 Hello, everyone. Welcome to another social distancing social. Thank you so much for joining us for a conversation about imagining worlds and seeing them come true. We're very lucky to be joined today by two of the most popular writers of speculative fiction, Veronica Roth and Peter Warren Singer, who writes as PW Singer. Veronica Roth is the author of the Divergent series, which of course the components of which are divergent, insurgent, Allegiant and Poor, a divergent collection, the Carved The Mark duology, Carved The Mark and the Fates Divide, the End and the Beginnings, and most recently her first book written explicitly for adults chosen once. Welcome Veronica. And singer or PW Singer is a strategist and senior fellow at New America. He is the co-author with August Cole of the newly published novel, Burning, a novel of the real robotic revolution. Listeners, if you are viewers, excuse me, if you have any questions, please type them into the Q&A slot at the bottom of the zoom screen, and we will bring them when we can to our esteemed guests. And with a question for both of you. When you're writing fiction and especially speculative fiction, there really are no limits other than the limits of your imagination. So I'm curious how you build your fictional worlds, Veronica, when you are in the earliest stages of a piece of fiction. How do you decide what kind of world it's going to be set in. Sorry, just figuring out my mute. Yeah, hello. Oh gosh, it's a good question. I am kind of a concept driven writer. So for me it's not character that comes first or even plot it's just like a bigger idea, which I think is probably why I gravitated towards science fiction and fantasy to begin with. And it really just kind of depends on whatever that big idea is so for chosen ones. I wanted to write about what happened 10 years after you save the world from a dark lord. So it had to be, you know, in this world that was close to our own I think that was what made it appealing to me. And then everything sort of spiraled from the magic system that I built as a result of that so. Yeah, this is like the least specific answer. But I just tried and once you make one decision and you find yourself making a series of other decisions and suddenly find yourself in, you know, whatever world you've built so I just try to take it one step at a time I think. And you're the first thing that came to mind when you when chosen ones started to pop into your head. Well I think I was always curious about the other people in chosen one stories so like the heroes girlfriend or. This is where my main character Sloan started she was supposed to be like, this was going to be her story as opposed to his story and then it changed as the concept developed but I wonder about that like there's like an episode of Buffy the vampire slayer called I think, like the Zepo or something, where it's like the B story of the episode is the focus so it's like Xander it is weird hygiene some men in the background Buffy and Angel are saving the world. And so I've always loved that kind of like meta narrative stuff. So I think that's kind of what started, you know where the idea came from. I think I'm one of the only people in the world who loves television but isn't a Buffy watcher. I take it though that Zepo is a reference to Zepo marks. I don't know. Yeah, I think so is the forgotten marks brothers. The forgotten marks brother. So that's really interesting. Peter, I hope you'll forgive me from reading from promotional materials from your book, burn in. If I can quote from the books Amazon page quote an FBI agent hunts a new kind of terrorist through a Washington DC of the future in this groundbreaking book that wants a gripping techno thriller and a fact based tour of tomorrow. I love the phrase fact based tour of tomorrow. You almost certainly didn't write that description but it makes me wonder about the balance of facts and fiction in your work. When you are setting out the contours and rules of your fictional world. How conscious are you of sticking to what's possible or plausible. So it's actually at the very essence of the whole design of the project itself. So what burning is and it builds on something we did in a prior book called ghostly is that it's a combination of novel and nonfiction. From the very start where both world building and just like you know Veronica said there's these kind of moments and the fiction creation when you begin to you know discover your character. And then that character looks back at you and you begin to sort of you know understand their backstory. You begin to work out the settings and the plots, but simultaneous to that we're conducting you know a classic nonfiction research project we're doing. We're pulling threat reports from cybersecurity. We're doing interviews of real world people and then that interviews, you know just like you in fiction sometimes it's informing you for. Okay, this can actually happen other times there's that little thing that they say that becomes a turn of phrase that you'll use in a character, or there's a couple of scenes and burn in big, you know, attacks that bad things that happen we don't want to plot spoil too much but basically bad things that happened to Washington DC that was essentially from a guy working on the water systems of Washington sharing that I essentially how to flood the metro system that it really could happen and so you know okay I'm like oh we're going to have that in. And so there are a conscious set of rules that we follow we call it useful fiction and you know real quickly the four of the rules are one real world timeline. So, Arthur C Clark you know who was a phenomenal scientist. He invents the idea artificial satellites but is even better science fiction writer. He talked about how once you moved more than a generation ahead. You kind of move from science into the realm of magic. And so we try and stay within that one generation timeline. So every technology that's in the book is drawn from the real world. Another real is real world setting so it's all takes place in DC and real places to it but you know amazing things happen in it but it grounds it in that way. And then another is the idea of real characters acting realistically. So, you know we're in there. There's bad guys and there's a hero, but the types of things that they do are what a real person would do in that situation. And that to me, you know, I think that combination, hopefully makes it both it hits the education side but also I think makes it more entertaining, because it has that, oh my goodness this really could happen. That makes the scenes hit harder. Veronica you, I would, I'm guessing don't shy away from magic. To what extent do you worry about plausibility