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Robert Charles Wilson on H.G. Wells The Time Machine
178 Plays1 year ago
Mark and Joe jump around in time with Nebula and Hugo-Award winning author Robert Charles Wilson.
Written in the late 1800s, The Time Machine is one of the first books of science fiction that Robert Charles Wilson discovered. "It was obviously the work of someone who was intellectually engaged with the big discoveries of the late 19th century," says Robert. Particularly what science was learning about geology and, of course, evolution.
The Time Machine looked directly and bluntly at those ideas, says Robert. He was struck by the ending of the book, which moves far into the future, when the sun is dying and earth is doomed.
"There's a kind of bleak beauty in it."
From there, the trio then move into a fascinating discussion about Robert's new book, Owning the Unknown. He describes it as a "sort of matryoshka doll, a memoir inside a history of the science fiction genre inside a defense of metaphysical agnosticism/atheism."
Don't miss this deep and fascinating discussion!
Find out more about Robert Charles Wilson's work on the show notes page for this episode.
Re-Creative is a co-production of Donovan Street Press Inc. in association with Mark A. Rayner.
Contact us at: [email protected]
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Transcript
Time Travel Desires
00:00:09
Speaker
Hello, Mark. Joe, how are you? Doing very well. We're back to ask each other how we're doing. As long as they don't start talking about the weather. No, I won't. No, I promise. So I do have a question. Okay. Now this was a really leading question, but it's I think still interesting. If you could go visit any era, what era would it be? Well, I've recently been diving deep into the Roman Empire.
00:00:33
Speaker
So yeah, I've been finding that fascinating but I don't know that I would visit it because especially the era that I'm learning about now. What era are you talking about? Well, I just got to Augustus Caesar and it's been basically 20 or 40 years of civil war. Oh yeah, it's mayhem. But apparently the century before that was one of the best possible times and places to live in human history.
00:00:59
Speaker
But then the, the inhabitants of the century that I'm learning about now with Julius Caesar, Augustus Caesar, whatnot. That's like the worst. Oh yeah. And it's, it's with Sulla and Marius. It's even before it starts with a generation before Caesar. Exactly. Yeah. It's horrible. Yeah. Those guys. Yeah. So I guess so. So yeah, the a hundred years right up to that point is where I would be interested in checking out.
00:01:22
Speaker
Okay, now what about you? Well, I think we should include our guests. Well, for me, actually, I have two things I'd like to do. I'd like to visit about 12,000 to 10,000 years ago, just so I can learn what was actually going on, because that's probably one of the most interesting things happening right now in archaeology is was there a significant civilization back then? Because there's some indications there was, they found some ruins recently that are
00:01:49
Speaker
not recently, last 30 years, but you know that our sort of traditional story is changing a bit. And so I'd like to know about that. But I'm also really just interested to see what happens in the next, I don't know, 1000 years to see if I'm interested in what happens in the next two years. I'm actually interested to know what happens in the next couple seconds to see what our guest has to say about this.
Guest Introduction: Robert Charles Wilson
00:02:10
Speaker
Robert Charles Wilson. Yes, I think that would be fascinating. Hopefully he will share with his opinion with us. Hello, Robert. Hi, how are you doing?
00:02:18
Speaker
Very well. Welcome to our podcast, Recreative. Thank you so much. So, what do you think? If you could go somewhere, where would you go? Well, it depends if I can get all my shots, you know? Well, yeah, assuming you don't have to stay there. I mean, I should have said I didn't want to make it. Yeah, you don't have to stay there, but you can go visit, you can poke around, you can look around, you can understand what people are saying. Yeah.
00:02:42
Speaker
Well, you know, I have a couple of answers. I'm kind of fascinated by the recent past, the period around the time I was born or before I was born. Because that's, for me, looking backward, that's when the world starts to get strange. It's something I'm not accustomed to. If I could drop in on the 1940s or the 1950s, spend a couple of weeks looking around, I would do that. If I wanted to dive a little deeper, maybe the Pleistocene era, you know, poke around a little bit.
00:03:11
Speaker
But predominantly, I think I would like to look forward. It's one of those unanswerable questions. What's the world going to be like in 50 or 100 or 1000 or a million years? None of us will ever know the answer to that question, but that's exactly what makes it so intriguing.
Science Fiction's Role in Imagination
00:03:30
Speaker
Is that one of the reasons you write science fiction?
00:03:33
Speaker
Yeah, it is in fact. One of the things science fiction does so well is to pose imaginative answers to unanswerable questions. And I think at this point we should do what we usually do and probably I should have warned you about this. Rather than have us introduce the guests, we ask the guests to introduce themselves. Are you okay with that?
