 assign it to you and that's how money is made there and we're talking tens of thousands of dollars yeah so I can see how they might be reluctant however I keep thinking like this is a problem that can be solved with a better engine. It just needs good processing power. Okay I think it's time right? Yes it is. All right. Welcome to the third session of the Antel inside science fiction book club hosted by Haskeek. Our previous sessions have included a reading and discussion of The Wall by Gautam Bhattia and a discussion of Bengali science fiction from past to the present. Today of course we are here with the amazing Yudhanya Vijay Ratne and we are talking to him about his book The Salvage Crew. A few notes before we begin. Please keep your mics on mute and keep typing in your questions for Yudhanya on the chat box and we shall take them up later in the session. To introduce myself I am Vijay Lakshmi. I am the author of Strangely Familiar Tales. I also write for women's web on issues of pop culture and feminism. My co-modulator today is the wonderful T. G. Shenoy. T. G. Shenoy is an SFF enthusiast and columnist and critic. He is the writer of India's longest running weekly SF column New World's Weekly for Factor Daily and the Speckfix column for Bangalore Mirror. He also curates the SF track for Bangalore Litfest. He has featured in podcasts such as the Taleharete Kannada podcast and even such as the Sri Lanka Comic Con to talk about SFF in general and Indian SF in particular. He hosts Suboli Go, a fun SFF quiz every Saturday. He is also an advertising and marketing professional and is currently a consulting partner with Celsius 100 Consulting. And of course the person we are all looking forward to talking to today is Yudhanya. Yudhanya Vijayrathne is the author of The Salvage Crew, The Inhuman Race, Numbercast and The Slow Sad Suicide of Rohan Vijayrathne. His stories are included in anthologies like Future Visions and The Expanding Universe. His Novelet Messenger was nominated for the 2019 Nebula Awards. His work has also been published on Wired, Foreign Policy and Slate and has appeared on Amazon bestseller lists. His novels are available from HarperCollins and Athern Books. As a data scientist, he works with the data, algorithms and policy team at Learn Asia. He also co-founded and helps run Watchtalk Sri Lanka, a fact checker. He is also the creator of OSEN, a set of AI plus human literary experiments. When not doing these things, he argues with his cat as his bio on his website, Yudhanya.com states. Welcome Yudhanya. I had a lot of fun reading The Salvage Crew and I'm really excited to learn more about it from you. Thank you. I'm very glad to be here and I should know that the cat wins almost all this argument. Shenai, you want to get started off? Yeah, I mean, so we're here today to discuss The Salvage Crew. Quite possibly the first full-length novel, which has been co-written using GPT2. I mean, you can co-written using AI to use the going term. Possibly the first published. I know that in 2016, there was a Japanese literary experiment that made a few headlines. It was long-listed or shortlisted for a Japanese literary prize. Yeah, it was a prize, yes. Yes. And in that case as well, it was a case of co-authoring. There are several years' worth of, I think, people attempting poetry. And yeah, this may be the first published sort of commercial work of fiction. Yeah, like I said, the first published full-length fan fiction novel. I mean... But there have been tons of brilliant people around the world taking steps at this. Yeah, I mean, hashtag meta. A science fiction, futuristic science fiction or this again. To give you a brief about The Salvage Crew, it's about, I mean, a Salvage Crew, which has been sent to this planet called Umahonbita to salvage something. And it's, as the description says, it's not an A team or a B team or probably a C minus team working together with sort of cobbled together, what shall I say, gear. And the ship is, and the overseer is an AI who used to be human in a previous life. And the adventures that they go through and they land on this planet on Umahonbita and they're looking for what they have to salvage. And what looks like cheap and careful, get in, clean up, get out job, just sort of gets becoming more and more complex and more and more challenging. You have megabase, you know, megafauna to deal with. You have these strange mercenary crews to deal with and all of this plus the crew has their own issues. So I mean, and without giving away spoilers, it's also a first contact novel unlike any that has come before because of how and why the first contact happens. And so with that being the sort of brief introduction, I mean, I loved it. It was like a nice space adventure, right? Lots of things happening, lots of action happening and the stakes keep getting higher with every half a chapter. So you have like one megabase, next thing you have like 12 megabase with zombie riders. I mean, I absolutely, I mean, it's a lot of current contemporary science fiction has started becoming very sort of serious and very dystopian and all this sort of, you know, that sense of wonder as they say, it sort of captured that for me as well. So you know, I just want you to, you know, how salvage you came about and, you know. Sure, I should probably add that the world the OSEA lives in is not a pleasant one where sort of, where like these like tiny farmsteads trying to leave one planet are harvested, then these people are given this huge economic choice of, hey, do you want to make, do you want to make some money or do you want to die and do you want your corpse to rot on this planet because their fathers and ancestors are here. And it's very much like, you know, the OSEA's bosses basically say, well, yes, we might want to, yeah, we kind of think your crew doesn't need life support right now because budgets are a thing, dude. It doesn't really matter. Humans are flesh and flesh is weak. So I'm glad that there is a sense of wonder there. It's still pretty, I wouldn't still want to live in that world. But yeah, sorry, how it came to be. Yeah. And you also said that, you know, when you gave it to people to read and publishes, many of the humans failed it during tests. So. Yeah. Okay. So how it came to be was when GPT2 came out, OpenAS GPT2 obviously made a huge media spectacle for what was essentially a transform architecture, trained on lots of data, and was able to write, now there is a certain narrative, there's a marketing push there, but it was able to present pieces of journalism that seemed, that looked like they were written by, that might pass for being written by humans at a first glance. This article, for example, about unicorns. So they had asked it to write an article about unicorns. They come up