The SF Universe of Max Barry

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Speaker 1: Hey, or hey, let's talk about aliens. It's a bit early in the morning for that, isn't it not on alien standard time? All right? What are we talking about? All right, here's the situation. Say you are the first human to meet the aliens. Then we're in trouble already. Daniel from the ambassador for the entire human race. All right, so you're about to meet the aliens. Here's my question. What percentage of you is excited and what percentage of you is terrified for your life? Oh? Man, I would say it's pretty even. It's about a hundred percent excitement terrified. That sounds are right on to me. Hi important. I'm a cartoonists and the creator of PhD comments. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I definitely don't want to be ambassador for planet Earth. Welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of Our Heart Radio in which we send our minds, not our bodies, out into the universe to explore the far reaches of space. Talk about all the crazy stuff that's out there. We break down black holes, we crack open neutron stars, we talk about the tiny particles that make up everything, and we explain all of it to you. That's right. We like to talk about all of the amazing things out there in the cosmos, everything that's actually happening right now as we speak. And we also like to talk about all the things that might be in this universe because a big part of exploring how the universe works is thinking about all the various scenarios for how it might work. And well, physicists like to be creative and imagine various scenarios, and we're new kinds of particles. There's another community of folks out there whose entire job is being creative about speculative universes. Are you talking about cartoonists or I'm talking about our podcast listeners, those creative geniuses. Yeah, there's an amazing potential out there in the universe, and it's up to science fiction authors to kind of think about it and figure out what are the exciting possibilities of where the human race can go. Yeah. Sometimes I think of science fiction authors is like the most mature thinkers. They're on the edge imagining other universes and the way things might work. And sometimes I imagine that they've sort of like returned to childhood, you know, the way kids don't really understand the universe, and to them, the universe could be basically anything. They're not so like nailed down to the current orthodoxy and the current dogma for how the universe works. If you told them the universe is made of tiny, bouncing little oranges, they would be like, Wow, that's cool. Can I see one? Can I make a plot out of that? Can I get up? I get a serious out of that? I'm not sure if you just pray science fiction authors or maybe insulted there are scientific knowledge that you know. I think it's difficult to return that sort of like childlike openness and curiosity and creativity and imagining the way the universe could be. It's difficult to take yourself out of our current mindset and think about other ideas that you would have accepted, other ways the universe could be. So I'm totally impressed with science fiction authors who are able to do that and really imagine brand new, creative world. Do you feel like having a physics degree somehow makes you jaded about that about the possibilities out there? Like maybe it dampens you, know, your sense of what could be. I think it must a little bit. You know, there are these plots that show that no mathematicians or theoretical physicists have deep breakthroughs after the age of thirty, and that's just because they're like so far into the orthodoxy and the establishment that they're just like, you know, adding shingles to the theory rather than like laying entire new foundations. When there's a correlation with tenures in it's definitely a correlation with tenure and the number of naps i'd take in my office. Well, there you go. Both things are easy to fix if you want it. To be a pioneer in physics, I'm sorry, I do want to be a pioneer in physics. But also, naps are pretty nice. Can you be a napping pioneer? Like, can you take a nap on the ship that's out there exploring? That would be a deal. Yeah. I think the way I would explain it if my department chair walked in is that I was marinating on an idea and that I often wake up from naps with clever new ideas for research for brands. And you say you lost your childlike propensity for making up stories, Daniel, that's right, that's definitely fiction. But anyways, um, yeah, we like to talk about science fiction authors and they're amazing ideas and the amazing stories that they've been together using some of the interesting science ideas. And so today we'll be talking to another big science fiction author about their science and their fiction. That's right. I love these episodes. What we talked to science fiction authors. We ask them how they built their universe, how the science works in their universe. This is not your typical literary science fiction podcast. We're asking science questions to science fiction authors. So today on the program, we'll be talking about the science fiction universe of Max Barry. This is an Australian author, right, Daniel. That's right. He's an Australian author, and so when you read his book, you have to read all the characters as having an Australian accent in your mind. It's very important. What do you mean Australians have an accent? I thought we had the accent. We do. Actually, when I first read his books, I didn't know he's Australian, and then when I interviewed him it was pretty obvious. And then I'm reading another one of his books now and I can't get his Australian accent out of my mind. So like even all the narration I read in his voice in my mom are the characters in Australia or or are they Australian or does it take place uh, you know, not even in this planet. Well, he's written lots of different books. He writes speculative fiction. He wrote a book called Lexicon about five years ago, which is really wonderful and fantastical and I totally encourage everybody to read it, and there are scenes there in Australia. The book we're talking about today takes place mostly in deep space, which is not Australia as far as I understand. But no, he's not just an Australian writer. He's a writer who happens to be Australian. Yeah, so today we'll be talking about his book Prominence, which takes place in space. Yeah, that's right. It takes place mostly in space, and it's a sweeping space opera that happens