and what really could happen in the world that we're living in or do you enjoy strain from that. I mean, I'm coming at it from the totally other angle where I think I've become more of a realistic writer over time but I started out like full on like sort of dystopian fantasy but for me what's important is to have internal consistency so as long as like you can't break your thoughts because then you destroy the experience of reading for everyone if there can be an act of God or sudden revelation that changes everything that you've established up into that point like the whole system breaks down. So for me that's important and then I do think it's it's a priority to make sure that characters feel like even though they're dealing with an impossible or strange situation that they're acting like people. You know, trying to get the real people acting realistically in the totally bizarre, you know, can control magic with your mind can. So, yeah, that's my, my priority is a little, little less research, little less realism I would say. I apologize. It's interesting though because I think I unfortunately I'm not able to do magic with my mind but I dream of it all the time and so I, I love to put myself in that position but Peter, your characters I imagine sometimes do things that real people could do but they have to be particularly skilled or particularly smart, which actually feels more of a challenge for readers to put themselves in that position. Do you think about that when you're writing. I wanted to pull back one and it connects something that you said before that Veronica brought up is that, you know, the appeal of something like of the TV series, you know, Buffy the vampire slayer or you think about Game of Thrones is actually how realistic the characters are and from their actions to the way that they speak. And that's what I think you know makes people love them even when they're in settings that are fantastic. It also frankly makes them useful I've been part of a couple of projects that have brought together everything from us and allied military officers, and they've used in one case it was using Game of Thrones and it's using Star Wars as a means to teach the lessons of strategy and technology and the like and so it's that that you know it's what I was getting what she brought up I think it's so neat is the idea of it's the, it's the realism within the fantastic and that that drives it home. You know, to your to your broader question. You know, I, I guess what what I sort of fell backwards into this realm of combining the fiction and the nonfiction. You know, I'd written a series of nonfiction books and my partner on it, August Cole, you know, he was Wall Street Journal reporter. And when we started the ghost fleet project, it was we wanted to give people the same kind of fun reading experience that we had had as kids we didn't know each other as kids, but we both grown up, you know, reading both science fiction and techno thrillers and you know for me I'm going to date myself but like, I remember reading Mom Clancy in the back of my mom's station wagon on the way to Myrtle Beach. You know, and when I say back like literally in the back, you know, when we didn't have seatbelts and the like. And so we set out to have that kind of, you know, give people that kind of experience that was what it was inspiring us and we know we were creating scenes were like, Oh, this can be so much fun. We kept pulling on the fact that we, you know, we're researchers. And so we kept populating we were like what would characters do how would they act. We were fitting that in. And then that's what gave it its resonance in the real world. That's what made not just people enjoy it for summer but you know it was used in briefings and the like. So then in Burnin, we sort of said, Okay, let's let's bake that in from the start. What's a topic that's treated all the time in science fiction AI that kind of but but science, it's now coming true. But guess what science fiction got it wrong. It's not killer robots around us it's not singular how or whatever. It's an industrial revolution. And so you get the sort of amazing fantastical things that would seem like magic. And yet they're playing out in our real world. We've been the world dystopian has come up several times today even in the few minutes that we've been talking. So, I'm curious how central the idea of dystopia is to your creative process. Maybe I'm wrong Veronica but I imagine that when you are in your imagining an outlining stage, you're thinking kind of psychologically more than technologically perhaps, but I'm curious when your big bad comes into things. When when does the dystopic element arise is it, is it at the beginning is it as you start writing, where do you find yourself with the with the antagonist of your novels. You know, I'm not. It's something I've been working on throughout my career as the antagonist. Because they often don't enter the story for a while for me and then throughout the over the course of the rough draft I feel like I get to know them or understand what if it's not a person and you know what kind of like force we're dealing with. And then I have to go back and like introduce it to the beginning in this just like constant revision kind of way. I think, usually the antagonist is just like essentially like connected to whatever the issue in the world, or the darker like underlying things in the world are, which I think is what gives the books, my books in general a kind of dystopic feeling even if they're not classically dystopian because it's like what's wrong with the world is what's wrong with people, which is like what's wrong in the plot. So those things are kind of linked together. Interesting. Peter. How is, how is that for you. Do you begin with the tenant technological threat that makes your world dystopic. It's the, I was having this conversation with someone actually online and you know and we think we say something's dystopian and how does that define is it because of the setting the world that it is in, you know, it's it's post apocalyptic if we think about divergent or it's some kind of, you know, 1984 of techno, you know, dystopic realm, or is it because of something about the opposition in the story, the, the, is it the bad guy or is it because the characters are battling against a system as opposed to the setting. And you know I don't even know kind of where I come down on it but it's one of the things I was thinking about where you were asking that you know what makes something dystopian. One of the other issues that I wrestle with is how there's a very fine line between dystopian and utopian views of the world, including some of the things that we see coming out of like Silicon Valley right