Christopher Brown is emerging as one of the hardest hitting voices in science fiction. His stories pack a sense urgency, considering anti-democratic movements, social justice, economic inequality, climate change. Brown is the master of leading us to an image, an inverted moment that resonates, even haunts us until we understand the message.
Brown is a deep well of ideas and experiences. A conversation with Brown is a master class on fiction writing, political science, science fiction, futurism, and pop culture. But what comes through the most is his joy. Laughter punctuated a conversation that could also be thought of as a creative exploration of the mind of a science fiction writer, a writer at the top of his game and loving every second of it.
Brown is a deep well of ideas and experiences. A conversation with Brown is a master class on fiction writing, political science, science fiction, futurism, and pop culture. But what comes through the most is his joy. Laughter punctuated a conversation that could also be thought of as a creative exploration of the mind of a science fiction writer, a writer at the top of his game and loving every second of it.
It seems to me like you've probably had stories in your head for years. But then you broke through, and you got the amazing Tropic of Kansas published. It feels like a work that you had been developing for a decade. Can you tell me the process there?
Not quite a decade, but there were a lot of ideas that had been stewing in my brain that ended up in there. It's definitely that kind of book. Rudy Rucker reviewed it, and he made a comment about how it's one of those books where you can tell it's like everything somebody had been thinking about for a long time. Maybe that came to you critically as well. That book was sort of funny in that I was trying to put a lot of ideas to work in one coherent narrative. I originally wrote a story for an anthology that Joe Lansdale and a guy named Scott Cup edited for the World Fantasy Convention on the centennial of Robert E Howard's birthday. Robert E Howard of Conan the Barbarian fame. One of the constraints of this anthology was you were supposed to write a story featuring a Robert E Howard character or in the style of Howard, but the only rule was you couldn't use Conan because they didn't have the rights. So, I thought, I'll write a Conan story. That's what turned me on to fantastic fiction as an eleven-year-old. I wrote a story that invented this character of Sig, who was like my version of Conan, but he was an out-of-work Blackwater type guy. You know, like B-team, would-be Blackwater guy in post-9/11 Baghdad or post-invasion Baghdad. It was a fun character. It got a great response. It was sort of funny and did this kind of thing I was trying to do, like take the things great about pulp fiction, like Robert E Howard stories, and try to repurpose them towards more emancipatory ends or something like that, something with a little more political edge. I had been mostly just writing short fiction and was keen to write a novel that didn't suck, that I was happy with. As I was starting to write notes for thinking about doing something with this material, there were these #Occupy—kind of crazy quasi-revolutionary #Occupy protester types—who made a camp in this abandoned neon lighting factory across the street from where I live. And every night I'd go to sleep and all these guys were out there, like, planning the uprising, and this was early 2011 and the Arab Spring started happening. And so I had started out planning to write something that was much more like an adventure novel set in the post-9/11 real world, and realized what I really wanted to do was write a story about a popular uprising in the United States. And to do that, you really need to—things would have to be worse than they are, or at least worse than they were then. So, that's where the alternate history came from, and in the process, all this other stuff gets kind of crammed in there, whether it's the outdoorsy stuff or the Internet-based direct democracy stuff. Lots of ideas were in my head.
I'd like to talk about how you wrote about an anti-democratic version of America a few years ahead of the Trump administration's slippery slope of lies, leading to a capital invasion. When you read that quote "His scars are America's scars," you think, holy crap, how did he see Trump before Trump, an administration built on lies veiled by patriotism?
I don't think I saw Trump. I worked on Capitol Hill right out of college and again right out of law school and I had worked around a lot of these bizarre figures that are elected officials at the national level, especially US senators, people like John McCain. If you were ever around McCain in person, he's like a scarred torture victim. He's right in there with the archetype of the damaged Vietnam Vet that persisted through the popular culture of my youth, 70s television and movies. You couldn't change the channel without finding at least one Vietnam flashback scene going on. I didn't see Donald Trump, but I’d seen all these other candidates for executive office who were pitched on the theme that the best qualification to run a state or a big country is that they'd been in charge of a big company, like Mitt Romney was the turnaround artist for America or whatever, and even both Presidents Bush and how their entrepreneurial business acumen was a big part of the pitch—that manager-in-chief sort of idea, or CEO of the country. And I’ve worked in corporate life, and I thought, that's an interesting idea because anybody that's worked in a corporation knows that it's not a democracy, it's a dictatorship. And so, I thought, well what would that look like?, and kind of ran with it. Couple that with that sense of "His scars are America's scars." That's the post-9/11 dark energy that focused on our scars, that idea that "you hurt our people," that intensely emotional spirit of vengeance that was manifest in the zeitgeist.
Yeah, I just read The Commanders by Bob Woodward from the '90s about Cheney and the first Bush and how they ran the government on TV. They would give the military orders live on CNN. All the while, this is a decade or more before 911, and these guys are creating policy that would become Homeland Security. People comment on how Homeland Security was rolled out so quickly after 911, but they'd been working on it for a decade or more, two decades, most likely.
Everything about that was so Orwellian. I mean, even the name.
Speaking of, you have a kind of Orwellian callback to the Nazis in Tropic of Kansas. Don't you call America the motherland in Tropic of Kansas?
Yeah, “the Homeland” is already pretty Nazi-ish. It sounds very blood and soil. That idea is so deeply rooted in human culture, even in our pre-agricultural, nomadic roots. There was always that place where the ancestors were buried, the one true home. And it's fundamental to the idea of the state, and so riffing on that, you couldn't call it Fatherland because that would be too obvious, and, you know, the American republic is embodied by a female figure. She's usually on top of everything. She's on top of the US Capitol, Columbia, or whatever, even if it is really about the presidential father figure.
Another brilliant bit from Tropic of Kansas is the spirit of the native American fighters invested in the names of all the helicopters, the Apache, the Black Hawk, Comanche. You know, if you look at a map of the US and take in all the names, you notice that everything is an indigenous name, but we've pushed out those people. Keep the names and then everything else changes.
And everything is otherwise completely erased. It's really strange. In Texas, because it was not part of the US at the time of Anglo-American settlement, the approach to the erasure was a little more just sort of baldly genocidal. And so the cultural erasure is so complete. Even as you learn that half your neighbors who you've been taught to categorize by terms involving the country on the other side of the border are the descendants of people who Hispanicized their surnames just to survive. I was trying to play with those ideas in Tropic of Kansas. But when you travel through the American landscape and you see the levels of erasure, it's not just the identity and very existence of the peoples that were once there, other than through place names that sort of persist—especially when you go through places like Oklahoma and they're sort of still there—but what you see is something very different, and it includes the erasure of the natural environment, especially in places like the Midwest or just middle America more broadly—in “flyover country”—where on the one hand, everywhere you go is sort of green, but there's no nature to be seen, because it's just all this agribusiness dystopia that even in the days of the family farms was a big part of what you're talking about.
