like I remember for you using a calculator,
you're really data or your spelling
or recall of those sorts of things.
You're very good.
Now you're saying that I probably remember two phone numbers
because I couldn't remember that.
I barely remember my own one.

(44:24):
But it's true if you're not used to that
or I think that can be also how studying has changed.
I look at like my kids are studying and I've just got signs
just finished school HSC here or in Sydney in New South Wales,
but same sort of thing across the country.
And the way he studied for probably how I would have studied
is a lot better at it.
But I think he's just smarter.
But that to me is going to that how you use,

(44:46):
how you can train your memory and like a muscle,
like you go to the gym or running a lot
so I can be a better runner if I do this type of training.
And I think it's important to remember
and it's highlighted in the book wonderfully
is like if you don't use that for facilities
then it gets lost.
It's like anything else you've got to train it.
That's a forgetting curve.
The less you use specific memories,

(45:07):
the faster you forget them.
And also memories that aren't that relevant,
the brain just pushes them
so that we can get other memories.
So with the Emissioner, you reminded me of something.
So the Emissioner is a translation I found,
the character explains in the novel,
but the Emissioner is an actual historical position,
ancient China, and that would be the person

(45:28):
who held, contained the memories
and would stand next to the emperor.
And they say for laws and things like this.
And so then when they were in like a petitioners
or a court meeting, they could refer to the Emissioner
and they would remember all the laws.
And I thought, fuck, how powerful is that individual?
How much power, their culture is residing in their memory

(45:50):
and they could say anything.
And so I have a short story in Neil of Arthur
called Dark on a Darkling Earth.
And there's an Emissioner comes along
and there's a group of soldiers
and the Emissioner is kind of a drunk and doesn't care.
And they keep saying, asking him
what the official memory of things are.
And this person is just making it up.
But they leave every single thing that this person says,
the rest of them have had a memory virus
and can't remember anything at all.

(46:11):
Different cultures have had something similar.
That again, she says it in the book,
but the Greeks had it and it was in Jewish tradition as well.
You had this repository of memory.
And I'm like, that is such a fascinating,
scary, exciting idea.
And then you project that into a science fictional.
You can do some cool things with it.

(46:31):
Have you read The Mountain in the Sea?
No, is that set in Vietnam as well?
It's fascinating book, but it looks at the transference
of knowledge from generation to generation
in a much more simplistic way,
because it's basically looking at the beginning of sentience
and what is required for a species to become intelligent.

(46:53):
There's this juxtaposition between evolving creatures
and human beings and AI and all these different things.
And anyway, it's a very interesting book
that I don't wanna ruin for you.
But one of the important aspects of being able to evolve
is the ability to record information

(47:13):
for the next generation to learn.
So writing systems, things like that,
and more and more complex means of transferring
a lot of information to the next generation
for them to embody and pass on.
So it's, unfortunately, these days we're passing
half of our information to our children
and then the other half to computers.

(47:35):
And we're not passing everything down.
Not even the computers to tech bros.
And we're giving them, they're the middlemen
for memory in a way, for everything we do in our lives.
And that's the most awful middleman I could possibly imagine.
The most venal and the most uncultured
and the most indifferent to us as a civilization.
They're standing between us and everything.

(47:56):
Human relations, memory, ideas, news.
Yeah, these are, the stuff that I've been thinking about
in my books is not becoming less relevant.
Let me put it like that.
In fact, some of the stuff is a bit scary.
Like America falling apart
and China becoming the sole superpower
and the staggering inequality and the nature

(48:17):
and the way technology is used.
I don't wanna be prescient.
Well, we're just rushing headlong into this dystopian future.
And we kind of, you can laugh about it,
but I guess you have to.
But I'm not seeing much contrary evidence.
You know, if I read the news coming in from China
or Ukraine or America, the scary stuff comes.

(48:39):
Yeah, the paths seem to be converging, don't they?
If you think that we have chat GPT
with how much it hallucinates
and it can just spew history that is hallucinated
and not real, it's like, we are kind of like there.
I have another question that I wanted to ask you all.
Towards the end of the book, we have this omissioner
who is basically copying people into a machine.