now. And how, you know, you can play with that in in story and it's often like an underlying theme. And one of the things that's great about, you know, taking the nonfiction but putting it in the fiction is that you get to examine something from multiple different character perspectives. So, whether it's how a technology might seem dystopian from one point of view can be a useful tool to another. And it's something we all kind of feel right now. Like some of the face recognition technology, you know, is being used by policing it's being used by corporations. Everyone from, you know, Facebook to Kentucky fried chicken or rolling out face recognition oh by the way the police oh by the way it raises some really deep scary issues of, you know, profiling and connects to racism you name it. That that issue of like a roll out of something and exploring it from different points of view different people in the story. And then the other part that I particularly wrestle with and something we we tried a little bit more I think we sort of developed further that Veronica referenced is your, your, your adversary or your bad guy. We're trying to flesh them out so that they're not the sneering, you know, mustache pulling character, but that the, the bad actually thinks you know everyone is the hero and their own story. So can you play that out. And, you know, so in burn in, it's a two handed story of there's a, there's a story of a partnership between this FBI agent, and this robot that she's been assigned to test out, but we also follow a bad guy, new kind of terrorist, but the biology that the terrorist has is meant to be pretty empathetic that kind of a lot of us might agree just with what he thinks if not the activities that he's doing. And that's something I think about the applicability of that to the real world. Everyone, even the worst villains out there think they're the good guy. I want to get to a question from a viewer. This one's for Veronica is from Alex Torres. Which of your stories was the hardest in terms of world building which was the biggest challenge as you was as you were writing. And that was 100% chosen ones. Because in chosen ones I don't want to like spoil, but there's like a big turn and after the first 100 pages of the book that I have to kind of lightly spoiled. There's an alternate universe and chosen ones with an alternative history. You know, I just have like a very an average and casual level of historical knowledge about the history of modern computing or about the Cold War or stuff like that. And for chosen ones because I had decided on a point of divergence between the universities in 1969 or 1970. I had to research everything. I mean not everything obviously like but a lot of the highlights of kind of, you know where we had been where we are at our historically so that I can come up with like a deviation that makes sense, because like the proliferation of magic changes the course of history basically so it was definitely the hardest and the most fun to write. Hundreds of government documents from K ultra which is our governments experiments using LSD and like the 60s and 70s, which are real creepy and unsettling, gotta gotta say, it was definitely the most rigorous world building because all of the extra documents that are throughout like interspersed through the narrative sections of the text, each of them required like a full day of research so it just, you know, it was a great exercise. You also wrote kind of in different styles you wrote as if you were writing government documents you wrote as if you were writing a sort of sleazy journalistic profile. How, how much complication did that add because I don't, I mean I realize you're writing fiction you're maybe never actually writing as Veronica would write to a friend. But, you know, adding those extra levels of I am writing in this voice must have made things really quite complicated. Yeah, I was kind of not sure that I could do it at first. That's a lot of different voices to take on but it was, and at the end of the day and really amazing creative exercise. One of them maybe want to take a shower afterward like the misogynistic piece of journalism that you're referring to. But the funny, one of the funny things that happened was that in copy edits it's kind of your copy editor's job to eliminate like passive voice and like you know sort of useless clauses and sentences and stuff and so in the government documents and copy editor would correct a lot of the like government lingo and I was like no no. This is essential because no one ever wants to take responsibility for anything so it's all passive voice all the time. And so that was just one of the just one example of a lot of the kind of voice considerations that had to be made. But man it was, I, I don't know, just, I think the more challenging something is the more fun it is for a writer and so yeah he's nodding, you know. Exactly, especially once you've finished it I do see you nodding Peter. So I'm wondering like a violent agreement. I believe started as a nonfiction writer, like do you find yourself, you know, okay I've got just, I've got to put on a fictional voice I've got to write in the in the language of of thrillers. How do you get into that headsets. Oh yeah. And it's part of actually referencing what it's part of the fun of it. So nonfiction is an assembling of facts, and it's, you know, you're basically get I sort of I've got kids I think of like it's almost like a parallel of a puzzle or Legos, sort of getting all of them together, and then you're ordering them and assembling them, and then you build with it. Whereas fiction, you are doing that you're getting certain elements, and you're doing just like Veronica revenue you know sometimes there's research and the like, but you also are just struck by inspiration at various moments and it might be a direct kind of inspiration. Like someone in the real world says something and you're like oh that's a and it might be a micro level. That's an awesome turn of phrase or they're they're wearing something or whatever a tiny detail, or it might be something macro. Oh, I mean, you know, that's that's that's the plot. It hits in all sorts of different places. It hits in at work it hits in the shower, and you, and you know it when it happens, because you get that kind of excitement of that's the crack that's the breakthrough. You also, there's a working at it where there might be a problem that you're kind of puzzling your way out you know it's the character. Not actually but like locked in a room. How do I get my character out of this situation in a manner that's faithful to the rules that we set either how the character operates or whatever. And here again there's that kind of joy that