 stuff. If you have things. Yeah, sure. I do. And then, yeah, and then we'll do what you're suggesting. Okay. Yeah, we are live so we can. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Anthel Insight Science Fiction Book Club. We are here today to talk with Elliot Pepper about his analog series and his latest book, Veil. We are waiting on him to join the session. But meanwhile, we have TG Shenoy with us, who is my very, very capable and knowledgeable, you know, co-host. So Shenoy, would you like to just kind of get us started a little bit while we are waiting on Elliot? Right. So, I mean, I don't like doing this, but comparing authors to other authors and stuff like that. But Elliot Pepper is one, one author whose books sort of bridge the genres of science fiction and techno thriller. Some of them are like Michael Crichton meets, you know, Kim Stanley Robinson meets Elliot Pepper himself. So I was first introduced to him with Bandwit, which is book one of the analog trilogy. And it was fascinating. The way it read, the ideas it had, you know, William Gibson once famously said that, you know, the future is already here. It's unevenly distributed. Right. So in that sense, Bandwit as a book that's, it's near future, but it's more also near certain future, I would think. So what happens in Bandwit kicks off the analog trilogy. So what the, in essence, what the central player of the analog trilogy is this company called the Commonwealth. Now, what's the Commonwealth? Now, think of every big tech company that you can think of, think of Google, think of Amazon, think of Facebook, think of Apple, think of all these big tech companies, then mash them together with all these social networks that you can think of, be it Instagram or be it WhatsApp or Facebook or Twitter, and then mash it again together with all the other communication channels, news sources, and all sorts of transactional channels that we use, even financial, and you get an idea of what the Commonwealth is. Now, this, now, once a company, a tech company becomes this powerful, it gets to make its own rules. Right. And that's what happens in the analog trilogy. So much so that over the course of the trilogy, Commonwealth decides to call itself a sovereign nation and no one can do anything. And by that time, or in the timeline of the analog trilogy, the nation states are there in sort of name only. So it is in this sort of near future that we come across people who are working for the system. One of who in bandwidth has a change of heart and sort of besides to become a double agent for this place or this group known as the island, which is trying to sort of hack the Commonwealth and use that to target the one person and take over the feed. Now, the feed is the Commonwealth's big product, which feeds, as the name suggests, feeds everything that goes on in the world. Everyone has their own digital feed, their own personal feed. It's with them all the time. It's ubiquitous. And the society cannot function without the feed. And the feed is brought to you is a product of the Commonwealth. And the Commonwealth controls all the information that's flowing through the field. It knows you better than yourself. And that's what this team of rebels and outsiders and hackers try to do and sort of use the Commonwealth system against itself and against the thing. Oh, hi, Elliot. Hello, you finally made it. Hello. Yeah, apologies for being late. Apparently, even without the feed, I can't avoid a few little technical issues on my end. So I appreciate your patience and I'm really happy to be here. No worries. So you just thought we'd get things going and I was just doing the long winded introduction to bandwidth and the analog trilogy and how it's about unevenly distributed feed futures and one thing that it does well is sort of illuminate the present by examining the future. And while these books are near futures, we're not sure if they are near certain futures. But before we proceed, would you like to give the introductions to Thank you. Thank you, Shenoy. And welcome, Elliot. Glad to have you here. A few instructions for the participants before we begin. Please keep your mics on mute. And if you have any questions, please type them into the chat box and we'll take them at the end of this session. To introduce my co-modulator today, T.J. Shenoy is an SFF enthusiast, columnist and critic. He is the writer of India's longest running weekly SFF column, New World's Weekly for Factor Daily, and the Speckfix column for Bangalore Mirror. He has appeared in various podcasts and lit fests to talk about SFF in general and Indian SFF in particular. He hosts to Bo Ligo, a fun SFF quiz every Saturday. He's also an advertising and marketing professional and is currently creative director at Publix's Leo Burnett. Today, of course, we're speaking to the prolific and, you know, very, very far-sighted Elliot Pepper. Elliot Pepper is the author of Vail, Fumilis, Neon Fever Dream, The Uncommon Series and the Analog Series. His speculative thrillers have been praised by the New York Times Book Review, Popular Science, San Francisco Magazine, Business Week, I09, Boing Boing, Polygon and Ars Technica. He has helped build technology businesses, survived dengue fever, translated Virgil's Enid from the original Latin, worked as an entrepreneur in residence at a venture capital firm and explored the ancient Himalayan kingdom of Mustang. His writing has appeared in our business review, TheVirge, Thor.com, Tech Crunch, Vice, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and he has been a speaker at Google, Comic Con, SXXW, Future in Review and the Conference on World Affairs. He publishes a blog, sends a monthly newsletter, tweets more than he probably should and lives in Oakland, California. Welcome, Elliot. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. So, like we said, Chennai was just giving us a bit of an introduction on the analog series. And Chennai, in your review of Beech for Factor Daily, which I'll share the link for, you've advised readers that they should read the analog series before it becomes packed. So would you like to just kind of finish your thoughts on that? Yeah. I mean, that's what I tell people. I mean, for example, when I think it was Denmark or was it Finland sent an ambassador, right? Usually countries sent ambassadors to other countries to sovereign states, nation states. And also when Denmark or Finland sent an ambassador to Silicon Valley, I was like, okay, listen, this is like what happened in the analog trilogy and, you know, where countries are sending ambassadors to the Commonwealth. So it sort of, it wasn't new to me because I read it in the analog trilogy. So which is why I said I'm not sure if the analog trilogy is near future or near a certain future. So, and how much it, you know, sort of picks up on the thread. So, Elliot, how did you come up with this vision of this future of algorithmically, or shall I say, curated realities and what are the threads that you followed? Sure. Yeah. I mean, it's sort of interesting because, you know, science fiction, so much of science fiction is set in the future and some of it, my books are certainly set in the near future. But as a writer, when I was working on the analog series, it doesn't feel like I'm trying to predict it. Really, when I'm working on a new novel concept, it's because I, I'm a voracious reader. In fact, I love your science fiction column. And I've discovered many, many wonderful books through it. And so I read a lot. I, and I'm very curious. I'm the kind of person who when I get interested in something, I will go down the internet rabbit hole forever. And then often, I'll start asking people about it. So if I, if I start learning about a topic or I have a strange or surprising experience just in daily life, I'll try to learn more. And I'm sort of shameless in, in indulging my curiosity. And often that is where the seed for a new book comes from. And so in a certain way, you know, William Gibson has this famous quote that the future's already arrived. It just isn't even evenly distributed. And I think that is just literally true. Like there's a reason why that quote is repeated so often. We all, we all part of our lives are already in the future. We are living in someone else's future. They're living in ours. And so suddenly you start paying attention to your life a little bit more. Sometimes you'll, you'll notice these weird little details. And then as a writer, I like to play with that with thought experiment. So rather than thinking, what is a technology trend that I can extrapolate or something like that? I will, I'll approach a new novel by saying, wow, this is a really fascinating thing that already exists. What if it was ubiquitous, right? What if suddenly something that, that right now feels like a toy and people enjoy as a toy? What if that became just the infrastructure of daily life? And then I'd say that the second thing that, that I sometimes think about when I'm trying to imagine a near future and to portray it in a novel is that technology is, is very often invisible, like the most successful, the most ubiquitous technologies we don't even notice anymore, right? So clearly, if you're participating in this call, you have electricity, you know, I like, I, we have plumbing, right? We have these, we have asphalt on the streets. At one time, every single one of those things was cutting edge technology worldwide, right? And now the, they're so woven through the fabric of the infrastructure that we live with that they don't feel like technology anymore, even if, even if they still are. And so when I'm trying to write about the future, I often go for that. So for example, the, the feed is sometimes, is notable in the fact that the mechanics of it are never described, right? In, in the book. And that's very intentional because when I drive to meet a friend for dinner, at no point during that drive, do I think about how an internal combustion engine works, right? And I wanted to make sure that that felt that all of the technologies portrayed in the novel feel that way to the characters living them. Thank you, Elliot. That was fascinating to know about how you go about ideating for these novels. The one thing that really struck me about the analog series is the club analog itself, because, you know, it's this one place where people go to unplug and you really notice like it really disorients people when they go in there. And you know, it is a place that has a lot of historical significance as well. And social significance in the world of analog, you know, like Cody Doctor gets mentioned and stuff, but it's never really expanded upon. So I'd like you to tell us a little more about the club analog itself. And, you know, what role do you think spaces such as analog would play in the future? Yeah, great question. So it's analog was actually very fun to write. And partly it was because the idea came from a late night dinner that I had with my wife and a close friend of ours. And we had cooked and eaten together in the kitchen. And then we were, you know, basically enjoying a bottle of wine afterwards and just waxing philosophical. And we were talking about how we would love to go to a place like analog. So we were talking about how connected we feel to the internet all the time, right? And how ubiquitous phones are and how, you know, how socially frustrating it can be if you're catching up with friends and people are pulling out their phones and it's interrupting conversations because they're getting and receiving texts, right? And so we thought, wow, wouldn't it be wonderful to be able to go to a social club where it was completely off grid and you had no choice but to, you know, to interact face to face. And initially we were thinking about it like, oh, wow, you know, this would be fun. It doesn't exist yet. It seems like the San Francisco Bay Area would be a very good place for that because people are so engaged with the internet that it would be a natural place to want to get off grid. And maybe we should do that. Maybe we should open that or try to make that happen. And of course, that