all over the universe and their grand battle between aliens and humans. It's a bit of a departure for him. He writes speculative fiction, so you know, like in alternative universes, but not always science fiction. You know, speculative fiction is like the rules of the universe are different, but it's not always technology related or space related or something like that, but it's in the same sort of category of stuff. I really enjoy because it's a different universe where you have to be a detective and like figure out what are the rules of this universe. And for me, that's the fun of being a physicist, that we're being detectives about this universe. And so it's fun to play around in somebody else's invented universe. Well, I wonder, Daniel, what makes something a space opera and not like a space musical. They have to be Viking hats, and they have to be really really high notes and it has to go on for hours and then it's an all see. But then in space nobody can hear you. Then, so they was doing the thing. Well, maybe that's good. Based on all the operas I've attended, I wish they were in space. No. I think a space opera is just, you know, something with a grand scale. It takes place in multiple solar systems or galaxies, are preferably over hundreds or thousands of years, so it's operatic sort of in the scale of the story. You're telling the drama. I guess you have the drama. All right, well, this book sounds interesting. Let's talk about what the book is about. I guess first of all, how did you hear about it? I heard about this book because I read his other book, Lexicon, and really enjoyed it. No idea how I came across that one and recommended to me by somebody who recommended something else to me. Maybe so then I just picked up this next book that he had just come out with, and I was pleasantly surprised to learn that it was all about aliens and human alien warfare and zooming around the galaxy and all sorts of crazy stuff. I'm hooked Aliens opera? Did they have accents at all? I wonder if, like humans went out into space, they would develop a different accent. Oh yeah, haven't you seen the Expanse. They have a whole interesting accident for the belters, and like a little dialect of English. It's really well done. I imagine they would. You know, any geographically separated population is going to drift off linguistically, so I imagine they would interesting. All right, Well, let's talk about the book. What's the book about? You said, aliens? It's aliens good aliens are bad alien? Well, you start off and you don't know, right. All we know is that there's this moment of first contact. We're gonna meet the aliens. They found this weird rock essentially accelerating through the Solar system, and it turns out it's an alien spaceship and they go out and they meet it, and there's this exciting scene where the aliens like come through the hatch and you don't know as the reader, and you can tell that the characters in the scene they don't know, like are we about to die or we about to meet friendly aliens? They're gonna unlock the secrets of the universe. So it's a the moment of great tension that really underpins a lot of what happens in the book. Really, there was no texting contact or phone call before meeting in person. No, and you know how you know how to communicate with these aliens. You don't have like electronic signals in common. I mean it's hard enough to get another human being on Skype or Zoom to get that to work. You know, getting your audio to work on a Zoom call is hard enough, so getting to chat with an alien before you meet with them in person is pretty tricky. So the aliens sort of climb aboard a human ship and what you discovered this is not really a spoiler because it happens very early on in the book, is that the aliens are not friendly, not at all. Oh man, what do they do? They come in, guns a blazing or brandishing their claws. Yeah, they come in, and it turns out they can do something crazy, which is they can spit many black holes. They can spit black holes. What they spit these little black holes which passed through you and basically just like tear you shreds. And that's not a very friendly thing to do. And so the humans are basically torn apart in the very first moment of contact, and that sets the tone for the human alien interaction in the rest of the book. Oh man, Well, there's a lot of signs that are to talk about. But but then what happens then the then the book is sort of about what a war or cleaning up after this mess? Yes, so then it launches a massive planetary war, and the rest of the book is essentially an exploration for what that war is like. And how it plays out, you know, how does humanity respond to that? What kind of weapons do we build to try to defend ourselves to try to take it to the aliens? What has to happen for that to work? And then what's it like for those humans on board? And it's pretty fascinating because he develops this technology, this almost self driving ship and these massive warships that are so complicated they have to be essentially driven by AI. Man, oh wait, so there's robots to involved. Yeah, well, the whole ship is like a robe odd and it's making decisions. The humans are on board, but they're not really in charge. They're just sort of like there. And it's not clear in the very beginning, like well why are the humans even on the ship? But what is the nature of this AI? And one of the things I really like about this book is that there's not a lot of just like explainer, You've got to figure stuff out for yourself, which leaves mysteries. Why are the aliens attacking us? Like why are they still grumpy? Are the interested in having a conversation? Or like what is the AI on this ship? What is it doing? Why is it making these decisions? Why are the humans even on the ship. It's pretty fascinating. Wait, there's nobody like in charge of the ship, Like the humans are just passengers. Yeah, the ship is in charge of the ship. I mean, the humans have rules they have to like do this and do that, but it becomes pretty clear that they're not actually necessary. And I think he's put the humans on board mostly to sell the war back to people on Earth. So the humans are they're like basically take pictures and like turn out Instagram stories so that the folks back on Earth feel invested in the war. Otherwise, the war is just sort of like our AI versus these weird inscrutable aliens. Uh. Well, I'm all in favor of putting Instagram influencers on a spaceship and shooting the above to fight aliens. That's I think that would certainly improve