I live in Kentucky, and I was taught in grade school that Native Americans didn't live in Kentucky. The name Kentucky means a dark and bloody ground, and so the teachers told us the land was a hunting ground, not a place that natives lived. Totally false narrative there. Later, I learned that the Kentucky headhunters were paid to kill the Native Americans that lived in Kentucky. So, you wonder, why all these lies? Then fast forward to the use of nuclear weapons against Japan at the end of World War II along with the lie that nearly a million people would be saved by using the weapons, a lie conjured up by the government at the time, because they had a bomb and they wanted to use it.
There's this constant tension between the truth of colonization and conquest and our desire to maintain the ennobling narratives of the exceptional American experience that we're sort of all raised on. Tropic of Kansas is trying to bite into the copper wire of the tension of growing up in a country where we're taught this national creation myth tied to a violent revolution. If you grew up in Texas, like my son did, you get two of them because you get the national one and then the Texas revolution, which is even bloodier. And then the desire to maintain the order and supremacy of the state that now exists, and you talk about January 6 as we were getting into this and how that feels very Tropic of Kansas. Certainly, watching it was so close to the scenes at the end of that book. I don't think it's that hard to see those kinds of things because they're all over the place. When you dig into discussions around the Second Amendment, there’s an argument that it's really all about the notion that a constitutional right to revolt is really what it's embodying. There are even some state constitutions that have an express right of revolt. I think New Hampshire has one. “Live free or die” is what it says on the license plate. We love stories of revolution, but for some reason, we shy away from really looking at what that's about.
In your writing, you philosophize without philosophizing, and this is hard to do, but you're able to imbue an image with a philosophy. Like we were talking about exceptionalism. You think about Carl Schmitt, the German political philosopher. The Nazis borrowed his idea of the exceptional state and then Americans borrowed it, but you have the philosophy of the exceptional state appear in your novel with that moment where Tania is watching the President. She screams at him, then sees his piercing blue eyes and realizes he has the power to do whatever he wants. That's an image that sends shivers down the spine. It's like you're communicating to us, "Hey, here's the embodiment of sovereign power in this one man." How do you do that? How are you able to philosophize without philosophizing?
I mean, I don't know, other than the hard-learned lessons of fiction writing. In my earliest stories, I tended to have a lot of characters who would talk like semiotics professors. It turns out that's not a great way to build a large audience over here.
Guilty!
I try in these novels to draw from the experience of my own lived life and to adhere to the writers' workshop aphoristic truism of show don't tell. Like encounters with powerful people, right? I’ve had some of those in my life, and it's about looking at the boundaries we all normally stay within and then just kind of pushing up against them here and there. Then, like that scene you were just describing, that was a hard scene to write, because I was trying to capture being so close to power. Like standing in Buckingham Palace and seeing the Queen, or whatever. Kind of an everyday touristic experience and there's not that far to push it to where, suddenly they say, "Okay, you're coming with us." Like Terry Gilliam does so brilliantly in his film Brazil—he has a sense of the banality of normal life cleaving against the really grim things that could happen to you right around the corner. With Tropic of Kansas, I tried telling it from the point of view of people who weren't middle-class white guys like me. For people for whom every encounter with a uniformed law officer has the potential for a very bad ending. For me, even as a kid, you knew that you're probably going to be okay.
Don't we all have that thought at some point when we're watching a live show, something with a lot of gravitas that should require you to stay stone silent, a performance of an opera or something, doesn't everybody have the thought, "What would happen if I stood up and just started singing?"
Totally, I think that's very innate in humans. I think we all do that, right?
Because we're all kind of selfish. We all want everyone to look at us?
We're all in orbit looking at the objectified self, and we're all characters in the movie playing out in the back of our own forehead. So, yeah, there's always that there. And that's certainly there for Tania. The character of Sig, he doesn't really have that so much because he's sort of the figure who doesn't exist in that state of alienation. He's more animal in his nature.
He's feral. I’m interested that Robert Howard is one of your influences because when I read your work, I have that same kind of desire to turn the page that I have when I read Robert Howard. When I first read Robert Howard, it's like lights went off and I realized, "Okay, this is how you can write a story, this is how you can get people to get interested. You just keep the narrative going." You know the popular description of history? History is one damn thing after another. Fiction gets in that same moment-by-moment mode. It propels you.
I think there's nothing wrong with propulsive narrative. It's kind of fun. I mentioned the Robert E Howard influence—he was a big like juvenile influence on me. He always had a sort of a power to him, more about his descriptive richness than that kind of narrative arc. But those were also design constraints I was given for that anthology, and I thought they were interesting archetypes, but Don Winslow was a bigger influence on Tropic of Kansas. I read Winslow's novel Savages, a great kind of super gonzo crime novel, and it has chapter structures all over the place. It will have a one-word or one-sentence chapter and a longer, more discursive one. And then I also read Joan Didion's Play it as it Lays, which I had never read, as I was working on this book. And her chapter structure there and the kind of emotional obliqueness was something that I was really interested in. She doesn't do propulsive cliffhangers, and yet she kind of does. They're these short chapters, and yet they leave you in an emotional moment where you're engaged and curious. All of those kinds of things were there directly or indirectly while I was working on Tropic of Kansas.
Your writing is clearly science fiction, but you also write what feels like political thrillers. Do you find that your audience goes beyond science fiction? Who are your readers?
I think it crosses over. A lot of people that would otherwise not read science fiction enjoy these books. And you know, they're not really about technology in the way that most science fiction is obsessed with the tools we make and the things that we can do with those tools. They work as thrillers, and they share with good science fiction the concept of the novel of ideas. They aspire to have a rich and engaging literary voice, each one in different ways, though that's for others to judge. But they try to be propulsive books that make you want to keep turning the pages. Then, hopefully, when you put the pages down, you're left thinking about some of the ideas they raise.
Are you currently working on another novel now or short stories? What's your project?
I’m working on two things. I’m working on a novel that's my take on the cozy catastrophe story. For those that don't know it, the cozy catastrophe is a classic disaster story following one or a small group of protagonists. They are usually kind of affluent white guys robbing the ruins. Think of all those Charlton Heston apocalypse movies, like The Omega Man, where it's like Charlton Heston is the only one left live on earth and he seems to be kind of enjoying it. All the stuff that's left is his for the taking, and then, of course, you find out that he's not the only person around. It's just like everybody else is treated as a zombie from his point of view.
