The SF Universe of Essa Hansen's novel "Nophek Gloss"

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Speaker 1: Hey, Alry, I've always wondered how did you learn to draw? So well? Oh, well, thank you for saying that I draw well. But I would attribute to practice. You know, I spent a lot of time doodling on my notebooks when I probably should have been paying attention in class. Well, did you ever wish you could just like skip all that practice, Like if the twenty year old me could draw like the forty year old me. Yeah, like accelerate your skills. Yeah, but then what would I have done in class, like pay attention? Which class are we talking about here? Well, A little embarrassed to say, but it was mostly physics. Well then I'm glad one of us was doodling and one of us was paying attention. Wait, you were doodling too. I was paying attention to my doodles him or handy cartoonists and the creator of PhD comics. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I usually paid attention in physics class. Paying attention? Now, do you pay attention when you teach physics? That's what I want to know? Or are you sort of an autopilot at this point? No? In fact, when I lecture, I solve problems I haven't seen before. I put fresh problems up on the board and solve them on the spot, No kidding, what did you can't do it? I think that's actually really valuable for the students to see me get stuck and then have to back up and go in another direction. And also, after twenty years, I'm pretty much able to solve any freshman level physics problem on the spot. Even how to retrieve a homework from a dog's stomach or something like that. That's an engineering problem. To buy you engineering, I guess. All right, Well, welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of our Heart Radio where we like to talk about everything in the universe and we try to explain it all in about fifty minutes. Everything is fair game to this podcast, from what's going on in the inside of black holes to how many dimensions there are of space and time to what is the smallest, tiniest particle out there and how does it all fit together to make this incredible, bonkers, glorious, delicious and mysterious universe that we are sharing. Yeah, because we are all in the same universe together and we're all looking out into the stars, wondering what's it all made of, what's going on up there? What is possible in this crazy cosmos that we live in. At least we're assuming that all of our listeners are in our universe. Maybe this podcast leaks out somewhere into the multiverse. What wait, you mean we might have listeners from a different universe. I check the email adjust if everybody who writes to me, but I can't actually trace it. It might come from another part of the multiverse, like another part of the Internet or the dark Web perhaps, or are you talking about like the dark universe? Who knows? Who knows? Who knows? What's possible? And that's the subject of this podcast, trying to figure out what's real and what's possible and can it all be explained? Yeah, because we like to talk about the real science that's out there and all of the knowledge we've gotten about the universe and the great work that scientists are doing. We also like to talk about what's possible and what might happen in the future. And I at least like to read science fiction, which means I'm always getting my brain deep into some alternate fictional universe and trying to figure out what are the rules of that universe and could our universe actually have those same rules. Yeah. I don't read a lot of science fiction, but I do love listening to podcasts that talk about science fiction, or hosting them for example, Yeah, or listening to them as they're being recorded. That's pretty exciting too. Yeah. So sometimes we like to talk to science fiction authors out there who are coming up with the next great ideas that scientists might pursue in the future. Because sometimes it's fun to solve the mystery of this universe, but it's also fun to liberate your mind and let it play around in other universes and think about what the rules could be over there. And that's not just playing around intellectually to dip into another pool and figure out what it's like to swim over there. But sometimes the ideas and science fiction really do leak into our universe and help us reveal what's going on over here. So I consider science fiction authors to be at the extreme edge of theoretical particle physics. Yeah, because that's a lot of what you do as a physicist, right, you sort of sit around and thinking about what could be what kinds of crazy explanations could help us understand what we're seeing, the experiments and things like that, right, Yeah, and the universe is literally stranger than fiction. And sometimes to think up the explanations to understand why we're seeing this weird stuff we see, we need a lot of creativity, so, as usual, we borrow it from other places. Yeah. So today we're talking to a science fiction author who has one book out. How many books out does she have? This is her first book, but she is working on the sequel, right, so to be on the program, we'll be talking about science fiction universe of Essa Hanson. That's right, as a. Hanson is the author of the book No Feck Gloss, a super fun book that I just finished reading and sa, like many of the folks were interviewing, is a debut author. So congratulations to her on breaking into this field. Oh that's great. How did you hear about this book? How did I hear about this book? Man? That is a hard question. Do you read every science twitching book that comes out? No, don't be ridiculous. Only of them, and I'll have time to read all of them. You were served one for sleeping, for sleeping, good doodling, doodling while you're reading it. May have been an Amazon suggestion, or maybe a listener said it to me. I don't even remember. But this is her debut novel, and she's a pretty interesting author because she has another job which is also pretty exciting sort of in the world of science fiction as well. Yes, she is immersed in science fiction because she is the sound designer for movies, and she's working on lots of the Marvel movies like The Avengers. Wow. You know, I feel like a lot of people don't appreciate sound design, but it's so important in movies, Like it really makes the world come alive and then feel real. Absolutely. I talked to her about it's super fun. She has to decide, like what does it sound like when Iron Man punches Captain America's shield? Or what does it sound like when Loki punches Captain America. Like every single combination has to sound different to sort of orally supplement the story and give the viewer a sense of like what's going on. There's a really rich sound texture that I think a lot of people aren't consciously aware of, but it's really enhancing their experience. Right, we need a sound designer for our podcast, and like, what does it sound like when Jorge makes a bad pun in front of thousands of people. That's the podcast. It's already rich in awkward perhaps the sound of awkwardness. And she's a really interesting person because she has synesthesia, which means that she experiences sounds slightly differently from the way we do. She told me that she's sort of feels their texture, like as she's listening to some things, she can tell whether it feels right. So for her, sound is more tactile, I think than it is for most people. M M, I see. Did you ask her what sound Robert Downey Jr. Makes When he rolls his eyes or how often did she have to kind of pace? I am grood for the Guardians of the Galaxy movies. I did, but unfortunately there's some ironclad n das there that prevented her from spilling any details. Oh man, that's exciting. But she