(49:00):
And then they'll talk to one of the doctors
that is in there in that machine.
And it seems real, you know, like kind of like he reacts
in a way that's similar to how he would given this,
if this person continued to be alive.
Given what we spoke of memory and the human memory
not being the same as a replica in the machine

(49:21):
and also memory being a person's soul.
Is that, can we say that those characters
that get copied and replicated, are those the real thing?
A faithful replica, just an approximation.
What do you think?
Oh, I've got my answer, but I guess I shoot that child
and there I have a crack.
But no, I've got my answer lined up,

(49:42):
queued up in my brain.
It's an interesting one, isn't it?
Is that like similarly of life, actually of life
and I don't think you can be artificial intelligence.
I thought, sorry for those listening,
there's a little quotation marks around that
because it's not really intelligence.
It's a very good copy and getting better
is what by all accounts.
But it's still not, I don't think,

(50:03):
it's not actual sentence, is it?
So I don't think if you haven't got that sentence,
I don't see how it could be.
I can't help but feel these sort of facsimiles
are just extremely advanced portrait, you know,
like paint a portrait of someone
and then think that it could live or perceive anything,
even if it was very convincing.
And it's just having multiple different aspects

(50:26):
of human reality expressed in a simulation.
Doesn't make it any more real to me.
It can look and smell and feel and whatever like a person,
but it's not a person.
Yeah, but it is weird in the book though,
because this guy is this simulation or whatever he may be
is reacting in real time to the knowledge of his own death.

(50:49):
So it certainly does complicate the idea and makes it,
that time aspect and the interaction
does make it a little bit different.
Yeah, and especially because that character
was also a professor.
And I think he had like a different view of things,
especially because of how he was.
I am a bit conflicted on that.
I think that those simulations are just partial replicas,

(51:12):
especially because it's mentioned throughout the book
that the memories that they recall,
they are just audiovisual.
It doesn't have anything else.
It doesn't have feelings.
It doesn't have the feelings of the body
and everything else that makes a person a person.
And I think that the fact that we exist in a body
that also help us perceive a moment in a different way,

(51:33):
like we can be talking right now and somebody's cold
or somebody may want to leave,
but we are not sharing that.
And that information, they have no way of collecting it.
Yeah, no, they're all dead.
There's two things.
There's uploading your consciousness to a neural net,
but then what they have is something far cruder,
which is merely scraping information from social media
and then putting that into kind of a futuristic version

(51:55):
of chat GPT and then using that to full relatives
so they think they're still alive,
but they simultaneously they're getting robbed by the,
like all their assets have been taken
by the gangsters that run this town.
You could get this service now.
I had it advertised to me the other day
and I've heard about it before though,
where you put imagery and audio of a loved one

(52:18):
who's about to die into like a chat GPT bot.
And I'm not sure if you get visual as well,
but I think you might.
And so say it's your dad, dad passes away.
You can go back, ask your dad questions.
This is technology that exists now.
And so you go and say,
oh dad, I'm thinking of buying a car, what should I do?
And then the chat GPT equivalent bot

(52:40):
based on the data that's been entered
that you've given it will give you the answer back.
How to talk to loved ones they say,
they will never die, et cetera, et cetera.
How fucking inhuman that is owned again.
The fucking tech bro owns the data of your dead relative
and you're paying them to mush it all together
and regurgitate it back out to you
rather than relying on the lessons you learned from,

(53:01):
say your father during life and your memories during life
and to have, well having an internal dialogue with yourself.
You're using this awful golem that has kind of resurrected
an image of a loved one
and put through a large language model.
They are the equivalent of the people in that book.
In that, the people get put into that simulator.