00:03:54
Speaker
I guess so. So tell us who you are. Okay, let me see. Well, I've been writing science fiction for more than 35, 40 years now, professionally. I've been reading it since I was 10 or 12 years old. Before that, if you count children's books, it's been a lifelong fascination of mine. It's
00:04:19
Speaker
been my privilege to spend a career as an adult exploring that particular aesthetic space. Other than that, I don't know, I don't know what to say, to say about myself. You know, I'm just some guy, I live outside of Toronto. And, you know, when I write books, and, you know, hang out with my friends, and, you know, that's just, that's kind of sums it up, really.
00:04:39
Speaker
I guess we can embellish it a little bit. I mean, Mark and I are both admittedly fans and have read several of your books and I'm currently reading your latest book now, which perhaps we'll talk a little bit about later.
00:04:51
Speaker
But you've won the Hugo Award and several other awards, Philip K. Dick Award, and have done quite well in the field of science fiction. And we were just chatting just before we started recording about how Stephen King had said that you were one of, if not the finest practitioners of science fiction working today, which is, I imagine, quite a moment for you.
00:05:12
Speaker
Oh, that was an incredible moment. I've been reading Stephen King since he published Carrie. It was kind of a formative influence on me, in a sense, because I just fell in love with the intimacy he has with the characters he writes about. So when he said that, it was in an issue of Entertainment Weekly. He had a column in Entertainment Weekly. I was completely blown away by that. I never expected, you know, in a sane universe,
00:05:38
Speaker
I would read him, but he would not read me. But apparently that isn't the case. So yeah, that was an incredible moment for me.
Influence of 'The Time Machine' on Robert
00:05:48
Speaker
He's got to read something and why not a great science fiction? Absolutely. I'm trying to think 15 years ago, what book would he have read? Would that have been Spin? I think it was just after Spin came out. That's an amazing book, by the way. That was a big book for me. That was the one that took the awards. I love Darwinia though too. I always think about that book.
00:06:17
Speaker
When i think about you cuz i yeah i don't want to spoil anything for people that i don't know for a while but i won't say too much because it was well surprised that wonderful book thank you for saying so actually my introduction to was a bridge of years i remember wondering through a close bookstore looking for something to read and there was and i was unfamiliar with you at that time and,
00:06:37
Speaker
and then read that book. And then you were instantly elevated to one of my favorite science fiction writers. Well, it's interesting. Yeah. You've wandered into a Kohl's bookstore. It's funny because I used to be a regular at Kohl's back in the day. And when my first book was published, I made a point of not only going to look for it in a Kohl's bookstore, I went to look for it in the Kohl's bookstore I used to visit when I was 10 years old. I literally took transit out to Etobicoke, you know, and found a little mall where I used to shop. And by God, there was something that I had written was sitting on that shelf.
00:07:07
Speaker
Yeah. So, yeah. So, is that the moment you knew you'd made it? I don't know if made it is the word. I just want to skip a little bit. I'd at least on something and if it didn't impress others, it impressed me. Well, and that's probably actually what it's all about, isn't it? I mean, we're only here to impress ourselves. We're not, we don't really need to impress others. Although I have to admit, I'm thinking when you saw that Stephen King had written that, did you call Robert J. Sawyer afterwards?
00:07:35
Speaker
No, I didn't. But now that you mentioned it, I probably should have, yeah. Something worth gloating over, yeah. That's true. But you're a real gent. Okay, that brings us to your choice of topic for today. Would you like to tell us what that is? Well, you asked for an inspirational work of art.
00:07:54
Speaker
And what I kept coming back to was The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. I mention that because it's one of the first books of science fiction that I discovered. But I've come back to it repeatedly over the course of my career, and I always find something new in it. It's a simple little story. It's more novella than a novel. Wells himself in his later life dismissed it as being undergraduate work, I think he called it.
00:08:21
Speaker
What I like about it is that it is so clearly the work of a young man. He was a working class guy. He was, if he hadn't been a writer, his other career was as a Draper's apprentice. He had to struggle a lot when he was young to read what he wanted to read and to
00:08:38
Speaker
make time for it. But it was obviously the work of someone who was intellectually engaged and fascinated by what were the big discoveries of the 19th century, the geology that told us how old the planet was or hinted at it at least. And of course, evolution, the idea that we had all evolved from previous forms of life and that this would go on. It wasn't a process that stopped. Similarly, the geological changes over time on the Earth. This was not a process that stopped.
00:09:07
Speaker
And what I liked about the Time Machine is it looked so directly and bluntly at that. The scene that has always stuck with me is the scene at the end of the story where the time traveler travels 30 million years into the future and finds a dying Earth, a bloated red sun in the sky, a few sad remnants of life.
00:09:29
Speaker
And this at a time when people wrote about the future or wrote stories that were proto science fiction, there was a tendency to use them allegorically or to infuse them with metaphor or metaphysical ideas. It was a time when if people imagined if you went to Mars, you might find the spirits of the dead or angels or something like that.