our society. Here are you saying you want to send Kim Kardashian out to aliens? I won't deny that I do. Or maybe she is an alien That would actually explain a lot, or a robot, Yeah, that would explain a lot. Yeah, So so humans are just walking around the spaceship doing tasks. Now, is this word that Game among Us came from like it's one of them an impostor None of them are impostors. They're all real people. But the story goes pretty deep into like what it's like to be them, what it's like to be on a tin can for six months far away from humanity, and to be on this ship where you might not even really be necessary, and also to be fighting these aliens and like what do they want and why are they attacking us? And it goes pretty deep into that and what it means to be fighting a war when the humans are not even the ones making the decisions about who to kill and where to go right as it may happen here on earth, Like if you let AI, you know, drive the drones and stuff. Yeah, he's very clearly making a point about AI in weapons and AI and warfare. You know, is it a good idea to how the AI be doing these things because it's more efficient. It's obviously better than the humans at zapping the aliens. On the other hand, like you know, who knows what it's doing and why why is it making these decisions? Does it really have our interests at heart or the massive corporations that have funded it, do they have interests which don't exactly support what the public wants. Yeah, and do we get to find out later what the aliens want? Or is that a spoiler alert? We come close to there's sort of a moment of contact where one of the characters gets to talk to one of the aliens and sort of starts to maybe understand what they're doing and what they want. And I think the way that Barry has pitched it is that it's essentially a confrontation between two forms of life. And the way he looks at it, life is conflict. That everything on Earth is constantly competing for resources. I mean two forms of life that occupies sort of the same niche come into contact, they will instantly be in conflict. They're sort of like driven by their genes. So he sees like humans as just like the implementation of our d NA fighting to preserve and propagate our DNA, and the imagines the aliens are just doing the same thing. Whatever they use for code has created these bodies in order to propagate and reproduce that code. I see. And then when does Will Smith come in? Does he come in on a spaceship riding a horse? Well, let's get into the science of it. Sounds like there's some pretty interesting science going on here AI for warfare and spitting many black holes as as a bullet. So let's get into that. But first let's take a quick break. Alright. We're talking about the book Providence by the author Max Barry, who writes speculative fiction and science fiction and has written book about aliens coming to start some some beef humans. That's right, it's not the sort of like interplanetary physics confidence that I'm hoping for. If we do meet the alien you probably I wonder if you guys pit black holes at your confidence a little bit? Probably? Right, Hey, if somebody could show up and make black holes at a conference, they would be very popular. Make me one. I want to study one. Depends on which direction he's he or she is skidding these black holes. I'd like one so I could power my black hole starship with it, right right, right, all right, let's talk about the science of this book, which sounds pretty interesting. So I guess, first of all, we're fighting this war with the aliens here in our solar system, or does it spread out into the galaxy. It spreads out in the galaxy. We build these huge ships are called Providence class ships. That's where the book gets its name, and they go out, they do these hard skips, these faster than light travel out to find the aliens to hunt them down. Humanity has taken the first beating in the first contact, but now it's on the aggression. It wants to go out and to eradicate these aliens. And you know, it's interesting it it poses us as in conflict with these aliens. And as I was reading it, I was wondering, like, why do we have to eradicate those aliens? Or why those aliens want to kill us? Like why would aliens even want to kill them? And that's kind of part of the book, I imagine, right, like you not knowing and you figuring that out. Yeah, And also it's sort of an extension of this question. It's natural for forms of life on Earth to be in conflict because there are limited resources. But then when you go out into space, like man, there's plenty of room for everybody, and there are zillions of planets and huge blobs of ice or any kind of mineral you want. Do we really need to be in complex? Isn't the alexy big enough for two civilizations? But maybe we're just sort of like trapped into the modes of survival that we've developed on a planet where we're constantly in conflict and anybody who attacks us must be eradicated. And so it's an interesting question of like whether that really applies to a space civilization. I see, so they came to us we were happily sitting around in our planet, or did we already have like a multi planet civilization Now we're basically just living on Earth. We had a few spaceships, it was early days in space faring, sort of the way we are now, but we hadn't really like established a lot of colonies. But then this really fires up the space military industrial complex and we develop a whole new class of warships which gobble up huge fractions of our economy. All of a sudden, we developed AI and faster than light travels. Yeah. Absolutely, You know, when we are facing an existential threat, the scientists can do some amazing stuff. They cut out their naps and they really get to work. Man. But it makes me wonder, like if aliens you come, would they just sort of follow a biological drive to meet and exterminate any competition, or is it possible for us to sort of mentally and socially evolved to a point where we're like, hey, it's playing a room in the galaxy. Let's just have a nice coffee, right, Like, it's not clear to me that if we meet aliens they will naturally want to attack us. I imagine that a US we want to build a wall. Yeah, it would probably be partisan in the end. You know, are the aliens Democrats or Republicans? Right? I guess maybe pro human or anti alien? But I think there is something that he gets right, which is that aliens, if they do come, will be very alien. You know, I imagine some sort of like interplanetary physics conversation, but that's really very