is a debut science fiction novel author and her story is is pretty cool. You really liked it. I really liked it. I also found the writing to be really unusual and very creative. The visuals in her book are really incredible. They're like cinematic in a way that they create this impression in your mind. You can really see this stuff happening. It was really different from anything else I've read, and I really thoroughly enjoyed it. I wonder if her SyncE theseus sort of affects that. You know, that's when sort of your different sensations kind of mixed together inside of your brain, right, like you hear colors or you feel textures and things and things like that exactly. So that's sort of mixture of sensations. And so I think it's different for every person. But it might be that, or might just be that she's immersed in these movies and so she has a very like visual sense of how the action should play out. But while she describes in her book a very alien and weird universe, I had no trouble picturing it in my mind, and lots of the action scenes were really incredible. I really felt like I was watching a movie sort of in my own head. Oh interesting, All right, Well let's get into what the book is about, and then we'll talk about the kind of the signs of it, which she said deals in the multiverse, this idea that there are more than one universe out there and maybe an infinite number of universes, and then we'll hear an interview that you had with her. Yeah, I had a lot of fun talking to her. All right, I know. So what is the book No Fake Glass about. So it takes place in a very different universe from our own. It's not like one of these near future almost Earth novels. This is a totally alien situation. But they are humans. The main characters are humans. But it's sort of been a very far future scenario where there are civilizations all over the galaxy and on lots of different planets, and the story follows the main character who's born a slave, lives on a planet, helps sort of tend these very dangerous, terrible creatures called the no Feck. Interesting, so you don't know if it is the far future or not. It's just sort of like this sort of like Star Trek. Maybe it's the future, maybe it's an alternate universe scenario, or maybe it's the deep past, right, you never really know. But we follow a main character who seems human and he raises these creatures, these no fact and they produce these weird sort of blobs called gloss, which like a pearl sort of you can hold in your hands. This shimmery substance of great value. Now these creatures that spelled n O p h e K no fect And what are they like? Are they like the worms and dune? Are they sort of like, you know, cows or dogs or what do they look like? We don't see them for very long because the first scene essentially is the entire colony being slaughtered. But my mental image of them is sort of like a cow sized super spider with an incredible array of sort of slicy teeth and little, you know, appendages coming out of its mouth. Oh my gosh, they're pretty horrible. Now, it's terrifying. I know. He just gave me nightmares for the next couple of months. Well you should read her description though she's a better writer than I am, Like it makes it go down easier or it's more terrifying. Yeah, exactly. It's a crisper image, though I don't know either where you like it? Oh, I see. So they're dangerous, but they produce something really valuable, which is this gloss, and the slaves are the ones taking care of them. But in the very first scene, the entire colony is sort of liquidated by like a spaceship or by death ray from the sky. Yeah, so I don't want to reveal too much, but basically everybody he knows is killed in front of him, and he just barely apes and some band of explorers that happens to be coming by scoops him up and whisks him away. So he's like the only person from his planet to survive this crazy calamity. And then he has to, I guess, figure out what was going on and why his colony was wiped out, and I imagine that's kind of what sets off the plot. Yeah, and then he's on a journey of discovery, both self discovery, like to figure out who he is in this larger context, and also now he's understanding this larger context he was living in but was unaware of. So he meets all these crazy aliens in this band of explorers, none of whom are human of course, and have all sorts of really weird biology. They also sort of take him around from planet a planet and show him the structure of the multiverse that he lived in without realizing it. Oh interesting, like everybody knows they live in a multiverse except maybe him because he was stuck into planet as a slave. Yeah, exactly, And so these aliens they look humanoid or so. The aliens are a sort of human oid right. Mostly they have like two arms, two legs, and a head, but each of them has a weird characteristic. Some of them can change shape. Some of them are literally gender fluid, like they go back and forth between different genders. Other ones have features of their skin that constantly reveal their internal thoughts, like their internal emotions. Each one is really very creative and really unusual, like stuff I hadn't imagined before, but I could easily picture in my mind as she's describing it. So it was super fun to meet all these aliens and they all have like, you know, crazy personalities and a backstory, and he's sort of thrown into this cast of fun characters. Oh interesting, It's like he was rescued by Serenity. The ship Serenity was something like a rattack crew of explorers exactly, but none of them are human. They're all sort of like near human. And so he learns sort of the context of his universe, meaning that he lives in the multiverse. How do they know this? Everybody else seems to be aware that they live in a sort of set of universes where each universe is not an infinitely large thing. It's like a huge bubble. And apparently they used to be just one huge bubble, which was the single universe that existed, but then other smaller universes started bubbling off of it. So each multi versus like a bubble. Some of them are really really huge and some of them are much smaller. Interesting, all right, well, let's get into the signs of multiverses a little bit later. But tell me what sort of happens then? Then what's the overall plot of the book. So he understands finally that he's been a slave, and he figures out who was running the slave colony and tries to understand why they decided to liquidate it essentially, and he discovers this larger socio economic structure that fuels the economic incentives for somebody to have, like a planet of slaves, raising these no effects, producing these glosses. And then he's on a crusade for justice. He wants to take those folks down, he wants to expose them, and he wants to get revenge. Interesting, he joins Antifa sort of, he's like, let's take down the man he does or alien I guess alien aliens. They're all aliens, and he's sort of young. He's like, you know, in his very early teens, so he's not really equipped to take this on. So they take him to some nearby space station where they have this really cool machine that can accelerate your body. You can like grow you up by five years or ten years, so you get bigger, stronger, and you accumulate skills. Interesting, it's like a shortcut kind of. It's like a shortcut. Yeah, you can get in this machine and come out and you're five years older as if you've been training, and now you have like martial arts skills and you know how to fly a spaceship and all sorts of stuff, sort of like in the matrix how you know, they could just download skills into your mind, but it's a bit more physical. Interesting, but you can choose when you learn in that sort of accelerated time, like I