00:09:52
Speaker
But this was a very blunt, naturalistic vision of the future, and he faced it head on. And he found really a kind of a bleak beauty in it. I think that's why I keep coming back to it, and I think that's why that vision plays so often into what I've written over the course of my life. And he was a very young man when he wrote that, wasn't he? Was he under 30? Yeah, he was definitely under 30. I don't remember exactly how old he was, but yeah, it was among his first published works. And do you remember it happened to know roughly when it was published?
00:10:22
Speaker
There was a version of what he wrote called, what was it, The Chronic Argonaut, which I think is a wonderful title, but I think it was 1888, something like that. Don't quote me, but I think it's pretty much in the ballpark. It's late, late, late 19th century, though. Yeah. Yeah. And he's got kind of a, he sort of has that era's sort of fascination with machinery and the mechanics of things too, right?
00:10:45
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, technology. I mean, over the course of his career, he didn't see technological progress as necessarily a great thing. It had a strong side. But yeah, I think that's true. He was fascinated by all this stuff. But moreover, more than that, he had this aesthetic obsession with it. I mean, if you think of these ideas of geology and evolution as kind of as if they were a street map of Paris,
00:11:12
Speaker
What Welles produced was a painting of Paris. He brought that aesthetic dimension to it. I'm seeing that it was published in 1895.
Time Travel in Film: 'The Time Machine' Discussion
00:11:20
Speaker
Yeah, there were these earlier versions that he published. And how do you feel the movies have done in transitioning the novel or the novelette, I guess, into the screen? Think of two movies, at least, that do it. So the movie version I'm most familiar with is the George Powell version from 1960 or so. Yeah.
00:11:39
Speaker
which leaves a lot to be desired, but it is a fascinating movie for its time. It's good and it captures some of that spirit. For someone who was in love with the story, it seemed inadequate to me, but I have watched it and watched it, I have to admit, over and over again, various times. Yeah, because they do sort of have a few scenes where they talk, like you can sort of get a sense of that geological time passing as the time machine moves forward. Yeah, it's well done.
00:12:07
Speaker
And you have written time travel yourself. I mentioned the bridge of years, big time travel component to that. Would that have been influenced in any way by the time machine? Well, time travelers never traveled into the past, although he wrote about the deep past. He wrote a couple of things. He wrote a long story called A Story of the Stone Age.
00:12:29
Speaker
which he paired with a story called A Story of the Days to Come. And they're a lovely little set of two stories. The first is set in Paleolithic England at a time, as he said, when you could walk dry shod from France to England.
00:12:44
Speaker
He wrote another story called The Grizzly Folk about human beings and Neanderthals. They were influenced by the anthropology of his day, so there's some pretty questionable stuff in those stories. But again, it's part of his fascination with deep time. My time travel stories that were set in the historical past don't have much to do with whales. But stories that look forward the way Spin looked forward to the eventual expansion of the sun and the potential death of the earth
00:13:14
Speaker
That definitely has Wells DNA in it. And I have a work in progress called 40 Million Summers that has an awful lot of Wells DNA in it. It's been completed. I've just sent it to my agent, but I don't have much more to say about it than that. We're very early in the stage of producing a book at this point. But you do have a new book out.
Robert's Nonfiction Exploration of Belief Systems
00:13:36
Speaker
Yeah, it's my first book length work of nonfiction, Owning the Unknown. It's a strange little book. It was, in a way, it was my pandemic book. You know, I was at a weird point in my career where I had, I'd been working on a novel called The Cure, which I wasn't happy with. And I turned in a draft of it two years late, and my publisher Tor Books wasn't particularly happy with it either. And I ended up shelving it.
00:14:00
Speaker
And I was really kind of at a crossroads. I thought, you know, I'm an older guy. Am I going to be a, do I retire? Do I semi-retire? What do I do? And the Trump years had been depressing. The pandemic was isolating. So I thought, well,
00:14:18
Speaker
What I can do is write a book outside of a contract. I can do what they always tell you to do. I can write the book you couldn't find on the shelf when you went to the library. The book you wanted to read but couldn't find on the shelf. And it was a chance to put together a bunch of ideas that I had had. So I just did it and I didn't consider what to do with it until I'd finished writing it.
00:14:38
Speaker
It's like I say, it's an odd little book. It's a combination of things. There are elements of autobiography in it. There are elements of history of the science fiction genre in it. But it's also an argument for atheism, as I defined it in the book. The subtitle is, a science fiction writer explores atheism, agnosticism, and the idea of God. It's not a book. I didn't want it to be a book where I tell people whether they ought to believe in God or not.