unrealistic. It's very likely that if they come, we won't understand what they're doing or why they're doing it, and be very hard to sort of drill down to understand their motivations. It can be hard to understand other people, even other people you've known for a long time. So the idea of like understanding the motivations and the drives of a completely alien, intelligent species seems pretty far out of our reach. So I think it's very likely that if aliens do come, they will be inscrutable in their motives, and you really do get a good sense of that in this book. You're like, never really understand why the aliens are doing what they're doing, and nobody spends any time trying to figure this out. Worthy sociologists and the cultural anthropologists or alien trologists, Yeah, there are, and you hear internal debate and some of the characters like, why are we trying to essentially commit genocide against this intelligent species? Is that the right thing to do? You know? But then again, you're on this massive ship and that's the job of the ship, and you're following orders, and so there's some discussion about that, and you know, I think Barry races some questions about whether that's the appropriate response. But in the end, if it's kill or be killed, you know, then humanity steps up and tries to do the killing. All right. There's some science in the book Providence by Max Barry, and some of it has to do with spitting black holes. But there's also something called a violent zone what what set? At some point in the book, they lose contact with Earth because the ship goes into the violid zone. The violet zone is a place where you're just out of touch with Earth and there's no communication possible. And I think he's done this to sort of isolate the characters so they can't be supported and instructed by, you know, smart folks back on Earth, and it sort of felt like they're alone. They're there with the AI, and at some point of course things break down. The AI isn't doing what it's supposed to do, and they're wondering like, how should we solve this problem? And the characters come into conflict with each other. A lot of interesting developments. I don't want to spoil for the future readers. It's more of a plot device. You think that any kind of meaningful science statement. Absolutely, And as you hear my conversation with Max, he's very clear that he wanted this part of the plot, and he was like, I don't really care about the science of how this happens, so I'll just make something up. He totally owned it, right, right. I wonder how often physicist sated, well, I just needed something to make the equation balance, so I just made up this thing called the Higgs that is essentially theoretical physics. Yes, absolutely, they're unconstrained by reality. They just invent new ideas to fit what they need, and then we have to go out and check like, well, that's cool idea, but is it real? So absolutely, theoretical physicists are always creating stuff that suits their plot devices, all right. So the other piece of science here is that the aliens somehow spit black holes and they use them as bullets. Like that's how they kill you. They shoot black holes at you. Yeah, and they can shoot them at your ship and you know, puncture your ship. And these little black holes they're not just like bullets. They do pass through stuff and tear stuff up, but they also have intensive gravitational fields and so they know disorganized the ship and they pull stuff into them, So they're pretty powerful. It's pretty cool idea for a little weapon. It sounds like a bad idea, like like if you shoot it, wouldn't you get sucked into it too? Yeah, you have to shoot it away from you at some velocity. It's not the kind of thing you can really think about too deeply scientifically because it doesn't really hold water. What do you mean, Like, how do you make a black hole inside you without having all that mass and energy already inside you? You need to be incredibly massive or have incredible energy stores to create the kind of energy density you need to make a black hole. Right. Yeah, it's like making a plot in which people shoot bullets. Where did the bullets come from in the metal for them? Yeah, exactly, but here the bullets, you know, have to have like incredible amounts of mass. You could make a black hole. And you can make a black hole really really small. There's no theoretical lower limit there. But the problem is to have a black hole that's effective, you know, that has like powerful gravity, like the strength of Earth's gravity, right, even which is not that powerful but pretty effective. You need to create these black holes to have significant mass. So I did the calculation, and like, for you to have the power of Earth's gravity and be one meter away from a black hole, that black hole would have to have the mass of a hundred and fifty billion kilograms. So you have to compact a hundred and fifty billion ms of mass into a tiny dot in order to have the same power of Earth's gravity just a meter away from the black hole. Wow, that would be a lot. And these aliens can like shoot it like a machine gun or is it like a more like a death Star kind of takes a while for the engineers to pull the levers and they can shoot them out. It's not like a machine gun. But I don't know how many they have inside them, But it's not like it takes ten minutes to warm up, you know, in the moment of first contact they open the last they come inside, and then they just sort of like start black holing people. What and so, okay, so you shoot a black hole? And how big are these black holes? They're tiny, you know, they're infinite testimal essentially, they're you know, less than a millimeter across, less than amily, but they have about the mass of a planet. Well, he doesn't specify the mass of these things, but I did that little calculation, and in order to have the same gravity as a planet, then they would have to be like a hundred and fifty billion kilograms in mass. And so it doesn't seem to me at all feasible that these aliens that are walking around are holding a hundred fifty billion kilograms of mass inside them, all right, because if it's inside them before, they would also be pretty heavy, exactly exactly. And the thing about these black holes is that they come out and they don't just pass through you, but they gravitationally attract you. So they have to be massive enough to have that gravity. And you know, if it's just like a one millimeter blob that has you know, the same amount of stuff as one millimeter sized rock, there's no