 Hello, everyone. Welcome to Sci-Fi, Spies and Democracy. This is the first session for the Anthel Inside Science Fiction Book Club in 2021. And we have with us the brilliant Dr. Malka Older. A few things that I would like everyone to keep in mind before we get started. Please keep your mics on mute. And keep typing in your comments and questions in the chat box. We shall take them at the end during the Q&A session. To introduce myself, I am Vijay Lakshmi. I'm the author of Strangely Familiar Tales. My other writing has been published in various journals and anthologies and I also write on the regular for Women's Web. My co-modulator today is Tigi Shenoy. Tigi Shenoy is an SFF enthusiast and a columnist and critic. He's the writer of India's longest-running weekly SF column, New World's Weekly, for Factor Daily. He's the spec-fixed column for Bangalore Mida. He also curates the SF track for the Bangalore Litfest. He has featured in podcasts such as the Tale Harate Canada podcast and even such as the Sri Lanka Comic Con to talk about SFF in general and Indian SF in particular. He hosts, to boldly go, a fun SFF quiz every Saturday. He's also an advertising and marketing professional and is currently a consulting partner with Celsius Hunter Consulting. Our wonderful guest today, of course, is Dr. Malka Older. Dr. Older is a writer, aid worker and sociologist. Her science fiction political thriller Informacracy was named one of the best books of 2016 by Kirkus, Bookwright and The Washington Post and the Sentinel Cycle of which Informacracy is a part was nominated for the Hugo. She is the creator of the serial Ninth Step Station, currently running on Serial Box and her short story collection and other disasters came out in November 2019. She's a faculty associate at Arizona State University's School for the Future of Innovation and Society and opinions can be found in the New York Times, the nation and foreign policy among other places. Chenoy, you've always loved the Sentinel Cycle and you've always had much deserved high praise for it. So would you like to get us started today? So the Sentinel Cycle, it starts with Informacracy continues with state economics and international states. I mean, it's probably one of my favorite recent sci-fi trilogies. So pardon me if I sort of gush a little bit extra about it. It's brilliant and it's set about 20 years in the future and the parallels from here to there, it will resonate with anybody who follows geopolitics and how information is affecting politics and all of those things. But to just sort of step back a bit, I mean, science fiction has always been about politics and engaging with post structures and imagining new forms of government and all that sort of a thing. But and when it comes to forms of government, there have been enough, right? There's monarchy, there's even gerontocracy where comments are run by old people. There's even cockatocracy, which is government run by least qualified the thieves. Sometimes nowadays it seems like we're in a cockatocracy or a gerontocracy, but that the part, the only the form of system that's been running longest or we see across is democracy. Now, until Informacracy came along, hardly any books, I think there was one by Asimov or something which spoke about something that said the heart of democracy, which is the election. And that's what I absolutely loved about it, the way it looks at democracy. And it was it's a democracy or rather a micro democracy in which each voting block if you can call is made up of 100,000 people and it's called a sentinel. That's how the trilogy gets its name and you have all these little sentinels across the world and there are parties which are trying to win sentinels and the ones with the maximum sentinels get to form the super majority and everybody is like a fascinating form of micro democracy. I'm sure Dr. Oldu will speak more about it. What I liked about it was fact that it looks at democracy, it looks at power structures. There's this entity called the information which is think about all the social media that you can think of. Plus Apple plus Amazon with a little bit of the UN's powers thrown in and you get this entity called the information which controls flow of data and controls the elections and make sure that everybody gets information that they need which is why it's called information. So all these little things and it's a world that feels very sort of lived in. There's a lot of talk on policy and it's a lot of thought provoking things about democracy and power structures and makes it even better that it's also got Katana's and him through us. It's also got romance. It's also a political thriller. So, I mean I can keep going on and on like I said pardon me if I gush too much about this book but I'd like to see the stage and ask Dr. Oldu. I'll just sort of introduce us to the world and how you came up with it and what sort of sparked off the idea of the micro democracy and how you created this world which sort of feels very lived in. It doesn't feel sterile and you know you can relate to it and they're like this is something that can come to be. Thank you so much for that introduction. I personally don't think it's possible to gush too much about my books but that's my opinion. Anyway, I appreciate really hearing this it's always it's always great to hear from people who appreciate the books, and I think you described the system pretty well but I'll just I'll summarize again for anyone coming in late so it is this world of what I call micro democracy in which the basic unit is 100,000 people. So, in a very dense place that's a couple of city blocks or it could be just miles and miles of rural area, and those 100,000 people can vote for any government that they want that exists anywhere in the world. And at the time of the book it's there are roughly 2000 governments all over the world with different issues and interests and policies, some of them are very localized and some really compete on the global scale. And so what that means is that as a government, they would have these pockets of constituents maybe all over the world. And as someone living in the world as a citizen you could move into a different country by crossing the street. And all of this as TG said is facilitated by this big global bureaucracy called information. So, I came up with this idea, basically out of frustration and annoyance with the way things are in the world today which I think is, is not a bad way to start writing speculative fiction because, you know, a big part of speculative fiction is, it's really not fiction so much although sometimes there are elements of prediction in it but a lot of it is really just trying to present an alternative to the world that we're living in now. Whether you do that through alternative history whether you do that through dystopian stories whether you do that through science fiction or even whether you do it through fantasy. It can all work to show us the things that we sort of that we take for granted in our world and shows that they could in fact be different. So what I was trying to do. I had worked in worked and visited and lived in a number of different countries that had successionist problems, whether it was an all out war, as in Sri Lanka where I was working for a year. In Indonesia where it was sort of a post conflict situation, both in the east and in Ache in Sudan which was in kind of both in different parts of it, or, you know places where it was a terrorist movement like in Spain with Etta, or places where it was going to be a referendum again and again like Scotland. Basically we see that all of the world, we have even in what are at least nominally democracies, because except for Sudan all those countries are democracies. We have collections of people who don't want to be part of the government. And I was, you know I was really frustrated with all the, the terrible things that occur because of these attempts to succeed and and why a government would really want to keep people who don't want to be in their nation there. And so I