00:15:05
Speaker
It's not a book that tells you whether God exists or not. I figure people have been wrangling over that for 2,000 years and more. It's unlikely that I'm going to be the guy who settles it once and for all. Yeah, but you can aim high. Yeah, you never know. Yeah.
00:15:20
Speaker
But it was a way to explore those ideas. And they seem pertinent to science fiction in a way because they're part of that body of unanswerable questions. And although I am an atheist and I defend a kind of genial atheism in it,
00:15:36
Speaker
What struck me is when you put aside the arguments, when you stop imagining that other people are stupid for believing something you don't believe, if you stop asking, how can people believe this with regard to a religion? And you realize they can believe it because it's easy to believe.
00:15:51
Speaker
People believed it through history. The majority of people believe it now. It's not hard to believe. Once you make those allowances, then when you talk about religion and faith, you can approach it as a novelist might approach it. You can talk about the aesthetics of it. You can talk about the role it plays in people's lives, positive and negative.
00:16:09
Speaker
you can explore different ways of thinking about these things and how we arrive at our conclusions about the world. So that's what I tried to do in that book. And I included at the end of it two short stories that kind of illustrate how that process of thought and how I developed those ideas and how that played into my fiction. So that's that book and it's in print now. And
00:16:33
Speaker
I don't think it's the kind of book that's destined to ever be a best seller, but it's from a small press. It'll be in print forever. And I think the people who would like it will be able to find their way to it. And I have some evidence that that's happening already. So I'm happy about it. Congratulations. That's great. Yeah.
00:16:49
Speaker
the comment you made about it, perhaps never being a bestseller. I read once that a book is the success of it is often inversely proportional to how you think it will do. So perhaps it will do very well. And the other thing is that I know from having read much of your work in the past and comments that you've either written or made,
00:17:06
Speaker
that you did have a rather fundamentalist upbringing. And I think that has infused bits of your work through your career. So this book in a way to me seems like a natural conclusion really, or a natural waypoint in your career that you were destined perhaps to to tackle at some point more of a comment on the question. Well, I'll answer it anyway. Okay.
00:17:28
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's true. I wouldn't say necessarily, but I came from a fundamentalist family. I do discuss this to a certain extent in the book that it was very odd in my family that we had to attend church every Sunday, but it was never something we talked about at home. It was as if there was almost a cone of silence around that it would be distasteful.
00:17:48
Speaker
to just talk about religion. And as odd as that might seem, it made space for me as someone who found a lot of that stuff unconvincing. I was never confronted by my family about it. It was odd because religion played a big part.
00:18:04
Speaker
In my extended family, my uncle Kenneth was the editor of a magazine called The Christian Herald, which back in the day had the largest circulation of any Protestant Christian magazine. My grandmother was a Protestant of the old school. She was a teetotaler. When magazines came into the house, like Time or Life,
00:18:25
Speaker
before she opened them, she would go through them and cut out the liquor ads. So when we visited her, it was always troublesome to me when we visited her because the articles would have important pieces missing.
00:18:39
Speaker
It's kind of annoying. You should have bought her one of those heady black pens. That would have been better, I should have suggested. So yeah, there is that element in my upbringing, but there was space in that upbringing for me to, you know, I wasn't indoctrinated. I wouldn't put it that way. I was never required to participate in this stuff beyond saying the blessing at dinner and showing up at church on Sunday. Is there a moment or an event that you can trace back to becoming an atheist?
00:19:09
Speaker
Well, the one I narrated at the beginning of the book is when I was, I guess, about 12 years old, there was an announcement in the church bulletin, the one they put in the back of the pews every Sunday, that there was going to be an evening event for young people that was going to feature a display of ultraviolet light.
00:19:28
Speaker
Okay. And I was this science-oriented kid, and I had in fact been reading that probably in one of Isaac Asimov's book about how this worked, you know, how did ultraviolet fluorescence work? And I knew that. I knew that, you know, the ultraviolet light was invisible, but the photons were energetic and they would knock out lower energy photons from certain dyes and materials. I couldn't wait to see this. This was, you know, in the early 60s before Blacklight, Jimi Hendrix posters were in everybody's suburban bedroom.
00:19:58
Speaker
So I showed up at one of these, this event, you know, one evening, one winter evening, and it turned out to be two youth evangelists and a small crowd of sullen adolescents. And what they had was what they call a flannel graph. I don't know if you know what these things are, but it's a big sheet of cloth and they have cloth figures. You can stick to it to tell a story. So they told the story of the nativity. It was December.
00:20:21
Speaker
I was disappointed because, you know, where was the black light? Eventually, it came to the manger, the star over the manger. They asked someone to turn out the lights in the hall, and they flipped on the ultraviolet light.