gravity there. Like the gravity there is so negligible you would never feel it. So you have to make it so compact and so dense that it's essentially physically impossible for an alien of human skill to have that much energy or stuff inside them to make that black hole. So then you shoot the black hole and like fast or is it like floating out away from me? Yeah, it's pretty quick. I mean it's not like light speed or anything. But it's also not a bullet speed. But it just sort of like drifts forward and passes through stuff and it does a lot of damage. Now, would a black hole like that last very long or does it evaporate or does it keep going forever? And then basically you created a black hole only in the universe. Oh, that's a great question. The black holes do evaporate. We think this is something called Hawking radiation, where a black hole can give energy to quantum particles just outside of it and lose some of its energy in doing so. And if those particles then drift away, the black holes effectively lost some of its mass. So this is black hole evaporation. And it actually happens much more rapidly for small black holes than for big black holes. So for small black holes like these, they do evaporate, but these would last a long time, Like a black hole the size of the Empire State Building, for example, that would last several years. And this is a hundred and forties seven billion kilograms, so substantially bigger than the Empire State Building. So these should last several years. Yeah, all right, Well, and you talked to Max Berry, right, Daniel. You zoomed or skyped him, reached out to Max, and he was very happy to talk to us about the signs of his novel. Cool, And did you tell him that it was totally implausible? I let him know we'd be talking about the science of his novel, and he said that sounds like something I'd be totally out of my depth. Four, But I'm totally up for it. He's I just don't shoot any black holes in me. No, he was a great sport. Cool. All right, Well, here is Daniel's interview with science fiction author Max Barry, reader of the book Providence. Okay, then it's my pleasure to introduce to the podcast Max Barry, author of Providence. Max, say hello to our listeners. Yeah, hello listeners. Thank you for having me, and thanks very much for being on the program. Tell us a little bit about how you got into science fiction writing. It seems like a small departure from some of your earlier novels, like a Lexicon or Company. Yeah. Look, it's funny because my first ever novel was, Um, it's called Syrup, and it's a satire basically a comedy about a guy who works in the marketing industry, and it doesn't really have anything to do with science fiction at all, except for the fact I guess that the characters make a science fiction movie at some point during the book. And then the second one was Jennifer Government, which is probably the book I'm best known for, and that is science fiction without the aliens and spaceships and futuristic technologies. Right, So it's it's an alternate present kind of science fiction novel where you know, the social structures are different. Um, It's set in a ultra capitalist society where Australia is a part of the United States and there's basically no government and everything is run by the free market, so it's it's yeah, it's a science fiction of ideas rather than of objects or things. So anyway, I was invited along to a science fiction con um here in my hometown of Melbourne, Australia, not too long after that was published, and I felt like a bit of a fraud because I had these two books and only one was even sci fi, and I'm there on panels with all these actual science fiction writers who have produced their thirteenth novel in you know, the Ring Arc cycle, and um, the guy said no, no, it's it's fine because you know this Jennifer Government. And then with Syrup, you know, even though it's not science fiction, it feels like it was written by a sci fi fan. And I was really pleased to hear that, because yeah, I have been a sci fi fan my whole life. It was basically all I read in my teen years. That and horror. I was really into that, into sci fi and horror with a bit of fantasy, probably when I was younger. But yeah, I have this this real background in a lot of classic sci fi especially the sort of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clark and Larry Niven. All these sort of Golden age sci fi novels were part of my diet growing up. So yeah, I just I've just always been into that and it sort of leaks through in my books, even when I don't really set out to write a sci fi novel. So help us orient you a little bit in the sort of space of science fiction writers and answer a few questions about the science fiction genre. Are you of the opinion that a Star Trek transporter will actually kill you and then clone you on the other side, or does it literally transport your atoms from one place to another? Yeah, I mean it's gotta it's got to transport information, right, There'll be no sense in transporting atoms. And it would be kind of meaningless too, wouldn't it, Because they're just atoms. It's not like they're imbued with the soul of you in your your molecules. So yeah, it's it surely has to be murdering you and then rebuilding an identical you on the other side. So then would you be willing to get into a transporter or somebody built one? No, No, I wouldn't know. I mean that that's a death sentence, so it's terrific for my clone on the other side, but that that's a different person alright. So then what technology that you see in science fiction would you most like to see come reality? Um? Yeah, I mean to completely contract what I just said, Like, something that would actually take me to long distances would be fantastic. If I could get the teleportation without the murdering, that would be terrific. Yeah, I mean it's a thing. The fast distance of the universe is something I actually bumped up again against with with Providence because it is my like classics sci fi story where it's it's set on a spaceship, it involves aliens and all of these these sort of really traditional space opera elements um that I really loved as a kid. But the thing, and I've tried to transport that into a really plausible world and to make the technology work like I think it really would, and the AI function like I think an A I would function. But the distance thing is a real problem at some point you, I think, when you're writing a book like this, unless you want to get into you unless you want to write a story about the technology of um faster than