Like Day of the Triffids with the evil plants.
Day of the Triffids. I did read that. It's a crazy book.
Some of that coziness features in it. In the middle of the book, this dude and his girl find a really posh apartment, settle in, even try on the clothes.
Yeah, totally. They just hole up in a really nice pad and like garden or something. It's exactly that idea that the apocalypse happens and it's kind of fun. Walker Percy plays with it in his book Love in the Ruins where this guy is holed up in a Howard Johnson's somewhere outside New Orleans, but he's with three attractive women as the world's ending. It's a very funny, revealing story type. So in my version, for which the working title is Controlled Burn, a woman ends up in a kind of Robinson Crusoe situation of life after a disaster. It's very engaged with the ecological themes. And it's a story from a point of view of, not enjoying the loneliness, but of trying to craft a different idea of community, one that's based on a healthier relationship with our natural environment.
And then I’m working on a kind of a creative nonfiction book that draws on the material I’ve been writing in a weekly urban nature newsletter called Field Notes that I started last year right after I finished Failed State. I'm trying to talk in a fresh and interesting way about climate change issues through the prism of wild nature as it exists within the urban fold, especially in the peripheries and interstices of American cities. I talk about the resilience of nature, even in the face of human erasure of it. I try to take the point of view of dystopian fiction and apply it to nonfiction, of contemporary life with a focus on non-human life and nature and landscape. And I try to find a path to have a little bit more of a redemptive take on climate change issues, one that sees the resiliency of nature and the potential for humanity to take a different approach.
I’m sure you've read the idea that science fiction in the 21st century has to be about climate change, just because it's the most pressing issue that we face. You can't avoid the effects of climate change in day-to-day life. In Kentucky, we don't even know what the death count from last week's EF5 tornado. It feels like that's the future. You never really know what the death count is. You don't really understand the actual effects of climate change.
That's right, you can't write any kind of fiction, right now, or any kind of story without addressing those issues. Science fiction often shirks away from really looking straight in the eye of the near future on the climate front. I think we tend to either populate the future with magical beasts or mutants running around. And we go visit these places that are kind of avoiding it or acknowledge there's some kind of near-term apocalypse basically but spend most of their time in a far future that's got enough distance from it and that imagines an alternative that could exist on the other side.
I’m interested in the kind of story that starts from the premise that the seemingly apocalyptic end of the world stories that I grew up on, the ones like Logan's Run, the film adaptation where everybody's living in this domed shopping mall city, shopping for mates on a screen that slides in front of them—imagine that—and, you know, everybody has to die through some ritual for reasons that are never explained and nobody ever argues with. And on the outside it's a nuclear wasteland or something, right? And then they go outside finally, these rebel characters, a cop and his fugitive prey. They find this rewilded Washington, D.C. It's supposed to be the end of the world in the context of the movie, but it's also sort of very obviously the new beginning and this kind of Edenic opportunity. That idea of exploring the end of the world as not the end but the beginning in the context of climate change stories is a really interesting thing, even if it's a little intense. It's kind of what Gibson did in The Peripheral and in Agency, the following book, where he imagines a horrific, obliquely described "Jackpot" event where it's like 40 years in the second half of the 21st century, in which most of the human population dies in a multifactor apocalypse, but then the people that survive have a pretty good setup because this is sort of a resulting bounty.
Absolutely! In the current novel I’m writing, a humongous asteroid is headed toward the earth, but we discovered it's made of ice. And so, we figure out if you just let it land, if you just hit it in space enough so it lands in the Southern hemisphere, billions will die, but then it'll actually solve our global warming problem because you'll have two Antarcticas.
That's awesome. I love that. You have a title?
Well. The title is... okay, The Last Great American Science Fiction Novel.
All right, that's funny. That's kind of funny and self-referential and kind ofyeah, I like that—meta-textual.
And, the scientists are for it, they just say look, this is the best shot we have. We're all going to die anyway. We might as well sacrifice some so that others will live.
It plays with Jeff Bezos' recent musing about how we have to save Earth by turning it into some sort of vacation spot for the rich. Imagine the wealthiest humans enjoying the sea breeze while everyone else lives off-world, you know, working on mines, on poorly lit mining colonies.
Amazon warehouses on Mars.
Everyone will live in Amazon warehouses, absolutely, and they don't hold up well against tornado-level winds by the way.
No, not when they're just four tilted-up concrete walls that are ready to fall on the occupants when there's one big gust. Really horrifying stuff. Have you ever read Brian Aldiss?
Brian Aldiss, I read one of his books. Maybe one of the Helliconia books.
He has a story called “Last Orders” on a planet that is being evacuated. These people are hanging out in a bar. They're supposed to get on the rocket. And they're just kind of coming up with reasons not to, and instead, they're getting shit-faced at the end of the world, and there's some deep truth to that.
Right down the street from where I live, I live on the Colorado River in East Austin in a kind of industrial part of East Austin, and just downriver from here we have Elon Musk building the new Tesla Gigafactory, which I saw from downtown for the first time from a high-rise vantage last weekend. It was astonishing how science-fictional and monumental this structure is. And across the road from that, he's building a new SpaceX headquarters, and he's building out his rocket launching pad in Brownsville. We're involved in conservation efforts here and having discussions with these guys and just kind of coming to terms with the reality of how powerful these early 21st-century techno-barons really are. I’m seeing it literally in my backyard. The political implications of that and economic implications of that and the fictional opportunities and the non-fictional opportunities that present you just confronting what's really going on. It's intriguing even as a lot of what I see is scary, especially when it's coupled with the seemingly emphysemic condition of the democracy that we grew up with.
One of the reviewers of Tropic of Kansas said that you can still surprise readers with your fictional worlds in a 24-hour news cycle era that blitzes the US with the most insane things occurring in the nation and the world, and it never stops: global issues, economic concerns, climate concerns. Your writing still manages to surprise, despite the backdrop of insanity around us. Can you comment on how you're able to do that?