was thinking about that and also I was thinking about, you know, in the United States, which is the country where I vote. We were having elections and each election it seemed to we're getting more granular data about who's voting for what so, and you can look obviously we recently had an election. And you can look and see and they can tell you down to a very small level, you know which county or which zip code voted for one way or another to the percentage. So you see these little dots of in the US red and blue. And so those represent people who have probably pretty fundamentally different ideas about what they want out of their government. And to me it became very frustrating to think about how we're sort of all squam together into this massive country for no particular reason with people who have very different ideas about what they want and and keep going back and forth. So, you know, I started to imagine what it could look like with a couple of different changes if instead of worrying about territory and landmass which honestly in today's economy is really not so very important for a country's economy or status in the world. Instead of that if we thought more about population. The narrow democracies down to a much smaller size, and we're much more flexible than in the choices that we had in government. What that would be like, and I wasn't trying to create the utopia. I was trying to, again, both reflect on the world that we live in and see how things might be different. And you know, put out a sort of proposal that I didn't think would work perfectly but I thought would have some interesting interesting points to it. And the, the information, this, this vast bureaucracy that manages all of the information access in the world, because of course I was very frustrated with information misinformation the way it stands now in the world. So, that's, that's where it came from and yes I just want to repeat at this point after having gone through all that wonky stuff Katana's play him throwers throwing stars chase scenes bites romance definitely so yeah it's it's also there's there's some fun in the book. I mean, of course it's fun and that's what I said you know beyond all the serious policy wonky stuff there's a lot, you know, there's a lot of things going on and just sort of keeps makes it look like sort of a page turn about in the nicest way possible. So, of course, people have described it as a critical thriller, I mean, there's shades stylistically the shades of cyberpunk and all but the world per se. I mean you mentioned the word utopia. Right so I've seen people look at it from both sides some people say hey listen this is sort of this way some people like listen this is utopian but then I've always said that every utopia is depends on you know who it is a utopia for if it's dystopian who it is a dystopia for. So, the world of informocracy and of the Sentinel cycle. I mean, from your perspective I mean, like you said you're not trying to create a utopia but critical and sort of automatic. Given these are terms that are banned often and people use it as shortcuts where do you think it would fall what was the ratio. Well, I think what you said is such a good point that you know when we call something utopia or even a dystopia. It depends who you're talking about because if we think about even the most famous dystopias. There are people in them who are doing very well for themselves. And so that's, that's, that's, you know, fundamental because I think what we are attempting to do in the world. For the last three centuries or whatever with democracy is is to try to even that out a little and say that, you know, we have to find something that works out more or less for everybody or at least for majority, and obviously it's not working perfectly. There's some big problems with that. It's hard to be part of it being that majority bit. And there's a lot we have to work on but it's, you know, it's still the way that we're trying to push towards something that's more equitable and how the that utopia dystopia balance goes. But in terms of my book. Personally, I think it's a very hopeful book. I don't think everything about the world I describe is better than where we are now but I think quite a few things are. Mostly what I think is hopeful about it is that all the main characters pretty much are working towards a better world, even if some of them disagree on what better means and disagree quite quite seriously with each other. But you know that there are people who are really engaged and for whom it is their job they are paid to try to make the world better try to make democracy work better try to make governments work better. I think that's very hopeful, but I will say quite a lot of people have said that the book is dystopian or terrifying. It's been on a lot of best dystopia to read after you finish binging black mirror, etc type of lists. Oh yeah. I think, you know, I think partly that has to do with the surveillance aspect because information as this, this, you know, massive information management system. It does, you know, there are cameras in in pretty much all public spaces, not in private spaces not inside homes but in pretty much all public spaces and all that video is available to everyone, not to mention everything else like search result data and so on. And I think people react to surveillance. There's sort of like a major connection of surveillance to dystopia because of 1984. And certainly like, I, you know, I don't think surveillance is ideal but I when when people bring this up I tend to point out that the level of surveillance in the book is actually not that much more than what we are what we see today in quite a lot of places. The difference being that the results of the surveillance the data is available to everyone, instead of just being available to either the state, or, you know, a patchwork of companies, which usually then make it available to the state. So I, you know, I think that there's some really important issues there in terms of who has access to the data and how it is used beyond just the simple fact of the data existing. And that's a very good point because I mean, one of the reasons that chai away from, you know, you don't know, you know, who's going to have access to it you don't know how much of use out there and as in, and I think I think one of the reasons why people look at it as dystopian and all is the fact that Informa crazy came out in 2016 just as the elections were happening. And the fact that, you know, there was a whole image and I let it come in that came out and how they were trying to sort of quote unquote hack democracy. And the parallels between that and the information, right, we're sort of, you know, between Facebook and the information or, or I mean the existence silos now but whereas information is a monolith. So I, a lot of it I'm sure is coming from there whole hacking democracy bit. And so, and I mean, you know, might be at the book came out in the summer of 2016, but all of those issues of fake news and manipulating information for democracy have been around longer I think they really like smashed us in the face in and there was a level of organization there I think also that got higher but you know I always remember the 2004 election in the US. There was this perpetration of a fake news story that was probably influenced the results of the presidential election, and was so pervasive at the time. It was about John Kerry service in Vietnam and it was a bunch of people who'd been on a swift boat, and it was so important at the time that it became a verb so people would say to swift boat someone. And then it disappeared, like it was, it was, you know, it happened in 2004 and blah, blah, and then the election was over. There was no way to dispute it, you know, we still I mean I think this is one of the things globally in democracy that we need to start thinking about is, you know, what do you do how do you evaluate something that is unfair and an election. It doesn't matter if it's domestically perpetrated or foreign