you get when you when they get out of the room, so to speak. It's, yeah, I think that's one of the fundamental differences of it. But one, you know it's interesting you were referencing and I've been hearing this from you Veronica, the, the editing process. To me, there is a, there's a similarity if you've got the standard, you know editors and copy editors and the like, but we, I share both fiction and nonfiction with trusted resources. On fiction side, it's usually people who are experts in that and they're kind of checking for the expertise on the fiction side it's people checking both for. Do they enjoy it the pacing of it, but also did that sound right, right so you might pick someone, we have a female lead character. So I made, you know, there's a various women of that background that I wanted them to read to to make sure that we're hitting, you know, everything from how she spoke to how she wore her hair. Did we was that faithful to the character. And I'd be interested like do you do the same of do you share your drafts with people who are giving you not just kind of the classic fiction but like the voice feedback. Yeah, so I think I had someone read for authenticity and chosen one specifically about racism, and like a black person in America's encounter with racism. It's not, I mean character who is dealing with that but one of the prominent side characters and I was like, I can do a lot of research about this and I did, but I just need to make sure that it sounds right to someone. You know, preferably more than one person. But yeah, I definitely with every book have shared the draft with people with various different layers of experience of particular things, which I don't know if that's a thing that self evident to people outside of writing because if you're writing science fiction and fantasy they're sort of this idea that we should just like be able to make it all up but that's not, that's not true at all. So being able to access something that feels accurate and authentic and responsible. I don't know you need you need more eyes, basically. Yeah. Peter what I want to know is, I've been wondering this the whole time. Did you have to stretch like the truth or what's possible for the book in certain ways and does that make you mad. Does it make you uncomfortable as someone who's like came from nonfiction. Um, what we'll do is the bad guy actually is maybe not 10 feet tall, but is like eight feet tall. And by that I mean the, you know, in one story, it's a story of what World War three might look like. And the, the bad guy in it, it's a US China Russia war. And they are able to go after every real world vulnerability so they're kind of extra smart so to speak. And it's the same thing are, you know, dastardly terrorist in burn in, you know, he's, he's hitting every, you know, plot spoil he basically creates a digital versions of the 10 biblical plagues, hitting DC. And he's, so he's, he's a little more capable than, than, but it's that. So I think it's, you know, I'm getting at is, I think it's okay there that way, because one, it makes a better story to if we go to the real world side, if you're helping with the, you know, explanation or prevention. You know, you're, you're telling about this is the worst day possible. The flaw in a lot of the real world policy stuff is that people plan for the best day possible, not okay the bad guy might do X, Y or Z. So I guess that's the, the part that, you know, I won't say it's frustrating but I'm sort of conscious that we're doing that that the bad guys slightly more capable. And then what you do is consciously build in, you know, there's certain things that he fails at or there's a moment when he's trying to escape any, you know, slips and mud and stumbles and you know, and there's these sort of, you can't find his way out and he sort of you are conscious of that I guess I would say. It's one other thing I would say that it's interesting when you raised about sharing drafts with people. One thing that stuck in the back of my head on the reason for this is not just the sort of the overall realism, but how you get one tiny real world thing wrong. You know, I don't stick for people I just always think like my real reference TV shows but like, my father was a military lawyer. And there are things in like the TV show, Jack, that they would wear their uniform, slightly wrong. I would make him hate the show, not that they were like involved in a court martial of where, you know, a conspiracy theory that led all the way to the president blah blah blah, that if you get that one turn a phrase wrong, you know, oh a teenager wouldn't say that or whatever. That's the part that people's suspension of disbelief, they'll accept the big fantastic plot stuff they won't if you get you know, actually know that street is two blocks over something like that. I remember seeing people years ago writing the subway in DC on the in a movie, but it was clearly the Baltimore subway which I understood why but it was the same thing that's all I remember about that movie I don't remember anything else. The one error sticks with you more than the thousand accuracies that's that's just human human life. Another question from viewer. The question is from Kim Kelly. She wants to know, do you purposely try to incorporate current day issues in your work. Do you, or do you find that it subconsciously makes its way in. And I guess I'll add another question. And do you welcome it or do you try to push out, you know, push away current day issues. Well, um, for me it's a subconscious it's never I think the approach of that would be hard for me like I'm going to make a point about X or Y is not really what makes me interested in telling stories. Especially because I rarely know what I think that confidently about anything. So, it's only by writing that I end up figuring out that I'm exploring something that's on my mind. And that's what happens because you know I'm a real person living in the real world and I become concerned about the things around me, and I read a lot about, you know, science and technology and the news and all that stuff and so it's sort of like living in my head and then it will kind of like creep its way in. It doesn't bother me when that happens. I mean your work is always saying something whether you intended to or not. It reflects your unconscious biases and and all that so it's kind of like once the draft is done you can look at like what am I saying. What is this does the story say to people so that's something I think is useful to be aware of but that's like a later in the process thing for me I suspect that the answer will be different. This is different, but I would say you know one of the things that I'm conscious of is not just you