I think that quote comes maybe from Bruce Sterling. I work hard to evade the headlines because writing topical fiction, especially novel length, is like the enemy of success, because you can never keep up with the headlines. And especially now. The news cycle is moving at photonic speed and the publishing cycle of a novel, including the time of writing it, it's like, you're lucky if it's like a two-and-a-half-year cycle, right? I try to do the Gibsonian thing of seeing interesting things in the environment that haven't gotten a lot of attention and you draw them out. Like what if you had a CEO as the President? I hear y'all talking about that in the campaign ads, but wait a minute, have you really thought that through? Right? Those guys don't allow free speech. There isn't free speech in a business corporation. You piss off the boss and see you later. And, you know, you can get "severance," as it were.
So, I try to put a funhouse mirror up to the world I see and draw out the things that interest me and not stay in conversation with the headlines. I try to use the tools of speculative fiction to put that mirror up in a way that tells truths about the real world that more conventional social realism or naturalism cannot. I’m trying to be engaged in this roundabout or oblique way. Sometimes that succeeds in telling a truth that normal, non-fictional journalistic truth-telling can't.
I love that because sometimes I see a headline and think, "Now I can't use that!" But what you're saying is, let's take it and give it a rocket boost and see where it goes.
Or just turn it on its head, you know. Probably my biggest influence in terms of science fiction writers was J. G. Ballard. He talked about that idea of the inversion. He took the approach of having been a medical student. You know, like the same kind of technique you take to dissecting a cadaver to literally turn the world inside out and take that “Earth is the alien planet” approach. If the conflict revolves around a family, that might be a divorce, a death, an accident, you know, whatever. Widen the aperture to have something happen at the societal level, and you should be able to achieve a similar kind of result. Those kinds of inversions as a narrative trick in speculative fiction work really well.
Back to Tropic of Kansas, the inversion is basically like, what if you took all of that dark post-9/11 energy and instead of directing it at the Middle East, it's all directed at home? And what if these revolutions going on in faraway countries were going on right here? What if those #Occupy people had AK47s? Those things often end up turning out closer to real. I worked on that, and now there's a thing that's been happening, the past few years. There are revolutionary Maoist slogans spraypainted all over our neighborhood by people who have adopted the ideologies of the Shining Path. They've adopted ideologies of the peasant revolution to deal with gentrification in historically working-class and minority communities in Austin or other parts of Texas. If you engage in those kinds of inversions, you'd be surprised at how often they end up seeming prescient because they're looking at things as they are with maybe a slight skew.
It's amazing how we're not surprised that people get radicalized now. Or maybe the surprise is what they were radicalized to or how often they get re-radicalized. Like how many different ways can a person be radicalized? I wouldn't have expected the Shining Path to be something that Americans went in for.
If you think back to your point about the erasure of the indigenous communities, there are more people that have indigenous families, and certainly in Texas, like a lot more people than you might realize. If you think about it through that prism, like these people who borrowed from theories of revolutionary communism to help understand the post-colonial landscape of some rural area in Latin America or something, I can see how it makes a certain sense, because you don’t have to live in Texas very long to learn that you’re living in colonized space, and that all of the vestiges of what's gone on here over the past 200 years are really manifest in the landscape. But yet they're so manifest that they're just part of everyday life. Unless you take that step back and take that “Earth is the alien planet” view or you try to imagine altering some element of it. Then it can come through more clearly. I tried to really play with that in Rule of Capture, which, is all about that “all property is theft” idea. It's really like when you dig into American jurisprudence about land, it's all these cases where it says, "Yeah, well, actually we did steal it, but we can't change that, so here it is, and, you know, the law of the conqueror ultimately rules.” There's a Supreme Court case that says something to that effect.
In America, I feel like we're always getting recolonized. Especially in the way we're supposed to think about our government or the way we're supposed to think about who we are as a people. No occupying force is necessary either. The idea of sovereignty is enough to accomplish the recolonizing work. It's almost like every decade there's a new kind of vision that you're supposed to accept.
Totally, a new reinvention of the national myth that serves to perpetuate the state. You know, like border fortifications or whatever, the main purpose of which just seems to be the sovereign insisting that it really exists. The truth of the matter is much more muddled.
Yes, state sovereignty defends itself by military spending--what's our budget for the military in America?
It's a huge percentage of the GDP, yeah.
So, when you're thinking about utopia, you just kind of wish there was a way to build a great society without using the military-industrial complex to do it.
My book from last year, Failed State, is about people trying to create a more authentically utopian community. My conclusion was that a utopia grounded in realism is a tragedy. Because utopia doesn't exist, but utopia is also an aspiration, a decision, and the idea of the utopian dream is like the downtrodden dreaming of what's at the end of the Shining Path for people who subscribe to those radical theories of a totally different revolutionary approach to dealing with the situation they find themselves born into. Throughout modern Western history, that utopian aspiration and political philosophy and everyday politics played an important counterbalancing role to conservative pragmatism of, like, well, this is the world we have because that's what came to be, and you can't really change it that much, and I think after the end of history, after the fall of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, that all of those kinds of utopian theories completely disappeared from our political vernacular and we're just left with variations of that pragmatism. Science fiction can play a valuable role in trying to help resuscitate that kind of thinking, especially in the context of things like our climate future where most of us don't want to look at because there's no good news there, it seems like. So, trying to engage in that somewhat daunting project is a useful undertaking.
We need more breakthroughs in science to get us to that kind of utopian science fiction world. I don't know if you've read Cory Doctorow's Walkaway?
Oh yeah. I love Walkaway.
He had the premise that if you have nanotech assembly machines suddenly. You don't need to have the sort of supply chains that we rely on. You don't need money.
I love Cory—the idea of technological breakthroughs that eliminate scarcity, allowing for an authentically communitarian utopia. I tend to go in a kind of totally different direction, which is like you can't get around our problems unless you undo the origins of agriculture and the grain monocultures and undo those agricultural surplus-focused fundaments of civilization that intrinsically create inequality because it's about who controls the surplus, and an approach to nature that's all about controlling the reproduction of other species. It's fundamentally damaged. You have to look to the examples of other pre-agricultural or more pastoral societies to find the kind of inspiration we need to imagine something different. But Cory's world, I would certainly live in, if I believed it were possible.
Oh yeah, I’m sure you're right that if nano-assemblers did exist, and even if there were tons of them, you'd have people that would get together in gangs and try to destroy the other nano-assemblers and kill that group of people, because of this Malthusian idea engrained in humanity of resource scarcity and the need to fight for what's yours. I'm not sure that humans would even be able to accept a world without scarcity even if all of the products we needed were free and available. Humans are hardwired to hunt. And I think we like to hurt each other.