light space travel. You you have to hand wave at some point and say, in this universe there is faster than light travel. I'm not sure exactly how it works, but people can get from here to there in a short amount of time, like within a generation. Otherwise, you know you have no story to tell. So then, what is your personal answer to the Fermi paradox? If the universe is so likely to host life, where is everybody? The distances just too vast and the speed of light too slow? Right? I have to believe that there's something out there, I guess I tend to think that there must be something out there, but maybe it doesn't fit neatly within our pretty narrow ideas of what life is. Because we we tend to imagine everything experiencing the world the same way we do. We tend to think that unless something fits into our own idea of what a person thinks like or what a life form should look like, then it doesn't really count. And there's really no reason to believe that there isn't a vast range of other types of things out there that you know, it would shock the hell out of us if we actually encountered them. But wouldn't turn out to be you know, the kind of star Trek alien where it's like us, but with bumpy ridges on the forehead, or you know, a different, different shade color ear or something like that. So then let's turn into the topic of your novel, Providence, which I just read and thoroughly enjoyed. Two congratulations, aren't really wonderful, Thank you, exciting space opera. Would love to really fascinating themes in it. And something that I really liked about the novel was that you have the excitement of meeting aliens, but then basically everything goes wrong. Is that something that you were trying to capture in the book, something that you were trying to explore. Yeah, that that's certainly the concept that first got me thinking that it might be an interesting story to tell. I guess it sort of stemmed from the idea that when we used to go off to find wars, it used to be a very personal experience. Used to be, you know, a man with a gun or not even that in some cases up against another man with a weapon, and it has evolved because of technology to the point where it's nowadays it's a lot more like a person in a dark room with a screen guiding what's happening, and future wars maybe fought with humans well back from the front lines. And you know, this was really impressed upon me watching the Gulf Wars and the way that that warfare seemed to operate. Now where you have this sort of a symmetric warfare between a force that was quite technologically advanced and one that was less. So so yeah, it's and we and we we value life differently in that sort of situation. So the loss of a soldier nowadays is quite shocking compared to what it would have been, you know, in decades gone by. So yeah, I was thinking about how this might work. And the situation that interested me was the idea that you have, say, a crew on a battleship as we as happens in Providence. So there is an amazing warship that has sucked the resources of Earth dry to build and it's it's fantastic. It it's got these incredible weapons, it's run by this incredible AI. The functions of the actual for humans on board are pretty limited because you know, they can't do a whole lot compared to the capabilities of this battleship. The interesting thing there, of course, is that, Okay, so what happens when things start to go wrong and these people who were maybe there to basically to look good for the humans back on Earth who are trying to fund this war effort now actually have to do their jobs. But do you think it's sort of inevitable that if we meet an alien race that we will not understand them and essentially be launched into war just because it's impossible to sympathize, were too communicate or to understand each other if, as you say, an alien race is very likely to be extremely alien, right, Okay, I think there's a couple of things there. First of all, I think any encounter with an alien race is going to be super disappointing from our point of view, just because we you know, we're expecting something like us, and it will be something that is so different that we will think like, it won't be cool in any of the metrics that we rate as humans. Has been has been interesting, So you know, it will be a type of life form that does things. Maybe it grows by consuming a particular element um and it doesn't seem intelligent at all to us, but it's extremely successful in terms of you know what it's doing to survive and multiply. The second part is, and this is a big theme of the book, the idea that there is is conflict between life forms at every level. And there is a conflict between I guess most obviously we're in our own species humans fight each other, but there is also conflict between the genes that make up our DNA were there's been a battle for territory on our on our DNA that goes back however long. And this is a battle that we're completely unaware of, except it does really guide a lot of our behavior. We do care for families and raise them and protect our kin and try to defeat the others who have different DNA and all that's kind of guided by these instructions that we are only vaguely aware of. But we're basically programmed in a way. We're programs, but we have free will at the same time, which is another interesting concept. So yeah, the idea that there is this inherent conflict between all living things and that the universe is at some level this pretty bleak battleground where nothing matters except survival. I thought that was an interesting foundation for the story. And on top of that, you have these these characters, is for in particular, who spend most of the book just the four of them, and they their people. So we we go into this universe, this cold, uncaring universe of physics and logic, and we actually bring stories to it, and we bring value, and we create these really warm emotions, and yeah, I guess value is the best way to put it. We we sort of create things that have nothing just buy our perceptions of what we care about. So I think it's just a lovely contrast where you can have the pretty practical, brutal reality of the universe on one hand, and then you have a more personal set of personal journeys going through it. I don't disagree with you, but I don't think that answer is going to get you nominated to be among our contingent to go meet the aliens if we ever do meet them, Right, Yeah, No, I don't think i'd like to hear either, like I'd love to see it, but maybe from a distance, a safe distance. I'm actually