know how we're shaped by our surroundings and issues that are going on. But, and this is again kind of a, you know, pulling back the veil for for people books are really long processes in terms of building so there's the the writing of it that takes, you know, multiple years, but then there's the okay I've turned my draft in, and then you've got you know depending on the timeline, roughly another year plus before it comes out. Then you have, okay, I would like the book, not just to do well and be useful and interesting to people the first week that it comes out but in an ideal world it's something that, you know, lasts for years. So you have to be conscious of that, you know, there may be something that's really really hot right now that, and again, whether it's an issue in politics to a technology that, you know, you have to say okay is it going to be out there three four 20 years from now. And so that's always in my mind. What I would share one of the US about like how does it feel June or the questioners. One of the things that's been striking and strange and I'm at a loss for the right verbiage, amusingly enough to describe it is, we knew with burn in that the technology parts of it would come true because of the research side. It's literally it's a novel that has research and notes in it so when a certain robot was deployed in the real world. Well, we knew that because the Amazon, you know, we had the patent for it, or when right now there's literally a cyber attack playing out in Israel. That's something that we talked about in the book. It's hitting water treatment plants. Well, we knew because this is vulnerabilities. We knew that would happen. The part that was strange was and it goes to what you asked earlier, June, the dystopian elements that we built as a conscious like to create a dystopian future Washington DC. Those happened. So, eight days after the book came out. In the scene in the book there is a militarized perimeter fence thrown up around the White House with an M wrap in front of him, which is a military vehicle. It's literally at the perimeter line that we had it in the book. There was another scene that we thought was our kind of ultimate dystopian of riot police around the base of the Lincoln Memorial. And that happened, you know, again, and we're like, okay, that's the part that, that, you know, I wasn't prepared for. And it was the part that I thought was going to be kind of the imaginary dystopian that instead, you know, we're feeling these themes in the real world. And I think that's part of the, you know, with the utility of dystopian fiction or things that are said in dystopian is that, you know, they imagine these worlds and they warn us of, you know, the perils of if it comes true. Veronica, I'm very curious. As we said earlier, Chosen Ones is your first book written explicitly for adults, but you know, your earlier novels were all intended for young adults. And the dystopian worlds, your books, the Hunger Games, maybe even the Harry Potter books, they're very successful, very popular dystopian set worlds. Why do you think that young readers are so drawn to dystopian stories? I've thought about this a lot, as you're probably not surprised to hear. And I mean, really, I'm not sure. But if I could hazard a guess, it's that if you remember high school at all. It really is. So you kind of, I mean, whether it's dramatic or not, like some people's lives really are really difficult as adolescents and some people just feel that their lives are very difficult. But either way, that's your emotional reality. It's a very difficult time, I think, to be a person and to be taking shape. So when you're reading about a character is handling something so much worse than what is around you. I think there's some something empowering about that but also some like darsis kind of like seeing your emotional reality reflected in stories is important, especially at that age. So that's my working theory. I buy it. I throw an end in them on that. So it comes out of actually research for a nonfiction book I did, which was on robots that went around interviewing both robot designers and like but also science fiction authors about where they got their ideas from and the like and why they thought it resonated and struck the real world and one of them. I remember it was a conversation with Orson Scott Carter did Ender's game and sort of asking why he thought it connected so much. We then saw it play out in sort of connecting to different residents, whether it's, you know, handmade tail or whatnot is that dystopian fiction. It's while whatever the setting like how we define it. It's actually a story of there's an agency involved. It's a story of perseverance usually you know we follow a set of heroes as they finally they usually kind of. They usually kind of control the destiny of this world. And so I the addendum on top of like high school being awful. It's also that there is a kind of in youth I think there's a sense of like not controlling everything that goes on around you. And yet most of these stories is about someone sort of ultimately deciding to take control in some way shape or form and reshaping their world and their decisions in it. I used to get, you know, I still do actually a lot of concerned parents about other kid is really a dystopian fiction. And don't I think that's dark and should they be worried. I always told them no absolutely not because your kid is reading a story about becoming more aware of the world around you and seeing the problems that exists and then fighting to fix them. So these are, this is a very positive side for your child. And a somewhat related topic we have another question from a viewer from Anthony, who's to ask, do either of you worry about the real world taking inspiration from the negative aspects of the worlds you've created in your stories. Peter in, perhaps it's that's a little easier to to answer you might actually be giving bad guys ideas I'm wondering how you think about that. But Veronica I know it's maybe less direct for you but do you worry about how do you feel about people comparing real world people to the antagonists in your stories like I know it's slightly different but I'm curious about how you both deal with that interaction between your ideas and the real world. We'll start with you Peter maybe. I'm smiling because I'm thinking about the, the, you know, and we don't have this now in the land of Coronavirus era but the type, you know, the people that come to your events, and you know, know the different backgrounds and the like and I'm smiling because I had two different groups that hit your question this question exactly two different people that showed up. One was basically a Chinese spy with incredibly