(53:22):
It's just, it's a more advanced version of that.
And in that sense, it's just basically a true version
of what they're trying to do now,
which is contain these memories
for the purpose of extracting more revenue.
An interesting question though, relevant question
is the idea of uploading consciousness.
So instead of just scraping data from social media

(53:43):
as they do in the book,
it's uploading your memories uploaded into a neural net.
And then the question is, is that immortality?
Is that sentience?
I was reading an interesting book about just this,
this is one of the things I discussed.
I think it's Superintelligence, it's called,
which is kind of considered the Bible of AI.
But in that, he has this fascinating idea

(54:04):
where the first zombie apocalypse occurs
when all the very rich have themselves
uploaded into neural networks
as a way of having eternal life
because consciousness is not uploaded.
So you have a perfect Sarah uploaded
and I talked to you and it'd be like this.
And you talk and you react in all the normal ways

(54:24):
and you have your memories
and you can hold this conversation
and you might even say everything that you've just said,
but you're not self-aware, yeah?
So that's the first zombie apocalypse
is this computer filled with dead people talking
that give the semblance of life.
And this is one of the,
this is one of the deep mysteries
of our existence is consciousness.
Why are we conscious?

(54:46):
Why are we self-aware?
Where it's not required for living.
All the things we do, art, literature and music,
from an evolutionary perspective,
we don't necessarily need all these things
and we really don't need consciousness.
I love science fiction novels that look at,
that try and imagine what a civilization
without self-awareness is like.
That's in Peter Watts' blindsight, I think it's called,
imagines the huge expansive alien civilization

(55:07):
that has no self-awareness.
So that's a big tangent, but I wrote the note down,
so I had to say it.
But it's related in sense
because they were uploading just data in the book.
But even if you upload consciousness,
the question is, are you still human?
And you're only still human if you're still self-aware,
right?
Otherwise you might be the most perfect simulation
of the self possible,

(55:28):
saying and doing all the things on screen
that you would do normally.
But it's all, there's no ghosts in the shell.
You know, there's no spark of human life inside.
One interesting thing about consciousness
is the experience of actually being conscious,
like being awake.
Because when you're very ill
and when you're sleeping a lot,

(55:49):
you have this weird sense of just like,
okay, I'm here, I'm here for a couple of hours,
and then you're asleep again.
And then you're sort of not there,
and you have these dreams occasionally,
but there's a huge amount of your life
that you're actually not conscious
or that you're not aware of.
And of course, some,
remember in the book you were talking about
the importance of forgetting.
You know, there's this element of,

(56:11):
it's almost like the day and night of consciousness.
Like there is this mystery that we can't understand,
we can't even see it.
You know, we visit that state every 24 hours basically,
but some people are in that state more
when they have experienced some kind of trauma in there,
you know, staying in hospital for a long time
or something like that.
Yeah, just the nature of what the self is,

(56:32):
and you know, whether it's these chattering thoughts
and the things we verbally say
or more sort of background drifting of the mind.
Like there's so many layers.
I think that is also the self-awareness is there,
it's in some sense it manifests in the relationship
between being conscious and being unconscious,
because our brain keeps working

(56:53):
and it keeps processing stuff.
And when we are awake, immediately after an event,
we may think in a way about what happened,
but after we quote unquote sleep on it,
we wake up and have new memories
or new feelings about what happened.
So the memory keeps working in that case.
And I think that the self-awareness extends

(57:15):
even so differently when we are unconscious.
It's like we need both.
Yeah, this is another one of these ineffables
that you can sometimes approach
and it's one of the very few places
you can think more deeply about it.
Of course you can do it scientifically,
but as a way to communicate more broadly
and to get inside and experience.
I was watching an interview with Cormac McCarthy

(57:36):
and he talked about, he was kind of obsessed
with the unconscious, the way our brain worked,
including during sleep.
And he called it the night shift.
So your brain keeps working and this is the thing about,
I'm gonna sleep on it.
Your brain's still working out these things
and you do feel differently the next day, don't you?
Because you've had this some level of,

(57:56):
I don't know, the consciousness or thought there
where you're processing all these things
that have happened to you.
I know I rely on the night shift in my writing.
I wonder if this is true of all of you,
but I absolutely know that not just the night shift,
but I guess it's the day shift as well, I suppose.
But I will put it, like I'll put aside a book for weeks
or months or sometimes years, my brain will work.