was way too much work. So instead I wrote it into a novel. But as I was writing it into the novel, there was another experience that really influenced it. And it was that I have a close friend who's a designer and we've collaborated on numerous projects over the years. And one thing he taught me about how he thinks about design is basically the importance of white space. So as an example, you know, if you read the Avalok series, like whether you read it on Kindle or in a paper, paperback book or hardcover, you know, when I think about words on the page, but as a designer, he's thinking just as much about the margins and the space between the words and the space between the lines and that without that white space around it, it doesn't have the emotional weight, the thing you're trying to communicate or how you're trying to move people with the design doesn't work. And that that white space is really crucial. And so as I was writing analog, I realized that the analog club in the world of these novels is the white space for the future they live in, right, that if you could see how disorienting it was to be cut off from the feed, that would help the reader see how fundamental the feed is to the human experience in that future without needing to describe it directly. And so I just, I loved that. And those were sort of the two really foundational pieces for the club itself. We'll get to Vail next, which expands on that a lot more, but at the heart of in the background, there's a lot of talk about climate change also. I mean, there's a lot of tech and there's a lot of talk about climate change also in the analog series so much so that the commonwealth decides to impose a carbon tax on companies. It's that powerful, right? They can just decide to do it and they do. So which is about, it brings you to two questions. It's this future of the analog in terms of helping, common earth helping a better future is predicated on the fact that tech companies like this, which have too much power or have some sort of an enlightened leadership or people with the heart at, you know, which is sort of contrary to reality. So that's one bit of it. And a bit of it is like how important is climate change? I mean, which sort of reminds me of what I think Kim Stanley Robinson told you in one of your interviews that, you know, we are all living in a science fiction novel that we're writing together. So if you have to write about reality or treat realism, we have to write science fiction. So it's two questions in one. What are your questions? Yeah, wow, those are those are big questions. So I would say, first of all, that to address the second one first, I think that there's this, you know, as as a writer of fiction, you become really attuned to how much fiction there is in our daily lives. So when we think of fiction, we usually think of like a Netflix series or a novel or a comic book. But we don't often think of things like money or the nation state as an idea or all of these like all of these abstract concepts that really are very fundamental to our societies and our social lives that are inventions, that are human inventions, right? Like things like money only work because we all agree to believe in them together, right? And they only work to the extent that we agree that. And when you see economies start to break down, sometimes it because that shared belief is starting to fracture, right? So, you know, when we're all born into a world that has a status quo, and often that status quo feels very concrete, it feels immovable. But it's important to remember that that that a lot of that status quo, there are certainly things that are the physical realities of the world, right? But but that a lot of the status quo that we think is concrete is often a collective dream. It is like that doesn't mean it's not important. It doesn't mean that it doesn't have enormous and dramatic impacts on people's lives. In fact, the opposite. But it also means that because it's a human invention, it can be reinvented, right? That that history like we interpret and reinterpret history as we live and like the actions we take are what create the next bit of history, right? So we actually have agency in the world, sometimes more than we think, even in how we look at the world. And so, I think that there is an underlying theme, frankly, in in all of my books. And honestly, also, I think in all of Kim Stanley Robinson's books, that there's this underlying sense of optimism, that even if the world is is terrible, and even if you can point to things like in Vale or the analog series that are tremendously disturbing and scary and even worse than maybe that same independent variable today, that that still there's this sense that the people in them are are able to to face that and to try to move through it and to try to invent something new in a way that is generous towards the the the other people in their lives, rather than just, I don't know, like, getting as rich as they can, or you know, something like that. So I think that there is that sort of underlying optimism about no matter how bad the world is that we're born into that that we are the only people who have the opportunity to change it right now, right? So that's I think that's maybe the the second part of your question. And for the first one with with Commonwealth and and how it starts to play in the geopolitical world and and, you know, institute that carbon tax, I think that there's this like one sort of character arc in the story is that Rachel, who, you know, was Commonwealth's founder, you know, like many, many of the founders of today's tech giants started by inventing something she wanted, right? It was and it was small. When she started it, it what like Commonwealth wasn't what it became. Ultimately, it was the startup, right? And if you think of many of the big Silicon Valley companies whose founders are still alive and in charge, you know, the their first few years with that company, what it was like a tiny group of friends working on something that didn't feel serious or, you know, that