more concerned about what we're going to do to ourselves with AI than what aliens are going to do to us. All Right, we have lots more to talk about But first, let's take a quick break, and we're back and I'm talking to Max Barry, author of the science fiction novel Providence. Well, something I thought was fascinating in the book was that moment of first contact. There's hope, the humans are not necessarily just pulling out their weapons and blasting. They're wondering what these like, are they going to be friendly? And then they sort of met with this immediate assault of this this deadly attack. And something that drove me through the book was wondering, why are these aliens trying to kill us? And I hear what you're saying that life is in conflict always, But isn't that sort of on a planetary scale where we're competing for resources, we're sort of trapped in makes me wonder, like this alien species, why don't they just go somewhere else and find some empty planet. Is it really necessary do you think for life forms to battle it out on the scale of galaxies or the universe where things are just so vast and so separated and so rich. Yeah, that's that's a great question. I think, No, there's not a need. There is a kind of bias towards conflict. There is maybe the best way to work. It doesn't it doesn't have to be resolved by conflict, and with this story, it begins in a fairly traditional way, I guess, where there is basically a war between humans and aliens, and the aliens seem hostile and aggressive just because they are. And throughout the book that question gets explored a little bit and the different characters have different opinions about it as well. So for one of them, for Jackson, for example, it doesn't really matter why why the aliens behave the way they do, or why they're aggressive, or what their aims are. It's just the fact that they attacked us. We need to wipe them out in the story. For others, they can try to imagine what the motivations of So the alien race is called the salamanders, what the salamanders are actually you know, thinking, and what motivates them and try to to tease out, you know, how did this conflict happen? Doesn't even need to happen. Do we need to be at all with this race or not? So, yeah, it is a question that gets explored a little bit, and you know, without giving away the answer to it, I hope that it's it's resolved in a satisfying way. Um, but an unusual way too. I hope my answer to that question is is a pretty practical one um and a pretty unsentimental one um. But yeah, it's it's it felt true to me. I thought it was really well done. The way you have sort of this unthinking or or understandable alien war that you're fighting, or this ununderstandable enemy you're fighting, and then the humans have to build essentially an ununderstandable, undecipherable attack AI to fight that war for them, until you end up with this two sides neither would you understand even if you're on one of them. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. And when I was tackling the idea of a story, it's a war story. Essentially, the question is how do you do that? Because war is too big to understand. You can this, it happens on many different levels. At the top level, you can sort of understand maybe whether the big forces are moving in which side is ascendant. But you know, that's a really detached way of looking at war. The way that it really matters to people is what's happening to the individuals. You know, what's the individual's experience of war, but then their experience is only a tiny little slice of it. So I did hope that the feeling that you get from this book is that there are a lot of different levels of conflict going on at once, and some are moving faster than others, but there is a conflict that a very deep level. There is also the individuals who are soldiers in a war, who are fighting the most obvious form of it, but they are also really just tiny little players in in the larger conflict because they are you know, as you say, they're quite limited in what they can do, especially compared to the capabilities of the battleship run by the AI that they're inside. So yeah, and what is actually happening with the AI, of course, is another whole area of the book. And I love that you didn't just explain it to us that he left at a mystery. We have to try to decipher it ourselves. That's one of my funnest elements in well written novels. But let me ask you about the the science of this universe that you've built. And so you have a few elements in this universe you have fasten like travel, and you call them skips you have this region where no communication is possible, the violid zone. Did you have these ideas and then sort of build the story in the universe you created, or do you sort of like make up the physics as you went along in order to enable the story you wanted to tell. Yeah, probably closer to the second one. Whenever, whenever a writer approaches a story, they have to decide which parts of it are the most interesting to them. So for some writers it's you know, they're more into the actual technology, like the hardware and you know what it does and how it works. Others are more into you assume that this does exist and however it works. You know, we don't really mind so much, but let's look more at how it affects the choices people make, and how it affects their behavior, how it affects society. So, you know, it's it's hard to do everything at once, and at some point you've got to really decide where your focus is. So for me, it was it was the people. It was the characters, and you know, the particular experience that they go through, the hardware and the technology and the science of it. I'm a big fan and like I enjoy that stuff in the stuff I read, but not quite as much as I enjoy a novel with characters that I really fall in love with and and identify with that will carry me along in a story. So so yeah, that was my focus. So there the skips. The faster than light travel, as I sort of mentioned earlier, is is absolutely a you know, I did not want to go into how that was possible, because yeah, it becomes such a distraction unless your book is about that and it's about the technology, then yeah, it doesn't. It just slows everything down, so, you know, ironically, because I'm trying to speed things up so they can travel faster than light, just so they can remove themselves from the solar system without everybody growing old in the meantime. What was the other one that you meant and the other violet you have the yeah, yeah, well again it's