(58:17):
And when I least expect it, I'll go, oh!
And I'll write some notes down on something
that I've put aside for a few months.
The brain's always working.
It's such a weird organ that we kind of have
to just creatively,
you just have to trust.
I can't force an idea.
I mean, maybe I guess if you read a lot
of scientific articles, maybe, but you can't force an idea

(58:38):
and it does the editing for you.
It does, it's thinking about, a book is,
it seems impossible to contain in the mind
because it's something that's 400 pages long
and has all these characters and ideas and emotions
and you're embodying all these different characters
and they're conscious.
It's almost impossible to hold in your head,
but you do somehow.

(58:58):
But it's always working, it's working it out,
not just here, the front of your mind,
but when you sleep, when you're reading,
when you go for a walk.
I've kind of slipped away from what Sarah was saying,
but it just reminded me of this interview
with Cormac McCarthy talking about his kind of,
the faith he put in the unconscious
and the night shift, as he called it,
where your brain's doing all this work

(59:20):
when you're sleeping.
So thank you everyone for joining me in the discussion.
Before we call it a day, let's do a round of photos
so the listeners know where to find you.
You can find me at Fanfightings,
where I do a lot of my interviews.
All of you have appeared on an interview
with kindly done interviews with me in the past,

(59:40):
so go and look up there.
There's some great interviews with Australian
and Kevin also said I did.
Last year, Mike Silver was there again.
I think I got up to about 25, 26 or so,
and there's a few more to get.
That's all on Fanfightings,
and there's cover reveals and things there.
More recently, I mentioned,
I've got four beards from the Book Populists,
which is a sort of on YouTube,

(01:00:00):
doing with David T. List, Tom Bookbeard,
and DB Rook and myself.
I don't have the beard, so I'm the beardless one.
So there we're interviewing authors.
We're also doing a sort of a live role play,
which is very much tongue in cheek,
doesn't take itself too seriously,
which is quite fun to do as well.
So if you have a chance to check that out, please do so.

(01:00:22):
So my name's Sarah K. Baustrop,
and my debut dark fantasy novel,
The Way of Unity came out in 2023.
I'm about to release the sequel
to that one called Black Stream,
and I'm currently in the last phases of editing.
So it will come out early 2025,
and I've also done a new book cover for The Way of Unity,

(01:00:45):
and I've painted the covers myself this time,
and I wanted to have continuity
between first book, second book,
and the planned third book.
So I'm painting the cover of the third book,
even though I haven't written it yet.
I'm on X slash Twitter.
I'm not anywhere else.
I have a website.
I can't remember the name of my own website,
but if you go to my profile,

(01:01:07):
I've got the link there,
and that's how you can find me.
Well, I've had two things come out this year,
Ghost and The Eshoman, and I'm tired.
Being a writer is way more doing things
that aren't writing than you'd imagine.
For your listeners, if you're aspiring writers.
I don't have anything coming out next year
in terms of trad publishing.

(01:01:28):
I do have a novella coming out in Asimov's,
which is cool, in like March, April,
which is about, I thought I'd do a fun topic.
I really wanted to,
I think I just finished a really difficult novel,
so I decided I'd have some fun
and write a story about killing billionaires,
and then it became, it couldn't be easy though, could it?
I had to get long and dark and morally complex.

(01:01:50):
So that story is appearing in Asimov's,
and it's really,
everything that's happened since in America
and is happening now,
I think it's more relevant than ever.
But no, next year I'm just gonna write,
and I'm excited that the idea
of kind of focusing more on writing,
finishing up the draft of a novel I did this year,
and then going back to this fantasy novel I'm working on.
In terms of where you can find me,

(01:02:11):
The Eshoman, funnily enough, on Twitter,
and everywhere else is T.R. Napa,
and I'm nearly everywhere else, I hate it.
Thank you to all of you
for giving up two hours of your Saturday
to talk about my book, but yeah, thank you.
Thank you.
And that said, if you liked the episode,
please like and subscribe.
If you want to get by size prose analysis,

(01:02:32):
short thematic discussions, and other bookish musings,
then subscribe to my newsletter at liviajelio.com.
By doing so, you will also get an ebook for my novella,
The Genesis of Change.
I will leave the link in the episode's description.
Thank you for listening, and happy reading.
See you next time.
Bye.
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