didn't have any influence outside of whatever they were actually coding. And so for Rachel, she's over time, her, her little invention has turned into this hugely dominant institution, where any decision she makes has these cascading comp, you know, consequences for billions of people. And but she hasn't wrapped her head around that yet, right? It's almost like her psychology is stuck early on, where it hasn't caught up with the scale of the success of where her, her company has gotten. And frankly, I think that is already the case with a lot of Silicon Valley tech giants today, where, like, if you got to know the founders personally, you would probably be like, oh, you're a, you're a genuinely nice human being who's sort of trying to do the right thing. But the scale of the decisions they're making, they haven't caught up to it yet. Their sense of responsibility hasn't yet cut up to the scale of their decision making. And so that's part of what Rachel is going through in the series, is that she is trying to figure out, she's starting to realize, she's starting to see that, that her moral compass has to catch up with the, the, the consequences of her decisions. And I think that the other half of Commonwealth taking action on climate change by instituting a carbon tax is also what you alluded to before with Denmark sending diplomats to Silicon Valley, where in a sense, this is Commonwealth maybe doing something that many people today would agree with and cheer on. But in another sense, it is a private company that internally is completely authoritarian. That's sort of where it gets to and breach, right? And, and how it sort of changes. But it's a private company that is starting to make global policy, right? It's effectively displacing the UN by doing something like this. So in that sense, it might be, it might be sort of a, we would consider maybe, maybe everyone on this call would like agree with that they would might vote for that policy, but nobody voted for that policy in the books, right? It was this unilateral decision. And I think that that is also pretty characteristic of a lot of tech giants where they'll do what they think is right. And it may not be right for many other people, but, but they'll make that decision anyway. It is, it is, it is right for them. But, you know, but thankfully there are counterbalances like those little rebels at the island, right? And there's Miss Kim and all those people who sort of try to strike a counterbalance and saying anything more would sort of be spoilery. So I will hold my horses. I believe Vijay had a question. Yeah, I mean, I was just picking up on that point about that he was making about, you know, how Rachel hasn't caught up or her moral compass hasn't caught up to the enormity of, you know, what Commonwealth is and what the feed can do. And I was just thinking that, you know, of course, in the book, she has people like Dag and Diana and, you know, others around her who are willing to wear the white hat and, you know, help her make decisions that lead to something better. But I was wondering what we can do in the real world to ensure that there's some sort of, you know, accountability or ethicality within the tech world. Yeah, wow, that's a huge question. And I think you're the right person to ask you because you've been a part of the tech world, you've been a part of startups, you've been part of Scout and a lot of these. So you have an insider's view of how the gears mesh together. Yeah, so, okay. Yeah, that's really deep. And I'm going to have to see if I can summon something here. So I think that there are a few things to keep in mind. I mean, like, the first is that when it comes to having a moral compass yourself, right? I mean, a lot of that is about listening rather than talking, right? And like, I'm saying this as a writer. So basically, like, I have the hubris to believe that things I write other people might want to read, like sort of have to if you're going to write anything. But I think that there is this. So like, first of all, I would say develop your own moral compass, because it's hard to lead others if you don't have if you aren't sort of firmly footed yourself in in what you believe about the world. The second is like with anything else to lead by example, to the extent possible. So that doesn't mean that everybody has equal sway to lead by example. But like even in your personal lives, and in my personal life, like, I try to like, I try to act on the values that I hold dear, even if it's in a very small way, right? So as an example, my parent, like many people in the United States in California, I'm the son of immigrants. So my mother is Canadian, my father is Dutch, my wife is Colombian. And my grandparents fled here in the wake of World War Two. My grandfather's family was all killed in the Holocaust, and he was the only survivor and his and him and his wife fled here. And effectively the same is true for my wife, like they her family fled the drug violence in Colombia in the 90s and moved to the United States. And so we're really attuned to the problems that that immigrants have moving to the US. It's such it's such a real part of our family lives every day. And so I don't have the power to like force the US Senate to like make better immigration policy. I can obviously like vote for one senator or another. But I don't unilaterally have that power. But what we, what, you know, we tried to do so two years ago, we volunteered and hosted a Ugandan refugee in our home for nine months and and helped him find a job and figure out life here and, you know, connect to other local organizations and other Ugandans who live here in Oakland. And we learned so much more from that experience than we did from years of reading and advocating for immigration policy, right. So I think that finding ways to act in your personal life is very powerful and is also very informative. You'll learn a lot more from it. And then when it comes to tech companies in particular, I mean, frankly, the reason to the extent that they need our guidance about having a