I don't think so. I think we're designed to live in small bands without leadership hierarchies, and we're designed to kind of get by season to season without maintaining these huge complex societies in which there is enough for people to survive for years. A small group of people have to control that surplus. It creates wealth inequality. And wealth inequality creates all kinds of other inequality. Needing to extract from the land the way we do requires systems of labor that intrinsically involve people having a level of indenture or worse, and—I don't know, I don't think I have all that many answers to those questions, but I feel like I’m starting to figure out where some of the problems are.
I don't know when the great nanotech utopia will arrive, but I hope it's in my lifetime. We'll see what happens.
I have a neighbor who's a patent lawyer. All she does is nanotech patents, and she's the busiest person I know, so maybe there's something going on there.
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Not quite a decade, but there were a lot of ideas that had been stewing in my brain that ended up in there. It's definitely that kind of book. Rudy Rucker reviewed it, and he made a comment about how it's one of those books where you can tell it's like everything somebody had been thinking about for a long time. Maybe that came to you critically as well. That book was sort of funny in that I was trying to put a lot of ideas to work in one coherent narrative. I originally wrote a story for an anthology that Joe Lansdale and a guy named Scott Cup edited for the World Fantasy Convention on the centennial of Robert E Howard's birthday. Robert E Howard of Conan the Barbarian fame. One of the constraints of this anthology was you were supposed to write a story featuring a Robert E Howard character or in the style of Howard, but the only rule was you couldn't use Conan because they didn't have the rights. So, I thought, I'll write a Conan story. That's what turned me on to fantastic fiction as an eleven-year-old. I wrote a story that invented this character of Sig, who was like my version of Conan, but he was an out-of-work Blackwater type guy. You know, like B-team, would-be Blackwater guy in post-9/11 Baghdad or post-invasion Baghdad. It was a fun character. It got a great response. It was sort of funny and did this kind of thing I was trying to do, like take the things great about pulp fiction, like Robert E Howard stories, and try to repurpose them towards more emancipatory ends or something like that, something with a little more political edge. I had been mostly just writing short fiction and was keen to write a novel that didn't suck, that I was happy with. As I was starting to write notes for thinking about doing something with this material, there were these #Occupy—kind of crazy quasi-revolutionary #Occupy protester types—who made a camp in this abandoned neon lighting factory across the street from where I live. And every night I'd go to sleep and all these guys were out there, like, planning the uprising, and this was early 2011 and the Arab Spring started happening. And so I had started out planning to write something that was much more like an adventure novel set in the post-9/11 real world, and realized what I really wanted to do was write a story about a popular uprising in the United States. And to do that, you really need to—things would have to be worse than they are, or at least worse than they were then. So, that's where the alternate history came from, and in the process, all this other stuff gets kind of crammed in there, whether it's the outdoorsy stuff or the Internet-based direct democracy stuff. Lots of ideas were in my head.
I'd like to talk about how you wrote about an anti-democratic version of America a few years ahead of the Trump administration's slippery slope of lies, leading to a capital invasion. When you read that quote "His scars are America's scars," you think, holy crap, how did he see Trump before Trump, an administration built on lies veiled by patriotism?
I don't think I saw Trump. I worked on Capitol Hill right out of college and again right out of law school and I had worked around a lot of these bizarre figures that are elected officials at the national level, especially US senators, people like John McCain. If you were ever around McCain in person, he's like a scarred torture victim. He's right in there with the archetype of the damaged Vietnam Vet that persisted through the popular culture of my youth, 70s television and movies. You couldn't change the channel without finding at least one Vietnam flashback scene going on. I didn't see Donald Trump, but I’d seen all these other candidates for executive office who were pitched on the theme that the best qualification to run a state or a big country is that they'd been in charge of a big company, like Mitt Romney was the turnaround artist for America or whatever, and even both Presidents Bush and how their entrepreneurial business acumen was a big part of the pitch—that manager-in-chief sort of idea, or CEO of the country. And I’ve worked in corporate life, and I thought, that's an interesting idea because anybody that's worked in a corporation knows that it's not a democracy, it's a dictatorship. And so, I thought, well what would that look like?, and kind of ran with it. Couple that with that sense of "His scars are America's scars." That's the post-9/11 dark energy that focused on our scars, that idea that "you hurt our people," that intensely emotional spirit of vengeance that was manifest in the zeitgeist.
Yeah, I just read The Commanders by Bob Woodward from the '90s about Cheney and the first Bush and how they ran the government on TV. They would give the military orders live on CNN. All the while, this is a decade or more before 911, and these guys are creating policy that would become Homeland Security. People comment on how Homeland Security was rolled out so quickly after 911, but they'd been working on it for a decade or more, two decades, most likely.
Everything about that was so Orwellian. I mean, even the name.
Speaking of, you have a kind of Orwellian callback to the Nazis in Tropic of Kansas. Don't you call America the motherland in Tropic of Kansas?
Yeah, “the Homeland” is already pretty Nazi-ish. It sounds very blood and soil. That idea is so deeply rooted in human culture, even in our pre-agricultural, nomadic roots. There was always that place where the ancestors were buried, the one true home. And it's fundamental to the idea of the state, and so riffing on that, you couldn't call it Fatherland because that would be too obvious, and, you know, the American republic is embodied by a female figure. She's usually on top of everything. She's on top of the US Capitol, Columbia, or whatever, even if it is really about the presidential father figure.
Another brilliant bit from Tropic of Kansas is the spirit of the native American fighters invested in the names of all the helicopters, the Apache, the Black Hawk, Comanche. You know, if you look at a map of the US and take in all the names, you notice that everything is an indigenous name, but we've pushed out those people. Keep the names and then everything else changes.
And everything is otherwise completely erased. It's really strange. In Texas, because it was not part of the US at the time of Anglo-American settlement, the approach to the erasure was a little more just sort of baldly genocidal. And so the cultural erasure is so complete. Even as you learn that half your neighbors who you've been taught to categorize by terms involving the country on the other side of the border are the descendants of people who Hispanicized their surnames just to survive. I was trying to play with those ideas in Tropic of Kansas. But when you travel through the American landscape and you see the levels of erasure, it's not just the identity and very existence of the peoples that were once there, other than through place names that sort of persist—especially when you go through places like Oklahoma and they're sort of still there—but what you see is something very different, and it includes the erasure of the natural environment, especially in places like the Midwest or just middle America more broadly—in “flyover country”—where on the one hand, everywhere you go is sort of green, but there's no nature to be seen, because it's just all this agribusiness dystopia that even in the days of the family farms was a big part of what you're talking about.