want to be a koon Fu master, or I want to be a competent cartoonist, yeah, or I want to be an online doodler or whatever. You can pay for what you want, but it doesn't grow up your mind. You don't like become more emotionally mature. So then this is really interesting conflict within him where he seems older. He now has the skills of an older person, but he's still twelve years old at heart, and so it doesn't make great decisions. I think you're assuming that if he had grown up normally, he would have matured, which humans, I'm not sure that's always the case. You know, I'm still a twelve year old at heart, right, Well, that explains a lot. Maybe somebody accelerated you. But it's really fun because it helps you as the reader. You're also getting introduced to this world, and he is getting introduced to the world, so he's growing up rapidly and trying to acclimatize into the world, and you're getting thrown into it as a reader and trying to understand how this world works. So it sort of makes you feel like you're on this journey together a little bit. It makes you feel like a twelve year old stuck in the body over of a twenty year old. Al Right, well, let's get into the science in the book, the multiverse, accelerating your body and aliens, and then we'll get to your interview with science fiction author is A. Hanson, author of no fake clause. But first, let's take a quick break. Alright, we're talking about the science fiction universe of sa Hanson and her debut novel, No Fact Glass. Now, Daniel, let's talk about the science in this book. And you said, a big part of the plot is the multiverse. But it's not sort of like the quantum multiverse that maybe we've heard about. It's more like the bubble multiverse. It's sort of like the bubble multiverse. And as you're referring to, in current cosmology, we have several ideas for what we mean by multiverse, all of which are totally different, and all of which are totally different from the idea she has in her book. So I think it's worth sort of unpacking. Oh, I see, she has a whole new, different idea for the multiverse. She does. She has an idea for the multiverse which is not one that cosmologists are currently imagining for our universe, though it's you know, sort of related maybe to one of them. So the simplest idea for the multiverse here in our universe is the idea that we can't see everything in the universe. There's a limit to like the observable universe. You can't see everything just because the speed of light is limited, and so it takes time for stuff to get here, which means we can't interact or see or observe anything past a certain distance. It's more than the age of the universe times the speed of light, because the universe is also expanding, but there's still this finite sphere around us, something like nineties three billion light years across, that we can interact with and can influence us. So the idea of the multiverse is just that there are multiple observable universes sort of like near each other, and if somebody is really really far away, a trillion light years away, they would have a different observable universe, And so the multiverse is then that set of observable universes. Oh, I see. Interesting. It's like we're all in the same space, but because of the distances, you might as well consider them different universes because we're so far away. Yeah, it's kind of like where I am in South Pasadena and you and Orange County. We're both sort of in lay, but since it takes three hours with traffic, we're basically in different universes. And culturally it feels like another universe. You're all aliens. I used to feel like an alien when I got down here. Now it feels like home. You've been accelerated into an assimilated. Now you're slaved. Then maybe I'm the master. So that's the idea here of this multiverse is that there are sort of like pockets of universes. That's one idea of a multiverse. Another idea of the multiverse is that we don't know how our universe started. We know that it began with some really really rapid expansion of space, but we don't know what caused that. What hypothesis is that it was caused by the decay of some really weird field we call an infloton field, which filled all of space and sometimes randomly sort of decays into normal matter, which creates a whole universe, and it's like a pocket universe. And so then you can imagine that maybe somewhere else, far away, in this infloton field, another pocket universe was made, and this would be different from the first level multiverse because these different multiverses might have different physical laws, like they might follow the same fundamental rules. But it might be that the Higgs field ended up at a slightly different place in our universe and in the other universe, which would make particles have different masses and have really very different physics and chemistry and biology. Interesting, I see, So we're all still in the same kind of you know, continuum of this in ploton field, but like our space, like what we call space, it's its own little bubble, is its own little bubble, and there are different laws of physics in that bubble and in our bubble. So it might be like really impossible for us to even imagine what it's like or to ever communicate because we think that this infloton field is also expanding super duper rapidly, faster than the speed of light, which would make it literally impossible to ever send or receive a message to any of these other multiverses in this in slaton field. But like if two bubbles, you know, bumped into each other, would they connect or there or is there some sort of barrier in between? A great question. We think that couldn't happen because the infloton field is constantly expanding, and so it's creating new space, new infloton field space between our universe and the other ones faster than our universe could ever move through it. But there are some people who think that maybe there are some scenarios in which they bump into each other and then you get some clash, you know, like space where the Higgs field is this, another space with Higgs field is that, And now it caused one of the two Higgs field to collapse to the lower value. And there are some people who think that maybe that could leave like an imprint on the very early universe, and so they look for these sort of imprints on the early universe by looking for the cosmic microwave background. Nobody's ever seen anything like that, but it's a fun thing to think about. I see, like if you look at the cosmic microwave background and notice like a big dent in it, it looks like we had a little fender bender with another universe there. Yeah, there are these rings in the cosmic Mergaway background radiation people look for. All right, So that's another idea for the multiverse. What are some of the other ideas and what's the idea in the book. Yeah, So the last idea for the multiverse that people really do think about in terms of current cosmology is the quantum multiverse that you mentioned, and this is a way they sort of understand why the way function and quantum mechanics, which describes what might happen every time a quantum particle is doing something, why it seems to pick one thing or another, Like if an electron can go left and it can go right, why does it seem to go right or why does it seem to go left? And the way we answer that question, or some people like Sean Carroll and other ever endians who proposed this multi world's interpretation of quantum mechanics, the way they answer it is they say that the universe splits at every time a quantum particle can go left or right, it goes left, and there's another version of the universe created where it goes right. So it tries to avoid answering the question of why does the electron