00:20:38
Speaker
And as I think I said in the book, the star over the manger lit up like a plum-colored supernova. And so did everything else on the final graph. So did various pieces of lint on my clothing and the seams on my shoes. And it was fascinating. I just loved that. It was all too brief. And after that, we were all asked to commit ourselves to essentially commit ourselves to Christ.
00:21:07
Speaker
And what troubled me at that point was that it just seemed too much. I didn't object to the story. I knew the story of the Nativity and all that. It was just the idea of being asked to stand up and declare it was true and make it the central pivot point of my life.
00:21:23
Speaker
I mean, how could I? I can't declare this is true. I mean, it's an interesting story. Maybe it's true. I know I was 12 years old. But I just felt like I was being asked to sign a contract I hadn't read, basically. So I made my excuses. I asked for a bathroom break, made my way out, grabbed my coat off the coat hanger and exited it into the winter night.
00:21:52
Speaker
and began to wonder what I should think about all this stuff. And it was part of a lifetime of thinking about this stuff, not because it was angry, not because it seemed stupid or mean or anything like that. It did interest me enormously, but because it interested me enormously,
00:22:12
Speaker
I wanted some space around it so I could think about it. So yeah, I guess that was a pivotal point for me. Oh, sorry, Mark, you go ahead. I was going to say I was wondering how much Asimov your youth pastor was reading. That sounds like something read at a foundation using science to sell religion. I would be willing to bet I had read more Asimov than my youth pastor. Probably.
00:22:35
Speaker
Okay, so yeah, I'm really looking forward to reading the rest of the book and how that journey went for you. I would describe myself as an agnostic, so we're probably not too far apart. I'm in the same boat. My father was raised Baptist, which I didn't know until I was 18.
00:22:52
Speaker
Like there wasn't really religion in the house and a couple of way were Jehovah's Witnesses. There were Mormons, Church of Latter-day Saint. And they came by and they wanted to tell us all about their book. And my dad said, okay, sure. You can tell me about the book. And we sat outside and had lemonade and talked to these two young fellows. And.
00:23:11
Speaker
all of this, like he, my dad was capable of quoting scripture, which I never heard him do before in my life. It blew my mind. But yeah, so there was religion in their family's deep history, but it just didn't get transmitted to me. And I was raised a Catholic and the one thing I did appreciate being brought up that way was that familiarity with the Bible and having that biblical literacy, which I think was valuable.
00:23:38
Speaker
Did you find the same thing? That's true. I mean, there's a lot of stuff of value there, you know, aesthetically as well. I'm fascinated sometimes by writers who either have a background in Catholicism or Catholic or lapsed Catholics, I guess, like Cormac McCarthy or James Lee Burke. There always seems to be this kind of
00:24:00
Speaker
invisible metaphysical superstructure looming just off stage. It's a fascinating effect. I mean, there's a literary effect that's fascinating. I mean, I don't give it credence as a description of the cosmos, but as a facet of human psychology, it's definitely deeply embedded in all of us. Would it be a spoiler to ask you what your perception of the universe is then? I'm guessing that you have a much more scientific explanation then for what is going on.
Metaphysical Realities and Beliefs
00:24:30
Speaker
Well, in many cases, I don't have an explanation for what's going on. I make a distinction in the book between metaphysical reality, reality at all times and all places, no matter how physically or ontologically distant they are from us, versus the observable universe, the observable universe, the one we see within the limits of the distant past, the foreseeable future, the very large and the very small.
00:24:57
Speaker
I think in the case of the observable universe, yeah, we rely on science to understand that. In the case of the metaphysical cosmos, I describe myself in the book as a metaphysically agnostic. I don't know what the ultimate nature of reality is.
00:25:16
Speaker
I suspect no one else does, but if people claim they do, they're welcome to present their evidence to me to demonstrate that they have some reliable knowledge about the metaphysical universe. But I don't know. It doesn't become atheism until someone presents us a specified description of theism. At that point, my metaphysical agnosticism collapses into atheism.
00:25:43
Speaker
I defend that idea at length in the book. Yeah, that's kind of what I arrived at. I love that actually that it's yeah, it's not absolutely one thing or the other that it's yeah, there's there's kind of room for both depending on the the circumstances. Yeah, well, I was active for a long time on Christian and atheist websites. There are a few places where you can actually have pleasant conversations with people who don't share your convictions.
00:26:07
Speaker
Yeah, and at one point someone said to me, well, you know, God isn't a physical force or an entity in the universe. He doesn't exist in the way physical things exist or physical forces exist. My reaction was, well, okay, you've satisfied 90% of my atheism.
00:26:23
Speaker
Yeah, like that seems like a reasonable position to take. Are you concerned at all about, maybe I shouldn't use the word fundamentalism, but how some atheists are becoming a bit dogmatic in their atheism?