I live in Kentucky, and I was taught in grade school that Native Americans didn't live in Kentucky. The name Kentucky means a dark and bloody ground, and so the teachers told us the land was a hunting ground, not a place that natives lived. Totally false narrative there. Later, I learned that the Kentucky headhunters were paid to kill the Native Americans that lived in Kentucky. So, you wonder, why all these lies? Then fast forward to the use of nuclear weapons against Japan at the end of World War II along with the lie that nearly a million people would be saved by using the weapons, a lie conjured up by the government at the time, because they had a bomb and they wanted to use it.
There's this constant tension between the truth of colonization and conquest and our desire to maintain the ennobling narratives of the exceptional American experience that we're sort of all raised on. Tropic of Kansas is trying to bite into the copper wire of the tension of growing up in a country where we're taught this national creation myth tied to a violent revolution. If you grew up in Texas, like my son did, you get two of them because you get the national one and then the Texas revolution, which is even bloodier. And then the desire to maintain the order and supremacy of the state that now exists, and you talk about January 6 as we were getting into this and how that feels very Tropic of Kansas. Certainly, watching it was so close to the scenes at the end of that book. I don't think it's that hard to see those kinds of things because they're all over the place. When you dig into discussions around the Second Amendment, there’s an argument that it's really all about the notion that a constitutional right to revolt is really what it's embodying. There are even some state constitutions that have an express right of revolt. I think New Hampshire has one. “Live free or die” is what it says on the license plate. We love stories of revolution, but for some reason, we shy away from really looking at what that's about.
In your writing, you philosophize without philosophizing, and this is hard to do, but you're able to imbue an image with a philosophy. Like we were talking about exceptionalism. You think about Carl Schmitt, the German political philosopher. The Nazis borrowed his idea of the exceptional state and then Americans borrowed it, but you have the philosophy of the exceptional state appear in your novel with that moment where Tania is watching the President. She screams at him, then sees his piercing blue eyes and realizes he has the power to do whatever he wants. That's an image that sends shivers down the spine. It's like you're communicating to us, "Hey, here's the embodiment of sovereign power in this one man." How do you do that? How are you able to philosophize without philosophizing?
I mean, I don't know, other than the hard-learned lessons of fiction writing. In my earliest stories, I tended to have a lot of characters who would talk like semiotics professors. It turns out that's not a great way to build a large audience over here.
Guilty!
I try in these novels to draw from the experience of my own lived life and to adhere to the writers' workshop aphoristic truism of show don't tell. Like encounters with powerful people, right? I’ve had some of those in my life, and it's about looking at the boundaries we all normally stay within and then just kind of pushing up against them here and there. Then, like that scene you were just describing, that was a hard scene to write, because I was trying to capture being so close to power. Like standing in Buckingham Palace and seeing the Queen, or whatever. Kind of an everyday touristic experience and there's not that far to push it to where, suddenly they say, "Okay, you're coming with us." Like Terry Gilliam does so brilliantly in his film Brazil—he has a sense of the banality of normal life cleaving against the really grim things that could happen to you right around the corner. With Tropic of Kansas, I tried telling it from the point of view of people who weren't middle-class white guys like me. For people for whom every encounter with a uniformed law officer has the potential for a very bad ending. For me, even as a kid, you knew that you're probably going to be okay.
Don't we all have that thought at some point when we're watching a live show, something with a lot of gravitas that should require you to stay stone silent, a performance of an opera or something, doesn't everybody have the thought, "What would happen if I stood up and just started singing?"
Totally, I think that's very innate in humans. I think we all do that, right?
Because we're all kind of selfish. We all want everyone to look at us?
We're all in orbit looking at the objectified self, and we're all characters in the movie playing out in the back of our own forehead. So, yeah, there's always that there. And that's certainly there for Tania. The character of Sig, he doesn't really have that so much because he's sort of the figure who doesn't exist in that state of alienation. He's more animal in his nature.
He's feral. I’m interested that Robert Howard is one of your influences because when I read your work, I have that same kind of desire to turn the page that I have when I read Robert Howard. When I first read Robert Howard, it's like lights went off and I realized, "Okay, this is how you can write a story, this is how you can get people to get interested. You just keep the narrative going." You know the popular description of history? History is one damn thing after another. Fiction gets in that same moment-by-moment mode. It propels you.
I think there's nothing wrong with propulsive narrative. It's kind of fun. I mentioned the Robert E Howard influence—he was a big like juvenile influence on me. He always had a sort of a power to him, more about his descriptive richness than that kind of narrative arc. But those were also design constraints I was given for that anthology, and I thought they were interesting archetypes, but Don Winslow was a bigger influence on Tropic of Kansas. I read Winslow's novel Savages, a great kind of super gonzo crime novel, and it has chapter structures all over the place. It will have a one-word or one-sentence chapter and a longer, more discursive one. And then I also read Joan Didion's Play it as it Lays, which I had never read, as I was working on this book. And her chapter structure there and the kind of emotional obliqueness was something that I was really interested in. She doesn't do propulsive cliffhangers, and yet she kind of does. They're these short chapters, and yet they leave you in an emotional moment where you're engaged and curious. All of those kinds of things were there directly or indirectly while I was working on Tropic of Kansas.
Your writing is clearly science fiction, but you also write what feels like political thrillers. Do you find that your audience goes beyond science fiction? Who are your readers?
I think it crosses over. A lot of people that would otherwise not read science fiction enjoy these books. And you know, they're not really about technology in the way that most science fiction is obsessed with the tools we make and the things that we can do with those tools. They work as thrillers, and they share with good science fiction the concept of the novel of ideas. They aspire to have a rich and engaging literary voice, each one in different ways, though that's for others to judge. But they try to be propulsive books that make you want to keep turning the pages. Then, hopefully, when you put the pages down, you're left thinking about some of the ideas they raise.
Are you currently working on another novel now or short stories? What's your project?
I’m working on two things. I’m working on a novel that's my take on the cozy catastrophe story. For those that don't know it, the cozy catastrophe is a classic disaster story following one or a small group of protagonists. They are usually kind of affluent white guys robbing the ruins. Think of all those Charlton Heston apocalypse movies, like The Omega Man, where it's like Charlton Heston is the only one left live on earth and he seems to be kind of enjoying it. All the stuff that's left is his for the taking, and then, of course, you find out that he's not the only person around. It's just like everybody else is treated as a zombie from his point of view.
Like Day of the Triffids with the evil plants.
Day of the Triffids. I did read that. It's a crazy book.
Some of that coziness features in it. In the middle of the book, this dude and his girl find a really posh apartment, settle in, even try on the clothes.