go left by saying it doesn't just go left, it does everything possible. We just happened to be in a left branch. And the consequences there are that the universe is constantly branching. So you have like an infinite, infinite infinite number of these versions of the universe, each of which are different by one quantum particle's decision. Wow, that's pretty mind blowing. And that's kind of like this idea that maybe there's a version of the universe that's just like ours, but a little bit different or a lot different, you know, one where the dinosaurs didn't get it by the asteroid, or one where JFK wasn't assassinated. That's where this idea of like the multiple versions of the universe comes from. Yeah, where you became a professor of physics and I became a cartoon you know, crazy things like that, and where that's right, the podcast will be called John Daniel Explained the Universe. Yeah. And for some people this isn't a metaphor, this isn't like a hypothetical thought experiment. They believe that this is real, that those universes actually exist and they are out there. I personally find it ridiculous. I don't think it actually answers the question of the collapse of the way of function, because we still have to answer like why are we on this branch? You know. It tries to avoid answering the question of why one branch feels special by saying there are all these other branches, but one branch still feels special because I'm in that branch and I'm not in the other branches. Well, the other Daniel things he is special, but also, yeah, well I didn't know that the other Daniel exists, though I can't take his data seriously anyway. Those are the ideas of the multiverse that are sort of existent in current cosmology. Says, a multiverse is quite different. She imagined, first of all, that the multiverse started as a single bubble universe, and then new universes were created like sort of nucleated off of it, like at the edges of our universe, or like in the middle of our universe is a bubble or what does that mean both? She imagines these bubble universes created at the edge, and so there's this transition between the universes. She calls it the rind, like you know the peel of an orange, where you go from one universe to the other. But you can also have a new universe created, like as a sub universe within your universe. This ragtag group of explorers, for example, has a spaceship that's capable of creating its own sub universe to wrap around itself, and it can use that as a sort of like method of propulsion and also protection. There's this awesome scene where it wraps itself in this new universe and then it dives into the heart of a star and they literally fly right through a star and it's sort of like going underwater, but they're like understar. They're flying through it, looking at the interior of a star. Super awesome. Wow. And so you can create universes too, like you can some of manipulate this inflocon field and like create a layer of universe between you and other stuff. As we're all about it in the interview, you can hear it. She doesn't go as deep as like understanding how you could possibly influence the infloton field. She totally admits to handwaving her way around that. But in her universe, yes, you can create new universes, and new universes are being created all the time. And the cool thing is that you have different laws of physics in each of these sort of bubble universes, and when you transition from one to the other, things get like translated. It's sort of like do you go to another country and suddenly become you know, like French Orge or something that is George. Cool. That's pretty awesome. And so then I guess one cushion is how do they get around so well in this universe? Do they have like faster than light travel? They have spaceships that can essentially propel themselves using these like relative universe laws of physics. So you like wrap yourself in this bubble and then you can move through this other universe and sort of pop back out. Oh, I see, like you take shortcuts through other universes. Yeah, you can take advantage of the fact that different universes have different laws. So then that's the universe In her sci fi universe, it's like a universe with little neighborhoods here and there. And how does that affect I guess the you know, cosmo politics of how people treat each other. Yeah, well it means that there's a lot to explore because there are a lot of different universes out there for people to discover. And she's thought a lot about the economics of this situation, like how would a huge, diverse, interplanetary, multi species civilization actually work, Who would want to go and explore, who would pay them to do that? And she very specifically chosen to be sort of like a little bit of an anarchy, you know, no tight central government with a single set of laws, because she thought that was going to be unrealistic. So there's this whole collection of folks called cartographers that essentially incentivize exploration, pay people to bring back information about what's going on in this other multiverse were more created, and this this whole layer of mystery because they don't really fully understand the physics of it. Some of the technology needed to create and traverse these multiverses is left over from an ancient now past civilization that seemed to have a better handle on the physics than the current set of aliens. It's sort of like magic to them. Kind of yeah, it's sort of like magic, or at least it's like treasure. When you find a little piece of this leftover technology from that law civilization, they can do things you can't understand and couldn't reproduce. And now, as a physicist, how does this idea of the multiverse soundy? Does it sound plausible? Does it fit within some of the theories that you have. It's a little hard to imagine how it's plausible. I mean, having different laws of physics in these bubbles, and then the transitions between them. It's pretty hard to get your mind around. You know. People wonder like, how could you have different laws of physics in different places? And it depends a little bit on the semantics. You know, we talk about different laws of physics, we mean the rules by which the things around us operate under. You know, like what happens to an electron when it flies through a magnetic field, or you know, how does the Higgs boson decay? Those aren't actually what we think are the most fundamental laws of physics. Those are the laws of physics that we have here today, in our current temperature and our current time. After the birth of the universe. We don't know what the real fundamental laws of the universe are. We're trying to figure that out, right. We don't know how the universe works when it's hot and dead, it's like in the original Big Bang. But we think that what we're looking at is what we call an effective theory, so as things cool down, they sort of crystallize into the laws that we have now. But we think it might have gone differently. We think that like some random fluctuations in the early universe might have led the same fundamental laws of physics to turn into different effective laws of physics we have today. So it's possible to imagine different parts of space or different parts of the multiverse having different effective laws of physics, But it seems like the fundamental rules really have to be the same, because in the end, the source code for the universe has to just be one thing. It can't like change from here to there. Right, Well, it could have the same source code, but as you said, it could have maybe like different initial conditions, right Like maybe you know, you could have a black hole with a universe in the side of it, and somehow, you know, the value of the