better moral compass like Rachel needs DAG and others is because they hold power, right. They have they've accrued all this new this new kind of power. And so they need the same kind of reminders that anyone else with power needs the the sort of the wealthy or people who hold a lot of political power or people who hold a lot of social and reputational power like celebrities, right. And people hold different kinds of power in society. And basically they need the same reminders as anyone else. And so that means, you know, smart, critical investigative journalism, for example, that can really keep an eye on what's going on. It means internally that that, you know, if you're like, if you're going to act morally, that means taking risk, right. Like, you need to be able to stand up and say, like, Hey, this is, you know, this is what I think is important or why, knowing that that could have consequences for your for your career or for your life. And if there aren't is if there isn't risk, then it's not a true moral choice, right. Then it so, you know, like, actually doing those things. And I mean, like, in my very small way, you were like, you know, like, from my experience, just working in various capacities in the sort of tech world, honestly, writing novels as a part of how I try to do that. Because telling stories that can illuminate a new point of view on that on these issues is one way that you can encourage people to think differently. And in fact, telling a story telling a human story that moves someone is so often much more powerful than making an argument. Right. And so that doesn't mean you have to write novels, like it certainly doesn't mean that novels are like the best form of activism far from it, like not not I mean, there's a they're fun, right, like novels are fun to read. And that's what really, you know, you're taking someone on a journey. But even if you are trying to guide someone to, you know, and reorient perhaps their moral compass, because you have something that you can share to impart to them, like doing it through a story is often a really wonderful approach and often has longer term sort of like a larger impact than than sort of intellectually debating them. Right. Absolutely. Thank you, Elliot. I think let's move on to talking about Will now. We'd like you to do a little reading from Will. But before that, Shanae could you just introduce us to Will and you know, tell us what it's all about. Yeah. So, well, Elliot looks both got ready is the passage that he's going to read for us. Could you? So let me just give you a quick. Okay, I do not have a passage prepared. So I sorry, I don't know if I was supposed to have one. Okay, no worries, Will. Okay, Will. Let me just intro it and then we'll get to sure. Sounds good. So I'm glad you spoke about, you know, about human relationships and how a story is a good way of getting a point across because that's actually what happens in Vale. Right. It has been described as science nonfiction for a large part of it. So what for those of you who haven't read Vale, what happens in Vale is that while the analog trilogy was about, quote unquote, hacking people and hacking existing systems, we moved to actually hacking the climate. Right. So, and if the climate change was in the background of the analog trilogy, it comes front and center in Vale. And there's a fascinating reason why it's called Vale. So when Paul Cano, the Mount Pinatubo, exploded, it just sort of coated the Earth with the ash. And during that period, the temperatures on Earth actually dropped because these particles were forming a Vale around Earth. That's where the novel gets its title from. And that's what tech billionaire, one of the most powerful people decides to sort of emulate. Tech is a solution to everything. Hence, tech is a solution to climate change as well, which is, yes, we have thoughts on that. So that's basically one big thing and counterbalancing. Again, like with the analog trilogy, there's always a counterbalance and that comes in the form of this daughter who's seen firsthand, millions of people die in a heat wave and who puts a job as a diplomat to take this up. And so it's a, as always, like I said, it's science fiction. It's near future. Hopefully it's not a near certain future. It's also techno thriller. It's been plotted well. So this whole thing about hacking the climate, you know, if you play your cards in where he was inspired from, but why did you decide to write a book about climate change? Was it to do with, like you said, if I put it in the context of a human story, maybe people will realize the consequences, the very human consequences of it because there's a lot of talk about diplomacy and climate science and, you know, your negotiations in it, you know, sort of, like I said, it's also, that's why it's been described as science nonfiction. Yeah. So the origin story, so often the origin story for a novel is sometimes vague. Like I'm not exactly sure where that novel might have come from. You know, the idea sort of starts percolating and then over time it takes a shape. But with Vale, it was immediate. I can point to a really specific moment. And I was actually listening to a podcast, not unlike all of our conversation right now. And it was with a science journalist, Charles C. Man, who was being interviewed on the Conversations with Tyler podcast. And he had an often comment for, I don't know, spent two or three minutes talking about, effectively, climate hackers, people who, there have been a small group of scientists who for years have been researching geoengineering, which is basically refers to a basket of ideas for how you can intentionally change the global climate. So if you think about current anthropogenic climate change, you know, like burning fossil fuels, pumping carbon into the atmosphere and warming the earth because of it. Like that was unintentional geoengineering, right? Like all we were thinking about was burning oil rather than what the exhaust would do. And then we did it at such a scale that it created, that we did engineer the