perpetrated doesn't matter if it's, you know, automated with bought farms or if it's individuals and is that something that we need to to deal with in our elections but it just, you know, after that happened it just sort of disappeared and then we were all shocked all over again when we return to fake news and so you know it's it is something that has been around for a while it's it's really scary it's one of the things honestly that I was trying to sort of with information but as soon as I came up with this idea of you know a single source that people would believe in for information, it was also immediately obvious to me that this was an incredibly dangerous and terrible idea. Of course because as soon as you have that source, if it gets corrupted, then you know you have no recourse the power part of the power that we have is having lots of diverse viewpoints but as we see you know in most of our environments, the majority of those viewpoints and the ones that are the most powerful and the loudest have been corrupted you know they're very much has to do with the economic structure of the corporations that run them. And it has to do with the number of outlets that a single corporation might control. And it has to do with the structures of how we see news and what makes people look and where they get their money. So there's lots of reasons why we have have these problems. Diversity of news sources not solving them. And so I wanted to look at what it would be like with the single news source knowing that there was this huge element of, you know, possible corruption and certainly possible skewing that would go into that but think about you know what it would look like if, instead of having very limited choices in our government, and tons of choices and information, we had, you know, one mostly choice for information and lots and lots of choices for government. I mean, the same news can be interpreted in multiple ways. Right, depending on how you come and even down to, you know, what we call quote unquote, you know, analytics and all that sort of thing like they say you know that is is damned license statistics. The thing that you spoke about is like to choose between who rules us or who forms the government and all which brings me to the parties in the Sentinel cycle. You know the heritage and of course I'm policy first which is your favorite and I like this, you know, they're that you know policy first leaders later. Right. So, can you just for those who not I could go on like I said but then I like departments to hear it from you who not ready for Chrissy about policy first and what policy first and he does later means. Sure, so yeah I had to come up with a lot of different ideas of governance which, which was actually a lot of fun. So some of them are kind of obvious jabs at certain existing either governments or ideologies. And corporations, you know quite a lot of them are formed of a group of corporations that band together and think okay if we're government now, then we can decide taxes in our favor and labor laws in our favor etc. Some of them are kind of single issue ish like there's some that are all about economics there's some that are all about the environment. And they're really, you know, small and local, because I think that that's, you know, there's, there's, there's quite a lot of people and places for which the local issues are really the most important and they just want a government that's right there that's that's concentrating on on their local problems whether it's you know, I don't know some environmental problem that has to do with the river right there, or the economic problem that has to do with the single commodity that they grow in that place and so on. And that are quite interest based so like I came up with a Hello Kitty government which is all about like cuteness and anime and people having fun with that and you know that's great they, they have a good time and and there's, you know, that's the foreign party. Of course, I mean there has to be like, that's the thing I think we have, you know, and if we think about the different ways that we have allegiances beyond our nationality. I mean, Facebook is is one model for that slack groups or another model but we see people kind of going into these groups of of interests that, you know, have some governance application to them, and also just involve community and people getting together so, so you know I was interested in sort of that area and then as you mentioned policy first which yes. And it's, it's, you know, so much of our politics again this is all stuff that I'm frustrated and annoyed with in the real world, but you know so much of our politics has to do with personalities, I'm actually super annoyed with with how people call governments populist, which I think is terrible term because any government any party that wins an election and a democracy is by definition populist because people have to like it. And also just, you know, what we're really talking about is typically with those governments is personality cults that form around some charismatic person who says the things that they think people want to hear and that some group, some subsection and people want to hear. And it really has to do with the person. And then you get this really weak link between the vote and what actually ends up happening what the government actually does. It's really hard to hold people to their personality if that's what you're voting based on that's not something that you can look at later and say, Oh, you know, I thought I would like to have a beer with you but then, you know, after I saw what you did in government I don't want to have a beer with you anymore you know that's it's not something that you can tell them, oh you broke your promises right. So much of our political conversation certainly in the US is focused around, you know, what did the person where how did they look on stage did they speak well. I mean speaking well you know at one point in the history of US democracy was kind of important because you use you persuaded people in debate to vote, and that has not really such an important factor anymore. And yet it's a huge part of the criteria that were given to judge politicians. So you know I really wish that we would move away from people in our political decision making and focus a lot more on what the policies are that they represent, or not have them represent those policies so but just vote directly for the policies, or have anonymous people or have it, you know, short terms that are decided by lottery. There's pluses and minuses to that because obviously experience is worth something but you know the way we're doing it doesn't work so we need to explore other ways. I can bring you. It's probably a US only problem. That's just the one that I know the best but yeah I mean, really most countries when we look at the date they very much make their politicians into these public figures these these celebrities almost, which also then means that you have the people who choose to go for those positions want to be celebrities which is just never a good idea. Yeah, it's just a very destructive process all around. Yeah, yeah, I mean there are a lot of quotes from infirmacy that keep coming to mind in recent times. Yeah. Okay to kind of move away a little from you know the elections and the democracy to the writing of the books. As I mentioned earlier you've worked around the globe in many places you've had more than eight years of experience as a humanitarian worker. I just like to know how those experiences influenced how you approach the writing of the Sentinel cycle because the books have this really nuanced understanding of global politics and you know cultural diversity and all of that. And as I said, I mean the whole idea in a lot of ways just came from my experience being in a lot of different places and seeing the things that are, you know that are similar problems everywhere, and also seeing the things that are that are the differences and that let me see my own country that I'd grown up in, in