Yeah, totally. They just hole up in a really nice pad and like garden or something. It's exactly that idea that the apocalypse happens and it's kind of fun. Walker Percy plays with it in his book Love in the Ruins where this guy is holed up in a Howard Johnson's somewhere outside New Orleans, but he's with three attractive women as the world's ending. It's a very funny, revealing story type. So in my version, for which the working title is Controlled Burn, a woman ends up in a kind of Robinson Crusoe situation of life after a disaster. It's very engaged with the ecological themes. And it's a story from a point of view of, not enjoying the loneliness, but of trying to craft a different idea of community, one that's based on a healthier relationship with our natural environment.
And then I’m working on a kind of a creative nonfiction book that draws on the material I’ve been writing in a weekly urban nature newsletter called Field Notes that I started last year right after I finished Failed State. I'm trying to talk in a fresh and interesting way about climate change issues through the prism of wild nature as it exists within the urban fold, especially in the peripheries and interstices of American cities. I talk about the resilience of nature, even in the face of human erasure of it. I try to take the point of view of dystopian fiction and apply it to nonfiction, of contemporary life with a focus on non-human life and nature and landscape. And I try to find a path to have a little bit more of a redemptive take on climate change issues, one that sees the resiliency of nature and the potential for humanity to take a different approach.
I’m sure you've read the idea that science fiction in the 21st century has to be about climate change, just because it's the most pressing issue that we face. You can't avoid the effects of climate change in day-to-day life. In Kentucky, we don't even know what the death count from last week's EF5 tornado. It feels like that's the future. You never really know what the death count is. You don't really understand the actual effects of climate change.
That's right, you can't write any kind of fiction, right now, or any kind of story without addressing those issues. Science fiction often shirks away from really looking straight in the eye of the near future on the climate front. I think we tend to either populate the future with magical beasts or mutants running around. And we go visit these places that are kind of avoiding it or acknowledge there's some kind of near-term apocalypse basically but spend most of their time in a far future that's got enough distance from it and that imagines an alternative that could exist on the other side.
I’m interested in the kind of story that starts from the premise that the seemingly apocalyptic end of the world stories that I grew up on, the ones like Logan's Run, the film adaptation where everybody's living in this domed shopping mall city, shopping for mates on a screen that slides in front of them—imagine that—and, you know, everybody has to die through some ritual for reasons that are never explained and nobody ever argues with. And on the outside it's a nuclear wasteland or something, right? And then they go outside finally, these rebel characters, a cop and his fugitive prey. They find this rewilded Washington, D.C. It's supposed to be the end of the world in the context of the movie, but it's also sort of very obviously the new beginning and this kind of Edenic opportunity. That idea of exploring the end of the world as not the end but the beginning in the context of climate change stories is a really interesting thing, even if it's a little intense. It's kind of what Gibson did in The Peripheral and in Agency, the following book, where he imagines a horrific, obliquely described "Jackpot" event where it's like 40 years in the second half of the 21st century, in which most of the human population dies in a multifactor apocalypse, but then the people that survive have a pretty good setup because this is sort of a resulting bounty.
Absolutely! In the current novel I’m writing, a humongous asteroid is headed toward the earth, but we discovered it's made of ice. And so, we figure out if you just let it land, if you just hit it in space enough so it lands in the Southern hemisphere, billions will die, but then it'll actually solve our global warming problem because you'll have two Antarcticas.
That's awesome. I love that. You have a title?
Well. The title is... okay, The Last Great American Science Fiction Novel.
All right, that's funny. That's kind of funny and self-referential and kind ofyeah, I like that—meta-textual.
And, the scientists are for it, they just say look, this is the best shot we have. We're all going to die anyway. We might as well sacrifice some so that others will live.
It plays with Jeff Bezos' recent musing about how we have to save Earth by turning it into some sort of vacation spot for the rich. Imagine the wealthiest humans enjoying the sea breeze while everyone else lives off-world, you know, working on mines, on poorly lit mining colonies.
Amazon warehouses on Mars.
Everyone will live in Amazon warehouses, absolutely, and they don't hold up well against tornado-level winds by the way.
No, not when they're just four tilted-up concrete walls that are ready to fall on the occupants when there's one big gust. Really horrifying stuff. Have you ever read Brian Aldiss?
Brian Aldiss, I read one of his books. Maybe one of the Helliconia books.
He has a story called “Last Orders” on a planet that is being evacuated. These people are hanging out in a bar. They're supposed to get on the rocket. And they're just kind of coming up with reasons not to, and instead, they're getting shit-faced at the end of the world, and there's some deep truth to that.
Right down the street from where I live, I live on the Colorado River in East Austin in a kind of industrial part of East Austin, and just downriver from here we have Elon Musk building the new Tesla Gigafactory, which I saw from downtown for the first time from a high-rise vantage last weekend. It was astonishing how science-fictional and monumental this structure is. And across the road from that, he's building a new SpaceX headquarters, and he's building out his rocket launching pad in Brownsville. We're involved in conservation efforts here and having discussions with these guys and just kind of coming to terms with the reality of how powerful these early 21st-century techno-barons really are. I’m seeing it literally in my backyard. The political implications of that and economic implications of that and the fictional opportunities and the non-fictional opportunities that present you just confronting what's really going on. It's intriguing even as a lot of what I see is scary, especially when it's coupled with the seemingly emphysemic condition of the democracy that we grew up with.
One of the reviewers of Tropic of Kansas said that you can still surprise readers with your fictional worlds in a 24-hour news cycle era that blitzes the US with the most insane things occurring in the nation and the world, and it never stops: global issues, economic concerns, climate concerns. Your writing still manages to surprise, despite the backdrop of insanity around us. Can you comment on how you're able to do that?
I think that quote comes maybe from Bruce Sterling. I work hard to evade the headlines because writing topical fiction, especially novel length, is like the enemy of success, because you can never keep up with the headlines. And especially now. The news cycle is moving at photonic speed and the publishing cycle of a novel, including the time of writing it, it's like, you're lucky if it's like a two-and-a-half-year cycle, right? I try to do the Gibsonian thing of seeing interesting things in the environment that haven't gotten a lot of attention and you draw them out. Like what if you had a CEO as the President? I hear y'all talking about that in the campaign ads, but wait a minute, have you really thought that through? Right? Those guys don't allow free speech. There isn't free speech in a business corporation. You piss off the boss and see you later. And, you know, you can get "severance," as it were.