00:26:40
Speaker
spend a little time online, yeah, you see a lot of that. And that kind of reflects what I said before. If you're atheism consists of mocking other people and feeling superior to them because you're not as stupid as they are, well, I mean, you know,
00:26:56
Speaker
That's a pointless exercise. Even if it were true, it would be a pointless exercise. And in fact, it's not true. There's sensible, thoughtful, kind, generous people on all sides of these arguments. There are terrible people on all sides of these arguments, too. And of course, we've seen the interaction of fundamentalism in politics is a particularly toxic environment. So yeah, those issues are real. But I don't know, sneering online atheism doesn't do much to improve matters, it seems to me.
00:27:26
Speaker
I want to tie your choice of subject at time travel.
00:27:30
Speaker
to this subject. First of all, with the comment that I read somewhere that before science fiction writers started writing about time travel, like H.G. Wells, that people never even thought in those terms. And of course, I don't know how we could know that, not having actually been back there with them. But there doesn't seem to be too much evidence, I think, in the past of people contemplating, gee, what would it be like to go back in time or forward in time before the last, say, 100 or 150 years?
00:27:59
Speaker
Well, they're earlier examples than Wells, but not much earlier, as far as I know. Yeah, but it's not a good example. Yeah. Mark Twain. Yeah.
Historical Perspectives and Enlightenment Influence
00:28:11
Speaker
But there is, I mean, I'm going to take it, but I'm going to take the backwards direction though, because there is a real thread in human civilization of always assuming that we're now a degraded form of a great once great civilization, right? The, the IV of the golden age.
00:28:25
Speaker
That that goes like that's almost universal and almost all cultures. So that's backwards looking, right?
00:28:33
Speaker
Yeah, it was also an example of how we kind of treat the past and the future as metaphysical places. The Christian idea, we began in a garden, we exist in a fallen state, and we're destined for a glorious kingdom. But there are other ideologies or religions that look backward to a golden age or look forward to a golden age. But the idea that these things are just continuous with us,
00:29:00
Speaker
is I think a strikingly modern idea. The idea that these moments, that there are a trail of moments behind us going back into the unknown, a trail of moments ahead of us going forward into the future. It's an interesting idea and that we're not separate from it. These aren't kingdoms or realms or supernaturally disconnected worlds. These are just us the way we used to be and us the way we will be.
00:29:29
Speaker
Yeah, I do think that the Enlightenment has a lot to do with that too though, right? Because I think the idea of progress in terms of scientific and civilizational programs really does kind of start with the Enlightenment in the way that
00:29:44
Speaker
Cause I don't think in ancient rope to use your example, Joe of an ancient Roman, I don't think they would be thinking about how much better life is going to be, you know, in a thousand years. I don't think that was, you know, they were, they were thinking from what I, you know, what I know of them. It's funny that the parallels between ancient Rome's and, and, you
00:30:03
Speaker
in America today or the world today, where there's the conservatives trying to keep things the way that they were and revert to that past. And then people like Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar coming in and saying, well, no, we actually don't think that that was working and we want to make that better. And here we have all these ideas and I'm going to conquer all your armies so that I can have the power to actually implement all these ideas. But the one thing that they didn't do
00:30:30
Speaker
Was they didn't reflect on the ability of creating a machine or some kind of a mechanism or magic to actually go back to the past or to the future. That concept is a modern science fiction concept, I think. Well, you mentioned the Enlightenment. One of the things I say in the book is after a couple of playful definitions of science fiction, and one of them was science fiction stories are the miracle stories of the Enlightenment. Yes.
00:30:58
Speaker
You know, the classical world is full of miracle stories. People love tales of distant lands with strange creatures and events in the heavens. Even within Christianity, there are apocryphal stories like the infancy gospel of Jesus, about Jesus as a child, you know, performing miracles and getting into trouble. The love of miracle stories is continuous. What the Enlightenment did was kind of create a new ontology. You could fit them in.
00:31:24
Speaker
you know, instead of talking about angels and demons and monstrous beings in non-existent lands, we could talk about, you know, spacecraft and time travel is a miracle when you come right down to it. It takes place within this completely different metal universe, you know, a metal universe in which you
00:31:45
Speaker
You need a machine. A machine can take you forward in time. A machine can take you to the- There's a rational way to do it. Yeah. Yeah. It exists within that enlightenment cosmology. Yeah.
00:31:56
Speaker
Now, to tie it into your book, your latest book, you talk about atheism having the same venerable history as religion. I hadn't actually really thought about that because, yeah, people in the past have come up with various religions, Zoroastrianism or whatever, but has there actually been any kind of dogmatic presentation of atheism in the past?
00:32:18
Speaker
Now you've seen arguments that there were effectively such things in Greek and Roman philosophy. I'm not well enough versed in that to say so. The point I make in the book is that there have always been kind of localized atheism, gods that have come to be disbelieved in.