a different light. So that was, that was a big part of it. I also, you know, I was very conscious as I started writing. I started writing in Japan, because that's actually where I was at the time when I, when I finally started writing it and that was this this the image the first image of the book which is in Japan was sort of the thing that gave me a hook for all these philosophical political ideas I had to put them in a, in a time and place in the future. So I started in Japan and because it was a novel set in the future in Japan. I naturally kind of thought of cyberpunk and use some of that aesthetic to draw, start drawing the books and the characters that, but I was also very conscious that you know cyberpunk and indeed science fiction in general, particularly, you know this was, this was a few years ago when I started writing the popular stuff the stuff that you come across if you're not digging is kind of focused on a very small number of countries. And that, you know, I wanted to do something different. And also, I have a kind of a philosophy where they say you know they say write what you know. I find it very effective to write what I miss, because if you miss something you typically have a very powerful emotional attachment to it and you want to bring it when you bring it to mind you know it comes very vividly. I tried to write about a lot of the places where I had lived or had traveled. And so that gave me some of you know I wanted to be putting myself back in that world and remembering the food and the people and the places that I had been to. And it was a lot of fun also to take this very, very flexible and decentralized idea of governments and think how would this play out in different countries and different cities, because countries of course are absolute in this world but the cities and the locations that I had been, as I said you know I had a lot of fun coming up with different governments and part of that was thinking you know what kind of governments would the different parts of Jakarta vote for, or you know what kind of government is going to take hold in Jakarta, or what kind of government you know what happens in the US, how does it divide into different governments so you know that there was a lot of that just it was you know it was really fun to go through and kind of and populate it with that diversity I wanted it to be a global book. I sort of remember how the idea of the Sentinels sort of resonated and it sort of sparked off a lot when I did the giveaway of Informocracy, one of the questions, I mean the question that I asked people who want to participate in the giveaway of Informocracy was, I mean what would Indian Sentinels look like. And it was such fun to watch because people were like really engaging with the idea of Sentinels and had some really fun stuff like people saying you know the Manahali sentinel is fighting with the BTM layout sentinel over Silk Boat toll taxes and you know who owns the traffic jams, but I liked how you know sort of they were thinking the idea of the Sentinels is sort of applying it to what we have and there was this Sentinels where you know just sort of very feminist and all of that so it's an absolutely great idea there's so much you can go and play around with it. I really just think it's such a shame that in most countries and all countries were so limited and the choices we have in government when in fact there's so many more you know inventive and interesting different ways that we could go and how we organize ourselves and how we govern ourselves so yeah it was a lot of fun to think of that. Other thing that is also interesting me which you introduced in the Sentinels cycle was the idea of narrative disorder. I mean Mishima suffers from narrative disorder where she seeks narratives and stuff like that and you had the shortest story also called narrative disorder in which you know it's treated as a condition and it's diagnosed and people who have narrative disorder sort of have to engage with sort of not just created content they turn reality into a narrative try to come to their own conclusions and you know sort of their minds being wired so much with all the information that we're getting where there's that WhatsApp and you can't distinguish sometimes fake news from fact and stuff like that and I remember in my interview with Bruce Sterling he told me that fake news is actually design fiction. Yeah. It's probably the most effective form of design fiction and sometimes it feels like you know we're all suffering from narrative disorders are we. Yes, yes we are I mean in my in my conception of this we are all suffering from narrative disorders but it's a spectrum so we're on different parts of the spectrum. Depending probably on on kind of our inclination for fiction, I personally am very deep in narrative disorder I have a severe case, which is why I, you know, either came up with it or named it depending on how you want to think about it but narrative disorder has has two sort of symptoms or parts of it. One is an addiction to narrative, and I think most of us like if you are at a book club on a Friday, you probably have some narrative you probably really enjoy fiction and narratives in general I mean narrative is not only fiction but you know narrative nonfiction is very popular now. And we see narrative techniques being used in news stories and oh my gosh like when you look up a recipe online you have to read through how many pages of narrative before you get to the actual recipe about you know the person's grandmother who gave them the recipe and when they found it in the book and this is all narrative like we have just we're now in a place in our society like culturally and in many of our societies because culturally where we just love to have stories. And, like I said, I am supremely guilty of this like I have my, my overdrive queue from the library I have all these books on hold and I'm constantly looking for more books and, and, and it's also, it's, it's a bit ironic because we are, there are more stories available to us, then we could possibly get through. I mean, only Netflix, only what I can get out of the library on my Kindle. It's immense. And yet, we are still always looking for the new thing that's coming out, and you know the sequel from our favorite author or the new movie that's had a lot of hype or whatever you know it's a it's a really interesting dynamic. I think so that's the one side than the other side is that as you keep ingesting these narratives. And particularly, if you kind of invest them in ingest them through one relatively narrow cultural framework. Okay, so if you always watch Hollywood movies and if you always watch a certain genre of Hollywood movies, you're going to start to you know your brain gets accustomed to those patterns that's what narratives are for for teaching our brains things. And you're going to start to see those patterns places. Sometimes where they don't exist. And sometimes where they exist because other people who are stuck in that same groove are somehow into the world. And so that's that's it's a double edged sword, I guess, for for Mishima the swordswoman for this character who I have who's who has a very severe case. And, you know, sometimes it helps her and it gets her to these amazing moments because she knows the narrative beats that are going on and sometimes it can be tricky because she expects a narrative type pacing or beat or storyline that isn't there because it's the real world. The real world doesn't always have those sort of meat pacing and beats and closure and things. And, and certainly because it's a diagnosed thing in this future world, her, her bosses and her colleagues are sometimes skeptical of it you know it's an easy thing for them to say oh you're letting your narrative disorder run away with you. And, you know, it's, it's the sort of thing that I think people have have had for for centuries probably but they would think of it as something else like oh you're hyperactive imagination is an imagination that is bad on lots and lots of