with this discovery of unicorns written almost exactly like the BBC would report on it. Very sober reporting, very like interviews with fictional scientists that it had clearly made up on the spot. And I looked at it as I was very interested because I had this theory that this whole cyberpunk thesis of humans and AI and humans and it had been playing around in my head for a long time by then. And I had started to dislike the constant questions of will AI take our jobs? Will AI actually write a novel? Will the great American novel be written by AI, for example? And to me, these questions are fundamentally boring because they showcase the whole Skynet man versus machine thinking, which we've seen in Rur, we've seen in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. There's a long legacy of that terminating, literally being terminated by Arnold Schwarzenegger. And this is, you know what? It's boring to me, at least personally. So I started thinking of what actually happened when AI has defeated man, man has been defeated by machine. And I looked through news archives and I found Gary Kasparov getting his ass handed to him by Deep Blue at the end of the 90s, the greatest chess grandmaster of the world. And it was a media outro, you know, man being defeated by machine, the end of humanity, et cetera. What Kasparov did next was the truly inspiring part. He came back with the field, promoting a field called advanced chess or centaur chess, which is essentially where instead of a human versus a chess engine or chess engines versus chess engines, it's a combination of a human and a chess engine against a human and a chess engine. So you have a much more, and they found that some of the, some of the highest elo ratings on the best chess players in the world at the time came from this group of people who were doing this, that the human plus machine combination was far stronger, the synthesis, because you could have the machine do what it did best, the depth search, the constant going through the similar program tracks of thought, and you could have the human bringing in the randomness, the creativity, the sense of play and the sense of unpredictability. And so you found random school boys and mid-range chess players suddenly operating far above grandmaster levels. And to me, this was very cyberpunk and this was very interesting. And I thought, okay, since I was just writing about it, which is fun, can I try to live that? I mean, is it possible to try and sort of, not just write science fiction, but actually to try and do some of this stuff, because that would be pretty cool. And I had the skills to do it. So I took GPD2, I retrained it, I turned it into an Instagram for it, called us and I let her run for a while and actually weirdly enough, Austin gained the following. And there are people who are like, Austin is basically an Instagram bot, so it context, it's a Python program, goes around, follows people, if they don't follow back in three days, we'll unfollow them, like occasionally comments on like the hashtag, Instagram, the hashtags and so on, hashtags are work and so on. And Typical influencer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And within like a very short period, built up an audience of people, like a tiny one, this is just a microtest, right? 100 or so followers started with nine posts and 100 or so followers, I mean, and people are commenting saying, Oh my God, this is so meaningful. This is so insightful. People are DMing asking for collaborations. And I thought, okay, this is legs poetry is done and dusted. Let's see how I can take this and do a little bit. And at the same time, this is neatly intersected with, with my work, because I work sort of as a computational linguistics is sort of the bread and butter of what I do. So at the time I was working on this gigantic corpus of 28 million words in Singhala that was part of my research. So I think a lot about language and, and I'm at the time I was thinking about Wittgenstein. And I kept thinking, we've got something generating syntax, it's generating grammar, it's generating structure and words. Now, what are sort of theories of intelligence and what would, what would a machine that is so self aware, but places a great deal of weight, he's obsessed with language. What would it look for? What, what would it look like? What would it react like? And out of that basically grew the, the eventual first contact, you know, where it doesn't really care if you have starships and metal cans. It's like, yeah, I'm bored by all of this stuff. You keep, you keep repeating navigation coordinates to each other. I've seen millions of species do that, that's not special. But are you playing the language game? That's special. Sorry, I think you're muted. No spoilers. Yeah, yeah. So that's why, but that's that's sort of the genesis. Those two things came first, the machine poet and the thought of what would something look like that might find this machine poet interesting. And those two ends of the book sort of came first. And the rest of it, I started getting serious about this. And I'm a huge fan of Rimworld, Dwarf Fortress, a lot of games where procedure or generation has been a critical component of world building. Diablo, initially these things arose at the countries like Diablo, for example, they couldn't fit all the content they wanted. So they, same for, same for like the first first elite, right? So they started writing programs that could generate entire universes on the fly. So this is, you know, this is incredible, because one of the problems in computer science in this branch of computing is that people will take, say the collective works of J.K. Rowling feed them into a generator and then laugh at the output. And every time we have nano-genmo and so on, then there are all these methods, they're incredibly sophisticated in their own right. But they don't really mimic an author's process where we think about the world, we think about the characters, we think about the plot and prose and all of these things operate at multiple levels. It's not one giant chunk that you can then spaz on. But these are all subtle little things that have to be combined. It's like a layer cake, really. Actually, that's an interesting analogy. Okay, save that for later. So I started, I realized that, you know, video games and some of my favorite games have been doing this layer cake for a long time. In fact, they're incredibly good at it. We have God simulation games right now. So I thought, well, why don't I teach myself some of that stuff? So I can work not just with with an AI poet, which I possibly have limited use for and it's like inspiration. But why can't I have the world being generated? God, so I said, like, God be the world in six days, surely we can do better. At