just you know, mainly because the idea is that you get these four people on the battleship and then they are they have to figure out what to do when the technology begins to fail them, and you know, that is the core premiss of the books. So there has to be a way for that to happen. But there's a few other things about like exactly what the weapons are and how the defenses work, where you know, a reference a few things, But yeah, it is it's not a book that describes how the technology works down to the technical level. Like for me, it has to make sense. It has to be plausible enough, and at some point, you know, I assume you reach a certain qualification of reader where no matter what I do, it's not going to be quite good enough because the maths and the physics just don't quite add up. Although, like I my my next book, which is about parallel dimensions and involves a little bit of like multiverse thinking, I've turned out to be fantastic because there is such a why I disagreement among experts that it seems like almost anything really could be possible there. So I feel a bit more confident with that one. But with but with faster than light travel and stuff like that, it's a bit more limited. So yeah, the technology I think is, you know, it's stuff. I just love the sort of feeling that you have a character inside a world where they're surrounded by technology and it's like really appeals to me just on it like a primal level. That's the sort of in a geek inside me. But the idea of being on a battleship where you know everything around you is designed for a purpose and you know works in a certain way because there is a purpose to it. I just find like, I find that really cool, Like that appeals to me in the sense of being a kid, you know, thirteen years old at home just hoping a spaceship would land in my backyard one day and take me off to the stars. So so yeah, that that environment I like, Um, I enjoyed this little tidbit that the saldman who can spit these cork gluon pellets. Tell me about how you came up with that or where that comes from. Yeah, it came fairly late. Like the the enemy in the book, I hadn't really figured out until yeah, probably later than you would expect. I got the main plot and the characters, and which was the main thing for me, like who these people were, why they were there, and how they would interact. So it was after that that I decided, Okay, let's figure out who the enemy is and how they fight and so yeah, the idea of them being able to manipulate gravity essentially, and that they can spit these incredibly dense particles that act as many black holes in that if they pass close by you, then you experience very different forces on different parts of your body that tear it apart. So yeah, that was like just sort of a thing that I came up with fairly late, and it turns out to be reasonably memorable part of the book, I think for people who read it. But yeah, it wasn't my I didn't set out to write a story about black hole spitting aliens. That actually came kind of late. Well it made it pretty fun awesome. Well, thanks very much for answering all of our questions. Can you tell us a little bit more about your next project when we can expect to see it out right? Well, I guess I can. And this is an exclusive because I've I've told nobody this. I only just heard yesterday from my publisher that it's okay to mention it, so I haven't even put it on my website yet. But yes, So the next book after Providence is The twenty two Murders of Madison may Um. It is about a serial killer who murders the same woman over and over in parallel worlds, and it is out July next year, and I'm really hoping that we can have a COVID nineteen vaccine before then so I can leave my own country and two rounds which I missed out on this time with providence, my book tour is supposed to happen on March thirty one this year, and the world shutdown before I could leave the country. So yeah, with luck, I'll get out there next year. Al Right, pretty fun conversation. You guys talked about a lot of things. Yeah, we're a really fun conversation. He's obviously a guy who's thought about this stuff pretty deeply and has lots of interests, and so we just sort of let the conversation take us where it went. But one of the things that he seems really interested in is this conflict between life forms and how that plays out across planetary boundaries. So that was a lot of fun. Yeah, it's interesting. He has such a pessimistic view about aliens, you know, like he said that aliens will be disappointing and unfriendly most likely. Yeah, well he's probably right. You know, our fantasies about aliens are just that fantasies, and most likely the universe won't provide friendly aliens with lots of insights into the nature of the universe and granting us technology. Most likely they'll be weird and they'll be frustrating and disappointing. But I think in the long run, you know, the longer arc of this human alien interaction will eventually be positive because we will learn from them what it's like to be an intelligent species that's not human. Right, Well, anything that causes us to send our influence us on a space ship far away sounds like a net positive freakingmanity, even if it costs trillions of dollars, That makes it worth it. Well, I don't know what would be worse, Daniel, What do you think would it be worth to meet aliens and find them disappointing and unfriendly, or to meet aliens and have them find us disappointing and open. What would be worse? That would be terrible. We're like desperate to hang out, and they just keep ignoring our texts. We're gonna ghosts like hello, oh never mind, see you never if they quickly discover that we have nothing to offer scientifically because they're so far ahead of us, and they just sort of leave us alone and ignore us forever, that would be torture to know their answers out there that people could give them to you and then did not have access, So that would be tortured. I imagine if they met us and they're like, oh, what a cute childlike fascination with physics they have. That is pat us on the head and the al right, well, if you're interested, the book is called Providence and the author is called Max Barry. Check out his book and other works that he's done. I highly recommend it, and he's a nice guy, so support his work. Great. Well, thanks for joining us. We hope you enjoyed that. See you next time. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge explained. The Universe is a production of I Heart Radio. 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