horrible trade craft, who was it was like out of a James Bond satire of someone. And just, it was like, stop acting like you're a fan. I know who you are let's stop. And by the way, you don't need to do this. Just, there's the book. The other was actually, and these are both from burning because there was about a US China war the other was actually a Chinese military officer who was open about the fact that they were a Chinese military officer. And he talked about how popular the book was among his fellow officers and I smiled and said that's funny because you didn't buy there's no Chinese language rights to it. And then he smiled back and it was a you property theft issue. But but my take on it is look in the real world. I'm not eating the bad guys because the bad guys have already gone after these issues. They're already engaged in the same kind of research at a scale that I'm not actually by exploring them and surfacing these problems that are known problems. I'm painting them in ways that act as ideally not prediction, but or inspiration, but prevention. I've pointed out the bad day that will happen. If you don't fix X, Y or Z. And then what we've seen is in some cases the book won't come true, because things have happened to fix X, Y or Z. So that that's my take on it. Yeah, I, I think. You don't have the same fan experiences of showing up. One day. No, I haven't had that experience but I think if you're a writer you feel in general we feel like knowing things is better than not knowing them. And so when you're shedding a light on something that's that's a good thing. So I don't, I mean, I don't think I think my books really lend themselves to inspiring bad guys, but because that would require, you know, magic or some kind of technology that cannot exist. Yet. There seems into virgin though that I could see someone running with. Oh yeah I guess like jumping off buildings or trains or something. I really hope that no one was inspired by diverging. But gosh, who knows, I don't really, I don't really worry about it because people are going to do what they're going to do usually. We don't really like plant things people's minds. Yeah, yeah, we're not that powerful. Peter, I have a question here from Cameron Bocari. And he says, or they say, I'm not sure if either of the authors have followed the shows 24 and more recently designated survivor. Both show both show set in Washington DC of course, both depict developments that some years afterward came to pass. To what extent are story writers extrapolating from the present to imagine the future. And to what degree is it an illustration of the aspirational, some of them, some of which then over time come true. So extrapolating from the present to imagine the future or an illustration of the aspirational. What do you think I would say it's the extrapolating side. Because I fictional creators ask in some way shape or form, what if. And actually, again, I remember speaking to a, it was a woman who was used to be a NASA scientist and then she was the creator of the, that she was the first curator of the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame. And she talked about how Science Fiction doesn't tell you how to build the atomic bomb. It tells you, you know, what if you built it, you know, what if Dr. Strangelove might happen or on the beach or whatever. And so we're not bound by, you know, budget, a government budget, but we'll say okay, what if you built X or what if magic did why or what if this circumstance hit the United States. And so that does allow a certain kind of extrapolation. If those what ifs are linked to something in the real world, what if a terrorist was trying to do X or what if they accomplished why I think that's the our plane with the what ifs allows that to play out is I guess the shorthand way I would answer it and that again goes back to the utility of it. The other thing to remember is because we're throwing so many different ideas out there. And then the part that comes true, we get the credit for that you don't get, you know, the reference to 24, like, you know, 24 had how many different seasons, and how many different episodes per season. And so, you know, there's lots of stuff that they didn't get right, but they get the, the correct people remember the correct part of it. There's a long, long history of that on whether it's imagining. There's a, there's a series of books that were written in the 1920s that imagined World War two that you know got Pearl Harbor right, but then there's other elements of it that they buy water as the author and people like you look back and like how did he predict that but then there's another piece of it where it had chemical warfare in it that had happened on and made sensitive would think it would happen World War two, and then it didn't know and remembers that part right so I think we're because we throw so many ideas out there we also get credit for things sometimes that we don't remember the losses. Yeah, and as somebody who watched 24 all the way through. I'm very glad that many of those things have at least not yet come true. I'm from a viewer from Sienna Negron. I'd like to ask this of you Veronica. When developing characters in fiction. How do you make them relatable if they have supernatural attributes or surroundings. So, when these people who are, you know, just have guests that that I don't have. How do you make them somebody who who readers can relate to. Oh, well. So the central question of chosen ones for me so I grew up reading chosen one stories, anyone like science fiction and fantasy did also, you know, or the rings or Harry Potter or do you know like they're all chosen one stories so. My curiosity came from not really understanding what the psychology of those people would be like after they were finished with their whole like quest, because I imagine it would like that quest is essentially like a depiction of a trauma for all of them really. And so I think I just try to take the supernatural part of it seriously and there's always kind of a real world correlation that you can look to to make sure that you're being. I don't know, honest, even if you're not, you know it's not factual. For Sloan the main character of chosen ones I just did a lot of research on PTSD, because that's what she has as a result of kind of this like a protracted battle with the Dark Lord prior to the start of the novel. So I looked at, you know how that would manifest in just the average person who endured something really incredibly difficult now and tried to bring that psychology to her. So the fact that it's supernatural is really not is not relevant to the character. And I haven't, I haven't had a character with like. Yeah, I have. Totally. But yeah, so I think