his act of supreme hubris, I created a galaxy generator inspired by No Man's Sky wrote the thing in our the first question is his open source. It's on my GitHub. I hope nobody uses it because it's janky as hell. But it does effectively generate a galaxy in a way that makes sense to me as an author. I don't necessarily care about coordinates of star systems. I don't care about absolute coordinates. I care about the story path. So what it does is it generates stars and planets and in the current version, civilization artifacts and a whole lot of stuff and change them together like a social network. So it's like, Hey, if you have this planet, you will also have a wormhole to this plan. Maybe you know some people here, maybe events here are influencing you. So it's essentially, I took sort of my background on like looking at social networks and data science and all that and combined that into a series of world generators. This gives world building quote unquote a whole different meaning altogether. I mean, literally building was because even in the forward, I saw that you spoke about planet generators and also using Markov chains, which dictated the weather patterns. And you know, when Milo and Anna would fight, right? So the conductor making sure everything just sort of goes smooth. Yeah, I'm going you symbols, you base. And I'm sort of, I was sort of like the lead singer, I'd say for the metal band. On cue, on cue. Yes. So I was sort of like the lead singer, sort of making sure, Hey, I'm singing the song. Are the drums playing? Is the bass guitar working? Is everything plugged in? Cool. Let's jam. And it was fantastic. I usually take, because this to me wasn't, it was just an experiment I was tripping on, right? So I usually take upwards of, I realize a year and a half or two to write a novel because initially there's like a year of just thinking and putting material together. This was the most free form I'd ever been. I usually, like my outlines right now stretch like 30 pages with another 20 pages of citations in the APA format so that I can come back and actually find stuff. And then I slowly build scenes out of those. This I literally just sat there and started blank page, smooth sailing start to finish. Possibly wrote it in about two and a half to three months. It was just basically because at every point, like whenever sort of the, the meter started running empty, the reason they say, Hey, the weather changes, by the way, it's a blizzard. And my mind would immediately go, Right, it's a blizzard. These guys are going to lose the crops that I've been building in this chapter. This is going to be like Milo is going to be so pissed off. And I is going to be devastated. They're both going to be at each other's throat. And then another thing would say, Okay, event, random event, Milo and, you know, a bunch of the merciful are going to have a conflict. And here's what the, here's what the mercenary has on their loadout. And I go, Okay, that in winter and invisibility cloak in winter, that's going to freak them the hell out. So it was just something just basically throwing in stuff into the pot. It was fantastic. It really felt like cooking to me. I mean, I quite understand, you could see your it was very obvious that you are having fun and throwing in all the things that I mean, all those little pop culture references and references to sci-fi classics. And it is all sort of, you know, we just just came together. There's Wittgenstein, there's, you know, Buddhist philosophy. I mean, is there anything you, you didn't put in here? Let's find out in the next one. Exactly. I mean, which is why we decided to call this, you know, the games aren't stopping. I mean, which has, which has choice. You know, like, you promised us in the forward that the games aren't stopping here. And before I gave it to the publisher, I had, like, obviously, I didn't know if this would work out, but I had collected the stuff, the raw material for the next two levels. And my challenge to myself was, okay, can I make it interesting? I mean, obviously you've got to scale up. And I think I did find a good way of scaling up. Of course, in hopefully in a year or two, you'll be able to tell me whether it was shit or not. But the games aren't stopping. Yeah, definitely. Sorry, Vijay. No, I was just saying that 2020 is the perfect year for this book to come out, because that planet is treating them the way 2020 is treating us. But you just keep slowly treating them and they have to adapt as quickly as they can. It takes their sanity and just slowly erodes it until there's nothing left. Absolutely. Yeah, for me, I don't understand the text of as much, because I'm definitely not a techie. But for me, it was the characters that I really related to. Like, they're really messed up people on this really big planet. And, you know, like, even though there's, we have to separate them in time and space and all that, I still found it very relatable, especially this year, O.C., you know, who was like this, he's like done with everything, like really frustrated, but also funny. And you're also really philosophical at times. And for me, it kind of changed the way I think about AI, because he's human. Like, I found it very difficult to think of him as something artificial. So is that tended for people to think about or how did that happen? So the thing is, actual AI is quite difficult to, if you throw aside the terminating stuff, right, actual AI is super-powered statistics. It is incredibly difficult to be excited about a super-powered spreadsheet. And I did, at the time, I was also having a look at what an actual AI would look like in practice. I did a piece for Slate that essentially was imagining a sort of near utopia, where you have this thing called the state machine that could dynamically understand the morals and changing social contracts of people in its periphery and re-roll a new constitution every two weeks. And about the human analyst who was studying it for his master's degree and trying to make sense of it and realizing and asking questions like, who can know the extent of the mind of God, because this is so many signals feeding into each other that there is almost no core to look at. It's very ethereal. So classical AI, one of the things, one of my pet peeves in science fiction, is AI that weirdly seem to be human. They have emotions. Why on earth would something like that have emotions? Like, if you were creating a piece of software that was supposed to be put on like the mass curiosity rover, where it was expected to stay on like a ball of rock out there for years and years. The last thing you'd want to do is give it emotions. Would you want that thing to be bored and terrified and lonely? No way. So like a lot of people, one thing I'm really irritated