stories in fact don't give you which is an example of, you know, someone who literally read so many what were romances at the time which is not, you know, love romance but is about nights going off to fight things romantically read so many of those that he went off and did it, even though he didn't actually have anything to fight like that is a very literal example of narrative disorder. I must say about the narrative disorder it was my one of my favorite parts in the book for very, very obvious reasons, but also, you know, like you mentioned the people around Mishima, you know very of the narrative disorder and, you know, they use it sometimes to dismiss some very legitimate concerns and ideas of hers. But she knows that it's her superpower so you know I really liked that it was a very affirming and positive representation of neurodiversity and you know so thank you for that. Yeah I mean as I said it's it's very much me and and and I was you know as I wrote it I was thinking about how we have these different ways of looking at things and depending on what's going on societally and culturally they get diagnosed as a disorder they get put in certain boxes, or they get ignored and people just kind of deal with them without having a name to put on it and so yeah I was definitely thinking about that dynamic as well. Thank you so much. Moving on to some of your other work. So, I mean you have your collection of stories which is and other disasters. You have stories in magazines like Tor the slate and most recently in constellation. I'd like you to tell us a little bit more about those. But before that, there's one particular story of yours tear tracks, which, you know, I connecting to what you were speaking earlier about, you know, the cult of personality. I mean this particular story tracks it really beautifully explores how vulnerability and pain can be strengths, and more importantly it speaks about how leaders themselves, you know, is essential for them to be vulnerable and open about their vulnerabilities. And you know, in what the trend is seeing worldwide is to elect people who project this very different idea of strength, which is almost very toxic. So, you know, could you tell us a little bit more about what made you write this story, you know why did you think this was a story to tell. Yeah, absolutely and I'm also going to put just a link to my, my website with the list of publications there because that has the links to all the free stories so if anyone hasn't read this they can, they can find that story from there maybe you can put it in the YouTube as well. So, yeah, this story. I, you know, I had, I knew someone a little bit and they had something really terrible and sad happened to them, and they dealt with this with a really incredible amount of grace. And it just made me think about how little we value that. And how little we, in particular, you know, value that sort of the sort of character that allows someone to deal with such a situation. And, and, and grow from it and, and, you know, respond to it and remain dealing with other people. And, and yeah contrast as you said that to the sort of things that we do put that we do put value in. And in the story, the way that the this alien civilization deals with it is perhaps not perfect. Like they're very focused on the thing that happens to the person, as opposed to the way that they respond to it the way that they, what it does to their character. And, you know, I, for me that's, I think that's very typical of humans perhaps when an aliens we don't know for aliens but for you know the stories are about us really and, and it's very typical about how humans will take some kind of value or criteria, and because it's difficult to evaluate that go to a proxy variable. You know, so we are, we want leaders who are, I don't know, intelligent in a certain way and we take this proxy veil variable of them being able to speak memorized talking points in, you know, an effective way or having sharp banter with someone else on a debate stage, and and take that to mean oh they're, you know, they're smart and they're quick and they can be decisive. And so, so, so yes it's it's really a story about sort of the different kinds of things we can value and, you know, in the story that the human who meets with this alien civilization has suppressed all of her vulnerability and and all of the things that have happened to her because they're not valued at all in her society. And, and that is kind of that would be the key to dealing to interacting with this alien society but because they can't see their cultural differences. She's not able to find it in that first visit. Maybe things will change in the future. In this stage, let me just tell everyone who's here with us on zoom that you can just type in your questions. I mean, we'll be going to taking a questions in a very short while you can type it in the chat. If you're watching us on YouTube, please type it in the comment box comment section of YouTube, and it will be conveyed to us here. The next thing before we get into the QA Q&A is is I wanted to ask you about the course that you're teaching or addictive fictions at the ASU. I mean we've always known, I mean, science fiction. People say, okay, this novel predicted that but we all know that the writer was just extrapolating and just happened to come through but can't deny that there is a sort of, you know, sort of a feedback loop between a sort of science fiction and a logical fact and I looked, I saw the syllabus that, you know, people have been informally following and reading. I found it very fascinating, you know, how you sort of getting these frameworks to look at future studies and that, you know, what you call predictive fictions could This is a bit about, you know, how you're going about it and what outcome is what what the experience of it has been teaching the course and how science fiction lends itself to this non SF also of course. Great question and yeah I'm really happy to talk about it because I'm pretty excited about this course right now I was asked by ASU to develop a course that was something around science fiction. And we eventually came up with actually talking about sort of the relationship between science fiction and the kinds of prediction and descriptions of the future that we don't think about as fiction. So in the course we're reading things about meteorology or reading things about cost benefit analysis and macroeconomic forecasting and polls polling political polling. And also disaster planning, which is much more my area, and then long term planning like 50 year plans or how we have a model climate change. So, you know, kind of the point about all of this is that all of these things that we think of it's just like oh you look at the weather forecast that's telling you what the weather is going to be are really involve a lot of guesswork and uncertainty and indeterminacy. The same is very much true of economic forecasting is true of all of these right. There's a degree to which they're manipulated by the people who create them and have certain interests, and there's a degree to which we just don't know and it's guesswork right. But they're presented to us in society very much as, as you know somehow rigorous calculations of the future that may be wrong but if they're wrong it's you know something like probability. Oh you know, the whole Nate silver depends for the, the polling errors. You know we showed that there was a 70% probability of this happening and it didn't happen so we were still right. And so what we're thinking about in the course is how, you know, all of these things are fiction. Why do we prioritize some and not others. What are the skills and and the calculations that are involved in science fiction. And how can those. How can we sort of relate these two different ways of thinking about the future, more than two but you know the supposedly nonfiction ways and the fictional ways how can we relate them and integrate them into something that gives us really a better idea of how we can relate