client, the climate by accident. And so there are scientists that are now trying to think, hey, is there a way to do that intentionally in reverse? I mean, that's very oversimplified. But basically, are there ways that we could intentionally engineer the climate to try to mitigate some of the worst impacts of climate change? And so he had, I don't know, he just described this in two minutes. And I immediately thought, seriously, like, people are actually doing this? I mean, obviously, that's a novel. Like, how have I not heard of this before? And so I then went down one of my rabbit holes. So I started reading scientific papers and reading books and interviewing scientists in the field, both people that are like climatologists who are looking at actual different kinds of interventions, but also political scientists who study the sort of the impact on international affairs and how it would sort of change the world order in certain ways. And so, yeah, so I started learning and the more I learned, the more I realized, wow, not only is this just fascinating intellectually, but as we were talking about before with the scope and scale of the decisions Rachel had to make with Commonwealth, doing something where you are intentionally manipulating the global climate. Like, it's hard to imagine anything, any other human decision that has like that kind of scaled impact, right? Where your your decisions are shaping so many people's lives. And what if they're not participating in those decisions? I mean, I guess like, nuclear weapons would be another example of that, right? Where if you press a button, it could reshape the world. But this is clearly one of those things. And while everybody has heard of nuclear weapons, very few people are familiar with the work that the research that scientists are doing into geoengineering. And so by sort of learning about that, that's where sort of the seed for this story came from. And then the second part of your question was about how do you translate that into a human story? And that was actually one of the hardest things with Vale. That was one of the hardest parts of the novel was to figure out, okay, you have this idea, this technology that people are playing with that could have these just enormous sort of consequences, both intentional and unintentional. How does that become a human story? How does that become a human story on a human timeframe? Because just like with climate change with fossil fuel, part of the reason why it's why I think humans have struggled so much to address it in a meaningful way is because it happens over decades, right? It's something where actions we took a long time ago play out over decades. And we're not very good at that. Like it's we're really good if you touch, if a baby touches a stove, it burns them and they pull their hand away and it's a really quick reaction time. But if you whenever you have these big issues that are on long time horizons where we know it's a problem, but like it takes a long time to get to have the feedback loop go from like our action to the reaction, that's where human psychology is just not as well suited. And so figuring out how to turn this story into something that didn't take 500 years to tell was a big creative challenge. And that so I actually spent a lot of time working on that before actually starting to write the rough draft. Yeah, and also I noticed that India gets the short end of the stick. But then there's a precedence for that as well, you know, Chhattisgarh and all the cities and the drought in Chhattisgarh. But then of course that's historical too, like, you know, when the other volcano erupted and the whole of the Indian subcontinent suffered and that's why I said I hope this doesn't come through because, you know, we're going to get caught in the middle again. Yeah, no, it's terrifying. And like that was straight out of scientific papers. So basically, you know, this style of geoengineering of it's called solar geoengineering where you basically create this veil that reduces a tiny amount of incoming sunlight and so cools the planet. It's, I mean, it will disrupt weather systems around the world. And one of the weather systems that scientists are very concerned about it disrupting is the monsoon. And if it disrupts the monsoon, you're going to have a drought in South Asia. And so that yeah, it's extremely terrifying for that reason. Yeah, which makes it all the more urgent that people educate themselves with papers or articles, listen to scientists, if not read a book like Veil to see the very real human impact, which is why I do when somebody talks about climate change and what it could be, read Veil, you probably give your perspective on things. And also from the fact that, you know, it's not always that you can hack your way to anything. So that is, yeah, or do you? I think you may be on mute or I can't hear you. Yeah, you're on mute. Technical glitches. Yeah. At least I'm not the only one. This makes me look good, right? Technology was supposed to make our life easier. But then it just shows our dependence on it. I mean, of course, without the internet and without tech, we couldn't be having this conversation where in one time zone, your four or five time zones away, we wouldn't have had it. And, you know, that's, you know, like you said, it's only when it goes away. It's only when the flush doesn't work that you realize that, hey, listen, you know, yes, it was otherwise it's just muscle memory and just goes on. Okay, Fijia seems to have sort of dropped. Yeah, so yeah, I'll ask on her behalf. So you said that, you know, in your afterward, you write that you were one of the inspirations for Vail was visiting the Prophet by, you know, Charles Mann. And then you so you said, you told us that you're a voracious reader and you also have this newsletter that you send out regularly about the books that you love. And let me say, as someone who subscribed, it's fabulous. Get a lot of recommendations from that. But for my question, it's very simple for the people here or who might be watching on YouTube or