with in science fiction was it's AI, but it's basically just a human without the body. So I took that and went, okay, what can I do to make myself satisfied and make myself interested in this? And hence the theology, hence the Buddhist theology part of this corporation overwhelmingly prefers to harvest Buddhist because it turns out if you sort of have an intrinsic belief in reincarnation, it's actually not as much a shock to you when you wake up in a tin can. And you can treat this as a life or and things like the ship of these years don't really bother you as much. So it was my way of sort of making that concept interesting to me by throwing like a gamut of things that I could put there and go, okay, now this is interesting enough that I want to write about it. And there's a lot of cursing going on and it doesn't get more human than that. I mean, have you met me? Yes, I know. I mean, I'm just talking about the AI over here. You call it AI, but he was human and there's a lot of his humanity is still there in that tin can and his influences and why he does otherwise he wouldn't be doing poetry, which brings me to the other bit of it that the sheer amount of poetry that's there. I mean, and I'll be honest because I had known about Austin Poet and I was like, okay, fine, here's poetry and there's, is it poetry for the sake of poetry? But then I read the poetry, my perfect sense, suited the mood, suited the plot, what OC was trying to do and trying to explain things to himself and to the people, you know, sort of it's his way of coping, explain it all this way. Initially he's doing a lot of poetry, but as he starts getting stressed, even that keeps getting harder for him. He does less and less and less as he's just like we are in creative work when stressed. Yes, exactly. I mean, it gets progressively difficult. Something that he used to do for himself, he also sort of starts sending the poetry to as a story progresses, sending this poetry to other people as well, you know, sort of trying to find a bridge of humanity or, you know, I understand and this is the way I can communicate and all this sort of thing. So I thought there was that and okay, I can put poetry, so there's poetry there, but till I came without giving out spoilers, right, and I wish somebody had told me this before I started the book that yes, there is a, you know, beyond all of this, beyond him using it as a coping mechanism, giving in touch with, you know, because he's interested in poetry that it actually has a serious purpose and is integral to the plot of. Very specific reason it's there. Yeah, we should just sort of probably put a blurb out there saying that this poetry has a purpose. Yes, there's a point to it. This art has meaning, oh God. This art has meaning, oh God. I mean, Vijay has a poet and she is a huge poetry buff, so I'll leave the poetry discussion to her. Yeah, I mean, you might be interested then. The base corpus is of course GPT2's own work plus Rumi plus Li Bai and Du Fu, 5th century Tang Dynasty poets. Interestingly, when I tried pouring in words, of course, when I tried pouring in words, just for us, things went horribly wrong because you have these weird references to Christian theology in a machine that shouldn't really have them. But Li Bai and Du Fu specialized sort of in capturing that moment and freezing it and just perfectly painting a picture with their words. And a lot of Chinese poetry really was like that. And the classics from the 5th centuries. And that and then I found interestingly Rumi seemed to play well the translations, the language, it fit like a hand in a glove. And as a result, that those are the poets that this was built on. And those influences are there, like I could definitely find the, you know, in front of, you said the Tang Dynasty poet, which was definitely very much there. And in that sense, it definitely passes the Turing test, obviously, because I don't think anyone can identify that, you know, it was not written by you. Yeah, because I did, just to be sure I ran a plagiarism check against the original, against the collection. I was like, okay, this is surprisingly like 80% of everything generated and this generated like hundreds of poems that aren't in this like 80% of everything generated was did actually was not like the plagiarism. Interesting. That was one thing, that was one thing, sorry, sorry, I was just saying, if you couldn't make out whether the poem was written by a person or an AI and all this, I don't know whether what it says about human poets or whether that's a commentary on the training data and the output. Okay, so to be brutal, a lot of Instagram poetry is shit. This is possibly a known fact, but a lot of Instagram poetry is also incredibly easy to automate. It's easy to get this sort of, because what some people essentially do is type a sentence, hit character in the middle. So there is in my head sort of this idea of a classification of art based on how easy it is to mimic it. Now, your average Instapoint, yes, also you can easily take them on. Someone like, let's say, Tennyson writing Ulysses, magnificent work. Someone like T.S. Eliot writing the Wastelands, which is actually, it should be technically easier because it has such a disconnected schema, tying into this much greater structure. No, that would be the current, the state things are right now that would be incredibly difficult. So there is almost this, this curve. And there is automatibility on one end. And that's your, that's the art that really, I don't think it should be called art. And there's the good stuff on the other side. And this boundary keeps going, keeps moving forward. I mean, I mentioned, you mentioned that thing about, you know, what does it say about the human poets? Like there's this line that says to Anna at one point that all poetry is something about the poet. So, you know, it kind of made me wonder what it says about the poet here. And then the whole concept of the Chinese room and all that, which again is addressed in the book at one point. Yes. A lot of that thinking, I think, I think the best, some of the best thinking done around this is in Peter what's blindside, which is, which I highly recommend, if you haven't, there is literally a sequence where they initiate first contact, and they have a very coherent conversation. And it's a linguist who spots that the ontology on the replies doesn't seem to make sense. The classification of knowledge doesn't seem to make sense. Grammar, syntax, perfectly fine. There's something odd about how this thing seems to categorize knowledge. Because it, for me, reading that was like, wow, okay, this, this is like, this is the kind of thing I geek out over. So yeah, we'll still be needed. We'll still be around. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, it is a very creative piece of work, like it's really poetry. And some is some of those terms of phrases and position of words, I mean, they're excellent. Like if I, I'll just read out one of those poems, which is a bit of a landmark poem and truly stuck me greatly. Okay. So I moved here in spring from my ancestors garden, and have lived here among the green hills and woods. At midnight, when the cold makes the grounds slightly wet, I lie down to sleep in the twinkling of an eye. On the bank, surrounded by polymer and metal, I watch clouds curry as if they had been given the chance to breed and to fly their perch with as many as were chosen. In the mornings, I wake to the silence of the sun. But now, distant peoples from scattered lands have come to wake me with their hunger. How to tell them apart from the birds? Only the clouds have the answers and the shadows. This is a pretty landmark poem in the book for reasons. But also, I mean, I love this because there's so much of that natural imagery. And then suddenly you have that one line about, you know, the bank being made of polymer and metal, and that really kind of shifts your perspective. So I love poetry plays around with the imagery and things like that. I find it fascinating, like how like that was a lovely reading. Thank you so much for that. I find it fascinating how what people react to. I mean, much like poetry itself, right? The author is dead. People give their own meaning. Absolutely. And I mean, how have the reactions been to the poetry and to the book? In general, amazing. So it's interesting to see like on audible, I think reactions have been absolutely amazing. Thanks in part to the narrative is Nathan Fillion. You know, people are people are making comments like I so on saying as someone who is into religion is also a programmer, this book changed my life. And that's tremendously flattering to hear and also kind of all things like there is this sense of I don't know how to react to this. And, you know, it's been absolutely amazing. I think people who expected more firefly because there was also that link with Nathan coming in as a writer, people who expected more firefly, I think may have been a bit disappointed. And this is something, this is like the nature of what's being created, right? Because if you're expecting like an upbeat drama about the resistance, you know, loan man, gunslinger stuff, no, these people, like you said, these people have some serious issues and the planet is attrition on a different level. It's not a it's not a it's me having fun. But those characters side with that and Milo are not having fun at all. I mean, like one of my favorite pieces is just four lines, you know, I just read, I mean, for reasons, as you'll see, it's like, it made sense to me that coming home, the old soldier creates peace, but broken men around him stir, souls are drawn, battle cries ring, blood spills like tears in the ring. Yes, I got the difference. Yes, you got the difference. This is me. This is my moment of happiness. I love, I mean, I love anything that has these little touches and nods to stuff that you love and then just takes it off in a different direction. And to come back to what you said about audible and, you know, that there was quite the coup getting Captain Mall Reynolds himself to read it. So, you know, it's Nathan Fillion's first audiobook narration, unless I'm mistaken. No, no, I don't think it costs the first he's done lots of audio work before he's actually done lots of audio for Halo, even. He's, I think he's not known as an audiobook narrator because, because of course, Captain Mall and Richard Castle, these are such iconic. Yeah, I mean, these are roles that are cemented in Geekdom. But, but he has done a significant amount of audio work. I actually first, I actually heard his voice on Halo game long before I watched Firefly. Oh, okay. On that note, shall we just play the first chapter for a few minutes for, for our listeners as well. Let me just share my screen and we'll, this is how it begins just a second. I need to optimize it for, yeah, so this is how the salvage cruise starts. Part one, don't stick the landing. One, I want to make one thing clear. I did not repeat not ask for any of this. I did not ask to be promoted. I did not ask to be made overseer. And I certainly did not ask to be strapped down in this tin can body of a drop bod hurtling down with three idiots screaming their lungs out inside me. The company promised me an 18. The kind of people Joe Heldeman wrote about in the forever war, astrophysicists who could blow a man's head off at 500 meters. The best of the best. You know, the master chiefs and all that. The kind of people who go in, get shit done, leave a nice calling card and live to strike a heroic pose. Did we get what it said on the label? Well, let's look around. Exhibit A. Simon Houston. Simon is my geologist. He's 35-ish biological time and looks like someone stuck eyeballs on a mop. They told me Simon would be reliable. He's good at everything to do with rocks and earthquakes. He scored well on the shooting Sims. He can do CPR and basic medical aid and looks like your average nerd trying too hard to be cool. He'll make a fine crew member. But here's what they didn't tell me. Simon grew up on the brutal world of old New York. He was sold to a corporation as a child. They stuck a needle into the center of his brainstem and jacked him into a virtual fantasy world so they could broadcast his feed as reality TV. As reality TV. His entire childhood was spent being beaten up by gangs and digging holes in fake grounds so nobody could hear him crying in the fake darkness. Except for the audience, of course. Who most have had a hoot, the sick bastards? Old New York had its times. After the Mercator basic rebellion, the UN jumped in and did a number on them, including yanking out of those poor souls out of reality TV and setting them free. For some reason, I don't think this man never really recovered. I'm not saying Simon is a bad person. I'm saying what doesn't kill you makes you stranger. I'm saying a traumatized reality TV slave star is the last person I want dropped into an unexplored planet on my first landing mission. Exhibit B. Anna Agrawal. Anna is an odd fish. She's got 20 years on Simon, but unlike Simon, Anna grew up with everything she ever wanted. I've checked her degree transcripts, but through the roof. High social skills. And then somewhere along the line, she decided to ditch everything and become an army doctor. Doesn't compute. You know why it doesn't compute? Because Anna Agrawal doesn't exist. I don't know who the hell this person is, but the real Anna Agrawal, as verified by her gene sample, died on the micro planet we were child. This imposter, let's call her fake Anna, showed