00:32:34
Speaker
gods who have fallen out of belief. People have often been in a relation of atheism, as I say it, to certain particular ideas of God throughout history.
Origins and Evolution of Religious Beliefs
00:32:43
Speaker
Otherwise, we would live in a fixed religious state, but clearly we don't. These ideas evolve over time, you know, for various reasons.
00:32:51
Speaker
Yeah. I've often reflected on how religion came about, you know, just the early humans, just figuring out how to think and talk and communicate and, you know, trying to make sense of the universe around them. We're storytelling animals. I mean, we are, you know, animals that tell stories and a story is just a way to try to describe the world, right? So for the stuff that you can't actually describe, it makes sense that you would then have to go, okay, well, maybe there's something else out there that's causing that. So that's,
00:33:20
Speaker
You know, I do go into this in the new book. I imagine a woman from the Paleolithic era, I called her Eudena after the character in the well story, Story of the Stone Age, and I imagine her transported to the present so that we can interrogate her.
00:33:39
Speaker
But one of the things she points out, or one of the things that I point out through her, is that there are fundamental ideas that I think people come by rationally. They're not necessarily inventions to explain anything. For instance, Eudena, our Paleolithic visitor, believes that there are two worlds, a daylight world and a shadow world, that you can visit the shadow world when you sleep, that you go there to live when you die.
00:34:05
Speaker
And her reasons for believing this are perfectly rational. When she sleeps, she goes places where she doesn't go in her physical body. When she goes there, she sees often enough, sees people who have died and predeceased her, and she speaks to them in this shadow world. She can enter this world not only through sleep, but through the use of certain plants or rituals or ceremonies.
00:34:28
Speaker
The idea that she's more than just her body, that there's a kind of a disembodied self that can travel in the shadow world. These aren't made up explanations. These are just rational inferences about her daily experience. And these ideas are enormously easy for human beings to believe.
00:34:48
Speaker
That's where they're part of the stock and trade of what we do when we write science fiction. If you want to go to an adjacent world, there's always a way to get there. If you want to go to Hogwarts, you go to, what is it, nine and a half, whatever that is.
00:35:06
Speaker
Yeah, but there's this consistent idea of a shadow world with its own inhabitants, our world, creatures who are native to it. There's a barrier. You can't just walk over there, but it's a permeable barrier because those entities visit us from time to time and from time to time in our sleep, we visit them.
00:35:23
Speaker
Another analogy I used in the book is the Bell's story, The Door in the Wall. A perfect analogy for this about a young boy in Victorian England who discovers a mysterious door in a wall when he opens it and walks through. He's in another world entirely. It extends indefinitely. It's green. There are mountains in the distance. There's a strange woman who shows him the Book of Life.
00:35:47
Speaker
Once he leaves, the door vanishes. He sees it again at various times in his life, but it's either too busy to approach it or when he tries to go back to it, it isn't there. It's this whole, I call it the dual ontology, the idea that there's our world and there's a shadow world. It's very easy for us to believe as moderns, so we trade in it when we write science fiction.
00:36:09
Speaker
Many of the stories I've written are stories of dual ontology, our world and the other world, or stories of a disembodied self, people who put their consciousness in computers and so on. So I think for our ancestors, these were very straightforward, almost empirical ideas. They only begin to look like religion when we start to
00:36:29
Speaker
specify them when we decide that there are certain people who can tell us about the shadow world or conduct our journeys there or divine the future through sleep or travels of their disembodied selves. When we start to describe the creatures that inhabit the shadow world, then when we invent rituals to ask for their help or to protect us from evil, then you have something that begins to look very much like religion as we know it.
00:36:59
Speaker
But this basic intuitive idea of a shadow world and the disembodied self, I think at a certain point in our history, these were perfectly rational ideas and they come to us very easily and they persist in the modern day. So I don't think it's too mysterious how religions come to exist. I mean, they're elaborations of something that's fundamental to all of us. And then at some point, somebody decides that it would be a useful tool.
00:37:26
Speaker
Yes, yes. Or they could make a buck off of it. Yeah, that's right. One of those. Yeah. Yes. That there's a priest to it who are uniquely entitled to interpret these things and then consequently tell us what to do or what to pay. Yeah, that's true. I love that. I love that idea, Robert. Yeah.
00:37:47
Speaker
because it's true. It is intuitive. I think that's why atheism for some people is so very difficult, because intuitively, it feels like there is more. Another example I used in the book was the movie The Exorcist, which, you know, it's a perfect dual ontology story. In the novel, one of the characters even says, I'm a Catholic, I have a foot in two worlds. It's really easy to believe the ontology that's presented in the movie The Exorcist. It terrified people when it came out.