mass of the electron is a little bit different inside of it. Yeah, that's totally possible, And then you have to worry about these transitions, Like at the transitions, what happens. You know, we know that if the the Higgs field is different in one place and another, that it will cause the place with the higher field value to collapse to the lower field value, and so that kind of thing will spread, Like if you had created a machine which collapsed the Higgs field value locally to zero, that would spread throughout the universe and basically change the universe's effective laws of physics. To something else, and so, you know, not recommended, although it sounds that you consider it sounds like you thought about what happens. I keep an open mind, you know, yeah, exactly, try not to just reject things out of hand. And I think about it's sort of like analogous to phases. Imagine that the universe was like a huge pool of water and some parts of it had gotten cold and some parts of it had gotten hot. Then aliens or humans who had evolved under those circumstances would imagine that those were the fundamental constraints of the universe and would understand the way things work in that phase or in this phase, and wouldn't understand like the fundamental over all rules. So we just think that we're sort of stuck in one phase of the universe this temperature or this pressure, this age, and we've learned the rules of this universe. But you could have different you know, phases of space in other parts of the universe and still follow the same fundamental rules. But what would happen to the transitions. That would be pretty tricky. I mean, sometimes transitions are stable, right. You can have like a frozen lake and it doesn't all sublimate into the air. Depends a little bit on the details, but sometimes you have transitions that are unstable, where things do sublimate and there's attention there because of the conflict and that that can't survive. So he asked, like, what's wrong with the universe. You could just say, Hey, it's just going through a phase. Don't worry. It'll go through puberty soon and then things will get really crazy unless it just accelerates its way through puberty. Right there you go. I feel like that happened to my son a little bit because he spent all of his middle school in the pandemic, so he just sort of like skipped middle school, which is either like wonderful because middle school wasn't my favorite time of universe or terrible because you had to spend a year and a half inside. But you know, there's two ways to look at accelerating pastive life events, right, Yeah, middle school is its own pocket universe of formal terture for everyone. Really. All right, well, let's get into your interview with science fiction author Sa Hanson, author of the book No Fat Claws. I think you asked her about this idea of the multiverse. Where she got that idea this idea for aliens being interesting, and this idea of accelerating your growth and your cognitive development. So she had answers for all of these questions, right, Daniel, she did, Indeed she did. Indeed, I'm always amazing grateful when an author is willing to talk to a busist about how they built their universe. Right, that must be a little terrifying, like running into a no effect book. Perhaps I try to be friendly. Yeah, you could try pulling all your mindibles and spider like appendages before you shred her science to bits. It's like that scene when the monster smiles. All right. Here is Daniel's interview with sign switching author as a handsOn. So it's my great pleasure to welcome to the podcasts A Hanson, the author of the book No Fact Loss Asa. Thanks very much for joining us. Thanks for inviting me on the show. Wonderful. Well, before we dig into your book, we'd love to hear a little bit about your background. How you ended up being a science fiction author. Yeah, I've been reading and writing since I can remember, which is a really boring origin story. But there there wasn't really one experience or piece of media that kicked me into it. You know. I grew up with a lot of the popular sci fi shows and movies from the eighties and nineties like Star Trek, Star Wars, Stargate when so many seemed to have Star in the name. I also devoured nature shows like National Geographic and spend most of my time outdoors exploring nature since I've lived in or very close to backcountry areas in national parks in the Western US and Canada. So combined with studying science, math, acts, and philosophy for pleasure, everything started to kind of come together in writing science fiction and fantasy, which is such a great playground for an overactive imagination concepts and explore fun what if questions. And you use your imagination a lot in your other job, don't you. I do. I'm a sound designer for science fiction and fantasy films from like Marvel and Disney and Pixar, so I definitely spend a lot of time in other worlds wonderful. Well. We have a series of questions we ask all of our science fiction author gifts so we can compare and contrast them. The first one is about Star Trek transporters. Is it your opinion that these devices kill you and recreate you somewhere else, or that they actually transport you from one place to another. I love this question because to me, it's asking about the nature of consciousness, Like, are we assuming that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon from the structure of the physical system, and that recreating it exactly from the quantum level up in some new location will generate that same consciousness with out interruption. I personally think there's something more fundamental going on with conscious beings, so I'm more likely to believe that the atoms are transported instead and the consciousness gets transported with it. As a unified system. You think that an exact copy of you wouldn't be you. Yeah, I would actually love to see an episode where they explore, you know, they're early testing and theories of the transporters. What working didn't work? You know, does the clone appear but it's not the same person, or you know, doesn't have any brain inflection. Star Trek Research Division. I definitely want to see that whole episode. So then it sounds like you would be willing to get into a Star Trek transporter because you think that they actually somehow move your same atoms from one place to another. Yeah, I think so. Well, if something went wrong, would my consciousness be stranded in some other dimensions? It's another question. So then, what technology in science fiction would you most like to see become reality in our universe? What would you like scientists to make real. That's tough, since there's so many mind blowing pieces of technology that could just change our understanding of the universe. But actually my mind goes right away to the really practical things, since they could change so many aspects of life and the environment. So I would probably pick a replicator from Star Trek, you know, to be able to synthesize food and drinking objects without needing the material to print them. And I think it recycles too, doesn't it. Yeah, environmentally be fantastic. It would change a lot of our infrastructure. All right, Well, then let me pivot and ask you about aliens. I'm sure you're familiar with the Fermi paradox. Why haven't we been visited yet? If the universe is so filled with wonderful planets? What's your personal thought on that question? Why do you think we haven't yet been visited by aliens? I like the theory that intelligent life will or may have interacted with Earth's life forms in ways we cannot detect. Most people's default thinking when they hear aliens is, you know, intelligent biological life that's using spacecraft comparable to something