that's, and I always want like even in the card in the Mark books they, they have like special powers or abilities, but they come from the psychology of the character so it's not the other way around like figuring out how the power influences the psychology it's always kind of character out. And I think that helps a lot when you're when you're building a person who feels real even if their circumstances are unreal. Peter for your main character or main characters. Is there a challenge of not wanting them to be super competent to kind of keep within the realm of believability how do you kind of balance that. So it's two different ways. In particular in Vernon one is the main character Lara Keegan is going to put a bluntly a rarity in the space of techno thrillers it's a it's a female lead character. In most of them if there is a female lead they're the one B they're the helper to the male lead you know the girl with the dragon tattoo, we could go on and on, but then even more so. She's, you know, again I would say developed a realistic, you know, she's a FBI agent, but she's also in a marriage that's crumbling, and she's the mom of a five year old. And that that balancing act and the different how different parts of your psyche and your identity come through in different moments you know it's trying to be fully realized character but also I would argue realistic. And the other one that's, it's actually the inverse of the psychology side. The other character is a technology. It's not a character, but it is a character Tams is basically your Alexa. The series move 10 years forward and or the robots that we've seen like the YouTube clips of Boston Dynamics doing, you know, flips or the like it's just take that move forward. And everything that it says and does is what a AI will say and do or already does. It's a technology, but the twist for is both Keegan. I suppose it's a technology but can't help herself and is every so often reacting to it as if it's a person. And we, the reader, we're reading into things that it says and does as if they are a joke or as if it is. There's a moment where something happens to it. And, you know, hopefully if the scene works out as a reader, you're reacting differently than you would if the car was turned off, right. And but here again this is drawn from the real world. One of the early inspirations for the book was teams in Iraq and Afghanistan. In one case, they're using real world robotic systems and they ran one of them, the robot got stuck in the mud. And they ran the human ran out under heavy machine gun fire to rescue the robot and this was a remote controlled, no speaking looks like a little lawnmower and yet the human risk their life to save their teammate. And, you know, I was struck by that and that's back in 2003 what happens is they begin to walk talk, or, you know, the coronavirus example of this is, I was having a bad day a couple weeks back, and Alexa wasn't working correctly, and I yelled at Alexa. And I wouldn't yell at it wouldn't it was doing timer for while I was cooking and Alexa timer wouldn't, and I yell that I would never yell at my stove, but that's what the blending of the psychology with technology is something that I find challenging but it's also sort of the essence of the story. Yeah. I'm just thinking of that there's a moment in on the show community where Jeff Wingers doing a rant as he does and he says something about how you I can show you this pencil and tell you its name is Steve and then break it and you care. We are so quick to present my things for sure. We can help ourselves and this will move forward in the real world and again, is it utopian or dystopian. And you're, you have to explain to your kid that their teddy bear that is able to talk and walk is not actually alive or not or when it I mean think you know anything that's like sci fi and yet real world issues looming. So at the beginning of the real world we have another really great question from Dominic good. Good desert. Will this experience of pandemic and lockdowns result in some new dystopian stories. I guess I'll put it another way. How do you both kind of foresee the pandemic appearing in fiction. Do you think it'll appear in your own fiction. Will you be trying to keep it out. Maybe we'll start with you Veronica. Yeah, I think it's going to take a couple years to know the answer to that question so I can never write about something when I'm inside it. It's, it's hard to reflect in any meaningful way on something that you're dealing with in real time I think. But I think this feeling of kind of collective effort that we have at the beginning of the pandemic is what feels like it's going to stick with me. Obviously it was not fully collective you know not everyone was on board but a lot of people like in my media social circle was like we're doing this together you know, and then kind of trying to innovate in the midst of that difficulty. And you know that's why I have a great virtual event set up right now because for the first few months is like all right we're doing this. So I think that that is what's resonated with me from the beginning of the pandemic but of course there's so much there's so much other stuff to think about the isolation of it and the way it's become politicized and just all that stuff is going to I think linger for a long time we have yet to see what effects it will have. So I hope people write about it because I think this is like a sort of. This is a big struggle that everyone had together, no matter how they feel about it so we're going to need to process that emotionally and you know in practically in the world around us. Yeah, Peter what do you think. I'm sort of, you know, trying to wear a dual hat of like creator but also, you know, futurist predictor. I, my gut is telling me, I mean not just for myself but I think for the field that you're going to see a reduction a massive reduction of the pandemic sub genre of all of this I think it just, you know, connects too close to home to you know what what is it. What do you build upon it, you know, there's we can think of just there's literally scores of pandemic theme either it's set in a pandemic or you're stopping a pandemic or it's after a pen. I think that genre will shrink in the next decade plus. I think it's a reaction to this I think the themes, the issues that have been surfaced. Those will color everything just like how you know you think of how whether it's the the literature that was written before versus after the Great Depression is just fundamentally different the way the 1960s in Vietnam and civil rights changes, you know, literature science fiction you know that I feel like we're at that same kind of moment. And maybe a larger question or kind