to the future how we can plan the present and act to change our future so it's. Again I put the link to the syllabus in the chat here. If people want to take a look. We're only in the actual course that I'm teaching, we're only part way through week three now so we're still quite early on to see how it's going for the students. There's a lot of reading. And, but I've been really really pleased with the discussion so far and I've been really pleased with the discussion has come out on Twitter as I've been sort of live tweeting my, my review of the readings for my for when I record my lectures. You know people come up with really wonderful and relevant examples that are quite different from what I thought of because this really is a very wide issue you know almost any area that you think of we have these projections of the future. And again they're usually presented in a way that does not suggest they are fictional. So, you know I found it really, really great interaction. And, and I'm enjoying looking into it a lot. I mean, I am a little behind in the reading. Yes. Yeah, I would love to be a student at the same time know. Yeah, I think they feel the same way. And of course there's science fiction and that you know we're reading the Gherkin the Lord of Tuesday by Sadhus Hussein which is just, you know, just hits on so many interesting topics. Absolutely brilliant book. It's so good. And it's a lot of fun. And we're reading the parable of the sewer which I think is like really just one of the most important things that you can read about politics today, and was written, you know not only before this happened but it was written in 1993 so like way before we got to this point, and really predicts things in a way that a lot of pundits missed doesn't get everything exactly of course but that's not the point you know the point is, is giving us the sense and the emotion of what's going on. And what else we're reading some some essays by Le Guin and essay by TV about there as well to go with parable of the sewer. Some some short stories. We're reading the push cart war which is a children's book that has, you know, very little technology in it but is always set in the future so it was written in the 50s and each subsequent edition moves the dates forward so that the events in the story always happen in the future from when you're reading it, and they're treated as history because the book is supposedly written much farther future than the events happen. So it's and it's a really brilliant book about resistance and economization and other things anyway so you can look at the syllabus. There's a lot of cool stuff on it. And, and yeah I think it's, it's, it's important to us to think you know as we, you know, a lot of us here I think are very focused on the science fiction side. Keep in mind, when you're thinking about this as, you know, a fun hobby or an insightful but very fictional kind of, you know, fun, not serious way of reading. Yeah, keep in mind that a lot of the things that we think of as serious and rigorous and part of our economies and our governments are also fiction and are not necessarily do not necessarily involve more research or more thought or more consideration or more than some science fiction, not all science fiction, some science fiction is also terrible. But, but some of it. Turgent's law applies. Some of some of the best fiction you will find is in election manifesto so. Also, also. Yeah, and part of my my inspiration for this course came when there's an entire book by disaster sociologists called mission improbable fantasy documents. And it's all about the planning and contingency plans, mostly by industrial companies about what they will do if there's an accident, and he just goes through an absolutely dissect them in terms of how they're totally unrealistic, totally fantasy. It's not comfortable reading, but it's very good. In fact, it's really this is everywhere. This is, you know, a lot of the stuff that we are told to take very much of face value is fiction. And so you need to treat it in the same way that we treat fiction in terms of thinking about who is writing it. You know, how is it, how is it structured and built up and what are they trying to get. Any questions before that one comment, Gautam Bhatia comments that one SFF reader and writer has titled that we can handle narrative disorder in honor of informocracy. We'll after this we'll go and find out. I think Leo says on YouTube that anonymous leader is a novel idea never heard of it for the reference to policy first and asks a question. Your description looks very similar to sovereign individual. How was your book inspired by that did it take anything from the work sovereign individual. So just to comment on the anonymous leader idea I also have a short story which you can read online which is kind of goes more into that idea it's called candidate why, and you can find the link to it on that that page that I gave you, or you can Google my name and my word press site and then you can find it. And no, actually, I have not. I haven't read it so no but but I will say like there's a number of books that kind of look at these ideas of the different ways that we could be structuring government and our allegiances. I just often mentioned with mine, also Elliott peppers analog series, which are both great so if you like mining or those are those are other books to delve further into these. They're different, but they deal with a lot of the same issues and concerns and I think there's really a feeling around that this this nation state system that we've been in for a couple of hundred years, not really that long. Civilizational terms or societal terms are definitely not in all of history terms. It's kind of cracking at the edges, and we need to be thinking about what comes next and hopefully, you know, managing that transition in an intentional way, and not just sort of falling into whatever the power structures set up for us. Sorry. Okay, that was a long answer. It's good. It's always good. So one of the things about informocracy was the fact that there are nation states are no more. Right, but no more. A couple left as we see in Muslim book to a little bit. These stragglers, the stragglers, which brings me to a question that Venkat Subramanian, she is CV has asked saying, you know, nationalism example in India has been used as a way to unite diverse set of people of different ethnicities, religions and language to sort of a common union. Such a scenario can micro democracies speak counterproductive. They do not lead to further divisions and complications instead of unifying people. Yeah, I think that's a really, that's a really good question. And it's definitely an issue. It's, it is something that I deal with somewhat in the book. Like in, in informocracy the first book you definitely see how a lot of these things are underlying and these these divisions kind of make it easier for fake news when it when it comes out and other types of sabotage to manipulate people because they can just grab that demographic all in one chunk right. And I also get into it a bit more in the third book, where there's some some sort of explicit discussion of whether information should be limiting the types of government and for example not allowing white supremacists to form a government even if they're in the authority like do they limit this, you know, beyond basic human rights which they have and beyond some sort of environmental minimum standards which they put in between the second and the third book. Do they do that and so I have, you know, I have a couple of answers to that. One is, yeah, I mean, the system is not supposed to be perfect. Right, so there is this problem, there's this flaw. One way to think about it is that and, and, and, you know, one way that I sort of thought about it as I was writing it was that, you know, I think that those governments that focus so much on nationalism around specific identities as their their reason for being are not going to be very well as governments. And so with these are very