humans might do with more advanced technology. I think it may be more likely that conscious beings exist in domain means are on a scale that we still struggle to measure or perceive with our current technology and science. So I feel like a non physical alternative is feasible, which means perhaps they have visited us or are constantly in communication range waiting for us to catch up. So you're imagining that consciousness and intelligence might be broader than our particular imaginations have considered. That it could be just something we can't even imagine or understand or interact with. Yeah, Like, I think a lot about how limited the you know, humans in two organs actually are compared to other animals, and compared to the instruments that we've created to measure, like the quantum world and things that we can't actually perceive, even ranges of light that are outside of our natural spectrum. So I don't think it's too much of a stretch to think that there may even be more beyond that that we do not have instruments for yet. No, I'm with you. I'm a big believer in the idea that we've only begun to explore the universe, that we're seeing a narrow and probably unrepresentative slice of what's out there. And we know from history that the discoveries revealed the universe to be a very different place from the way we imagined it. It would be shocking if intelligence was exactly the way we expected it to be, which is why I love reading creative science fiction and seeing people explore these ideas and other concepts. But it's hard. Yeah, Like, if you compare what we understand now he explain that to someone as historical scientists, they might think just sounds too bonkers. I would totally believe that there's things in the future that will understand that now just seem inconceivable. Well, it seems bonkers to me today, and so I'm getting forward to future bonkers discoveries. That's the whole motivating premise of my research. All right, But let's talk about your book, which is super fun and congratulations on it, Thank you. I really like the questions that your book raised, you know, about like how a young person navigates through life and grows up, how he finds his place in the world, how he finds his justice, And you know, the world that he grows up in, the universe that he grows up into, the multiverse that he grows up and seems to be very different from our own. But the themes, you know, are familiar. You know, these questions of how you find your place? What drew you to these questions, these themes, what made you want them to be sort of at the heart of the journey of your character. Yeah, so science fiction is so fun because you know, we're taking a human angle on it and often telling very human stories. But you know, something else is very inhuman, whether it's the setting or the aliens or worlds are interacting with. And I tend to write about outcasts like me, protagonists who feel uprooted and struggle with belonging in identity, people that don't have a culture, community, who are too mixed to have roots or were cut off from them by loss, and people who think are perceived a typically who might feel like they're on the wrong planet, being outcast or and more to such a relatable struggle for so many different sectionalities. Of people. It's a story that I feel can be told a lot in different ways, and there will always be something to take from it. You know, no matter how wild the sci fi setting, our situation is, it always sort of that human heart to it that readers find relatable. I think it's really interesting to see what's a common what's human in these stories, you know, what we can identify with, and it tells me something about what you think is sort of going to be constant in the human experience even if the world is very different, and you have built a very very different world from the one that we experience, but there are also like a lot of similarities, and I'm wondering if you built those in to be the same as the world we experience, because you think that they're going to be persistent. For example, in your book, there's a lot of economic disparity and a lot of political maneuvering. You know, other novels like Ian Banks culture novels, there's no more scarcity and everybody has exactly what they want. Do you think that these sort of like economic power struggles will always be with us? Are there always going to be the super rich and the poor? I think creatively I'm not so much assuming that, um, you know, these worlds will be just like what we understand from our human perspective, but more that if I'm gonna present the reader with a bunch of feelings through wild ideas, I do need some things that are familiar and relatable so that they feel grounded. You know, if you make absolutely everything in the world new and weird, the reader will just feel unsteady. And in the case of my multiverse, I feel the sheer volume of planets, species, cultures, and resources is too unwieldy to have a perfectly peaceful and balanced multiverse will society. You know, everything is going to have a different material and moral value depending on a perspective. So with trillions of unique planets, all with their own variety of cultures and governments, it didn't seem feasible that one set of needs, laws or rights could apply equally to every potential species and belief system. So, you know, the nature of a complex, diverse, and poorly interconnected multiverse will be an ecosystem that involves power struggles and mismatch value systems. I think my nature, so there's always going to be struggle, even in the future. That's what you're telling me. There's no federation or like unifying organization in this multiverse besides the Cartographers, which is a neutral group that maintains a database of knowledge and unifies much of the multiverse with a goal of exploration and of safety through shared knowledge. But they also provide free basic needs to anyone without discrimination, the food, shelter, education, health care, and so on, which I think is far more useful than a space police or multiverse laws trying trying to mesh together so many civilizations, you know, right, right, But then you also have populations that are like raised in slavery and then mistreated basically for economic gain. And it's not explored in this first book, but the central and largest universe unity is a utopian world, more along the lines of Banks culture novels, and so a later theme in the trilogy will be the pros and cons of a utopian world where potential has been limited for safety versus this chaotic multiplicity of worlds with a lot of variety of experience, but with the overarching sort of pirate culture where everyone takes response ability for themselves. Right. Well, I'm excited to hear that there are more books coming in the same universe. Can't wait to dig into those. One thing I really liked about your book is that I had a concept I hadn't seen in other science fiction novels, which is always exciting for me. And those are these bubbled multiverses where they have this like distinct transition between one universe and another that you call them rhymes. Can you tell us a little bit about the nature of the idea here, What was going on in your mind why you decided to build these into your story. Yeah, so the bubble multiverse concept was what kicked off this whole story, and I don't think I've read it or seen anything exactly like it in sci fi before. Most multiverses involved a shift in dimension or time, whereas my multiverse is a bunch of spherical universes like soap bubbles, all on the same timeline, each with unique physical laws inside, and all stuck together like a huge film cluster. And they can range in sizes be so smallly fit in the palm your hand, where they