00:38:17
Speaker
scholarly articles have been written about the hysteria that surrounded that movie when it came out. It's not because these ideas are difficult to believe. It's because they were enormously easy to believe. And boy, does that work to our benefit as writers of fantasy or science fiction. The reader wants to suspend his disbelief. And disbelief isn't very heavy. You're easily suspended. And that's a feature not a bug if you're a writer of fiction.
00:38:42
Speaker
I remember one time you wrote your first book and then you went away and decided, okay, now I actually have to figure out how to write a book, which I should have done before I wrote the first book. I haven't actually read your first book. I imagine it's actually much better than you thought it was. I think of that in relation to what you just said about the knowledge of how easy it is to convince people to suspend their disbelief and whatnot. Is that one of the things that you figured out about how to write a book?
00:39:08
Speaker
Well, I think at some point you realize a couple of things. One is that the idea that other writers know a ton of stuff that you don't is true, but I mean, you also know a ton of stuff they don't. You realize that no one walks into this business knowing how to do everything. We're all approximating at some level. It's a lifelong learning process. Maybe all the arts are that way. I'm sure there are people who
00:39:32
Speaker
who were brilliant from there. I know, in fact, that there are people who were brilliant from their first novel. But I was not one of them. I had to struggle with this. I was not, I was, I think, naturally talented with words. But that doesn't make you, you know, I could write a fluid, pleasant sounding sentence or paragraph.
00:39:50
Speaker
But that doesn't give you command of fictional structure or suspense or how to create characters and all those things. And those are skills. You don't always learn them consciously. Sometimes you learn them by imitation. Sometimes you just flail around until you hit on the right thing. So maybe I was too modest about my first novel. I don't know. Well, I'm looking forward to the next novel. Thank you for saying so. Because I think your last novel came out in 2016, was it?
00:40:18
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And then you were feeling that maybe you might be done, but now you've written another one, which is you've written this book, you've written another novel. Hopefully you're going to keep on going for some time. Yeah, I hope so. Well, you know, writing this nonfiction book reminded me of what I love about science fiction, but to me is the core of science fiction, which was what triggered the novel I wrote immediately afterwards.
Motivations for Writing Science Fiction
00:40:42
Speaker
So yeah, I think that's a question that's been productive for me to ask all through my life is why do you write science fiction? You could be writing anything. You could be writing mystery novels. What is it? What is it about this genre that keeps drawing you back? And I've had different answers to that all through my life, but every time I've tried to answer it, it's reminded me of something and drawn me back into the heart of what I'm trying to do with my work.
00:41:08
Speaker
Is there still a viable market for science fiction these days? It's my understanding a lot of writers are struggling now. Oh, I'm sure they are. I would hate to be trying to break into the field now. I can't speak authoritatively about the state of the market now. I just occupy my own little niche in it. But yes, I've heard stories about how difficult it is. It's strange too, because over the course of the last
00:41:37
Speaker
Well, save my lifetime, say 70 years, the arc of science fiction has been to go from being a, you know, a tiny fraction of a, you know, a tiny low rent fraction of the magazine and paperback publishing industry. It's two in the first quarter of the 21st century.
00:41:55
Speaker
something that's kind of consumed the entertainment industry. It's science fiction and fantasy are inescapable at the Cineplex and on the small screen. It's everywhere. Something that I grew up hunting for is now something that hunts for you in many ways. Yeah, it's crazy. I can even publicly admit I play D&D now when people don't laugh at me. Yeah, it is remarkable. Yeah. I mean, they laugh at me for other reasons.
00:42:24
Speaker
So yeah, in the midst of that though, there seems to be a, you know, within the literature of science fiction, there seem to be all kinds of maybe within literature generally, all sorts of just various circumstances make it financially and often emotionally difficult for young writers trying to break into the field. So where it goes from here, I do not know. I'm in love with the future, but I can't predict it. That's a great place to end this. I think so.
00:42:53
Speaker
It has been a great pleasure talking to you today. I really appreciate you coming on the podcast. Robert. It was fun talking to you guys. Thanks so much. Oh, thank you. That was just our pleasure.
00:43:25
Speaker
So Mark, you and I have discussed how people can support this podcast. And one of the ways I would like to get them to support us is by, and I think you're going to like this, by purchasing one of your books. Ooh, I like that. How about your books? We're going to start with your books. Start with my books. Okay. And today I would like to point people in particular to Alpha Max, which is a novel about the metaverse, which is kind of in vogue these days.
00:43:48
Speaker
Yeah, and it doesn't take a lot of the standard approaches that the Metaverse stories do. I think it's a bit more grounded. It's funny and it's witty and it's smart and it's entertaining. Go to recreative.ca slash support and you can find your books there. Alpha Max by Mark A. Rader.