So, I try to put a funhouse mirror up to the world I see and draw out the things that interest me and not stay in conversation with the headlines. I try to use the tools of speculative fiction to put that mirror up in a way that tells truths about the real world that more conventional social realism or naturalism cannot. I’m trying to be engaged in this roundabout or oblique way. Sometimes that succeeds in telling a truth that normal, non-fictional journalistic truth-telling can't.
I love that because sometimes I see a headline and think, "Now I can't use that!" But what you're saying is, let's take it and give it a rocket boost and see where it goes.
Or just turn it on its head, you know. Probably my biggest influence in terms of science fiction writers was J. G. Ballard. He talked about that idea of the inversion. He took the approach of having been a medical student. You know, like the same kind of technique you take to dissecting a cadaver to literally turn the world inside out and take that “Earth is the alien planet” approach. If the conflict revolves around a family, that might be a divorce, a death, an accident, you know, whatever. Widen the aperture to have something happen at the societal level, and you should be able to achieve a similar kind of result. Those kinds of inversions as a narrative trick in speculative fiction work really well.
Back to Tropic of Kansas, the inversion is basically like, what if you took all of that dark post-9/11 energy and instead of directing it at the Middle East, it's all directed at home? And what if these revolutions going on in faraway countries were going on right here? What if those #Occupy people had AK47s? Those things often end up turning out closer to real. I worked on that, and now there's a thing that's been happening, the past few years. There are revolutionary Maoist slogans spraypainted all over our neighborhood by people who have adopted the ideologies of the Shining Path. They've adopted ideologies of the peasant revolution to deal with gentrification in historically working-class and minority communities in Austin or other parts of Texas. If you engage in those kinds of inversions, you'd be surprised at how often they end up seeming prescient because they're looking at things as they are with maybe a slight skew.
It's amazing how we're not surprised that people get radicalized now. Or maybe the surprise is what they were radicalized to or how often they get re-radicalized. Like how many different ways can a person be radicalized? I wouldn't have expected the Shining Path to be something that Americans went in for.
If you think back to your point about the erasure of the indigenous communities, there are more people that have indigenous families, and certainly in Texas, like a lot more people than you might realize. If you think about it through that prism, like these people who borrowed from theories of revolutionary communism to help understand the post-colonial landscape of some rural area in Latin America or something, I can see how it makes a certain sense, because you don’t have to live in Texas very long to learn that you’re living in colonized space, and that all of the vestiges of what's gone on here over the past 200 years are really manifest in the landscape. But yet they're so manifest that they're just part of everyday life. Unless you take that step back and take that “Earth is the alien planet” view or you try to imagine altering some element of it. Then it can come through more clearly. I tried to really play with that in Rule of Capture, which, is all about that “all property is theft” idea. It's really like when you dig into American jurisprudence about land, it's all these cases where it says, "Yeah, well, actually we did steal it, but we can't change that, so here it is, and, you know, the law of the conqueror ultimately rules.” There's a Supreme Court case that says something to that effect.
In America, I feel like we're always getting recolonized. Especially in the way we're supposed to think about our government or the way we're supposed to think about who we are as a people. No occupying force is necessary either. The idea of sovereignty is enough to accomplish the recolonizing work. It's almost like every decade there's a new kind of vision that you're supposed to accept.
Totally, a new reinvention of the national myth that serves to perpetuate the state. You know, like border fortifications or whatever, the main purpose of which just seems to be the sovereign insisting that it really exists. The truth of the matter is much more muddled.
Yes, state sovereignty defends itself by military spending--what's our budget for the military in America?
It's a huge percentage of the GDP, yeah.
So, when you're thinking about utopia, you just kind of wish there was a way to build a great society without using the military-industrial complex to do it.
My book from last year, Failed State, is about people trying to create a more authentically utopian community. My conclusion was that a utopia grounded in realism is a tragedy. Because utopia doesn't exist, but utopia is also an aspiration, a decision, and the idea of the utopian dream is like the downtrodden dreaming of what's at the end of the Shining Path for people who subscribe to those radical theories of a totally different revolutionary approach to dealing with the situation they find themselves born into. Throughout modern Western history, that utopian aspiration and political philosophy and everyday politics played an important counterbalancing role to conservative pragmatism of, like, well, this is the world we have because that's what came to be, and you can't really change it that much, and I think after the end of history, after the fall of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, that all of those kinds of utopian theories completely disappeared from our political vernacular and we're just left with variations of that pragmatism. Science fiction can play a valuable role in trying to help resuscitate that kind of thinking, especially in the context of things like our climate future where most of us don't want to look at because there's no good news there, it seems like. So, trying to engage in that somewhat daunting project is a useful undertaking.
We need more breakthroughs in science to get us to that kind of utopian science fiction world. I don't know if you've read Cory Doctorow's Walkaway?
Oh yeah. I love Walkaway.
He had the premise that if you have nanotech assembly machines suddenly. You don't need to have the sort of supply chains that we rely on. You don't need money.
I love Cory—the idea of technological breakthroughs that eliminate scarcity, allowing for an authentically communitarian utopia. I tend to go in a kind of totally different direction, which is like you can't get around our problems unless you undo the origins of agriculture and the grain monocultures and undo those agricultural surplus-focused fundaments of civilization that intrinsically create inequality because it's about who controls the surplus, and an approach to nature that's all about controlling the reproduction of other species. It's fundamentally damaged. You have to look to the examples of other pre-agricultural or more pastoral societies to find the kind of inspiration we need to imagine something different. But Cory's world, I would certainly live in, if I believed it were possible.
Oh yeah, I’m sure you're right that if nano-assemblers did exist, and even if there were tons of them, you'd have people that would get together in gangs and try to destroy the other nano-assemblers and kill that group of people, because of this Malthusian idea engrained in humanity of resource scarcity and the need to fight for what's yours. I'm not sure that humans would even be able to accept a world without scarcity even if all of the products we needed were free and available. Humans are hardwired to hunt. And I think we like to hurt each other.
I don't think so. I think we're designed to live in small bands without leadership hierarchies, and we're designed to kind of get by season to season without maintaining these huge complex societies in which there is enough for people to survive for years. A small group of people have to control that surplus. It creates wealth inequality. And wealth inequality creates all kinds of other inequality. Needing to extract from the land the way we do requires systems of labor that intrinsically involve people having a level of indenture or worse, and—I don't know, I don't think I have all that many answers to those questions, but I feel like I’m starting to figure out where some of the problems are.
I don't know when the great nanotech utopia will arrive, but I hope it's in my lifetime. We'll see what happens.
I have a neighbor who's a patent lawyer. All she does is nanotech patents, and she's the busiest person I know, so maybe there's something going on there.
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