will catch up on the video later. If you had to recommend, say, three, four, say five books that people could read after they're done with the analog trilogy and with Vail, which which sort of is in the is in the same vicinity or, you know, expands on on the themes that are that are dominant throughout these these four books, the trilogy and Vail, what would those three or four books, what would those three or four books be? Okay, great question. So let's see, I'm going to give a couple of very different recommendations. So one is if you read the analog series, and you read Vail, and you're really fascinated by sort of the thought experimentation around climate change, what could the world look like in the next few decades? And what are the possible responses we might take to it? I would highly recommend Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future, which you already mentioned Stan's books before. And it's a lot of reviewers have compared it with Vail. So I think that's a fun one to add to the list. Now, let's get that was a zig. Now here's the zag. If you sort of, if what resonates with you in the books is sort of these, the philosophical ideas that the characters are wrestling with, and that honestly a lot of this conversation has been about, I would highly recommend a very short book that is extremely fascinating, called Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Kars. And it's maybe 150 pages long, but it is just chock full of sort of these really interesting philosophical examples of how to think about the world and how you can reinterpret your own thinking about the world. And I think that there's not a single idea in that book that is thematically connected to everything in these books, but just sort of the, I think the perspective that he brings to looking at the world and being curious about it is really on point. Another nonfiction book, if what you really enjoy is like the technology in the books and how that evolves, Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants is just spectacular. It's probably the most thought-provoking book I've read about technology's role in the world. And so I highly recommend that. And then finally, for the science fiction readers out there who sort of like how the books bring this together and reimagine our social and political institutions and all of that, I know that you have interviewed Malka Older. So my cheat recommendation is Infomocracy, but another, the one that I'll put on top of alongside Malka's books is Ada Palmer's To Like the Lightning. It's a four book series. The fourth and final book comes out later this year. And Ada is amazing. She's a professor of history at the University of Chicago. And so she spends her day job is Renaissance history. And she brings that perspective to writing about the future. And so where a lot of science fiction is focused on science and technology, she brings the same imagination and creativity to imagining social and cultural evolution over time. And so I absolutely adore that series and highly recommend it. I mean, absolutely me too. I mean, like, here you go. I was lucky enough to have a chat like this with Ada and Malka a couple of years back. And I was sort of like, oh man, this makes me so happy that you could have the Infomocracy series, the Ada series and the Analog series together. They're a great pairing. Yeah. Yeah. But Vail would make a very good Netflix series. I do. Oh, thank you. We should tell Netflix. Vijay? Vijay is three years younger again. So she's actually take over. She's back. Yeah, my internet connection is really unstable. So I don't know what's happening. But yeah, not having a good internet day today. But what I was going to say before Zoom decided that it wants to kick me out is that I really loved how Vail ends and the solutions that it tries to come up with. So especially in light of what Shanai was saying with reference to India, I think it's important that people read the book and have a look. I think let's move on to audience questions now before Zoom decides it wants to kick me out again. We have a question here from TCV. In Vail, the core theme is climate change and our desperate attempts to reverse it. Do you think A, human induced climate change is reversible within a time frame in reality? And B, are sorry, what is the rest of that question? Shanai, can you see it? Sorry. Yeah, I'll read it. So the first part of the question is human induced climate change is reversible within a reasonable time frame in reality. And the second part of the question is are companies and countries that grew rich on the back of fossil fuel now playing the quote-unquote sustainability card to grow richer once again leaving poor countries poorer in the name of green taxes. So that's a question from TCV. Yeah, so both are very thorny and really good questions to tackle the second one first. I think you're absolutely right. I live in a country that grew immensely rich off of oil. And I think a lot of people living in countries that developed off the back of oil and became rich because of it and now have a lot of wealth because of it, there is a blindness to the fact that an intentional blindness to that reality and to the fact that sure, climate change may be a moral imperative, but so is ending poverty. So are any country that wants to create a better life for itself, for its citizens? That is the moral quandary that's basically one of the hardest problems within the sort of geopolitics of any kind of climate agreement. And so I mean, effectively, I basically think you're right. That's an enormous issue and there's no easy answer to it politically. For the first question, I don't think that, so the earth system, which includes sort of the atmosphere and our climate, but it's even larger than that, right? It's the water cycle, it's the biosphere, the whole earth system that we live within, all of the natural and physical processes and human processes that shape it is so enormously complex that nobody understands it. Like we do our best, right? The best climate models in the world