up on origin of three and has been hopping planets ever since. Always moving outwards. Day of Olympus. Boat murdered. Carthaga Highway. This kind of stuff is real easy when delays between databases are measured in light years. Fake Anna picked up a gunshot wound somewhere on the way, left leg. And now she's on my mission on the very edge of human space. Right now she's cradling Simon as he screams, which excuse me, Anna is the stupidest fucking thing you can do while strapped inside a tin can plummeting through the atmosphere. Damn it, Anna, go back to your seat. Exhibit C. Milo Killer. Finally, a sane choice. Milo, 37, is an inventor. He can shoot, yes, but also make stuff and argue Machiavelli and Chanaka by the fireside. Master's degree in engineering from the Orte Academy. There are some regularities. He's been demoted three times so far, each time by a woman commander. That's odd. And he's spent a weird amount of time in cryosleep. Almost three centuries. But right now I don't have much to go on. So he's my golden boy. Look at him smile. He's enjoying this. He's enjoying being alive after all that time in the freezer. Don't let me down, Milo. Simon pukes all over me. Oh, gods. This isn't an A team. This is a D team with a paint job. The real heroes are probably out somewhere in the inner rim discovering alien civilizations while looking heroic in their armor. Me, I get the backwater planet and the salvage job. Go dig up an old crash site, they said. It'll be fun, they said. Which brings us to myself. I'm the drop pod. Yeah, go ahead laugh. I'm a 4.4 ton safety capsule hurtling through a sky the color of topaz. Inside, I'm a state of the art computer with weapons, seedstock, building materials, people, and of course myself to instruct the baselines how to do their job. In turn, the theory goes, the humans ask the right questions, make the right pseudo random moves, nudge your thinking in all the right ways, ways that a machine can't. Humans evolve to survive and they're fantastically good at it. The combination of myself and a human crew is supposed to make us better, faster, a little more chaotic, yes, but a lot more survivable. This is what happens when PCS thinks you're smart enough to be an overseer. You end up knee deep in theory with Simon's puke all over your instrument panels. For fuck's sake, Anna, strap yourself in. It's going to be a bumpy ride. Yeah, and thanks for delivering on that marketing pitch that it's going to be a bumpy ride. And the whole book was me laughing, basically, because the joke of humans being pseudo random. Of course, the book felt very indulgent, but the techno bubble was so glorious and it's nice to be along on a fun ride because it's been a while since I read something which was good old fashioned space adventure. So it is nice to see it again in the book. Of course, the Martian told us about all this one man rising up and all that sort of a thing. This took a very realistic look about actually building a hab and creating the water and I liked how the prioritized vodka. These are people after my own heart. I mean, vodka is important. Yeah, I don't think anyone's going to survive without alcohol. Alcohol is like art. It won't change things too much, but it makes reality bearable. So they had their priorities right and what about all the megafauna and all of those things in the city? I mean, how did you sort of just slot the men together? Because I mean, I was almost expecting every chapter to sort of end on a cliffhanger. It's like the good old fashioned serialized stories. You're expecting a cliffhanger, but it just of course plays havoc with those sort of expectations and conventions. So the megafauna of a nod to Dreamworld. It's because I'm a huge Dreamworld fan. I'm also a huge fan of the creator of Dreamworld. In fact, I'm a particular fan of a blog post that he wrote that actually inspired what I would eventually do here. Dreamworld is this game. It's a colony simulator. And essentially, people get so into it that they create entire stories out of what happens. And the creator points out that this is that humans have the tendency, but we have apophenia, which is the ability or the tendency rather to see patterns in random noise. That's how we look at prehistoric man crawls out of caves, sees rain falling down, and see it's sundry and lightning and dreams of gods. And over time, these things keep getting more and more complex. We keep falling prey to things like astrology and prophecies, which are, again, predetermined patterns. And we keep looking for random noise that the patterns just fit so nicely on. And we go, yay, Nostradamus called it. Which is what makes us such great conspiracy theorists. Which is also one of our greatest strengths. The ability to see those patterns is what then lets us create stuff. It's what lets us imagine. So it's one of our greatest strengths, also one of our greatest weaknesses. Malko Oldu sort of calls it the narrative disorder. The narrative disorder, yeah. And this is possibly like, this is most likely like a holdover from a couple of 10,000 years ago, when the person who was looking out into the night and seeing tigers and wolves and things a little bit more fearful and possibly a little bit better prepared to survive. And the tiger eventually didn't take out the camp. And so we have this. And this was actually instrumental to my thinking of how to put these different components together. So the megabits were an explicit nod to the mark of respect to that game, its stature, its creation of it, but also its influence on me. Boat murdered, one of those planets mentioned, is the name of a duo fortress game. So duo fortress is even more complex, right? But it's famously difficult to play because it's rendered purely nasty. The common joke about duo fortress is the creator has figured out how to simulate 42% of the universe. Because when you start a game, it generates tens of thousands of years of history, all these entities, all of these incredibly rich world. Boat murdered was a game slash almost an art project. This is duo fortress is essentially about dwarves kind of building their own minds on mine of Moria kind of thing. You are very much and you're an overseer, literally. And you're toggling these things and trying them. These people don't do anything about what they'd expect. What you'd expect them. That's that's a classic of the of the colony simulator style of gaming. Boat murdered was a game that spanned 13 players. Each player would inherit the kingdom of the previous and there would be all these design additions and all these things happening at wars and stuff that they have no context in. They just stepped into their presence as shoes and it would it ended with like 200 dwarves eating each other and worshipping elephants and playing