clear delineations between different governments, and lots of information about what's going on in different governments and also typically very free immigration between different places. Those governments are going to shoot their shot and go extinct hopefully very quickly is is sort of the hope behind it, but it's a tenuous one because we know that you know we have centuries of people using that type of thinking in very seductive and problematic ways so I don't know if that's enough which is why again in the third book we come around and have this discussion of information you know information is not only this this information management they're kind of the organization that lays down the rules for how this government works. And the rules are, you know, they're pretty, they're pretty slender mostly it's it's decentralized and it's up to the sentinels what they do. But there are a couple of rules about what they have to follow if they want to participate, and you know it's debating it do we include this and if so, how do we, how do we manage it. I think that, I think that it's, it's, it's one of the issues that keeps evolving. When we moved from, you know, when we moved into this nation state system. Right. There was this idea of nations like groups of people that were the same in some kind of way, fitting into geographical areas this is obviously never going to work because people move and ideologies change and borders change. It had this ideal which has caused all sorts of terrible problems and misery for the past 150 years all over the world. But then we also got to this place where we had sort of new countries in quotes because of course they were taking over other people's land, but they were there were countries that were formed without a ethnic basis of people who live there so if you're friends, you can be like okay people who speak French and some version or other should be within our borders and everyone else we can decide to kick out or call them visitors and we're going to make sure our borders line up and we're going to fight with Germany over these areas that are bilingual and then we'll figure it out and we have our French inherent Frenchness territory right, but then if you start a new country taking over other people's land in the United States or Canada or Australia or South America, then you're dealing with with something different where you don't have that group that you believe is inherently attached to that land in some way. And you have to come up with other reasons and so now we have these this weird phenomenon of nationalism that's not really tied to any inherent characteristic. It's mostly tied to where people are born. And yet we also have immigration processes so like sometimes it's tied to where they choose but only in certain cases. And, you know, to me that's it's, it's, it's a real problem, but it's also kind of very slow half step away from, you know if we can if we can have people to realize that the random place you're born is really not a good way of deciding who's exceptional or who's on your side or whatever. Then that takes us a step further away from these ideas of, you know, ethnic centrism or or or religious or whatever other grouping of people based on inherent characteristics that they can't change. And sort of takes us a little bit farther from then in group ad group so I think there's like this slow moving away and in the books. The people and you know the the higher ups and information who, who are sort of behind this whole idea they're hoping that the sentinels will gradually pull people further away from those old allegiances. But it definitely hasn't happened yet and there is the risk that instead they become more ingrained in smaller groups. So, yeah, again along answer sorry. No, no, no, that's good. I mean what you said actually reminded me of the classic Omgol cartoon about us versus them, you know built on sort of nationalism and national pride, you know, our enlightened people air barbaric hordes glorious leader, and this is the same people. Exactly. The more we can get ourselves to sort of lift out of where we are. You know, the closer we'll come to that. So there's a question again about tear tracks, which I want to ask because it's a perspective that I never thought of, but would you ask a question I had about the short story tear tracks. Does Cyclope and society have have patriarchy of a form, given that leaders in this society are chosen by how much they suffer, and if suffering is disproportionately disproportionately experienced by women. And he quotes, they do appear to be mostly female, the flow counts three phases of the 38 that scan to her as me. It might point to major differences in their traditional gender roles. Yes, that's a great question. And, you know, I should say that it's noted in the, in the story that they realize that female and male are probably not the right words to put on these aliens but they're reacting to how they perceive the aliens. Physiologically, on the basis that in that case the aliens will have a similar reaction to their own and they're thinking about how the aliens will respond to them in terms of having gender balance and their mission and so on. But, but I think it's an interesting question I'm inclined to, to say goes the other way because I think that, you know, we have lots of characteristics in our criteria for leadership in our society that in fact are more predominant among people who are marginalized one way or another but those people still don't get more chances at being in power so my suspicion is that, in fact, women are some women, you know, the people that read to the humans as female in the society are somewhat dominant. And so even though the suffering of the types that are described in the story are more or less evenly distributed, the females have more chances to take on leadership roles. But I think that's a really great question and a really great unpacking of the story. Right. Somebody asks, do you think SF needs to take political economy more seriously than it does at present. Yes and no, I mean I kind of think that people should write what they want to write and not everyone needs to have political economy is one of their specializations or obsessions I mean I think there's plenty of great SF stories that are, you know, either focused very much on the sort of individual relationship domestic smaller level or or just have a very different interest in what they're trying to do. So on the one hand, no on the other hand, I find political economy really fascinating so I'm always interested to read new takes on it. And I think certainly our economy and the ways that we run our politics are one of the things that's, that's most, you know, ingrained in our society in the way that as Ursula Le Guin noted you know make it very hard to imagine things running in a different way. And so that means it's also very, very important that we have people who think about how it could be different and present those implausible narrative formats that we can more and more imagine something different. So, yes and no, I want to tell anyone else what to write, and I don't want to tell anyone else what to read either, except to read widely. But so, so yeah yes and no I mean I think there are some examples that have done really interesting things with it lately but it's, it's, there aren't that many science fiction novels about democracy, as I know because I've looked I've been asked to look. I haven't had many novels at all about democracy actually. Yeah, I think because we kind of consider it right now the apex of governance and that's a problem, we need to keep getting making it better, which is why I think it's a it's a fertile narrative territory. And there's some about economics but there could be a lot more done with it so nobody has to but I'm always interested to see those who do. I think the connected question is there from Anushri who asked is there some sort of science science fiction or fantasy, you wish would be written more off. You know, again, I think people should