of issue coming out of this it's funny I was earlier today part of the. They all feel the same as a zoom call but with a very different group and audiences a group of defense leaders. And one of the things that I talked about on that and you know connects to the burning book or the like is the pandemic did in this doing, but also what you know all the issues that have come out of the killing of George Floyd and the protests and unrest is that we had issues that were there and we're in play beforehand. But they, it took them it surface them, it put a put a point on them, it drove it home. And one of the themes running through all of this is that whether we're talking about the health care system or the social contract in America, or, you know, whatever is that America is not a weak state, but there's a brittleness to us there's a brittleness to our health care system there's a brittleness. When you think about the in under certain pressures, it cracks it looked like it was strong but it cracks. And I think that theme of kind of the and even you know in our personal lives, but I think that that brittleness is going to be something that sticks with us and is like a hangover on top of you know the writing that comes out of this whether it's something related to race and racism or it's a setting you know discussion of family impact or whatever it is I think that sort of how under pressure, the cracking that happens things that seem strong, or actually kind of weak. I think that's a theme that'll be with us for the long term because it's, it's something that that we're all coming to grips with as a nation. I agree with that I think the emotional impact of it and the. I don't know how many people will just go out and write a pandemic story I feel like that's the last thing I want to do, even if I was interested before now I'm like, definitely not. But I think there's a lot of this. A lot of things have become clear to us right they've been thrown into relief by by what's happened, like you said, so that those those in that kind of like emotional stuff will hang around and the way that we've become kind of like deeply uneasy in our systems that we might have trusted or that that sort of thing will carry over. However, I do think there will be a small but vital subgenre of like actual pandemic fiction and the reason I say that is because right after it, like everyone went into quarantine, like a lot of my friends started watching contagion. And I was like, No, that's the last thing I want to watch. But there are some people for whom their strategy for coping is to look directly into the eyes of the problem, like literally. And I think that helps them to kind of restore a feeling of control. Like, Oh, well they handled it in this movie, so I guess we can handle it in our lives, which of course is, you know, dubiously accurate but I do think there are people who cope that way. Can I can I say one one quick please please. I also think it's going to be interesting. How it plays out different generationally. So, you know, like Veronica, you mentioned, you know, like, Tolkien, Tolkien is is is massive that whole fantasy, they're massively influenced because they were youth during World War One, right. And I think they'll be in the same of like the writing coming out of the 1960s and the like. It's going to be interesting. I think, you know, people who are adults, parents during this are going to be inspired and write in different ways than someone who is a teenager right now, and how the effect of this is going to play out on their writing, you know, 10 years from now. That's going to be really fascinating and much the same way you know people see World War One elements and Tolkien and maybe it wasn't conscious or not we can have a debate about that. I think kind of future literary critics are going to like anyone who lived during this period they're going to like point to it as like oh that's the effect of the pandemic on their writing. They are a time but I'm just want to ask one last question to each of you. You both have newly published books are published books in the in the recent past. But as you mentioned earlier Peter takes a while for a book to be published from when you finish writing it so I imagine you are both deep into the writing of your next books. So anything you can share about what what you are working on in as broad or as, or as precise terms as you'd like I'm sure everybody would be interesting maybe we'll begin with you Veronica. Oh boy. Don't start with me I have nothing to say. Will it be dystopian I guess is a big question. I'm just playing with ideas right now. I'm kind of connected to nothing, but I, I did find it really difficult to work at the start of the pandemic partly because my book came out in the first week of April. So it's just like the worst, the worst point of it in some ways but so I'm still kind of like reeling from that a little but but yeah just now I can work again and writing so it's time to explore. Peter, you got something on the boil. It's the same, you know, feel of our book came out in May and the same it is this, you know, I've had multiple books come out this was fundamentally different a lot of different ways and more exhausting. Strangely without all the travel. And I'm still somewhat in the midst of helping to support it. I'll put it this way where we're reproved with ghostly and then burn in that the combination of fiction and nonfiction work together and that there's a there's a both an audience for it but also a utility of it. So what we're now doing is exploring that as a toolkit that might be used not just as books but as short stories and also in different forms, but for not just our own creativity but for different organizations. So for example something that we can talk about backwards, you know, we don't want to share too much but like, we did a project for the US Congress actually that was they had a report on cybersecurity. We created out of their report, a short story that's a that they actually used as the introduction to their report. So we're kind of playing with the idea of using the useful fiction tool for other topics and other forms is another one that's a graphic novella that we help the army with. And here again, the, the idea is that can you use that approach and apply it for other people's problems or interests. That's the most that I can share right now. Interesting. Well, I thank you both for sharing as you have. Thank you so much to this amazing audience that sent so many great questions. Thank you very much to Veronica rough is most recent because chosen ones to BW Peter singer whose most recent book is burning. Thank you for joining us. We hope to see you on another of these events. Thank you everyone.