a painting like creating incredible works of art in their own blood. It was incredibly dark towards the end. It's fascinating. No, it's it's it's really fascinating and you know the forward itself will lead one down many internet rabbit hole. Lots of rabbit holes there. Yes, quite a lot of rabbit holes there, you know. So that by the time you actually start the book, I mean if you have once you read the forward it's like your head is spinning already and then in comes the first chapter and goes boom. Boom. The forward was meant to be an afterward and the publisher actually liked it so much that they were like, why don't we shift this to the front? Oh, okay. It was meant to be you know afterwards. Hey, if you had fun reading this and you know, nobody really reads afterwards most of the time. If you had fun reading this maybe 1% of people would go, oh, okay, you bastard. That's what it's meant to do. Yeah, I mean, if you ask me, I mean I it looked like it belonged in the back because you know, when you pick this book up, you're like, you want to get straight in on the actions. Yes, you don't want to go down internet rabbit holes. Exactly. And then once you go in there, it's like, you know, it's four o'clock in the morning and you haven't yet started chapter one. So then the book is a success. I should just take the writing forwards instead. A book made up of forwards. Which I think if you read Neil Gaiman's view from the Sheeps, he did a lot of forwards to a lot of people and it's and there are significant numbers of forwards in there and those forwards are amazing. I mean, Neil Gaiman really knows how to write a forward. More than forwards, they are sort of essays in their own right. Like the one that introduced the whole Penguin series, the only other person who writes amazing, you know, forwards, which are like standalone essays in their own right in that sense is Adam Roberts. Absolutely. And Gaiman's is always this and even even Roberts like there always is insight into the creator and there are these anecdotes that you will not find anywhere else. There's this style of thinking that you go, this is a fresh take on something. So mine was more very, because like I sort of, I mean, I do a lot of academic writing. So mine was more, okay, and if you enjoy this, here's a methodology. You know, you've seen the abstract, that's the first page, you see the results that that's what you've read through. Here's the methodology section. Right. So yeah. So what I would say is, I mean, A, it's a great book. And if you're a sort of sensation fan and geek, you will have lots of reasons, you know, sort of while reading, you know, picking out little references to Tannouser Gates and the sort of mention of a Hyperion Museum. So all old favorites, you know, sort of touchstones of science fiction and sort of late 20th century pop culture being just sort of thrown in. So there's, it's like you said, a layer cake, whether it's in the, it was in the writing, which you described it to or in the reading of it, thereof. Yeah, I mean, there's definitely that sense of fun and wonder and all of that. But there are also like, you know, deeper messages about capitalism and all that. So it's not, it's like a really nice blend of all those things. So it's, it's like everybody has something in it that they can look forward to. Yeah, and the way the first contact happens and why that happens. And that's, that's quite interesting. I wish I could talk about it, but that would be, let me have something on the table. Yes, exactly. But thank you. I'm very glad to see that. I'm just very glad to see your response. I'm glad that you like it. I'm also very glad to see that two people responded to two different things. You responded to the sense of wonder and the nods to like, things that I find fascinating and the science fiction classics, whereas Vijay Lakshmi responded to the, the critique of these corporations coming in and turning like planets, which just want to continue their way of life into nexus worlds and so on. Which is what makes us good, you know, sort of cohorts. I'd love this. I love this. Thank you. If the people who are watching this on YouTube or here on Zoom have any questions, now is the time. You can actually, since not many, you can actually unmute and ask questions to Yudhan Jaya about his work or about salvage crew, which if you haven't read yet, you must. What about my cat? No questions. Okay. I guess they're either busy ordering the book, right? And I think fair warning, I mean, if you're like me who prefers reading physical books, I don't think that's coming anytime soon. Yeah. So there is a hard cover. That's expensive and shipping is, that's a $19 book and shipping right now is $60, as of the time I checked, to our sort of part of the world. The paperback, the mass market paperback is coming in about five months because of COVID, the US publishing industry has taken significant hits. The publisher is a small press, so this is like, this is serious damage. I would recommend getting it on Kindle, honestly. Or the TV center message saying that I've never heard Nathan Fillion's narration. He is awesome. So I guess we know what TCV is going to buy and read or listen. Or listen, yeah. Listen. I guess, I mean, I'm right. So for me, it was personally a lineup because I only do physical copies. So I don't have ever bothered with the Kindle. But this was one book that I really wanted to read. So I got over all those things and actually ended up reading the full novel on my phone. May I recommend that you get a Kindle? No, A, I don't know. I have issues reading it on Kindle or on screen. B, as it is, I'm a very impulse buyer sort of a thing and I come up with this big stack of stuff. If I have a Kindle, bye bye wallet. That's the downside of having a Kindle. The Kindle experience is completely different from a screen, by the way. It's actually easy on the eyes. It doesn't look like a screen, actually looks like the words have been printed on plastic, I suppose. It's somewhere between paper and a screen. It's brilliant. You have to see it to describe it. Very comfortable reading. However, the wallet hit is very serious because you go, oh, hey, people who enjoyed this book also bought this. Okay. People who enjoyed that book also bought this. Would you like to continue browsing? Maybe. Now you see why Jeff Bezos has so much money. Exactly. I would love for there to be the balance in that bank balance part of it. That's fair. I can't critique that. Of course, my interest is to sell more books to you. So ideally, you should be getting this stuff, but I really can't complain at all. I did it. I enjoyed it. I'll recommend it. Any questions or queries? Anything? Praveen, TCV, the people watching on YouTube. So I have a question because both of