are trying to create a simplified version of that in software that you can play forward to see what might happen, right? But the earth system is far more complex than our understanding of it is right now. And because of that, I don't think that any climate change is reversible. So that doesn't mean that you can't make the world more comfortable or better or safer or whatever than our current trajectory is. But if you imagine a child's toy with a clockwork motor where you like screw up the back and then it walks along the table, like you can imagine in your head the gears going in reverse, right? That you could almost walk it back and it screws the back back up, right? And that is a like that's what I think when I think reversible. It's like, oh, can we turn the world back into what it was before we started burning oil everywhere? And the I think that the earth system is far too complex for that to be a useful metaphor because we can't turn back the clock. The only question is how do we move forward in a way that is less destructive to human lives and to other species, right? How do we chart a course forward that helps that huge enormous system evolve toward a direction effectively that we want, right? Collectively. And I think that's the challenge. So when I think about the sort of inevitability of certain aspects of climate change and what should be done about them, like I'm trying to think, how do we invent a new way, a new path to move forward rather than how to return sort of return the earth system to a previous state, if that makes sense? It does. Thank you. Thank you, Elliot for that. Thank you. Thank you, Elliot. Okay, we're almost at the end of our hour. So before we close, just want to make sure that if the participants have any more questions, either you're on YouTube, this is your chance. Last few minutes. Yeah, maybe in the meantime, one comment that I think you made was about how technology is always the solution to our problems, right? I did this when I said that. Right. No, no, no. Oh, no, no. Yeah, sorry. You definitely had the quotes. They were really good. But, you know, I think that one thing I was thinking about while writing Vale is that technology, I mean, is sort of always the solution to our problems. The only issue is that you, as soon as you invent a solution, you're inventing a whole new set of problems, right? So, you know, like even with climate change, which is what we've been talking about for the past few minutes, and how it is unintentional due to engineering, you know, we burned so much oil because it was so useful, right? Like we wanted to, we invented cars, we invented planes, we invented, you know, like we used oil in so many industrial processes, we used it because it seemed like a great solution to a whole host of human problems. Like in the end of the 19th century, you had, like New York City was drowning a manure and they got all the smartest futurists and urban planners and scientists together. There was a big conference, I think it was 1898, where they asked like, what do we do about this manure problem, right? How do we, how can we have a city that doesn't have this enormous issue where there are piles of theses on the street, everywhere, all the time, enormous spread of disease, it's just untenable. And the result of the conference in 1898 was that all of those experts got together and said, it's impossible, the only thing humans can do is not have cities this big, that everyone should leave New York and move back into towns in the countryside because if you're going to have this many people together, you're going to have a lot of horses because they're dragging around material and supplies and all this stuff. So we're just never going to have cities that are ever larger than New York City in 1898, right? And of course, a few years later, you have the Model T and you have cars and within 15 years, basically like this manure problem ceased to exist. And that's part of why we have urbanization and live in these massive cities that we do today. And because of that, so like horses caused the manure problem, and then we solved the manure problem with cars and now we have climate change, right? So it's like this endless, it's an infinite game. You're always trying to solve the next problem knowing that you're going to invent a new problem that you're going to then have to solve afterwards. And so that I was, I was trying to play with that with Vale as well. That's fascinating. That is, I mean, and this actually reminds me of, sorry, sorry, Chenna, you were speaking. No, nothing. Good perspective on, on the, yeah. Go, go. Yeah. Now I was saying that it reminds me of the Lawn Story in the first analog series book, which also is, you know, equally, there's so much you can learn from history if you read it as stories and, you know, don't think of them in terms of dates, but yeah. And I must say that the thing that I really, really, the passage that I keep going back to in the books has nothing to do with tech. It has to do with gardening. Where you talk about gardening, you know, there's no such thing as a green thumb and you just need to learn love plans for what they are. And I mean, I must say, beautiful, beautiful books that I really enjoyed reading. And I hope that are everyone who's been here today and everyone who watches this later will definitely pick up Elliot's books. I think there are no more questions that have come on. So let's close this for the day. Thank you, Elliot, for coming and, you know, sharing your perspectives with us and speaking to us. This is really, really insightful. And I know that I am dealing with a lot of food for thought, and I'm sure others are as well. Thank you, Shenoy, for, you know, handling all my technical glitches and generally being an awesome co-host. Thank you for the, to the team as at Haskeek, Rishwin, Zerab, David, Jyotsna, everyone on the back end who helps, who help us every month to bring these conversations to you. And of course, thank you to everyone who attended. I hope you all enjoyed and that you will pick up the