write what they want to write and mostly I'm interested in reading stuff that I haven't read before. You know, I don't know what that's going to be necessarily before I see it, but I want to read stories by people who have had very different experiences than I have in there for come up with totally, totally different things than I would ever come up with, because if I could come up with it. You know, I don't necessarily need to read it. There's so many different ideas out there. And there's so many people who have just, you know, either really bizarre or just really make sense in ways that I just wouldn't have thought up really really put together that way so yeah mostly I want to read stuff that I haven't read before. There's certainly some themes that, you know, I notice being missing that there've been a couple of anthologies, I think that we're about things like pregnancy and parenting in the future which is something that you don't see a lot of in science fiction which again doesn't mean it needs to be the whole story or book about it, but, but that part of life tends to be missing. And gosh, I think, you know, I think there's a lot about there's there's, we have a lot of things that have singular heroes who are exceptional and I kind of like to see things about groups that that work together. I don't know there's there's a there's a lot of difference I just want to read stuff that I haven't read before. So, yeah. Nikita Deshpande asks, older, do you see a difference between the way you see another non white people structure and to see and sci fi. What is the standard fair published, what kind of story structures do you enjoy personally and related a related question from Nikita Deshpande herself what have you personally enjoyed reading recently. So, yeah, I mean I think I think that particularly in the US. And I mean for me to I see the gap really like publishing is not great, but publishing is still a lot better than movies. And so I think you can see the gap between what gets published and what doesn't doesn't but it's hard to see sometimes what doesn't. You can really see the gap between the books that get published and the movies that get me. And so if I look at kind of the standard structure in movies. It's a little bit you know what I was talking about there's that one hero is usually in a certain demographic and it's usually really annoying in one or another way, and the violence works out in certain specific ways and like, yeah, they're really annoying. So, I think that that yes people who have been othered in one way or another in a society that they live in tend to have a very different perspective on what the future looks like what the present looks like, how stories can be told. What, what is heroic and what is not. And I would certainly like to see more of those kinds of stories because as I said I don't like reading stuff that I've already read or seen movies that I've already seen, even if they're different CGI and a different you know supposedly attractive actor actress in the lead role is I still know what's going to happen so I'd much rather read stuff that's that's very differently structured. And what have I personally enjoyed recently reading recently. Okay, so I just read, Winters orbit, which is coming out soon from tour, or tour.com I forget which, which was, I think originally a thick, I think it was originally on a three. And so that's, I think so I kind of came at it sideways but that's what I've heard and it's a it's a really fun story. I'm about to read and I haven't yet, but I have the arc for the sequel to a memory called empire which I'm really looking forward to because I loved the first one by Arkady Martin. Yes. Yeah, the new one is called the desolation of peace I haven't read it yet. I'm really looking forward. So, I, there's a new, I don't know if it's come out yet now because I read the arc a long time ago but there's a sort of sideways sequel to the goblin emperor by Catherine Addison, which is, which is great, as you would expect. I don't know what else if I read recently that I loved. I like constantly reread the murder bot series. And there's a new one of that coming out as well, which is great. So, so definitely I always recommend that. Yeah, I think those are sort of the most, the most recent ones that I've been through. Yeah. Sorry. You were saying something. Okay, one last question, I think, from Pacific Leo again. They ask how narrative disorder is different from maladaptive daydreaming, like in Walter Mitty. And also the other thing that I think might have influenced it though I wasn't thinking about at the time was pattern recognition by William Gibson talks, you know, there's, there's quite a lot about that that sense of finding patterns that don't exist. It's, it's somewhat similar. I think maybe I would say that that's the maladaptive daydream is kind of a subset of it. But narrative disorder isn't always necessarily focused on the self it can be in some people, but in a lot of times it has to do with the way other people are acting or the way sort of things are happening in the world. Where you put them into a kind of a causal sequence when there isn't necessarily a causal sequence there. So yeah, I think there's it's that would probably fall under the umbrella but there's there's many other forms of the way it can, it can play out. And one thing with gaming is always some form of fulfillment. I don't even know if if in narrative disorder there is always wish fulfillment. Yeah, exactly. So that's that's one big difference that I see between daydreaming and narrative disorder narrative disorder isn't always wish fulfillment. Yeah, I mean I think some people will do that will have it always be about them getting something they want for a lot of people it's you know, you know the sort of anxiety of what terrible thing could happen next you know if I were in a movie, obviously, I would be the person who gets caught in this big terrible thing happening. I would get out of it somehow because I'd be here in the movie but like, you know, I'm expecting this terrible thing to happen to me, even though it's very low probability because I, you know I'm centering myself in this story. For example, and and yeah there. And again sometimes it also doesn't have to do with the person I mean when Mishima uses it a lot of times she's looking at the way other people act and saying, you know, who's going to be the villain here given sort of the pacing and the things that I see, or you know who, what would their next move be, given the narrative that I have that I built up in my head about this person and this or this collection of people up till now. I mean if you were in a movie I think you would totally survive one hand flamethrower in the other, as long as you don't open up open your wallet and show off the future of your family to someone that's anybody who does that is guaranteed to die. That is exactly that is exactly like narrative disorder is thinking of because we have these things that are so built into our head of like the characters who do this and movies always died so we don't we don't want to do it, even though you know that makes absolutely another good take on this is is Scalzi's red shirts. So yeah, I think there's a lot of people who kind of key down to this in different ways but but yeah that's exactly it. So, I guess that's about it so those of you haven't read the Sentinel cycle which starts with informocracy, he's read it I mean he's discussed all the awesome things at this thing and you know, out of time but could still go on and on talking about speculative resistance and whatnot. Olders on Twitter. M underscore older so that you can follow all of her, you know thoughts on speculative resistance which I absolutely love, especially the bits where he said the country should pay people to be their citizens. Competing against each other for a better world and this such gets up. Yeah, I see how we just sort of three minutes away from close and I think, you know, a great audience great questions. I think that's a wrap.