can contain entire galaxies, with some universes nested inside other ones. And said, the walls meet in energetic membranes called Ryan's that are in a physical barrier, but whatever passes through is translated from one set of loss to another and maybe almost unchanged or might be destroyed or transformed in the process. I got the idea initially while looking at macro photography of bubbles and mentally extrapolating that out to massive scale, you know, containing galaxies, the sort of world you could fly a star shipped through. And the fact that physics itself might be different from one universe to another has a lot of fun implications to think about, like what it might mean for trade and economy. An element that it's inaccessible in one universe might become usable or malleable in another. All right, so this is a lot of fun and I got lots more questions for ASA. But first, un let's take a quick break. All right, we're back in interview with science fiction author As A handsOn, author of the debut novel no fack Gloss. I was really interested in exploring an economy that operates on information is currency, you know, where exploration is incentivized and maps and knowledge hold the most value. In order to be able to explore more world, do you need a ship with technology that's able to withstand different ryns, meaning you can make more profit, to photo ship that can go even more places to be more profit, and so on. You know, exploration and curiosity is such a stable motivator, and science fiction from a human perspective, like star treks to bully go where no one has gone before. So I think this the whole multiverse allows for that, but with some new elements, while also feeling different from so much science fiction that focuses on war between factions and planets. Well, you've basically written the first paper on multiverse economics. That's pretty awesome. It's really cool, and it's really interesting to visualize. In my mind, I was definitely sort of imagining a series of soap bubbles. But one question I had, which it probably doesn't have an answer, is you you have all these bubbles and they're connected to each other. Are they all sitting in some larger sort of super space in which they're embedded? Is there anything outside of these universes? Does that not have any meaning? And I thought about this because you know, if you think about an outer edge and what's beyond that outer edge, and I know a lot of similar theories have actual content if it's a bubble universe to have the content of the universe on the surface area of it, whereas mine the content is all inside. And my idea is sort of more like the rind contains sort of holographically stores the information of all the content. But as for the edge, I haven't thought deeply about what is beyond it, because that's the well that's really chewy the lure. The lure is that there's originally one singular universe with stable physical laws like our own, inhabited by, among others, an advanced civilization called the Graven, and an unknown event caused daughter universe is to start to bubble off of the outer border of this one universe, inflating and continuing to bubble off new universe as at the outer edges, the entire mask Etine's expanding. Very cool. I love the idea that there are different physical laws inside each universe and the concept of how you translate an object from one to the other is super cool. So is it explored in the book, like how these new universes are created? Because I know this, For example, one particular ship that's capable of creating its own universe as it flies. Yeah, the protagonist Cadent ship has weird craven technology in it, with the power to expand and collapse a brand new universe of its own out of nothing, which allows it to travel on harm in places and situations it would be too destructive otherwise, and the next books in the trilogy will explore more of what that technology actually is and what the formation of the multi Verse could have been and why it happened. Well, I think one of the real strengths of your novel are the incredible visuals. You know, it seems to me like maybe not a surprise that you've worked on a lot of movies, because I felt like I could I was almost watching a movie in my mind with these incredible visual descriptions, and one of them was when this ship dies into the heart of a star, protected by its own little universe, just imagining like what it's like to fly through the heart of the star. Really fantastic stuff. Yeah, and that's what I love to like trying to describe the impossible in a way, like we know a lot about the insides of stars, but you know, we can't actually go in and experience it. So I love, you know, kind of researching what's involved in like a situation like that, and then how am I going to try to convey what the experience might be like if it were safe to, you know, fly, Well, I wish it were. I'd love to take that trip, but I feel like I already have a little bit in your book. Another thing that was really richly imagined were all the aliens. There's so many really interesting creatures with weird behaviors and capabilities that I've never heard of before, But one thing they seem to have in common is that most of them were a humanoid. In your book, do they have like a single origin where they've all branched off evolutionarily or they evolved in parallel or is that not something you worried about too much in detail? I actually love non humanoid aliens the most, but this is one of those one of those things where I knew I needed to balance the story with familiarity and grounding for the reader, especially since there's not just one first contact with one species, but so many different species of aliens, along with other concepts and technology to wrap our hand around, and flying into stars and creating universes and whatnotum I figured some humanoid aliens would help the reader connects to look better. So the actual humans in the story, of which there is a broad variety, had a single origin in the central universe. And for the other aliens, I did struggle with, you know, whether to assume there's something fundamentally superior about the general design of the human body. I'm not convinced there is. Plus, the evolution of that design is inextricable from the features of Earth. So if we assume humanoid aliens evolving on other planets were assuming some earthlike features of those planets, right, which is definitely true and feasible in this multiverse. So I think the answer is a mixed humans have a single origin and would have colonized outward and differentiated as a multiverse inflated. But there are also earthlike planets where humanoid design or similar will have evolved on its own. Wow, A right cool. So tell me, did you come up with this world first, this idea that multiverses and these aliens and then sort of find a story to tell that takes us through that world, or do you want to tell this story about this young man and his journey through life and the search for justice, and then you build a world around that story. The world definitely came first, but the main character in his ship came closely after, and they developed in parallel from there. And at that time I did a lot of my world building as I was drafting, rather than developing all the features of the world up front and then riding within that framework. So like I would find I needed a technology or a new species and would pause to create it on the fly and fitted logically in the world, which I think the author creates a greater sense of wonder from discovering things on the go like this, because you know, the act of discovering excitement gets put right on the page, but you're way more likely to having consistencies and elements that don't quite hold