you are so engaged in the book space. You run like online spaces for people to come and talk about books. What's it been like doing this in COVID times? Is business as usual or are things easier or harder that before? Do you find yourself changing in response? How's it been? I mean, personally, it's actually been, see this until I said book club actually started in the COVID times and in a non-COVID situation because by then people had been used to Zoom and webinars. So it's much easier to do that. Maybe if COVID hadn't happened, this book club may not have happened. It's much easier to get people, invite authors to join in and there's no problem with geography. Otherwise, you don't have to wait for a lit fest or something like that to listen to an author. Then there's the usual logistics, logistical issues and all of those things, but this doesn't have that. So it's actually made it a lot easier. Or for example, the weekly sensation quiz that I run. It actually started off as a one-off lockdown thing has now been going on for 13 months. Yeah, I don't think we would have been able to do that in the physical space. I found this interesting because like for example, WorldCom, the Hugo's are like, I'm normally not able to attend these things because passports, getting the expenses and so on and suddenly everyone's on Discord and everyone's on Zoom and suddenly I can be in a panel without actually having to spend several tens of thousands of dollars on plane tickets and so on. No, same here because if it was not for COVID, I don't think I would have ever attended the Nebius or I wouldn't have been in a sort of a room with big authors and writers that I like in a small intimate breakout room with some 78 of us talking amongst ourselves. Even if I had attended the physical Nebula in person also, these people would be in there on bubbles. Yes, that's also the thing. A lot of people say conferences like physical space is back on and you don't get the same experience online. It was interesting because there are some conferences that I go to for research and so on where the experience is clearly diminished online because a lot of discussion about research particularly if it's you're waiting for peer review which might and the whole process of writing and publishing can take months. You can't talk about it or you can't get up on the stage and talk about it. So you talk about it behind the scenes and that's where you learn what exciting stuff is happening, who's working on what groundbreaking research, how many years that might take, all of this stuff. But for the science fiction and fantasy conventions as far as I've been, the clustering is so tight between in-groups that when you're there you're still a stranger and Barkhan is pretty much the same experience almost in discord as it is actually better in discord than it is in person. One thing I don't miss is the conference food. No, I don't miss that at all. TCV has asked questions saying what role did GPT-3 play in the writing of this book? It was GPT-2. How did you seamlessly blend it with your creativity? I think we've already spoken about this in the initial part. Most of it, most of it, this stuff we spoke about. Yeah, because I think TCV came in a bit late, so maybe... Yeah, sort of recap a bit late, recap like a bit short question. GPT-2, 3, 4, 5 in particular because like the larger models require a lot more memory to run and are unwieldy to train. That mostly wrote the poetry, which is the sort of underlying personality of the machine poet, like the oversea of the main character is a machine poet. It's also the underlying crux of the first contact as it happens. The poetry was written by GPT-2. I allowed myself to edit three words in each poem, up to three words, no more and no less. So the structure, for example, those words polymer and metal, those are things I put in there because that's not in the core but Tang Dynasty poets didn't know anything about polyphony. But that's the limit of my edits. And that was more or less how I blended in with the story, the situation. It was essentially letting it generate a whole sheet of poems because you just type in the quote and you let it generate 50. And then going through these and saying, okay, this is what these people are going through right now. What mirrors the kind of emotion that a stressed-out machine poet would have? What kind of things would they want out there in the world? And selecting and then very, very tight. That's a short one, sir. I mean, yes, I mean, the fact that you said that the polymer and metal poet editions is what reminds me that human poets still matter. Yeah, I mean, like I said, I don't think AI is going to replace us. And I think in honestly, even having that conversation is, it gives into fears that shouldn't be fears. It's just generating the answer. I think the future is collaborative. And in a sense, we are all cyborgs already. I mean, look at us. We are in different parts of the world. A thousand miles apart, we are having a conversation seamlessly. We can see each other, we have phones, all these things. Today we walk around with so many things that someone in medieval time would look upon as magic, absolute sorcery. Maybe Merlin was just a guy with a smartphone. And he's happened to be Wikipedia is very looking at this quote, right? So I think this collaboration is a thing that's going to happen regardless of whether you want it or not. I think that is a more, that's a nicer future. At least I'd like to see that. Yeah, and it definitely comes through because the thought that I had reading the book was that, yes, like technology is something that you need not fear or push away, but it's something that we can make it work with us. It's something that is creative. Anyway, I think that's it for today. This is a fascinating conversation, Yudhanya. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me on this. I absolutely love this. Yeah, and thank you to the audience who's come in. Thank you, Shenoy. Thank you to David, Pasleek and the team. And we'll see you again soon next month. Yeah, so as always on the last Friday of every month, so we've seen the last Friday of December, peak holidays. Yeah, and just to put in my own plug, Shenoy's quiz happens tomorrow as a science fiction writer. I highly recommend it. It's an incredible learning experience. If you just sort of sit back and just want the questions and go with everything, it is absolutely fantastic. Right, yeah. Anybody who wants to attend to Boldly Coke and just DM me, I'm at the Bitcoin Twitter and I'll tell you the Zoom link. Thank you all for coming. It was lovely. Thank you, Yudha. Thank you, Vijaya. Thank you, Haske. And thanks David for making sure everything runs smoothly behind the scenes. And yeah, live long and prosper.