together. Hopefully there's time during edits to shore that stuff up, but a spontaneous story will definitely have a different feel to it, I think than a book that was developed over many years. Well, I'm a pretty close reader, and I didn't find any big logical clause, So congrats to you and your I'm careful, I think to hand away of when I need to instead of not mention something that might be a stitch to pull up. Yeah, so how important to you then in your sort of final story in Final Universe that the science is plausible. Are you imagining that this is something that could happen in our universe, or are you creating another universe with its own laws and then trying to follow those strictly, or you just sort of like navigating your way through the story and making it up as you go. For this trilogy, I'm definitely focused more on creative ideas and interesting implications than on presenting a world that's plausible compared to our own universe or current scientific understanding. There's already so much well done plausible science fiction and hard sci fi, but I feel like there's a lot less blue sky thinking science fiction that plays with things like massive cosmological scale, or the implications of quantum mechanics on reality, or metaphysics in the nature of consciousness as it relates the fabric of spacetime. Not all those ideas are in this particular book, but those are the areas of science that I love thinking about, you know, the science that is still theoretical or cutting edge, where all the creative thinking is happening to try and solve the problems and unknowns we still face. But one thing that was really fun. You know, I didn't research the bubble multiverse kind of idea because I thought it was so unplausible that there probably wasn't you know, real physics that would describe this. But then afterwards I stumbled on I think the World Science Festival videos were all online, and I went into a rabbit hole of black hole research and the information paradox and all these different multiverse theories and you know, holographic principle and inflationary multiverse theory, and I was like, oh, my gosh, this actually does sound maybe plausible that we could be in a bubble multiverse. And you know, the edge of our one universe is so far away that will never prove or disproved because we can't measure out there. Maybe it's more plausible than I thought when I came up. We will see in the future. Yeah, And I actually think that science fiction plays an important role in the development of those theories because a big part of the development of the theories is just having the idea of what to consider what could be real about our universe. And since we know that the universe is probably very different from the one we imagined, we have to stretch our creative minds and consider these other alternatives, and reading science fiction is a critical element of that. So I think, you know, it's more than just you're exploring this universe you or I think you're helping push forward the ideas that scientists themselves should be thinking about. Yeah. Absolutely, and that's and of what I love. Like there's you know, it's fun to play with the science we already have, but you know, we may not learn new things because we're only working within the constraints of what we know now, Whereas you know, stretching imagination and creativity is think what about this, what about this? Or you know, picking all often you know, here a theory and it will inspire me to like, oh, what if that means this? Or like what if you know we expand that a bit. I think that kind of thinking is really inspiring for not just the reader. But you know, I don't know, I like to think that it can go beyond the book what we understand right now. Absolutely, it's fascinating to me to see how you walk the line though of like letting your imagination unspool into crazy other ideas of universes, but then still grounding in a way that we can identify with some of the characters, and we can follow the story. Because as much as I'd like to believe that there are crazy aliens out there following rules we can't even imagine and weird societies, I probably have a hard time following that book. Yeah, it's a tough balance. Although actually I'm not sure. We just will kind of know what concepts are ones that I've pulled from actual science and which ones I just came up with out of the theoretical science. Right now is so exciting that you know the two are kind of the same, the bonker's ideas and the actual possibly plausible. Welcome to our bonkers reality exactly. I love it all right. Well, thanks very much for channing with us about your book, and again, congratulations. We look forward to reading the next novels. When are they coming out? Thank you. The sequel As Our Ghost is out December seven of this year. Does that mean that it's all written and in the hands of the publisher and the editors. It's very close. We're putting on the final polish and I'm already starting on book three. Wonderful. Well, we look forward to that and maybe we can have you back on to talk about the crazy bonkers ideas in the next book that you're right, there will be some more dimensions than a lot of bonkers ideas. Wonderful. Well, thanks again for joining us. Thanks, this is so much fun, all right? Pretty cool. She sounds for really amazing and so multi talented, being a sound designer for big movies and also a science fiction author. Yeah, she's super creative. One thing I really loved about her book that I forgot to ask her about was how every scene in her book, which is like really diverse locations, really feels different. She's done this great job of like giving each location its own texture, its own sort of like feeling, so you can keep track of where you are in the book. I'm not a sinis fit in any sense, but I feel like I was there, Like I could touch these places and hear what they sounded like. Interesting. Now, just reading her book make you excited to kind of meet other aliens and discover more of other universes perhaps, or does it make you happy to just have a couch at the end of the day in Orange County. Well, I think it's a positive experience, mostly because when you meet aliens, they're like a fun rag tag bunt to educate him about the universe. And boy, I would love for that to happen to me. A bunch aliens come down to Earth and tell me all about the larger context of our lives, how things actually work. It'd be great if that didn't mean that everybody else on Earth had to die. But you know, don't make me make that choice, You're like, that would be great, But if it had to happen in order for me to gain knowledge about the universe, you know, too bad. If it has to happen, it has to happen, right, Wait, no, not necessarily. According to the quantum multiverse that she's one possibility, Daniel. There you go. So I don't have to feel bad because in another multiverse, the Earth survives. In an infinite number of universes, we all die, and in an infinite number of universe we all survive, so it all washes out in the end. So therefore there is no morality, all right, Well, thank you to author sa Hansen again. Her novel is called No Fag Class. That's n O P h e K Class and it's out now. You can get it wherever you get your regular books. You can. And she's just turned in the sequel and working on the next book. So everybody out there who enjoys this book and look forward to even more zipping around the multiverse a right, Thanks for joining us, see you next time. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge explain the Universe is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcast for my heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio Apple Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.